1-1-1: Swarm

2023, d. Donald Glover, Adamma Ebo, Ibra Ake, Stephen Glover
7 episodes - AmazonPrime
created by Donald Glover and Adamma Ebo

The Plot 100:

Dre is the consummate "weird girl", the one who doesn't seem to fit in, who doesn't seem to get normal social cues, who stares too long at things, who moves oddly, who dresses strangely...who fixates...and Dre is fixated on superstar Beyonce-stand-in Ni'Jah. Dre lives with Marissa, her best (and only) friend, who looks out for her, but that's a full time job, and Marissa is trying to live her own life. A confluence of events unhinge Dre, sending her on a low-key murder spree across America.

1-1-1
1 Great: Dominique Fishback has been a power player as supporting actress in movies like Judas and the Black Messiah and Project Power but in Swarm the spotlight is all on her. Her performance as Dre is captivating, full of incredible nuance in physical presence, facial expression and line delivery. Fishback delivers a dead-eyed stare that will send a cold shiver up your spine like few others ever have.  Dre is barely tethered to reality when Marissa is grounding her, but without Marissa around, Dre is let loose on the world. 

As part of "The Swarm", the collective of Ni'Jah fans who shout down any naysayer or troll online, Dre takes the next steps to protecting her queen.  She goes to great lengths to hunt down the online trolls and murder them. It takes a special performance to sell the leap into murder, but not only does Fishback sell it, she makes it seem both the logical and inevitable next step for Dre. There's a fearlessness to the character, and to Fishback's performance. It's a very, very difficult thing to be funny and sympathetic in a performance that is also supposed to be terrifying, Fishback manages to be all these things in different combinations. Never is this more clear than in the second episode where Dre has taken a gig stripping and is mesmerisingly bad at it, and doesn't seem to care. She just kind of clomps around on stage in a teddy, a vacant look on her face, bewildering the one onlooker who seems like a deer in headlights.  She's not going to kill him, but he's definitely her victim.

It's hard to really like Dre, but in script and production, there is empathy for the show's protagonist, and since she is our only POV character, we always kind of want Dre to get what she wants, even if logically we know she just needs to be stopped. There are a couple instances of Dre killing an awful person, but she is by no means a sympathetic vigilante...she is a sociopathic murderer and her killings are just as often whims as they are pre-planned. 

I watched the 7 episodes in 2 chunks, the first three episodes, and then the final four about a week later. Between viewings, I was constantly thinking about the show. There was nothing in particular I was thinking about, but it was just more kind of haunting me. It would find myself thinking about Fishback's slack-jawed gaze, or her stilted physicality, or her line reading of "who's your favourite artist?", which becomes just as ominous a line as "do you like scary movies?" Perhaps moreso.

1 Good: Donald Glover's Atlanta [Season 1, Season 3, Season 4] was a unique production, a series of mini-films that sometimes featured the main cast, and were sometimes fully detached from even its own reality. The first episode of Swarm felt like it could have been one of Atlanta's one-off episodes, except that it didn't feel as self-contained, that it was building something. Each episode of Swarm has a tonal synergy with Atlanta, a quietness, a patience, but also an intensity and a sly sense of humour.  

This isn't solely Glover's baby, Janine Nabers (UnREAL), but the style seems very much guided by what Glover and team did for Atlanta with much success. Though a graduated story, each episode does stand alone as a unique thing. Episode 4, for instance finds Dre taken in by a commune led by Billie Eilish, which really twists the knife...you kind of want Dre to run, but at the same time, she's probably more trouble for the commune, and maybe you just want them both to self immolate. It takes some psychedelic turns.  The final episode is a love story, which, like every episode of Atlanta, you're just waiting for it to turn.  The thing with Atlanta was it only turned like 40% of the time. You can bet any good thing for Dre is going to tun 100% of the time.  It's like watching Dexter or Barry, where you just utterly sympathize with the love interest and want them to get the hell away, but at the same time that little glimmer of hoping the sociopath can learn to be happy and let go of their darker instincts. It never works out.

Each episode opens with the title cards "This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional." It's Glover and Nabers "Fargo-izing" the series, which then leads to Episode six, which is a documentary news program covering the "real" story of Dre, and the detective who pieced together that there was a Black female serial killer operating in America.  While trying to be a "real" documentary, its scripted-ness gives itself away (kind of like Atlanta Season 4's "The Blackest movie of all time" documentary on A Goofy Movie).  

1 Bad: Not really bad, but more a stylistic thing that I had a hard time parsing. There are a couple instances of Dre going into a sort of hallucinatory trance, and we see the world from this perspective. As such we're not really clear on the events that are occurring.  Mainly the climax of episode 3 and the series climax of episode 7.  

Episode 7, in particular, is titled "Only God makes happy endings" and it ends with Dre having her greatest dream come true. But clearly it's not true, just a delusional state that they're in. Episode six actually tells us the "real life" ending that we don't see in the show. It actually seems much darker a spin to even attempt a happy ending for Dre. If she gets her greatest desire, given her cross-country killing spree, what does that even mean? It's certainly provocative. The whole show is provocative.

META
It's kind of shocking how under-the-radar Swarm is right now. It doesn't seem to be getting promoted very intensely nor does it seem to be popping up in television discourse very much. It's a difficult show to market because it isn't the most accessible story, but it's, at its heart, elevated horror. It very well could fit cozily within A24's slate of genre films, and Amazon should be reaching for the same market.  It's an intense, unconventional show, defiantly not for everyone. 

I only heard of it in passing, with a brief mention of Donald Glover. That was all I needed. 

Pilot Season '16: Atlanta

FX, Tuesdays @ 10

You know how shows like Fargo or Breaking Bad are big, meaty crime dramas with a seriously dark (and sometimes not-so-dark) streak of humour throughout?  They can be uproariously funny shows but they're also really, really intense.  Donald Glover's Atlanta is the flipside to that.  It's a 1/2 hour comedy foremost, but it's damn intense in its delivery.

Glover is a wunderkind, a gifted actor, stand-up comedian and rapper, but he cut his teeth with sketch (with the Derrick sketch troupe) and comedy writing on 30 Rock.  It should be no surprise to anyone that he can come out with such an assured first effort when creating his own show.

Atlanta is difficult to put into words.  It follows Glover's Earn, an underemployed college dropout (Princeton no less, a little mystery surrounding what went down there), in a stressed, uncommitted relationship with the mother of his baby.  Earn's cousin, the rapper Paper Boi, has put together a demo album that Earn thinks has real crossover promise, and Earn wants to become his manager.  Of course, navigating a cruddy, commission-based day job, his family commitments, patching his relationship with his girlfriend, and promoting his cousin while staying out of trouble, which seems all to easy to find in Atlanta is the crux of the show.

The first episode, written by Glover and gorgeously directed by Hiro Murai, opens with Earn and Paper Boi getting into a parking lot confrontation with a thug from around the way, and Paper Boi shooting the thug.  The confrontation is tense, and it casts a dark shadow as the rest of the episode jumps back and leads into the confrontation.  It's somewhat of a hindrance to the comedy, and yet the comedy does seep through the darkness.

The second episode finds Earn spending the night in holding, while Paper Boi gets released (since the guy he shot didn't stay on the scene).  It's a surreal experience for Earn, who doesn't revel in or champion the thug life, at one point seated uncomfortably between a man and his ex-lover, a trans man.  Their relationship only seems to make Earn uneasy because he's seated directly (and hilariously) between their flirtatious conversation, but he seems to be the only one in holding without any real problem with their relationship.  It's a commentary on how prejudiced segments of the black community can be about non-heteronormative culture, while also showing how out of place Earn is with that segment.  Likewise, there's also a sequence where a frequent visitor to holding starts causing a fuss, clearly in some form of psychological distress (as Earn points out), and yet the rest of the group, including the cops, find him cartoonishly amusing...until he's not, and then is beaten severely.  The system fails the people, constantly.  It's clear this is not a place where Earn can ever fit (and why would anyone want to).  Yet, having been deprived of sleep, Earn can barely muster up any fear or anxiety over his situation.  The stats are that 1 in 3 black men in America can expect to go to prison in their lifetime, and from Glover's poker face throughout, it's as if Earn has been conditioned to be here, even if he had no expectation to ever be.

Meanwhile, in this same episode, Paper Boi's single has exploded since his arrest.  People are playing his track on the radio, his name is all over the news.  Crime is good for a harcore rapper's career is the point.  Kind of fucked up.  The dream, as they say in one of the episodes, is to escape this life, to become famous so they don't have to put up with the reality that fuelled their creativity and got them famous.  Paper Boi, though, is confronted with a bit of the price of his fame.  He's exceptionally nervous that the crew of the guy he shot is out to get him.  The guy that came to his door, asking if this is where Paper Boi lives, was he just a fan, or a scout?  Paper Boi takes a walk and sees some kids shooting toy guns, one of them screaming "I shot you, just like Paper Boi."  There are pangs of regret, conflicted by the surreality of the boy's Mother, having just chided the child for his actions, wants to take a selfie with this newly minted local rap star.  There's no easy answers here, just stark juxtaposition.

The third episode takes things a little easier, as Earn, desperate to make it up to Vanessa for bailing him out, wants to take her to dinner, except he's just got paid and only has $96 in his account.  He catches wind of a budget, higher-end tapas restaurant, but learns too late their nighttime budget menu was phased out.  Meanwhile Paper Boi and his buddy Darius prepare for a drug deal that, let me tell you, takes some serious turns, some comedic and some not so much.

Atlanta is an incredibly well-shot show (the nighttime aerial tracking shot of Paper Boi and Dairus following their supplier down and long, winding, desolate highway is just gorgeous, accompanied by a chilling, downtempo hip hop thump is masterful mood setting), and an incredibly well-acted one too.  Glover, at this point, has shown his range in comedy, drama, and even genre pieces, so his restrained, nuanced performance here is no surprise.  Brian Tyree Henry as Paper Boi, though, is incredible.  You think from the opening sequence, seeing him angrily confront and seemingly so easily shoot a guy...you think you know him.  But he is a surprise scene after scene, the range of subtle expression he can deliver.  He's as intelligent as Earn, if not moreso, he just never went to Princeton.  He's not callous.  He's not reckless.  He's not a clown, or a buffoon, or a thug.  He does what he does to try and make himself better.  His seemingly everpresent partner, Darius, could have quite easily been the evergreen stoner cliche and provided very basic, very overt comic relief, but Darius, as written by Glover and played by Keith Stanfield, is the poetic stoner.  He's a truth teller, even if sometimes that truth is totally absurd or a non-sequitur.  Glover's restraint in creating any buffoon characters is beyond admirable.  Even Vanessa (Zazie Beetz) isn't a shrew, nagging girlfriend.  She quite clearly sees through bullshit and calls Earn on it at every opportunity.  She's a woman whose patience has run out, but isn't quite ready to give up.  Hell, Earns parents are more than willing to look after their grandchild, but they have no time for Earn beyond pleasantries (they won't even let him in the house), which is a parent-child dynamic we haven't seen.  It's not hostile, there's not a lot of ill will, just some bad experiences and tough love. 

Glover's not aping any specific formula with this show.  There's elements of Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad here.  Glover wants weird, surreal, and he wants that intensely consumable crime drama, but he also wants honesty, reality and, hell, even earnestness to creep out from the the 8 Mile/Straight Outta Compton/Hustle & Flow rapper origin story pastiche.  It's funny, but yeah, intense as hell.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching (Kent Edition) - ANOTHER Another One

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Everything's bad bad.

What I Am/Have Been Watching is the admitted state of typically Toast, but in this case, Kent, spending too much time in front of the TV. But what else has the pandemic been about if not toobin? Sure, we got a few breaks from being confined at home, and might have actually gone outside (gasp!) and socialized with (double-gasp!) human beings (faint-dead-away) but we always ended up back on the sofa, flicker in hand, trying to find something to watch amidst the many streaming services pillaging our credit cards every month...and yeah, Kent still has cable. 

---

Like last time, since these are all subsequent seasons or spinoffs of things I've already watched/reviewed, I'm going to reread (and link to) my review(s) of previous seasons and see what, if anything, different I have to say about them in comparison.

---
Stranger Things Season 4 pt.1 - Netflix
Season 1 | Season 3

I called Season 1 of Stranger Things a masterpiece, and it remains so.  It's one of those first seasons that's basically so perfect, it was almost futile to continue on because it could only be downhill from there.  Season 2 was certainly a drop, with a few detours along rocky roads along the way.  Season three, for it's part, started climbing that hill, trying, but not quite making it back to the top.  With season 4, three years later, it's Running Up That Hill, but with the realization it's not going to reach that perfect peak.  Instead, it finding the closest plateau and just going to circle.  

I've run this analogy into the ground, all for the sake of a tremendously on-point Kate Bush joke, but the truth is still there: Season 4 is not quite the equal of Season 1, but it's pretty damn fantastic, at least so far.  There have been gripes and complaints bandied about regarding both the split Parts 1 & 2 of the season (a roughly 6 week gap between) and the length of the episodes this season (all running over an hour, most at 75 minutes or more), a lot of the complaints levied in advance of the show's airing.  Frankly, the show, almost every episode, earns its runtime.  The only episode I found was maybe a little drawn out was the 90-minute 7th episode where it perhaps teased too much rather than got on with things.  As for the splitting of  the season, I can only say it's likely to give everyone time to binge before all the shit starts going down, and it's a way for Netflix to keep subscribers from cancelling for two more months.  I really think Netflix should have released these as weekly appointment episodes, really let the fans savour them.  As much as we wanted to binge it all, we only really had time for one episode a night with some gapping between nights.  It was kind of exciting and really gave us something specific to look forward to on the same level as the Marvel or Star Wars shows on Disney+.

As for the content of the season, it breaks the cast up into at least four, if not more, bands, and it really, really works.  What Stranger Things has done quite amazingly well over its four seasons is cast well and then develop their characters.  While the first season had an amazing cast, I imagine the show would feel pretty tired if it we were mostly just following Mike, Lucas, Will, Dustin and Eleven.  Steve, Hopper, Joyce, Max, Robin all have become utterly great focal characters for the show, and this season, by separating Jonathan and Nancy, both of those characters have managed to come into their own in a much more natural way than what the show was trying to force feed before.  But we also get this season a bigger spotlight for Brett Gelman's Murray, and wonderful newer additions in Jonathan's stoner friend Argyle (Eduardo Franco), dungeon master/anarchist Eddie (Joseph Quinn), and a pair of entertaining mock-Russians in Dmitri (Tom Wlaschiha) and Yuri (Nikola Djuricko).  The show's even given Officer Reynolds more of a spotlight this season, having finally gotten around to realizing Search Party's John Reynolds hapless schtick is so much fun.

This season has hopper in a Siberian prison, with little hope of escape, it has some of the kids in Hawkins facing another incursion from the Upside Down - a very specific Freddie Kreuger-meets-Pinhead inspired nemesis this time - but having to sleuth out a mystery.  Eleven is on a journey back to the labs to rediscover her powers but also learn some horrible truths, while some of the other kids are on a mission to rescue her.  Plus there's a secret war going on between the government and the labs, and the Russians are still experimenting with the Upside Down, and the bad guy is seriously something else the kids just aren't prepared to face.   And it's not all plot, it's really digging deep into these characters (the characters getting the shortest shrift, however are Matthew Modine and Paul Riser, neither one getting any real growth or revelations).  By the end of the 90-minute 7th episode, it's set the dominoes up for a pretty spectacular display as they fall.  The Duffers could muff it, but this season is so strong, I think they've got it.

---
Atlanta Season 3 - FX
Season 1

I haven't written about Atlanta since early in the first season, way back in 2016.  As long a break as we've had from Stranger Things, we've had an even longer break for Atlanta.  In between, a lot has happened, both on the show, and in the world that the show is a reflection on.  

Donald Glover has gone on from being the "wunderkind" multi-hyphenate that he was as the first season launched to being a true auteur but also one of America's finest cultural critics.  He's been very concerned about the status of the Black community, and has a lot to say about it in an exceptionally contemplative fashion, both on a micro and macro scale.  

Glover has also been really concerned with both celebrity and status, and it shows in Atlanta through both the character he plays, Earn, and Al, aka Paper Boi, Earn's cousin who he manages, and has taken him from local mixtape celeb to an international superstar.  Earn has capitalized on Al's success, but he also is a big part of Al's success.  But as Al's status rises so too does the potential for Earn to be overshadowed, or underappreciated.  Al, tries to keep it real, but realizes that both his recognizability and his money no longer keep him at the street level from which he came.  The situations he finds himself in are not those of the first season, the awkward encounters of being cash strapped and hungry, but of the upper eschelon that act pretty much as a warning to desiring celebrity. 

Season 1 of Atlanta, although full of detours into specific moments. was still mostly a cohesive narrative.  Season 2 really started to lean into the detours as a focus, with occasional episodes that are completely removed and just pull you aside on a mini-movie journey.  Season 3 is mostly interested in detours, its interested in singular stories, rather than ongoing narrative, and its interesting in pushing boundaries of storytelling and the reality of its setting.  

Many of Season 3's episodes are fully detached from its main cast, with nary a Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, Zazie Beetz or Lakeith Stanfield to be seen.  The first episode of the season was a fable about a boy put into foster care only to become basically an indentured servant along with his foster siblings, and plot his escape.  It's a commentary both on Black children (boys specifically) and Black family dynamics are misunderstood by the systems that supposed to support them.  But it's also a ripped-from-the-headlines horror story, but with a pleasantly twisty ending, where the "troubled youth" gets to be the hero.  

A couple episodes later, were taken into a alternate reality where reparations litigation becomes the norm, but as told as a supposed "horror story" from the perspective of the normal middle-aged white guy being pursued.  But it's a dark comedy with a kind fantasy resolution where society kind of has finally embraced equality, at least in the limited sense of black-and-white.  A few episodes still we get another stand-alone that, well, I'm still parsing out what it was trying to say.  It involves a  white family whose  young child has been primarily raised by his Trinidadian nanny, as mostly told from the parent's point of view, the child definitely showing the influences of who raised him.  And a couple episodes later a deep exploration of Blackness, from the perspective of a bi-racial teen who primarily identifies with white preppy culture, but then, when an offer of free college tuition for all black students, he gets judged on his blackness and suffers a crisis of identity. It comes to a head in a real gut-punch action-horror fashion.

So 4 of the 10 episodes do not feature the series main cast (all of whom are now superstars since even before Season 2 aired).  What we do get is a spotlight episode for each character, with Al getting a really trippy insider tour of Amsterdam, Dairus learning that even his just-go-with-it attitude won't spare him from the disappointments of the world (like the co-opting of food culture) and the season ends with Van's really surreal new life in Paris through the eyes of a friend from back home that exposes the breakdown she's going through. 

Glover has used Atlanta as a playground in the past, but here it's its most assured, and, despite not having a cohesive narrative to the season, its most focused.  With each episode Glover knows what he wants to say, but never delivers his message in a conventional way.  There's still a comedian in Glover, and this season is frequently outrageous and conceptually audacious.  There's sort of a Black Mirror or Jordan Peele vibe throughout, playing with horrific concepts but with a bit of a wink and a bit of archness that doesn't cut the severity but relieves the tension.  

I don't use brilliant easily, but Atlanta is brilliant, and most of these episodes have kept me thinking long after watching.

---
Barry Season 3 - HBO
Season 1 & 2

Speaking of shows that haven't been around for a while, it's been 3 years since season 2 of Barry and I wasn't really sure I wanted to continue.  When last I left Barry, I wasn't keen of the story of a bad man who's trying to be good but can't escape his nature, and is dragging other people down with him.  Well, Season 3 starts up, and I've changed by tune.  He's not dragging other people down with him...cynically, they were already down there, but are now in the position to reveal their wolve's teeth.  Two episodes in, and I said "I don't really like any of these people and I'm not sure I care."  But the season, if it has a purpose, it's to show all these characters that their behaviour, their actions, they have consequences, and in the world of Barry, those consequences are, well, unexpected, and ridiculously entertaining.  

And then we get Episode 7, "Forgiving Jeff", which like Season 2: Episode 5 ("ronny/lily"), is one of the greatest action sequences ever on a television show.  The build is only a small part of what makes the sequence so good, I think even as a standalone piece, it's pretty exceptional.  It's not doing anything particularly flashy, but it's so well crafted, brilliantly shot, and full of wonderfully unexpected moments that make it unforgettable.  Just like "ronny/lily" this one is going to live beyond whatever else the series is about.  Hader, as a writer and director, really needs to get his hands on a big budget to make his own motion picture action/comedy.  It might possibly be a huge success, but more likely would be a slow burn cult hit for years to come.  

----
Wellington Paranormal Season 4 - Crave
Seasons 1-3

I was not expecting another season of Wellington Paranormal but was tremendously excited when it turned up.  It's another 6 episodes of incredibly entertaining paranormal Kiwi silliness.

This season we get a bird woman terrorizing the city (and a temporary love interest for Sarge), the WP take on small-town cults,  Sarge getting possessed by an old white ghost, and some time-travel shenanigans resulting from a literal worm-hole.

The season's best episode, "The Coolening", involves a haunted 80's leather jacket that makes its wearer a tremendously confident and stereotypically 1980's cool person. Of course each of the main cast get a turn in the coat, but its power is addictive.  

WP is such an of-the-week type comedy that there's very little in the way of character development or growth, but we do get a B-story that follows Parker - not a member of the Paranormal team - on his normal rounds, to find that he's a surprisingly capable supercop, but only has thoughts of being part of the Paranormal team.  It's a great joke that gets increasingly funny as his situation (and apathy towards it) escalates.

While maybe not the sharpest comedy, it's such an easily digestible series, and immensely fun.  

---
A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 3 - HBO
Season 1 | Season 2

Another season of A Black Lady Sketch Show and another bit of casting shaking, mainly in Laci Mosley's departure.  At this point it's evident that Robin Thede as creator and showrunner is the driving force of the series, but it needs the talents of its other cast members, and it seems that Thede has found her most stable cast with Ashley Nicole Black, Gabrielle Dennis, and Skye Townsend.  These are talented comedic actors who craft fun and funny characters for every piece.  There's comedy in specificity, and with ABLSS every sketch comes from a specific premise, and then plays that premise to sometimes ridiculous extremes, other times very subtle ones.

Like prior seasons the opening sequence is similar but not the same, each episode changing just a little from before, enough to make you pay attention or even keep the finger on the pause button to read the increasingly lengthy text that pops up on screen.  Structurally ABLSS has its framing formulae, and each season plays with it to keep it fresh, intriguing and entertaining.  Framing sequences are often a weak spot for sketch comedy series, just a basic device to introduce sketches, but here it's an ongoing narrative that give the performers, playing themselves, to show who they are as a comedic personality.

I've been learning about how Black women have been tremendously underserved, harmfully represented, tokenized and all manner of disrespected in comedy throughout history. In some respects A Black Lady Sketch Show needs to exist regardless of its quality.  HBO has certainly put money behind it -- the sketches are all very well produced -- but it doesn't matter unless it delivers the funny, and it does at that.  While I can easily say I'm not the target market for this show, and a lot of the show's humour frequently goes over my head as beyond my frame of reference (sometimes culturally, sometimes gender-ly, sometimes both) but even then the performances are where it stands out and it's open enough for anyone to come in.  

---
Human Resources Season 1 - Netflix
[Big Mouth Season 1 | Season 4]

Over 5 seasons the raunchy, heartfelt Netflix animated coming-of-age comedy Big Mouth introduced a whole other fantastical realm of creatures that influence our lives.  Hormone Monsters, Shame Wizards, Love Bugs-turned-Hate Worms, and Depression Kitties each season an escalation of what came before, used as parable for the emotional development of teenagers as they develop through puberty.  They are effective metaphors that took on a life of their own as the show's creators obviously really enjoyed playing in that realm, and the performers (including notables like Maya Rudolph, David Thewlis, and Thandiwe Newton) really chewed up their lines, and spit out gold.

I was dubious about a spin-off, as what works so well with Big Mouth is the balance of the human world with a smattering of this fantastical realm.  I thought, maybe, that spending more time there would dilute its impact.  I was most definitely wrong.  Big Mouth is as potent as it is funny but it still is constrained by its "human" cast of characters and their being pre-teens.   I mean, for as constrained as they are, they still get up to some huge flights of fancy...but I digress.

Human Resources allows the Big Mouth creators to move to a whole other level.  I mean, yes, it could have just been a weird workplace sitcom, but it has bigger ambitions.  Like Big Mouth it still has things to say amidst all its weirdness.

Like a perverted Monsters, Inc. crossed with a horny Inside Out, Human Resources really gets to play in the sandbox of human emotions by way of a reality of creatures who exist to manipulate said emotions.  Our lead character is Love Bug Emmy (Aidy Bryant) who is completely out of her depth in her role having accidentally gotten her mentor (voiced by Pamela Adlon) fired and is now tasked with taking the lead with a complicated "client" Becca (Ali Wong) who is pregnant and maybe unhappy in her marriage.  Across Emmy's journey is her own self doubt showing that despite the fact that these creatures are tailored to a specific emotion, they're not always inherently good at dealing with their emotions.  It can get a bit trippy thinking to much about it, but the creatures within this sphere also have a bit of influence on each other.

Maurice, Connie, Rick, Lionel and every other creature seen in Big Mouth appear in the show, but Maurice and Connie, who are spotlight creatures in Big Mouth take supporting roles here so as not to overplay them.  New creatures are introduced, Logic Rocks like Pete (Randall Park), Petra the Ambition Gremlin (Rosie Perez), Dante the Addiction Angel (Hugh Jackman), and Tito the Anxiety Mosquito (Maria Bamford).  There's more and more in the background teasing an even richer world to explore, but they definitely do a thoroughly satisfying job in the first season of proving just how worthy this world is to exist in.

Getting away from the hormonal, primarily white middle-school kids of Big Mouth (and also the pseudo-autobiographical nature derived from creators Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg) allows Human Resources to branch out culturally to delve deeper into stories involving queer and non-binary tales as well as cultural stories and stories about adults who are still slaves to their emotions (as we all still kind of are).  One story, a love story between a human and a love bug that has a lot to say about the tragedy of relationships that burn bright but are unhealthy long turn, is, as is Big Mouth's style, counter-punched by an incredibly silly story of Maruice's underground cock-fighting ring, and his little Rocky-esque champion.  Thankfully they don't counter-punch the next episode which very specifically focuses on loss and grief and is an absolutely beautiful, affecting piece of television.

Much like Big Mouth, it feels like Human Resources is getting away with something, but I think unlike Big Mouth it's not trying as hard to.  It strangely seems more focused than Big Mouth, and I guess more mature...there's a lot less talking genitalia at least.  A worthy expansion.

---
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1 - CTV Scifi

I loved Star Trek: Discovery's first season for daring to do something different with Star Trek but the fan reaction demanded a shift, and that came in Season 2 which introduced some of the new crew of the Enterprise - Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck).  Discovery, early in its second season really acted like it wanted to be old episodic Trek but it was still really stuck in building to something bigger.  Mount and Peck, however, proved themselves capable of taking on the legacy roles and bringing something new without dishonouring the past.  That they were to get their own spinoff was welcome news.  But what would this new series be?  This new age of Trek has been a challenging one, so would going back ten years before TOS really be wise, or welcome?

The answer is a resounding yes.  Part-way into Strange New Worlds' first season and the sense is that they're finally doing Trek like Trek... episodically.  Rather than building a big over-arching plot, they seem to instead just be threading in small character journies.  Rather than propulsive binge television they're reverting to a-mission-a-week format that just...feels...right.  It feels like proper Trek.  Yes, it does take place before TOS, and the sets and effects and costumes and make-up are all shinier and much more impressive, but at its heart it's telling the same type of story, so it fits.  Discovery, in telling a very different, darker, more character-driven story its first season, couldn't properly resolve its technological differences between itself and TOS, but here, with sympatico storytelling, it doesn't matter.

Casting hasn't been Trek's problem.  Most of the cast of Discovery and Picard have been uniformly great, and the same can be said here.  Obviously Mount, Peck and Romijn came pre-cast, but the rest of the crew are quickly revealing themselves as likeable new additions to the fan culture.  There's once again some re-casting of old roles with new faces.  Most immediately is Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura.  She's got such big shoes to fill, but she gets the spotlight role of the second episode and nails it completely (one of my favourite Trek episodes in a very long time).  Nurse Chapel is now played by Jess Bush, who, somehow, always has a little twinkle in her eye.  She's sexy without being sexualized, and bisexual, which in the narrow reaches of representation in Star Trek still feels rather novel.

Helmsman Erica Ortegas has a certain pilot's swagger but without being unlikeably douchey.  The new doctor, M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has a wonderful bedside disposition so as to be immediately endearing, while the new security officer, La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) quickly surpasses the need to tie her into the Khan mythos.  Bruce Horek is under piles of prostetics as Hemmer, the chief engineer, and resident curmudgeon.  As a blind character (but with enhanced other senses) there's an opportunity for a certain other type of differently abled representation (beyond Geordi LaForge) but, as yet, I haven't seen it in this character without delving into the superpowered solution.  There's no understanding or inference of how anything works differently on the ship for a blind person/alien.

It's a great looking show, and so far the episodes have been fun and stereotypical in the best way possible.  I hope they don't try, at all, to introduce an over-arching story, they've kind of nailed it right out the gate.  It doesn't make for essential watching, but it does make for delicious comfort watching.

---
Pacific Rim: The Black Season 2 - Netflix
Season 1

Despite my aversion to Anime and my disappointment with PR: Uprising, I quite enjoyed season one of PR: The Black.  It didn't necessarily explore the parts of the PR reality that I maybe wanted them to with Uprising but they did explore a part of the PR reality and that was enough to hook me back in.  Plus, it wasn't really Anime.  Sure the visual style of the show is tres Anime but the story was created and written by American writers (the showrunners are creators Greg Johnson and veteran Marvel comics and cartoon writer Craig Kyle) so its story sensibilites are far more Western.

Season two picks up where season one left off, with the motley band of orphaned youths making their way in their appropriated Jaeger to Sydney base, and encountering all the strange things The Black (this abandoned section of Australia) has to offer.   They meet early on a Kaiju-wrangler (voiced by Rhys Darby) who seems to have tamed the great beasts, but anyone who has seen Grizzly Man should have an inkling about how this will turn out.  There's also a coven of Kaiju-worshipping witches who seem to be at least partially inspired by the twin fairy priestesses from Mothra, except of a much more malevolent nature.  They seem to, through their majicks, have developed the ability to influence Kaiju with their chanting, and seem completely fixated on Boy, the human-Kaiju hybrid as their central figure of worship, their savior.

I was worried with the second season, much as I was with the first, that it would be dragged down by spinning wheels plot and story.  But, the second, much as with the first, doesn't ever get comfortable nor settle into anything remotely resembling a status quo.  Whenever the story seems to be veering into a predictable story pattern, something unpredictable happens, yet it's always something that makes sense in-character or in-world, not just a jag for jagging's sake.

It's evident by where the series went and how quickly it went there that the show needed a wrapping up point.  There was probably a trajectory towards a season 3 but instead became a wrapping up point.  I was into where the possibilities for a season 3 could take the characters, but a slightly hasty finale did kind of work for me, again, jagging to a conclusion when it should be settling in on a cliffhanger.

KsMIRT: ice and fire

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format. Behold, finished in February.

This month:
True Detective season 4 - HBO/Max 6 episodes
Mr. & Mrs. Smith season 1 - Amazon Prime 10 episodes

---

I had watched Season 1 of True Detective way back in 2014, but I honestly cannot tell you what I thought of it. The reason I write this blog is to record my thoughts on some of the pop culture I consume because otherwise those thoughts will be lost to the ether. My little peanut brain can only hold so much information... like a peanut-sized amount. I treat this blog like Guy Peirce's skin in Memento. If it's not tattooed here, I'm not really going to remember it.

What I know is I didn't watch Season 2, nor Season 3.  I don't know if that reflected as much on a dislike of Season 1 or if it was just the critical drubbing Season 2 received prior or early in its release was enough to put me off the subsequent seasons.  

What I recall of season 1 is thinking Alexandra Daddario was far too young to be having sex with Woody Harrelson, and also something about Lovecraft's King in Yellow being mixed up in all of it. Again, I don't know if those little impressions were good or bad.  Show creator Nic Pizzolatto did not become "a name to look out for", one way or the other.

But this new season of True Detective, subtitled Night Country, starring Jodie Foster and MMA fighter Kali Reis, hooked me from the first commercial. First, it's set in the depths of winter in the far north (Alaska), and desolate, wintery settings are my favourite. Second, it's set in the 30 days of night scenario, where, because of the location on the Earth's axis, there's no sunlight for a month every year. It's a conceit that hasn't been used nearly enough (the opposite setting, of days of no darkness has been used I think more often). Third, well, it's not Pizzolatto in charge, so, maybe the critical disappointment from Season 2  that probably tainted the reception of Season 3 would be scrubbed clean. And fourth, I mean, Jodie Foster, incapable of delivering a bad performance.

Issa Lopez acts as showrunner, writer (or co-writer) and director on every episode of the season and that creative consistency is everything. This is rock-solid storytelling from start to finish, with everything, and I mean everything, feeling entirely consistent and unified for the whole run. While six episodes, it really does feel like it could be a 5-hour movie because of the visual uniformity.  There's also no downtime, no filler, no stalling for time.

The first episode wastes no time in introducing its more metaphysical elements, and it definitely isn't being cagey or shy about it. But it's also very sharp in how it incorporates into the story. The setting is a Native American community that has expanded because of mining operations, but the mine's environmental impact on the town has been having increasingly severe repercussions. The ancestral community and the new community clash over protests around the mine.  With a large indigenous cast of characters, it would have been easy enough to lean into just Native spirituality, but it's clear that there's more going on beyond that, and the bleed between them makes it hard to distinguish, intentionally.

 It's a murder mystery, it's a horror story, it's a political statement, it's a police procedural, and, by nature of a largely female cast and writing crew, it's a complex feminist story as well. 

The story starts with a singular mystery, the disappearance of all members of a remote research station, only to be found naked, frozen together in the ice, looking like a mutated mass of flesh. But as Foster's Chief Danvers investigates this crew, it dredges up a cold case from years earlier that wound up severing her partnership with Reis' Navarro, who moved on becoming a State Trooper. 

The reunion of Danvers and Navarro is enough of a story on its own, but this True Detective tale encompasses the whole town, and there is a pretty broad cast of characters that we meet, and have some role to play in everything involved. It feels like we've met half the town by the time the series is finished, and we certainly have a clear idea of the politics at play, and the conflicts that persist.  

We get deep into Danvers and Navarro's family life, as well as Danvers' new protege, Officer Pete Prior (a breakout performance from Finn Bennett), whose dad (John Hawkes) was originally slated to be Chief before Danvers was assigned, and the contention is palpable.

Night Country is an incredibly deep and thoughtful series, presenting hard edged, flawed characters with a richness that allows you to dislike them, but understand them, and root for them to not just figure out what's going down, but also figure out their own lives as well.

This was an incredible series from start to finish, and watching week to week was somehow both frustrating and satisfying. Each episode is so densely structured that they're filling on their own, but that still doesn't stop them from just seeming like a course of the overall meal.

The finale could have went many different directions. It had the potential to go full blown action or horror spectacular, but it instead goes the detective route without forgetting that the metaphysical still is woven completely throughout the story. It does wind up being satisfying in its resolution without demystifying its paranormal aspect. 

I may not remember Season 1, but this one will stick with me for a long time. Foster does not disappoint in the slightest, playing an exceptionally traumatized character (and hurt people hurt people) while Reis is just an incredible presence who should be allowed to do whatever she wants after this. An immediate favourite performer. I'm very likely buying this one on Blu-ray, because it's worth revisiting.

---

Speaking of not remembering things... the 2005 Doug Liman-directed, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie-starring film Mr. & Mrs. Smith holds absolutely no space in my brain. I recall seeing it in theatre when it came out, but I've never revisited it. What I recall is the conceit of the film, two mercenaries, married to each other, are advised they need to kill one another. Watching a film where Brad Pitt physically fights his wife has not aged well as a concept. 

There was a Mr. & Mrs. Smith Hitchcock film in the 1940's but that was a screwball comedy about a warring couple. Then there was a short-lived Mr. & Mrs. Smith action/espionage series in the 90's starring Scott Bakula and Maria Bello that finds two special agents having to pretend they're married and do missions. 

Strangely, this latest Mr. & Mrs. Smith, created and developed by Donald Glover with Francesca Sloane, is deemed to be based off the 2005 film, which gave no credit to the 90's series, even though there's direct parallels there.

This series seemed to come out of nowhere. It's a problem with AmazonPrime where they seemed to have put all their promotional money into a failed Lord of the Rings series and nothing else in the year since. I never seem to know when anything is debuting or returning to Prime. It was actually a TV reviewer I follow that tipped me off to Mr. & Mrs. Smith's premiere two days before it dropped.

I'm always up for more Glover. The love for the Community cast runs fairly deep. But Glover's Atlanta was one of the most creative and experimental series in the past decade that fanned that flame of fandom. Mr. and Mrs. Smith doesn't take a lot of creative risks certainly not as many as Atlanta, but enough to feel elevated from, say, a network action-oriented series.

Glover is the known quantity, the draw, but his co-star, Maya Erskine, is the kaboom, the mind-blowing explosive stick of dynamite that makes the show feel revelatory.  It is a two-hander of a series, where both performers receive top billing, but it does feel like Erskine's show. She seems to be doing the heavier lifting acting and character-wise.

Jane and John Smith are each, independently recruited to a non-descript organization to run high-risk operations. They are selected and partnered and given their new identities as well as a gorgeously renovated brownstone in New York that seems well outside almost everyone's affordability rating.  They are given their missions by an unknown contact they call "HiHi". The first mission is a literal cake walk, but not what it seems and gives them a sense of what they're in for, as well as the tidbit of 3 fails remaining.

Across 10 episodes, the Smiths actually develop feelings for each other, and a genuine partnership is formed, but the missions start exposing their weaknesses as a couple and threaten to tear them apart in the end. Ultimately, if you're aware of the "source" film, they're going to start trying to kill one another, but when it happens it's still pretty shocking, because they do such a good job of wanting these crazy assassins to work it out.

I loved this show. It's full of wonderful action, comedy, romance and intrigue bits, plus it sets up the stakes from the get-go that play out delightfully. Glover leans into his charm, wearing it as a mask with just cracks of vulnerability beneath. He's playing at being a cool agent, but once we really come to realize what a mamma's boy John is, it really spells out his personality. Erskine is, as noted, an explosive performer... she sells everything she needs to sell, including her diagnosed psychopathy, yet it's the way she plays her detached coldness that makes Jane so completely likeable. We're going to be flooded with Erskine as a result of this.

There's some wonderful guest stars in this, including Parker Posey, John Turturro, Michaela Coel, Sarah Paulson, and more, but my favourite was Ron Perlman who is the Smith's escort mission in Italy. As they're young in their "marriage" the conversation of kids comes up, and, hilariously, Perlman basically acts like a toddler throughout the episode, testing both of their parenting mettle. It's a freaking delight, and Perlman kills the assignment without being too cartoony about it.

It's a great looking show, handing the romance and the action with equal style and verve. The globetrotting aspect must have made it an expensive shoot, but all the different locations are shot beautifully. Each episode has a mini-movie feel, but they also all chain with each other so that consuming them is all too easy.

The first season leaves a second season teased up and a full possibility. Hell, we still know absolutely nothing about the organization they work for by the end of the final episode.  With Amazon dropping the whole season in one shot, it just means the wait for another season is going to feel that much longer.  Lady Kent and I wanted more immediately upon completion.

Sorry To Bother You

 2018, d. Boots Riley - Netflix

I have to feel bad about not seeing Sorry To Bother You in the theatres.  It wasn't for lack of desire.  I could tell from the trailers it was "my kind of film", but I truly had no idea how much of a "my kind of film" it truly was.   It just kind of passed me by and I never made the time for it.  Even when it was on one of the cable channels I kept putting it off, and it's been on "my list" on Netflix for months, unloved. By the time I actually put it on, I had kind of forgotten what the film was actually about, only to dial into its swirling surrealism instantly.

Cribbing directly from Wikipedia --  Boots Riley describes the film as "an absurdist dark comedy with aspects of magical realism and science fiction inspired by the world of telemarketing" - which sums it up quite nicely, but not totally.  

We first meet Cassius "Cash" Green (Lakeith Stanfield) trying way too hard to get a telemarketing job.  To his interview he's brought with him a trophy and a placard supposedly representing triumphs from previous employment, only for the hiring manager to call out his bullshit references and accomplishments, but then confide that they will literally hire anyone.  Dashing expectations that this would be a cringe comedy about awkward telemarketing conversations, Riley's imaginative storytelling style imbues the film with a lively comedic energy, as Cash and his work desk slide in-person into his he caller's household interrupting everything from dinner to sex, only to be hung up on in short order.

If you have ever thought about telemarketing work, I'm sure it just sends a shiver down your spine.  You know there's a level of desperation when entering that field of employment, one that's about as high status as working at McDonalds.  There's a relatively easy and dispiriting movie to be had in the grind and misadventures of telemarketing, but that's not what this film or Riley is at all interested in doing. 

Instead there's a whole race and class context, where, in order to succeed, Cash starts employing his "white voice" (provided by an extra nasally David Cross).  The "white voice" isn't necessarily directly about code switching so much as employing an attitude that the listener is not only receptive to but envious of.  Cash starts succeeding very far, the newest golden boy in the organization.

In the background there's a thread of the employees unionizing, as well as a few cues about an organization providing housing and food for life, in exchange for a lifetime supply of cheap labor, promising to take all the complications out of life for those feeling run down and downtrodden.  These two threads start to collide into Cash's reality and he wants nothing more than to look past it, like his most successful colleagues but invariably he has a conscience.

Still he has to learn about a pretty gnarly conspiracy (you will NEVER see that twist coming) and mingle with the worst of the worst (it would appear that Armie Hammer's character in this film is pretty much Armie Hammer in real life) before his morals supplant his greed.

I love an absurd satire of capitalism, especially one that goes to such extremes as this does and yet isn't actively working to alienate its audience with its weirdness.  I think of How To Get Ahead In Advertising as a similar model, only with more of a Terry Gilliam-at-his-peak playfulness.  It's as savvy as the best Black Mirror episodes, but plays in a much more heightened reality.  It has such a clean logic that it's a film very easy to follow along with, and the parallels to reality are easily equatable despite all the crazy twists.  It's extremely funny, constantly surprising, and visually delightful.  Riley's debut has instantly entered him into my "must watch" directors list, and the only disappointment is in finding that Riley has no other films to catch up on or look out for. 

Stanfield, was on the cusp of stardom when this came out, and it launched him over the wall, which we've seen bear fruit over the past few years with his many various roles, but I can't help but feel this is still his brightest performance so far.  It will be interesting to see him return to Atlanta whenever Donald Glover decides to pick it up again.  The film is also stacked with stellar performances from Tessa Thompson (her art gallery scene is a mindbender), Jermaine Fowler (still just waiting for him to explode), Steven Yeun (an Oscar nod this year!), Terry Crews, Danny Glover and Omari Hardwick with voice work from Patton Oswalt, Forrest Whitaker and Rosario Dawson.

An instant favourite.

31 Days of Halloween 2015: The Lazarus Effect

2014, David Gelb (Jiro Dreams of Sushi) -- download

Yes, the director of the acclaimed documentary about a sushi master, has also made a cheesy horror movie. He should stick to documentaries.

More cheats! I left a few horror movies sitting in my list in case I do something in the evening other than watch a movie. This is one.

It doesn't take much to call this a remake of Flatliners, it actually is much worse. At least that movie had the brat pack of that era going for it, but this one has Olivia Wilde and Donald Glover, and that is about it.  Am I supposed to know who Mark Duplass is, because he is not convincing as the tortured scientist working on a drug that will prolong the period from which people can be revived.  You know, revived from death. By combining a milky substance with massive electrical shocks, they figure out how to draw you back from the beyond. But didn't Pet Cemetery teach anybody anything? You always come back wrong.

Olivia Wilde is his partner, his lover and the first human victim of his folly. And of course, she has to have a dark past which will be dragged back with her from over there. But for some reason they decide it will have a side effect that is not much different than "all your brain cells active" scifi, such as that in Lucy, but with the added bonus of black demon eyes. When did they decide that an entirely black eye means demonic?

They could have gone for a more science focused movie but completely, utterly dispensed with that for scares and darkness and crying side kicks. It goes no where, delivers everything else in a lazy fashion and inspires no desire to know how things will end up.

The Martian

2015, Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise) -- cinema

The Martian was my favourite book this year and I was rather stoked it was being made into a movie. The book read like a movie, being an incredibly lean story focused on the steps of his survival and little else. It was lauded as a love story to science, but really it is quite the fantasy, despite the hard science that is under the microscope on almost every page. For one, Mark Watney is so incredibly upbeat and positive, you think he was made of antidepressants. Secondly, the idea the world would pull together to rescue a lone man from Mars is ridiculous. Had it happened in our world they would have turned off the monitors and waited for him to die. But the fact a book was written with unabashed optimism and hope was an utter delight. I just gobbled this story up with a smile on my face and chuckles out loud on the bus.

This is not Matt Damon's first time being an astronaut marooned on a planet, as he was the asshole scientist who manipulated his rescue in Interstellar, killing a man and himself in the weak willed attempt. And let's not forget Saving Private Ryan. As the meme said, the American government has invested a lot in saving Matt Damon.

But he is perfect as Watney, quick with the smile, the crude jokes & language and believable with the science talk. He's relatable. He's just a likeable guy.

If you haven't seen the trailer, he ends up stranded on Mars when a freak storm (even freakier considering Mars' air density doesn't allow such storms) slams a communications antenna into him, knocking him out and killing his suit monitor. He appears dead to the rest of the crew and they have only minutes to escape. They do. The third mission to Mars ends on a depressing note.

But he wakes up, blood having congealed enough to seal the suit, along with the shrapnel, and he is able to get to the habitat. Alive but trapped with little food and no communication, how is he going to survive the four years until the 4th Mars mission? With SCIENCE of course! This book/movie is made for all the people who love the Internet celeb of Bill Nye, who listened to Quirks & Quarks on CBC and who loved the McGyver aspects of Myth Busters.

The story condenses down to Watney figuring out how to solve those greatest problems: food (requring water) and communication. Most other needs are filled by the redundancy of the mission and most of the equipment is made to last years. Unfortunately the only collection of music he has is disco; Mark hates disco. Ridley Scott brings the greatest of the science scenes together with great flourish, but less exposition. We get he is doing sciency stuff even if we never have it explained.

And to fill in the drama, he constantly flips back to Earth and how they are dealing. In a movie that could have been made of one star, he fills the supporting cast with recognizable faces; kind of annoyingly so in making Mindy Park white (MacKenzie Davis from Halt & Catch Fire) and Kapoor being played by (*checks spelling*) Chiwetal Ejiofor instead of an Indian actor. I would have gone with Irrfan Khan, from Jurassic World. But it works; the scenes at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labs are enthralling, as all the alpha nerds have to band together to help plan the rescue of Watney. Of particular note, was Donald Glover as the math nerd who figures out a key calculation for getting the mission ship back to Mars in time. Scott makes all of this very low key drama, very dramatic indeed. You know the end of the movie is going to be He Is Rescued but you are still carried along with the failures and recoveries.

Also, and I have mentioned my love for it before, but again we have a lovely sense of physical design going on. From Watney's spacesuit to the rover trucks to the HUDs used in the from-the-camera-view scenes where they make use of Watney's exposition -- the look & feel of the movie is just yummy. And let us not forget Fake Mars. This is the most colourful Mars we have seen before, not all red, all the time. There are gradients to the horizons and big, massive landscape shots that are really meant to inspire us to go there. I do hope that someone's Flickr feed from Mars happens in my lifetime.

I loved this movie, if you haven't gathered it yet. From a story, its all rather simplistic and doesn't have a lot of nuanced characters, nor would it have had any time to develop any. But the blatant optimism and love of ingenuity spoke to me. Yeah me, the not so optimistic guy. Can't deny I love it when I see it, because I see so little of it in real life. Go see the movie. And read the book, yet another example of a success in self publishing, which started as a blog entry!

KWIF: The Martian (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new this week, just some scienced fiction and a modern classic.

This Week:
The Martian (2015, d. Ridley Scott - disney+)
Solar Crisis (aka "Crisis 2050" - 1990, d. Allan Smithee - tubi)
Ocean's Eleven (2002, d. Steven Soderbergh - hollywood suite)

---

I love the idea of this poster, but 
why not red sand?

After watching Project Hail Mary (twice) I felt the urge to watch The Martian again. It was a movie I liked well enough the first time but it didn't really stick with me, beyond the "going to science the shit out of it" quote that lives rent free in my brain.

Both Project Hail Mary and The Martian are adaptations of Andy Weir novels, with screenplays by Drew Goddard, and as such there's a definite consistency in tone between the two of them. While both feature space men finding themselves alone and effectively stranded, these are not harrowing films of survival that Hollywood normally likes to present. 

Instead these are stories about men of science, men of competency, men of versatility, capable of adapting and, yes, science-ing the shit out of a problem. That makes them compelling figures to watch (there's a reason MacGyver was a big enough hit to run for 7 seasons in the '80's and a remake ran for 5 seasons in the 2010s) and with Drew Goddard, schooled in the Buffy/Angel writers den, he's got a knack for writing intelligent characters both pithiness and humility, which makes them enjoyable and somewhat down-to-Earth despite clearly advanced intellect and skills.

The key difference between Project Hail Mary and The Martian has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the directors involved. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are not Ridley Scott and Ridley Scott is not  Lord and Miller.  Lord and Miller are particularly gifted at comedy as well as exploring ideas in a big, conceptual way that subverts expectations, Scott has in current stage of his career (starting with Prometheus), leaned almost exclusively into the grandiose. It's not spectacle he's after but big moments, big ideas, big pressures on the characters.  Where with PHM Lord & Miller no doubt heightened the wit of Goddard's script with their own instincts and timing, Scott at times steps on the levity, not to quash it but so as not to diminish the emotional reality of the film.

As much as these two films have a consistency between them, I can't picture Ridley Scott's Project Hail Mary being nearly as entertaining, while I could picture a Lord & Miller The Martian being the "Best Musical or Comedy" of 2015 that the Golden Globes proclaimed it to be, but it wouldn't feel as prestigious as it does. 

I'm not going to review the story here in any great depth (Toasty did a good job of that already), because it's a very successful, 10-year-old (!) film with a very simple premise... a man gets stranded on Mars and has to rely on his wits, intellect and science to survive long enough to be rescued. 

Toasty is probably right that Mark Watney would have been left to die on Mars because the billions it would cost to rescue him would not have been approved, and most likely when they discovered Watney was alive, that info would have been classified and probably subject to conspiracy theories, but as we see with Weir's Project Hail Mary he prefers to find optimism in his crises situations.  Here not only does NASA and the US government do everything can to keep Watney alive and to rescue him, but they even wind up collaborating with foreign agencies who stretch out their hands (and money and technology) in a sign of goodwill and harmony.

I had forgotten how stacked the cast of The Martian is. Of course Matt Damon is the face of the picture, the central figure and titular martian, but the crew that leaves him behind has the likes of Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan, while among the ground crew there's Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Benedict Wong and Mackenzie Davis. At the time many of these actors were known primarily or only as comedic performers so it was a bit odd how reigned in their performances were (as if the script called for broader comedy and it was cast in such a way but Scott reined it in).

It's a captivating film through and through, even at almost two hours and twenty minutes. It looks great, with amazing sets, effects, and wardrobes, and the sound design (I really need to see it in the theatre some time) is incredible (it lost the Academy Award in both sound categories to Mad Max:Fury Road, which hard to argue with). It grossed over six hundred million at the box office internationally, and was nominated for many, many, many awards (winning a few), and has since become a big-time "dad movie", which maybe has diminished its prestige a little. The massive success of Project Hail Mary has put this other Weir adaptation back into the spotlight and, no doubt, has fast tracked adaptations of Weir's other novel and short stories, and I'm sure execs are champing at the bit to acquire the rights to whatever he's working on next.

---

I have been, for pretty much most of my life, pretty piped into what mainstream science fiction movies were out there. One of my favourite childhood books was one about science fiction movies, most of them grown-up films that I wouldn't get to see until a decade (or two) later. I was pretty aware of any new scifi movies that were released in theatre pretty much since adolescence.  So for there to be a sizable-budgeted science fiction movie from 1990 that I know nothing about is shocking to me.

Based off the novel "Crisis: Year 2050" ("Kuraishisu niju-goju nen" written by Takeshi Kawata), Solar Crisis was not a trifle of a film. With a budget of at least 30 million dollars (in 1990 money), with recognizable (if no longer A-list) stars like Tim Matheson, Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle and Jack Palance, there was some ambition behind this production. The investors were so hot on the idea a theme park was planned to accompany it.

Financed by a consortium of Japanese investors, Solar Crisis was an attempt to make a very American-style blockbuster sci-fi disaster epic. Instead its a very American-style epic disaster of a sci-fi blockbuster.

Japanese actor Tetsuya Bessho is the only real Japanese presence in the film in a tertiary role, and the film seems pointedly made in such a way as to not elicit anything...unAmerican, although it also seems somewhat filtered through a an outside lens despite being made at a Los Angeles (the way a lot of Euro-investor, made-in-Baltic-states-style sci-fi/fantasy productions would feel in the 2000s) .  What little details there are on the making of this film (I only learned what Grokipedia was after I had read it's surprisingly detailed AI generated article on the film, and I feel slimy all over now), word has it that the film was extensively re-edited with some re-shoots to make it more appealing to an American distributor, and one has to wonder what "unAmerican" elements had to be left on the cutting room floor. (And by all accounts, the film had a middling performance at the Japanese box office, so it's not like there's a secret masterpiece that was lost in this process.)

Solar Crisis would prove to be director Richard C. Sarafian (Vanishing Point). The intervention in editing and reshooting his film caused him to remove his name from the domestic release and, I guess, quit directing after that. He had a fairly prolific (if not quite esteemed) career directing in both film and television prior to that, and following Solar Crisis he seemed to focus instead on his acting career.

The film is somewhat a throwback to the "what if" scifi movies of the 1950's (for example The Day The Earth Caught Fire) where a specific threat or event loomed and it was up to a team of astronauts and military men and scientists to try and stop/fix it. In this case, it's a solar flare that could eradicate Earth entirely. The plan then is to sent off the largest, most powerful warhead ever produced to trigger the flare while the Earth is on the other side of the sun.

In charge of this mission is Commander Steve Kelso (Matheson). He's a military nepo-baby, as his father, Admiral "Skeet" Kelso (Heston) seems to be pulling strings a bit.  Steve has an enlisted kid, Mike Kelso (Corin Nemic), whom he declined to have strings pulled to bring him to the orbital base where Steve's mission is taking off from. Mike, however, decided to go AWOL and find his way there on his own...only things didn't go as planned and now he's stranded in the desert.

New to Steve's crew is the test-tube grown, genetically reprogrammed scientist Alex Noffe (Annabel Schofeld). She's an outcast among all the military on the satellite, but she's meant to be made to feel welcome by a lot of disrespecting of her boundaries. She finds herself drawn to Steve (like some unseen force, the script perhaps, demanded it) and Steve likewise finds Alex alluring.

What nobody knows is that the evil billionaire (is there any other kind) Arnold Teague (Boyle), head of the IXL Corporation, is a solar flare denier. He doesn't believe it exists and if it does it's not a threat, and even if it is it's not a threat to business, and if anything money can be made if it does destroy half the Earth. It's better for him if it does, actually. The one thing this film gets right, billionaires are psychopaths disconnected from their own humanity. It's a weirdly timely story, how billionaires are trying to control the narrative of a climate crisis for their own gain and everyone else's expense.

Teague is hedging his bets highly, but he's also not taking chances. Through espionage, Alex is kidnapped and reprogrammed to sabotage the mission. Young Mike, meanwhile, finds help in the desert in the form of the cracked ex-general Travis (Palance, just making a meal out of every scene), who agrees to help the kid find his way to the satellite transport site. Along the way the run afoul of Teague's men and learn of his sabotage plans with Admiral Skeet, searching for his grandson, always two steps behind them.

This isn't a unique story. There is a whole history of sci-fi save-the-Earth tales that predate this film, and many that follow (Armageddon, Sunshine, Project Hail Mary, to name just three). What makes this one pretty bland and generic is the military angle. Though not lacking in ideas, there is a lack of science, and a lack of psychological intrigue. The political and social intrigue, of world building, is hinted but needs more presence, and one has to wonder if some of it's on the cutting room floor. Boyle's evil corporate overlord is so bog standard for the time, seen in so many sci-fi and action films of the 80's and 90's. It doesn't help that it seems like Boyle's barely awake when delivering his lines.

Similarly Matheson seems utterly bored in the role as commander Steve, and lacks commanding presence. As stated, Palance seems to be having a blast in his role, and Heston is not lacking in gusto, as if this were his big break for a return to prominence. Young Nemic, meanwhile, is definitely trying to find his footing and do something good with a bad role, but he can't keep up with Palanace. Schofeld as Alex... well, you hate to say it, but sometimes you're watching a film and you see an actress in a prominent role that you've never seen before and you just know the main reason she's there is because she agreed to take her top off. She's not a terrible actress, but she's not up to the standards of the other main cast here, and Alex is perhaps the most prominent character in the story with the most emotional arc. Schofeld isn't up to the task.

The effects, mostly, are pretty good from former Star Wars visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. There are some wonky scenes (the very first shot of a shuttle in space was hot garbage) but they're few and far between, and I'm wondering if they were reshoots. The style of the film - the ships, wardrobe, hair and makeup - can best be described as uninspired.

I didn't hate Solar Crisis but it's not a great watch by any stretch. While it had aspirations of being a big screen blockbuster, it winds up being a levelled-up version of a Full Moon Video production.

---

I dunno about this poster...
I only count 5

Speaking of "dad movies", Ocean's Eleven is another modern classic of the "dad movie" oeuvre. It's so weird to me that anything by Steven Soderbergh could fit so explicitly in that classification.  Sure, the director's repertoire is so vast and varied that of course it should present the opportunity for a "dad movie" to find its way into his filmography, but generally Soderbergh's sensibilities skew outside the general tastes of the "dad movie" consumer. I mean just look at Haywire, which should seem like a total braindead "dad movie" actioner, but Soderbergh just can't help himself and bring something outre to it that just doesn't quite blend.

And yet, the glossy remake of the old Rat Pack non-classic is just sooo slick that Soderbergh subverted his own impulses and made a movie for pretty much everyone (aside from some cussing) that's devoid of sex, drugs, or any real violence. 

If anything, Ocean's Eleven was an exercise in shooting for the edit for Soderbergh. This film lives and dies by its hyperactive editing, and it really lives large. Soderbergh edits a lot of his own films, but for this (and for others) he called in Stephen Mirrione (who would later become a favourite of George Clooney's as well as Joseph Kosinski). All the pieces that need to be woven into this narrative means that scenes have to be tight as hell. There's no room to take more than a breath or two. 

The whole production is helped along by the bounciest film score in the history of film from David Holmes. That upright bass player's fingers must've been bleeding. I used to listen to the score just for fun, and I'd forgotten just how damn propulsive it was, but also just how damn essential it was to the film. There's a concert happening in Ocean's Eleven and Holmes provides the music while Mirrione choreographs the dance. It feels like if Mirrione edited any film like this and you laid Holmes' soundtrack over it, it would work, regardless of content. 

This is the heist film that reinvigorated heist films in modern cinema, but also kind of ruined heist films for modern cinema. It set the temperature for just how complex and convoluted a heist has to be to appease the audience, and anything less seems boring by comparison. Not even the subsequent Ocean's films (which I need to revisit) come close to being half as successful as this one (the next closest standout is Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, but that came out the year before...).

Of course, what takes the Mirrione-edits and Holmes-score to "dad movie" level is the star-studded, audience-baiting cast of Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle (but that accent tho...woof), Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, and Andy Garcia. That's just wall-to-wall talent carpet right there. As good as everyone is (barring Cheadle's bad cockney accent), I found Reiner delivered the standout performance of the film with Mac really popping as well. Clooney and Roberts need to ground the film in something a little more than just a heist (and it's truly a little more), which brings Garcia in, as the villain getting in between them. Garcia's performance is wonderfully understated and controlled, to the point that he seems both non-threatening and utterly dangerous.

It's been a couple decades since I last watched this, and, despite the Rick and Morty take down of all the heist cliches that Ocean's Eleven set-up, it still works almost completely.  

What I Have Been Watching (Kent Edition) - sitcomedies, sit

Toast's latest hat-on-a-hat-on-a-hat entry pulling more of our subfeatures together than ever before (or ever recommended) made me laugh but exposed that many of our subfeatures have a tendency of overlapping.  So I'm stripping out a lot of the other subtitles and just going with the What I Have Been Watching feature (which is a feature all about the admitted state of spending too much time in front of the TV.  There are too many streamers, too much content, and it drives me bonkers just even thinking about it anymore.  Here's some of what I saw in the comedy category in, let's say, the past year of television)

This is a grammatical nightmare.

In this edition:

The Kennedys (1 season, 2015) - amazon

Murderville (1 season, 2022) - Netflix

The After Party (Season 1, 2022)- AppleTV+

Grand Crew (Season 1, 2022) - Global/NBC

Reservation Dogs (Season 1, 2021) - d+/star

Our Flag Means Death (Season 1, 2022) - Crave

Mythic Quest (Season 1, 2020) - AppleTV+

Kids in the Hall: Death Comes To Town (1 season, 2010) - AmazonPrime (rewatch)

I Love That For You  (Season 1, 2022) - Showtime

----

The Kennedys seems to be a British take on, like, The Goldbergs or Fresh off the Boat or Everyone Hates Chris or Young Rock, a period-set sitcom that takes a look at a real person's amusing childhood experiences and family life, but, you know, turns them into sitcom fodder thus wearing away most of the autobiographical sensibilities that the show is premised upon.  In this case, it's actress and comedian Emma Kennedy telling tales about growing up in the late 70's in the Jessop Square subdivision.

Young Emma is played by Lucy Hutchinson who at about 12 years old has some pretty impeccable comedic timing.  As the series lead she's surprisingly capable and naturalistic.  She doesn't feel like she's acting or putting on a performance and she convincingly feels of the era, talking about Star Wars and whatnot.  Her mother,  Brenda (played by the IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson) is the show's powerhouse, though.  A rampant feminist but still unaware of her own trappings in the patriarchy, she's defiant to a fault of her role as mother and homemaker.  She's a boldly entertaining character, both for her lack of hubris, but also not lacking in love or kindness.  Patriarch Tony Kennedy (played by Dan Skinner) is kind of an oblivious lunk, never quite sure what anyone is saying to him or why.  Not stupid, just not always present in the moment.  The family is best friends with the unwed couple Tim (Toast of London's Harry Peacock) and Jenny (Emma Pierson), the former a womanizing drunk, the latter a preening mess of a woman, unsure of what she wants out of life.  

Most of the episodes take place within the neighbourhood and over its six episodes starts to build up familiarity with its surroundings for the audience.  The comedy is multifaceted and quick, with a lot of wordplay, as well as utilizing the sort of late-70s naivety as a hindsight joke machine, and then a whole bunch of non-sequitur side-swipes, which seem to be the fashion of this nostalgiac subgenre of sitcom.

I was shocked to see that there were only 6 episodes in this series.  It's quite funny, well-produced, and exceptionally well acted with recognizable faces.  It's not innovating anything but it's rocksolid in what it's trying to do, and that's usually good for two or three seasons, at least in British terms.

---

I don't want to talk about Netflix as an entity.  It's too complicated for this space.  But lets just say they've spent a lot of money trying stuff, most of which is forgettable and didn't work.  The odd thing is transcendant.  Murderville is somewhere in the middle.

It's a fully plotted, largely improvised comedy about a bumbling homicide detective who keeps getting a new partner each week and has a murder mystery to solve.  The partner is a real world celebrity (in this case Conan O'Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone and Ken Jeong fill the role), playing themself, coming in cold to the situation and having to act along.   The episodes that pop are the ones in which the performers are actively playing along, versus the performers who are lost, sitting back, and just watching things happening around them.

Leading them along the way is Will Arnett as Terry Seattle, who is in the midst of a divorce with his precinct Chief (Haneefah Wood) and is, most apparently, living out of his office.  Seattle drives a pristine looking El Camino (so awesome) which seems to be the only light in his life.  He still mourns the loss of his partner (who is only ever seen in a photo hanging on the wall as Jennifer Aniston) 15 years ago, and puts his grief and anxiety upon the unsuspecting rookie.

Surprisingly the show, for all its improvisational set-up, has an arc.  It's not necessarily a thoroughly satisfying arc but it's surprising that they even attempted it within the format.  It's an enjoyable show, with even the lesser episodes still providing some good laughs within.  It's certainly strange, and unlike anything I've seen done before, but I could see some refinement of the formula into something that's consistently great fun.

---

The one series I was most looking forward to on AppleTV+ when I started the service this year was The After Party.  It's the brainchild of Christopher Miller, one half of the great Lord and Miller comedy directing/producing team known for their ability to exploit genre tropes adeptly and shrewdly for maximum entertainment value (see Clone High, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the Jump Street movies, The Lego Movie).  

This series I was hoping would be the next great one, a murder mystery in which each episode takes a look at one of the accused but from a different genre standpoint.  It sounded fantastic, and the cast, featuring some of the most underhyped comedic talent going (Sam Richardson, Ilana Glazer, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, John Early) all held down by Tiffany Haddish's under-the-gun detective.   The crux is superstar Xavier (Dave Franco) is murdered in his own home during the afterparty following a high school reunion.

Well, I mean, I liked the series, quite a bit.  I enjoyed tremendously the performers, and I liked the characters, and I enjoyed the murder mystery angle certainly enough to eagerly come back from week-to-week, but my expectations of the genre-busting Miller were not quite lived up to.  True, each episode did focus on a different suspect, and leaned towards a specific genre/subgenre/storytype (like a Fast & Furious Movie, highschool drama, musical, animated comedy, psychological thriller) but the realities of trying to uphold a single story through these different genres meant the genres couldn't be exploited to their full potential.  So the show, while fully entertaining, doesn't hit that next level I had hoped for.

Season 2 is in the works.  I'll be there.

---

You can't really rely upon network television to deliver anything innovative or surprising.  They are hanging on for dear life in this era of the streaming wars, and know that their key to survival is reality competition shows and programming that appeals almost exclusively to the Boomers, doling out of-the-week dramas in every possible high-stakes professional situation.  At this stage network comedies are life support, and even the mighty Chuck Lorre's laugh track adherence is failing to save them.

So when something like Grand Crew sneaks out quietly, and just as quitely maintains a consistent tone of hilarity and fun, well, it's always a shock.  Brooklyn Nine-Nine was the last great network comedy, and Grand Crew has the potential to be the next.  It's a dead simple premise, a group of Black friends hang out at a wine bar when not living their lives.  It's basically a modernisation of Cheers and Friends  but a lot less dependent on that single situational environment.  It's also thoroughly a Black-led and run show, from creator Phil Augusta Jackson, but it's also inherently accessible as any network comedy should be.  It's a Black-centric show, thus many jokes are very specific references to of Black culture, and I'm a middle-aged white guy so I may not catch all these references, aptly so, but being hyper-specific in comedy is always the correct way to go.  When I do get the references (which is more often than not), they are gold, so I can only imagine how good the deep cut ones I'm not getting are.  But the general sensibility of the show's humour is straight-up character silliness, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Happy Endings.  It really leans into the characters goofball traits, and their unique personas for the majority of the humour, and it's great.

The cast is tremendous.  Echo Kellum (Arrow) is the lead of the ensemble, a flitty, hopeless romantic who just broke up with his girlfriend and is learning to live without love for a while, despite his impulses.  His sister Nikki is played by Nicole Byer, a hypersexual alpha who's also a realtor.  Carl Tart plays the perpetually unemployed, always calculating, boisterous Sherm while his roommate Aaron (Anthony Jennings) is the buttoned-down professional accountant who has to be the responsible yin to Sherm's yang. Then there's married friend Wyatt (Justin Cunningham) who is a stay-at-home husband (and still uncertain how he feels about it).  They make a new friend who works at the wine bar in Fay (Gracie Mercedes), who is relatively new to L.A. but still uncertain about her place there.

This is very much an episodic show, with only a little bit of character and/or relationship development happening from episode to episode.  They're a tremendously fun crew, some might say "grand".  Even when the show tackles the impact of yet another tragic murder-by-police shooting of a black youth, they still manage to find some levity within the resonance without dipping into "very special episode" terrain.  A second season is on its way, thankfully.  The current 10 episodes just isn't enough.  Grand needs a nice long life.

---

Reservation Dogs is a comedy in the vein of vanity projects like Atlanta, Master of None, or [edited...let's not go with that suggestion, apt as it was].  Normally "vanity project" has a negative connotation, but for creative performers like Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari and [redacted] their vanity projects give them a chance to hone and showcase all of their skills, including writing and directing, as well as delve deeper into more thoughtful exploration of subjects that aren't explored elsewhere, and certainly not with their point of view.  These projects take on their own rhythm, their own style, even though they're of a type together, they feel the impact of their creators' visions in letting creativity be the star.  Episodes tend to feel more like mini-movies than serialized television.

With the support of producer Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs was given life at FX from director and sketch comedian Sterlin Harjo, but unlike many a vanity project, Harjo remains off camera and uses the platform as an showcase for Native American performers, writers and more (both Ansari and Glover, though, it should be noted, use their platforms to elevate others too, but the talk of those shows is still centers so much around them).

The show is a comedy (but also has some weight behind it) about life on an Oklahoma reservation, following the "Reservation Dogs" crew, four teenage friends who steal shit to make money for a good cause, getting the fuck off the reservation and going to California.  They recently lost one of their crew to suicide, and the loss haunts them each in different, sobering ways. Things get further complicated when the NDN Mafia, a rival quartet of teens arrives on the scene and start taking shots at them.  What could have been a very straightforward series based off the setup quickly reveals itself within its first three episodes as something much more contemplative than that.

The episodes all vary in tone and subject matter and even who is starring in them, but they're all amazing, exploring so many different facets of res life, Native heritage and culture.  While there are some amazing guest stars (Gary Farmer, Zahn McClarnon, Jon Proudstar, and Kaniehtiio Horn among may) throughout the season, the stars are the four young members of the Dogs.  Devery Jacobs is Elora, the de facto leader of the crew, and the one who maybe feels the most outwardly motivated to leave the res.  Her spotlight episode finds her attempting yet again to get her drivers license only to get embroiled in her instructor's whole side deal.  Bear is played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, an awkward young man who needs the gang to bolster his sense of confidence and masculinity (but he also has a bold but equally awkward spirit guide, hilariously played by Dallas Goldtooth).  Bear's spotlight episode finds his estranged father, a successful rapper, returning to the res for a charity event, and Bear's mom tries to brace him for disappointment, but he starts spending the California money to try and look a big shot for his dad which raises tensions with Elora.  Willie Jack, played by Paulina Alexis, is tough-talking and hard-as-nails but is very connected with her family and was hit hard by her cousin's Daniel's suicide.  Her spotlight episode finds her going hunting with her father, but flashing back to memories of hunting trips with Daniel, and it's a very emotional journey that explores the problems of depression on the res, and the lasting impacts they have.  The final member of the crew is the youngest, Cheese (Lane Factor).  Quiet and laid back, he gets on with everyone and just kinda of seems to tag along with the dogs with no personal agenda.  Cheese's spotlight episode is actually more a spotlight for McClarnon's Officer Big and a showcase for the town as he has the young man as his ride-along partner for the episode.  

As many shows have keyed into over the past decade, you get a lot of mileage out of building out the population of your environment.  What used to only be seen as a thing in prime time animation (The Simpsons primarily) has now become a staple for all the great network comedies in recent years, and the same occurs here, with the res feeling full of interesting and fun people.  

It's a fantastic series. 

---

While Waititi only served as producer (and co-writer on the pilot) for Reservation Dogs -- thus his influence is limited -- Our Flag Means Death is a Waititi production through and through, catering much more to the comedic writer/director/performer's goofier sensibilities.  Here he has developed a semi-epic, 1700s-set, pirate comedy that kicks off with a soft, upper crust man abandoning his family for a life of skullduggery on the high seas.  It is a life for which he is ill-equipped, using his money to buy his ship and hire a crew of largely inexperienced scalliwags.

Taking to the seas, Stede Bonnett (Rhys Darby) and his ensemble pretty much immediately are boarded by the Royal Navy, led by an acquaintance from Stede's aristocratic past. Stede kills him accidentally, but it's unknown to the crew, and he earns at least a little of the respect that was missing from his men.  Stede's general management style and general world outlook could be considered progressive (adopting a lot of current managerial philosophies) but this all seems counterintuitive to a pirate crew, and the general amount of high seas piracy, kidnapping and murder is kept pretty much to a minimum.  Things like forced vacation days, a flag-making competition and a talent pageant, not to mention bedtime storytime (in which Stede reads the crew a story) all seem kind of...soft...for the lifestyle.  Stede gets nicknamed The Gentleman Pirate, which isn't meant as a compliment, despite how he takes it.

Things get more complicated when the Revenge encounters Blackbeard's ship.  The crew is direly intimidated by the men of Blackbeard's crew, and of course, of Blackbeard himself (Waititi performs the role).  A strange turnabout happens, however, when Blackbeard takes a shining to Stede's erudite lifestyle, moreover he wishes to escape the pirate's life and live a more humble existence in the world of high society. Stede offers to teach him about high society in exchange for lessons in piracy.  A deep kinship is borne, much to the dismay of Blackbeard's grizzled right hand, Izzy Hands (Con O'Neill).  Izzy conspires against the pairing only to his own detriment, as the rest of Blackbeard's crew start to glom onto Stede's way of leadership.  Of course, the Royal Navy is pursuing Stede with ruthless abandon, and things come to a glorious head in the final three episodes after threatening an amusing status quo.

This is, on top of it all, a large ensemble piece, which includes Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting), Samson Kayo (Truth Seekers), Vico Oritz, Christian Nairn (Hodor from Game of Thrones), Nat Faxon, and many more, with guest appearances from Rory Kinnear, Leslie Jones, Fred Armisen, Claudia O'Doherty, Kristen Schaal, Nick Kroll, Kristen Johnson and Will Arnett among others.

The crux of the series, though, comes down tot he different ways people express love to each other, and particularly the relationships between men and how they show affection for one another, whether it's platonic, idolisation, as brothers-in-arms, or as lovers.  It's not dissecting these with any great zeal, but it seems that love, and how people care for each other, is the great unifier of most of these episodes.

I don't have a great affinity for pirates, but Waititi's style, as upheld by his writing staff and his remarkably unique cast of performers, helps the adventure of it all go down smoothly.  It's kind of telling that the bits that take place on land (like at Spanish Jackie's pub or Stede and Blackbeard imprisoned at the Royal Privateering Academy) were my favourite parts of the series, thought he finale where Stede returns home to his family was easily the best episode for its wildly unexpected twists.

---

After basically writing it off after its initial announcement as another dumb workplace comedy on a topic I have little investment in (MMORPGs), it took all of one episode for AppleTV's Mythic Quest to hook me in.  It's a damn funny show.

From Always Sunny in Philadelphia creatives Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney with Megan Ganz (writer on Community, Always Sunny, Modern Family), and starring McElhenney as the self-aggrandizing creative head of the Mythic Quest Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game, I was expecting a tepid retread of The Office but with more nerd shit.  

I'm not a devoted follower of Always Sunny but from what I've seen of the show (a couple dozen random episodes) I shouldn't have been surprised at how whip-smart Mythic Quest is, and how it knows how to present an egomaniac as a fool (Always Sunny is basically a show about watching a crew of sociopaths get their come-uppance episode after episode).  What's also most immediately surprising is how tailored the show is as an ensemble piece and not a solo showcase for McElhenney.   Even as the creative head of Mythic Quest, his Ian (pronouced, annoyingly, "eye-ann") is still not the top dog.  He has (unseen) corporate overlords that he has to appease, an ineffective middleman to patronize in stammering beta David (David Hornsby), and he of course needs the support of his hyper awkward development lead Poppy (a transcendent Charlotte Nicdao).  Then there's the borderline psychopathic head of monetization, Brad (always great to see Dany Pudi), David's full-on psychopathic assistant Jo (Jessie Ennis),  the head writer, legendary 70's award-winning, over-the-hill sci-fi novelist C.W. Longbottom (F. Murray Abraham doing great work...at least on camera), and repping hard for the female gamers, game testers Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim).

The show quickly eases into its status quo.  It finds its groove rapidly in its first two episodes, and it feels like it's going to have a nice long life of great nerdy jokes (with a full understanding of the world it's operating in), great character conflicts, and gentle world building (its game, the economy and society that surrounds it, and the meta world around Mythic Quest as a company and property).   But by episode t it rapidly upends any expectation of what it should be.

Episode 5 is a full detour in the life of a female game developer and her relationship with her boyfriend-turned-business partner-turned-husband.  The episode is a mini-movie spanning three decades, starring Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) and Jake Johnson (Stumptown) as the lead couple in this romantic comdey-drama that really takes you through a tour of the highs and lows of video game celebrity and evolution.  It has an impact on the world of Mythic Quest but in a way that is not immediately apparent, and takes some time to reveal its ultimate point within the show.  It's a special thing, though.

Following that episode, Mythic Quest emboldens itself to actually embrace some dramatic storytelling within its otherwise riotous framework.  There's a gutpunch of an episode that introduces Ian's son, and a COVID special that stands as one of the best snapshots of what the first wave lockdown really felt like.  

There's something tremendously special about Mythic Quest, as such I haven't binged it like I normally would a series I enjoy this much... I savour its episodes, and they root down in me with the time that I give them to breathe.

--- 

Amidst the new Kids in the Hall series appearing on Amazon and my ongoing rewatch of the original series (plus the recent acquisition of Brain Candy on blu-ray) I thought it time to revisit the Kids' 2010 serialized mini-series Death Comes to Town.

I caught a few episodes of the series as it aired originally but its scheduling on CBC was a mess as it was interrupted by the Winter Olympics, and I had to purchase the series on Apple in order to watch the rest.  I don't recall loving the series and had little desire over the past dozen years to revisit it.  But with time comes fading memory so I was going into the series with near-fresh eyes.

And a rapid 175-minutes later, I did not come out with triumphant adoration for the series.  It does not feel unfamiliar to Kids in the Hall (more akin to the tone of Brain Candy than sketch comedy), but at the same time it lacks a specific drive.  It's effectively a murder-mystery, but it's a murder-mystery that's kind of disinterested in the fact that it's a murder-mystery.  It really wants to build characters and build a character out of the town of Shuckton, but with the death of its mayor (who everyone seems to idolize) in the first episode, Shuckton loses the one thing that really seems to define it.  As much as the series wants to build characters, it has a much harder time with building relationships between the characters.  Sure, it finds connective ties for the characters to share with each other, mostly as comedy, but few of the characters have any real, defining traits to their relationship with other characters beyond forgetful delivery lady Marnie (Kevin McDonald) and disgraced hockey wonderkid Ricky Jarvis (Bruce McCulloch), now obese and housebound.

Scott Thompson takes the ill-advised role of Crim Hollingsworth, adopting a Native Canadian patois, and adorning himself in style and symbology of, supposedly, Ojibwe culture, of which Crim puports to be 1/16th heritage.  I'm not sure why Thompson, of all the kids, tends to be the one in brownface all the time, but there's a trend.  It's an uncomfortable pattern.  While it's not necessarily mocking any culture, and there is the sense of trying to develop a character, it never seems the right thing to do, particularly inexcusable for 2010.  Likewise the amount of fat jokes and sight gags about Ricky Jarvis seem like they should have ended with Fat Bastard in Austin Powers.  And then there's the weird references to trans people, in a way that seems to be meant to be inclusive, but is edited with comedic timing to be a punchline.  This stuff has aged poorly and in much faster time than most KitH sketches.

There's plenty of silliness and a lot of conceptual comedy within Death Comes to Town but it does tend to be overshadowed by the sheer lack of laugh-out-loud comedy within.  Besides their post-Brain Candy

disbanding, this is a real low point for the troupe.  Not embarrassingly bad, but certainly not meeting up to expectations (even when they're low).

---

And if this wasn't a long enough post already, we ploughed through I Love That For You with reckless abandon.  I didn't want to.  I put it off for some time.  I mean, I liked Vanessa Bayer as an SNL cast member and have enjoyed her in her cameos in other things like Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but the setup for this series felt just...too...cringey for me to want to sit through.

Created by Bayer (and Jeremy Beiler), the story of I Love That For You finds Bayer as Joanna Gold, a lifelong fan of the SVC home shopping network.  She would watch religiously as a child while going through chemotherapy for leukaemia, and as a remarkably awkward adult, she seems her most comfortable and confident selling people seemingly worthless things.  She's always had a manipulative streak in her, but it's not malicious so much as a coping mechanism for her trauma.  She finally gets her shot at an open casting call for SVC and absolutely nails the audition.  She's elated to find she's gotten the job, only to blow it on her first on-air showcase.  As she's getting fired she blurts out that she has cancer, and there are dollarsigns in  network owner Patricia's eyes.  Joanna is suddely the new "it-girl" at the network, to the delight of some, like her idol Jackie (Molly Shannon) and to the chagrin of others she's displacing, like the preening, self-obsessed Beth Ann (Ayden Mayeri).

The show then has to deal with Joanna going deeper and deeper into her lie, and what should be unbearably cringe is somehow, in Bayer's hands, nearly effortlessly watchable and just straight up amusing.  Bayer has always been fantastic at being uncomfortably awkward in her performance without being cringe about it.  She does this by way of acknowledging she's aware of her own awkwardness, and Bayers one of the few people who can do this with just a look, but she's also equally clever at delivering lines that highlight how aware she is of her own social ineptitude.  Even within the show, this winds up endearing Joanna to her colleagues more than alienating her, but it never lets her off the hook for her lying, and she knows she's not capable of keeping it up forever.  It's more of an "I'm in too deep, and I don't know how to get out" kind of situation.

I enjoyed the show, even though I found the whole cancer-ploy of Joanna really held the show back from being a proper workplace sitcom.  It's a time bomb just waiting to go off, and so you can't ever rest or rely upon the dynamics as they're set up.  When the bomb goes off in the penultimate episode you have to wonder how the show could possibly set up a second season given what the fallout *should* be.  Yet, it does its thing, and finds a way, and things are perhaps more awkward for Joanna than ever as the season closes out.

The show struggles with it's shopping network within the show.  It doesn't know whether it should be lampooning hope shopping channels and the products they sell, or if it should be earnestly presenting something possible, something real.  It often wavers between the two in a gentle fashion, and it never feels comfortable.  When the hosts start being goofy or unprofessional on camera (and they all do it), it really diminishes what Joanna initially got fired for and thus betrays the whole crux of this first season.  At the same time, when the sales pitches are completely po-faced, it's not very engaging and I want them to move faster through those parts.

There's a solid supporting cast, topped by Jennifer Lewis as the no-nonsense Patricia is credibly intimidating but gets the best through-line in the show, and Punam Patel as show producer Beena develops into a complete scene stealer with both her micro- and macro-agressions (and her beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog who's always at her side).

It was a pleasant surprise of pleasantness, especially give to how easily it could have been full-bore cringe.