KsMIRT: October bleeds

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (uhhh..?) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  These "reviews" were actually written at the end of October and just needed to be formatted...so precious little time/energy to do so. I mean, formatting documents is what I spend half my days doing as is, who wants to do more of that when the work day is done?

This Month:
Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 1? (2024, Disney+, 4/4 episodes)
Only Murders In the Building Season 4 (2024, Disney+/Star, 10/10 episodes)
Midnight Mass (2022, Netflix, 10/10 episodes)
Agatha All Along (2024, Disney+, 9/9 episodes)
Lego Masters Australia Season 5 (2023, CTV, 14/14 episodes)

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Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy 

The What 100: Sig (Gaten Matarazzo, Stranger Things) is a total Skywalker fan-boy who also is force-sensitive kid and eager for adventure. His loving brother Dev (Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel) finds out Sig is force sensitive he encourages him to follow what the Force is telling him, which takes them to an ancient Jedi temple. Sig accidentally pulls out a single brick holding the fabric of the universe together, and when the dust settles everything's fucked right up.

(1 Great) When I saw the trailer for this, it looked like a lark, a goof, just a ridiculous "what if" scenario where nobody is like we remember them. Turns out, underneath, there's actually a character-centric story which pits Sig as the new hope against Dev, who is now a sith lord.  Where I thought the story would just be stepping through all the changes eventually being made right, instead, it's really just about one brother caring for another while trying to do the most good he can.  Matarazzo and Revolori are great in their voice roles here, even if the character drama is simplified for a child audience.

(1 Good) In the end, the universe isn't righted, it remains all fucked up, and given that it's Lego, that's OK. It's more fun that way. It's kind of bold to abandon the known Star Wars universe in favour of this weird remixed one.

(1 Bad) I've seen a few Lego Star Wars productions at this point (on top of the video games) and what I have the most difficulty with is the Lego look. It's not the reality of Lego...where characters and spaces are limited to their blocky brickiness and the kind of knowingness that their reality is made of of brick parts. Instead, it's literally the look. With Star Wars I want amazing ships and cool lightsaber fights and oddball designed sets, and while those are here in principle, they look terrible in Lego form and I never stopped wanting them to be in nearly any other medium than animated Lego brick.

META: This is a 4-episode mini-series that...well, doesn't end. Altogether, the 4 episodes *could* form a short Lego Star Wars movie, perhaps the first in a trilogy? It features some great voice talent on top of Matarazzo and Revolori, including a bunch of Star Wars veterans reprising their roles in a different context: Mark Hamill, Naomi Ackie, Ahmed Best, Kellie Marie Tran, BIllie Dee Williams, and many of the Clone Wars voice cast. 

It's Lego Star Wars so it's not deeply memorable, nor is it as funny as The Lego Movie or even The Lego Batman Movie, but it's also surprisingly not as interested in being a joke machine as its trailer may have indicated. It's nothing I'll obsess over, but it's enjoyable enough with some fun little gags for the Star Wars nerds. 

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Only Murders in the Building Season 4

The What 100: In one of the biggest losses for the show thus far, Charles' longtime friend and stuntperson stand-in Sazz Pataki was shot and killed in Charles' apartment, a seeming case of mistaken identity. This leads Charles into a bit of an emotional tailspin. Mabel is verging on homelessness, and is unsure of the career opportunities before her. Oliver and Loretta try a long distance relationship which puts him in as much of an emotional tailspin as Charles. A movie is being made out of the podcast which brings celebrities, excitement and more attention to the Arconia and the mysterious west-building tenants. 

(1 Great) The central murder here is a pretty good one, with Sazz being killed, and then completely disposed of before anyone finds her, it's dark and haunting...at least to start. It gets pretty out-of-hand quickly, at times taking pretty broad strides away from the central mystery into complete other mysteries. It's a bit chaotic, but the show makes it work... even if it undercuts how seriously bummed, and angry, Charles is. But the sentimentality, the performance Steve Martin gives of Charles' grief (and maybe guilt) is very affecting.

(1 Good) The show's penchant for bringing in celebrities in smaller parts hits a whole new dimension this season. With the movie of the "Only Murders..." podcast being made, our trio gets casted, with Eugene Levy as Charles, Eva Longoria aging Mabel up, and Zach Galifianakis resentfully playing Oliver. And that's just the start, with Paul Rudd, Meryl Streep, Amy Ryan, Jane Lynch and Davine Joy Randolph all returning, as well as Molly Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Kind among others. You can either find it very "stunt-y" or you can embrace how much fun the show is and how many people want to be a part of it. And, honestly, I have to give the show credit for not stunt-casting every role. There are still quite a few plum parts that are being filled by characters actors and up-and-coming comedic talent. As much as season 1's very story and character focus was the highlight and it's only been a bit in decline since, it's still committed to dishing out fun, and it's fun.

(1 Bad) I was initially very enthusiastic about this season, but that has waned a bit as it falls into its usual rhythms of drumming up a suspect Number 1 each episode and then writing them off by the end of the episode. While this season doesn't do so each episode, it does keep pedalling on that particular cycle. 

META: What I thought was going to be a pretty heavy season, based on how it started, has wound up being one of its sillier ones, but the final two episodes do start to circle back on the emotional aspects, particularly on the just mutual respect and admiration in Charles and Sazz's friendship. It all ends with, of course, yet another murder in the building (though I already have my theories) but not before Tea Leoni, looking very sterling, and with the huskiest "noir dame" voice tantalizes the crew with a seemingly unrelated mystery that's clearly going be the focus. 

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Midnight Mass

The What 100: Crockett Island is home to a small, remote fishing village off the east coast with a populace of around 120. A new priest is assigned to the island church, noting that the vacationing octogenarian monsenior fell ill while on holiday in the holy land. But Father Paul has a secret, a secret he's sharing with the faithful, and only the faithful. The sudden spate of "miracles" cause some islanders to question whether these are truly gifts from God, or something else entirely.

(1 Great) The first episode is an absolute masterpiece. It's an ensemble mini-series and the first hour so adeptly introduces us to every major player in the story without needing to drop gobs of clunky exposition. We get a sense of some characters by their actions, or their demeanour, or how other characters talk about them. We learn about some characters more from what they're hiding than what they're showing us. We meet probably two dozen characters in this town in this first episode, and we kind of know each of their deal, at least on an instinctive level by the end of that first hour. Plus we have a total sense of the island, its tempo, the dynamics of working and living there...we know the confines, the limits of the place and how people are able to reach the mainland. It's just an incredibly immersive environment, even without the creepiness and weird shit that is just lurking in the backgrounds. This isn't a show about a horror visited upon people, but a show about people who have a horror visited upon them...and they're convinced its a godsend, so they welcome it. 

(1 Good) I am not a religious person. My spirituality could best be described as "absent for attendance". While I have no patience for overtly religious productions that largely serve as confirmation bias propaganda, I do always appreciate a production that clearly comes from a point of examining what it means to be faithful and religious, especially in modern times.  And I have even more respect when it's critical of blind faith, or faith weaponized as a tool of power or control, or faith as superiority complex. In having a large cast of characters Flanagan could explore faith and religious belief in layers, with Bev (Samantha Sloyan, Hush) on one end of the spectrum -- the most vile of people who choose to interpret the text of the bible to serve their own selfish, racist and judgmental nature -- to Riley (Zach Gilford, There's Something Wrong With The Children) who has completely lapsed in his belief, to Ali (Rahul Abburi) a Muslim teen who gets caught up in the fervor of the miracles at the church and abandons Islam for Catholicism. It's a rich show, with a lot to say while still very adeptly delivering some good spooky shit.

(1 Bad) There's a moment where former childhood sweethearts Riley and Erin (Kate Siegal, Hypnotic)  talk about what happens when you die that was really overwritten. I liked the sentiments each of them had, but the way in which they were conveying them to each other was not like two people in a room who were having a conversation, but like stage monologues with the performers projecting out into the audience. Its relevance comes back again later on, twice even, so it's not purposeless, but it's like Flanagan just had these ideas which needed to be expressed, point-counterpoint essays that carry the themes of spirituality vs science in the show forward, just very awkwardly. To be honest, I'm really nitpicking. I absolutely loved this mini-series. It was incredible.

META: Toasty's been singing the praises of Mike Flanagan for the better part of the last decade, and I'm only now catching on. I blame Toasty for not selling me on it hard enough.  Midnight Mass is very, very Stephen King influenced, but for me King is an idea man who writes to his idea, where Flanagan, from what I've seen of his work so far, is a planner. I don't know if I've ever gotten the sense that King knew where he wanted a story to end where I thing Flanagan, at the very least with Midnight Mass, the path, while not at all obvious, seemed entirely deliberate and purposeful. It's an exceptionally satisfying watch.

[ToastyPost: we agree, other Toastypost: we still agree]

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Agatha All Along

The What 100: Since the events of Wandavision, having been bested by the Scarlet Witch, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn, Free Agents) is caught in an unreality, and can't seem to find her way out, until a witchy ex-lover (Aubrey Plaza, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) snaps her out of it, and a teen injects himself into her life looking for help to find the legendary "Witches Road". They're going to need a coven...

(1 Great) Episode 7 "Death's Hand in Mine" is a particularly great episode of television and just an incredibly well constructed character spotlight piece for Patti LuPone's Lilia. The structure of the show started with two episodes of getting the coven together and discovering the Witches Road, making the journey through a series of trials that should ultimately provide them with a power upgrade. The episodes that follow had a pattern of being character-centric to a member of the coven, and then they die at the end (spoiler). So when this episode put Lilia in the crosshairs, its end result was inevitable. And yet, it's the journey, and the journey is one incredible example of timey-wimey storytelling that would make even the best Doctor Who scribe green with envy. 

Also great, Aubrey Plaza. Always.
Kathryn Hahn too.

(1 Good) If there's one thing the basement-dwelling, mouth-breathing neckbeard trolls hate, it's an empowered woman. If there's another thing they hate, it's an empowered gay character. If there's a third thing they hate, it's a d-tier superhero character getting a prominent spotlight over whatever "kewl anti-hero" is in their top-50 personal favourite of boy-rage-power-fantasies.  So, just on its mere existence, Agatha All Along gets a big thumbs up from me. But even more so because it's not in any way, shape or form intended as a loogie-in-the-face to the aforementioned trolls. If anything it's not even paying any attention to them, not considering them in the slightest. It's just selling the shit out of this witches adventure that's part folklore, part Wizard of Oz, and part escape room horror (it's not too far askew from Cube, in its own way).  It's the right mix of genre premises with a nod to both its MCU history and future but dwelling in neither. 

(1 Bad) If there's a "bad" to Agatha All Along at all, it's that it's saddled with "Marvel" expectations. The show is small, and contained. It's a cast of seven primarily, with each episode introducing a fairly static set-piece as the "escape room" they need to solve. I'm sure just because it's Marvel it cost more than the average show, but for Marvel, it still pared things down in a way that some might call ...theatrical-looking.  The road, for instance looks every bit its on-set homage to Wizard of Oz, complete with painted backdrops that, at one point a character literally cuts into and walks through. But even that is an intentional choice in the end, to not completely mask the pastiche. As I said, being "Marvel" is going to set expectations, even when expectations have seemingly been dashed over and over, that Agatha All Along isn't going to live up to. But it did quite well anyway. 

META: There's a scene early in Star Wars: The Acolyte (I seemingly bring this show up once a week) where a group of space witches start an incantation that leads to singing and moaning and undulating, and in my head, if not out loud, I said "this is where it loses people". And I smiled. I was challenged by that scene of women moving and moaning not with any sexual connotation but as a moment of power induction, as a moment of collective purpose. I acknowledged my immediate reaction to it, which was to balk, but I then analyzed that reaction and came out on the other end appreciative of the fact that we don't get much representation at all of the power of feminine collective, especially in the masculine-dominated space opera and superhero genres. So when the coven in Agatha All Along begins their, well, far more harmonious chant that was the song "The Ballad of the Witches Road" (from Frozen songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) I got the same feeling of this event being about feminine unity and solidarity, even as I whinged a little bit (the song is reinterpreted many ways throughout the show, and I think this initial example was maybe my least favourite?).

Was this whole show all an excuse to bring Wanda's superhero offspring Wiccan into the MCU for the inevitable (and anticipated) Young Avengers? I think if it were a far lazier show that didn't really care about any of its other characters, it would be an easy criticism to lob, but it does so much without putting too much weight or expectations on Billy's shoulders, nor without the burden of setting up expectations. It lives entirely within its own microcosm of Wandavision and Agatha All Along without needing to easter egg the hell out of it.

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Lego Masters Australia Season 5

The What 100: Contest of champions (and almost-champions), the winners and runners-up and a wild-card or two from the past four seasons of Lego Masters Australia return in their teams of two to see which pair will be dubbed "Lego Grandmasters". Some of the most insane challenges and incredible builds in all of Lego Masters, globally, happen in these 14 very bingeable episodes.  

(1 Great) I don't watch a lot of "reality" or "competition" television, but, next to Taskmaster (original UK flavour), Lego Masters Australia is my happy place. I've written before about some of the differences between LegoMA and the American version, but what really, really comes through in LegoMA is the sense of community, not just between the contestants but the also host and judge. Especially with all these contestants being returning contestants, there are established dynamics and running jokes that continue. Plus, the contestants are fans of the show and know each other's work, so they know the calibre of the competition, and it's pretty fierce. Also pretty loving. But they're pushing each other to the breaking point.

(1 Good) Lady Kent and I have watched a lot of brick laying between four seasons of US Lego Masters, the prior 4 seasons of Australia, whatever that was in Lego Masters UK... and episode 7 might have been the most stressful and intense build of them all. It finds the remaining teams having to collectively build a Rube Goldberg machine that will move a tennis ball through a continuous obstacle course from one build to the next, start to finish. There are easy ways and hard ways to go about it with design challenges needing to be met in each segment, but with square blocks and notoriously finicky motor systems, there's a lot of potential for things to go awry.  

(1 Bad) Why did they need to bring Kale back? In season 1 of Lego MA, there was this wee squeaky-voiced know-it-all who was so full of self-importance and arrogance that would constantly tell the judge, Ryan "Brickman" McNaught (recognized as one of the world's premiere Lego builders) that he had no idea what he was talking about. Kale's partner in that season you could tell was suffering by the end. Here he returns with a runner-up from Season 1, Trent, and, at the very least, Trent seemed to know what he signed up for. It's hard to see Kale as anything but a drama-generator, and it's minutes before he starts pissing people off (least of all, me).  If what works for the show is the sense of community, this man is like The Big Bang Theory (that's a joke for me and my Greendale Human Beings out there) 

META: Unlike American reality TV shows, LegoMA doesn't eliminate contestants every episode, or even every other episode. With 8 pairs of contestants, 14 episodes and 3 sets of contestants advancing to the finale, that means 5 of 13 episodes are elimination episodes. It would be easy to say there's drama every episode when we don't find out until the end whether it's an elimination contest or not, but I've figured out the formulae. Basically the first two or three episodes are non-elimination as they are showcases to see what the contestants can do. Then if there are any challenges of a technical nature, those are non-elimination because the technical side can unfairly advantage the experienced (and a lot of randomness present in technical challenges). And, if there's ever a "sponsored" episode (eg. Disney, Marvel, Star Wars) there's no elimination. So, I think with only one exception, I predicted when an episode would be non-elimination.

 

KWIF: Hundreds Of Beavers (+4)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film, which in this case is actually Kent's Week in Film two weeks ago and then again this past weekend. Assuming I finish this post this weekend.

This "Week":
Hundreds of Beavers (2022, d. Mike Cheslik - Tubi)
Cast a Deadly Spell (1991, d. Martin Campbell - HBO)
Absentia (2014, d. Mike Flanagan - AmazonPrime)
Hush (2016, d. Mike Flanagan - Tubi)
Emilia Pérez (2024, d. Jacques Audiard - Netflix)

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A lot of movies have tried to emulate zany cartoon energy in live action. It so rarely works. Whether they're taking inspiration from Tex Avery or Chuck Jones or they're trying to put live actors into a Hanna Barbera or Jay Ward property, the results have mostly been of the "not great" sort. Outside of films that blend human actors with animated characters (again, more misses than hits), the only flat out successful humans-as-cartoons production I can think of is Stephen Chow's masterpiece, Kung-Fu Hustle.

Hundreds of Beavers (surprise! It's not porn!) isn't quite that level, but as an independent production it is quite ambitious and remarkably clever in its aping of animated forms. The film's creators, director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, credit the slapstick of the 20's and 30's silent and black and white era of cinema as inspiration, but it's hard to not see the Loony Tunes influence painted all over the first act, especially as characters pop in and out of rabbit holes that join different points of the terrain.

The film opens with a merry melody that spells out the disaster that befell our applejack-selling protagonist, a drunkard name Jean Kayak. Left with nothing in the dire 1800's winter wilderness, Jean is forced to learn how to hunt and trap in order to survive, and square off against the ingenuity of the wild animals he cohabitates with.

He finds the trading post where he can exchange his hides or fish for goods that will level up his trapping ability. The trading post also houses a fair belle who can skin a carcass in record time, and their flirtatious connection in the lonely wilderness is much to the chagrin of her father. 

The "animals" of the film -- beavers, wolves, racoons, rabbits, even a horse -- are just people in cheap mascot suits, but in washed-out black-and-white contrast, the cheapness has kind of the perfect effect.  Especially early on, it's the suits as much as anything else that establish the surreal world of the film.  

The environments are snowy and vibrantly white, which gives director/editor/effects creator Cheslik all he needs to disguise his deceptively rudimentary effects. As much as the film takes inspiration from slapstick and cartoons, it's also feeding off of video game structures at their most primal level. Feeling much more "Commodore 64" than "X-Box One", Hundreds of Beavers finds over it's hero levelling up and level restarting constantly over its 108 minutes, until its final act which goes full-blown Super Mario as Jean Kayak must navigate his way through the massive and intricate fortress the beavers have constructed. There's a Temple Run chase, a Frogger-like crossing, there's map discovery and puzzle solving of the try and try again variety. 

The film's title card doesn't really emerge until the 30-minute mark, complete with another song and credits, but it feels like it should be at the point where a cartoon with this kind of energy would normally end. Yet it keeps going for [time check] another 75 minutes. From what we've seen to this point, it doesn't feel like there's enough juice to sustain another 75 minutes, but it's a clever switching of gears, changing the pace and rooting down into the silly character drama, establishing relationships and rivalries and running gags that, quite astonishingly, actually sustains the enjoyability and fun of the production.

I should also note the film is completely silent, or at least, there's no spoken dialogue (what dialogue there is we see on olde-style screen cards). The score, from Chris Ryan is absolutely essential to the success of the film, and it's flawless. It's doing so much heavy lifting in a film where every element is pulling more weight than it should bear.  To me it felt like Terry Gilliam drawing Looney Tunes but directed by Guy Maddin. It's irreverent, pushing boundaries, but also reverent towards old cinema styles. It's a film that shouldn't work at all, and that it not only works, but works resoundingly well and manages to sustain it's total running time is an absolute feat (even if I think shaving off 20 minutes would have done it some good).

Dam fun and dam enjoyable.

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Cast A Deady Spell is a fantasy-noir set in an alternate 1940s where everyone seems to have some capability to use magic. It's a film that stars Frank Grillo precursor Fred Ward (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) as former cop, now hardboiled P.I. Harry Philip Lovecraft, a good detective who refuses to do magic.  A case comes his way to recover a stolen book, the Necronomicon, which leads H.P. to a swanky club owned by his former partner, an ex-dirty cop also named Harry (Borden, as played by Clancey Brown, Highlander). Singing at the club is Borden's girlfriend, H.P.'s ex, Connie Stone (as played with full femme fatale sultriness by Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights).

There's undead henchmen, gargoyle spies, deadly magic, and clever tricks, not to mention the looming threat of a Lovecraftian elder god. It's a film full of special effects, extensive prosthetics and make-up, not to mention being a period piece, so it's all quite stylized.  Martin Campbell, not yet the man behind Goldeneye, or The Legend of Zorro, or Casino Royale, but he's been in the game for 20 years at this point and shows off all the skills that would put him at the helm of some truly great action and genre pieces [and, to be fair, some not so great ones *cough*Green Lantern*cough*). While not the most lush visual production, everything work quite well in unison. There are no flat beats, no wrong notes, it builds its world adeptly, leaning both into its fantasy and noir influences (it's far heavier on the noir, and it abandons any real attempt at the horror side of Lovecraft).  

So I have to ask... why have I never heard of this before? I know all manners of sci-fi, horror and fantasy films from the era, including a broad range of low budget, direct-to-video garbage (now on Tubi!) but I've never heard of this film from a known director of some renown, with a handful of quality (and, in Moore's case, A-list) actors, with really good special effects, and a thoroughly enjoyable production. 

The answer comes back to the same problem we're facing with streaming: movies that don't go to theatres get lost. They get no promotion, and so there's no awareness of them. They don't get a second life on video, so there's no secondary "new release" push. They just live on in the archives to be randomly discovered. Oh, here's a Jennifer Lopez sci-fi movie I've never heard of, or a hanful of Chris Pine action movies that nobody knows existed, or movies starring Chris Evans we've watched and all forgotten about. Without being released to theatres where it would reveive even a modicum of marketing push, there's no sustaining a movie in the consciousness. They just disappear, a faint whisper of a memory when playing a movie trivia game.

Even now, at the end of this write-up, I've already forgotten the name of this film and had to scroll back up to read it.

[Side note: there is a gay and a trans character in this film who are a couple, and I'm not certain how I feel about their representation. H.P. drops casual slurs and gets physically rough, which I feel is to the detriment of H.P.'s characterization. At the same time, I feel like the couple are treated sweetly and sympathetic by the filmmaker and script, and their fate is tragic which may fall into the "kill your gays" trope, but also so many people die in this thing...so Idunno. Is it inclusive or exploitative?]

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As noted on my previous post, I'm all aboard the Flanagan train, and I'm wading knee deep in the Mike Flanagan waters, but I'm starting to worry it may be too much too soon.  After watching Midnight Mass, I started trolling Toasty's Flanagan reviews past, and I decided to hit up a personal favourite of his, Absentia. Both Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep impressed me so much I really needed to go back and see Flanagan's beginnings.

Watching Absentia reminded me of watching the films of Benson and Moorehead, The Endless and Resolution... just supremely well executed small-budget indies that intone much grander conceits and ideas without needing any real budget for it.

Here, a woman is in the final stages of having her husband declared dead in absence of a body after 7 years. She's pregnant, having become close to an officer on the case, and she's looking for a new start on life. Her sister, fresh out of rehab from heroin addiction is there for the mutual support feedback loop. 

A couple weird things happen to the sister, and then the husband returns. Questions are asked, emotions are heightened, and the whole world seems to go pear-shaped. The sister's maybe relapse-fuelled investigation yields dozens of disappearances in the neighborhood in all recorded record. There's something going on here. It only gets worse from there.

It's an early example of what Flanagan seems to do exceptionally well, which is set up a supernatural scenario, maybe even a horrifying one, and then let his characters live in that world, getting really intriguing reactions from them as they try to psychologically rationalize what is happening to them, or get a little off kilter from the realization that their understanding of the world is completely upended. Flanagan also likes to toy with religious themes as well as ideas of perception, and with the sister's substance abuse history, her view of what is actually happening is perhaps distorted.

I liked the film a lot, but it's let down by many of its performances. I've noted that Flanagan enjoys giving his characters a monologue (we've watched The Haunting of Hill House since I watched Absentia and that show is absolutely rife with them). It's a stylistic choice of his, as he must know it's utterly unnatural for people to monologue like that in the presences of others. What has made it tolerable in most of his productions is skill of the actors in delivering their speech, but here, these indie, probably novice actors, can't quite get there, and they come off pretty clunky.  Also, the only "name" actor in this is Doug Jones, and I would have loved to have so much more of him.

I tried to watch Hush immediately after watching Absentia but it's a film starring a deaf character (unfortunately not an actual deaf performer, instead co-writer and Flanagan's wife Kate Siegel) and I was multitasking so I couldn't track the subtitles and had to stop early on. What I didn't know was that within 15 minutes there's no more sign language and most of the film is pretty wordless.

The gist is Siegel plays a deaf writer who is terrorized by a serial killer. The killer has murdered her neighbour and now is outside her home holding her hostage, toying with her rather than going straight for the kill.  It becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game as the killer waits to see what his victim will do, only she starts incrementally getting the better of him, though not without taking a few hits herself.

I don't like home invasion thrillers/horrors. It's a definite thing that causes me anxiety, so movies like this, even when they're not particularly very good, are still pretty effective in raising my blood pressure, and that's really all Siegel and Flanagan are banking on here.

It feels like a small, contained indie production, like Absentia, but with much better cameras and lighting. It looks good. And if you don't think, like, at. all. about it, it's pretty intense. But the more you start looking at it, the more the flaws become apparent. 

The mask the killer wore had a texture of melted flesh, with a slight smirk on it, which gave the killer a cockiness that made sense when he decides to toy with her. But he very quickly reveals his face and the threat level drops sooo many notches once he does.  Something about that mask really brought out the angry, misogynistic alt-right white kid vibes that dissipate once we see John Gallagher Jr.s face.

There's also not much, if at all, in this home invasion/hostage thriller that utterly necessitates the lead character being deaf, except for the gruesome opening murder scene in which Siegel's bloodied neighbour is banging on the patio glass with Siegel completely oblivious. It's not an essential element to the story, or really, the character.

Siegel does a very good job at alternating between afraid, in pain, and steeling herself to do something probably stupid or brave or daring. She's the defacto final girl by nature of being pretty much the only girl in the cabin in the woods.

Overall, I was entertained but it felt like it was maybe a 30-40 minute short film stretched out into a feature length, and it's easily the weakest and least Flanagan-esque of his works I've seen so far.

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It's been a stressful few weeks at work with time being eaten up by demands in the off hours, so while I was working on a volunteer project I did so with Hallmarkies as a backdrop. I got three of them in before I finished by project and once complete I needed something ... not so trashy and mindless to watch.  I had clocked that Emilia Pérez was available on Netfilx and it was one of those titles I had stored in the back of my brain, even though only had a vague memory of what it was.  What I knew was it was boldly a musical about a drug kingpin who is a trans woman and wants to transition. It also won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

What I also learned, less than a minute into the film, is it's set in Mexico, almost completely in Spanish and stars Zoe Saldana (as well as Selina Gomez, of the familiar names), all from a white, cisgender French director.

Saldana is, Rita, an exceptionally competent lawyer overlooked by her superiors because of racism. She's approached by drug kingpin Manitas in secret with the promise of untold riches if she can help source out his transformation. Manitas tells her his whole life is a condition of his circumstances and as wealthy and powerful as he is, he cannot live this life anymore. He would commit suicide, if not for the desire to first live life as she truly would like to live it, to experience the world as her true self.

Manita's wife (Gomez) and children are escorted to Switzerland by Rita, while Manitas undergoes her surgeries, and Manita's death is faked and reported on television. Satisfied with the job, Rita is set free, with her riches, to live her life. 

Except, four years later, Rita, now living big shot lawyer life in London, meets Emilia Pérez, and Rita soon fears that this is a spectre from her past coming to kill her. Instead Emilia once again wants her help to bring her family back to Mexico, under the guise of being Manitas' beloved aunt.

While settling in, Emilia and Rita meet a woman searching for her son, who has been missing for 10 years. Emilia knows through old connections she can find out where the body is buried, and does. Emilia soon finds a path for her wealth and atonement for past sins, in trying to uncover the whereabouts of the hundreds of thousands of missing persons, all likely a victim of the drug cartels of which, in a past life, she was a part.

It is indeed a bold film, weaving between its criminal elements and its trans elements, it's attempts to be both an ally to trans women and innocent victims of the drug trade in Central America, all while jutting in and out of song and dance numbers that, more often than not, never fully flourish, or feel complete. The lyrics dip in and out of singing and dialogue in a way that's largely unsatisfying. Some tunes that have catchy hooks never play out in full song. I never thought about pulling up the tracks on Spotify because they never felt like whole songs.  

The nature of this hesitant musical is intriguing in its own right, and I found myself drawn to its rhythms, its beautiful costuming, its lush colours...even its dingy settings were captured so perfectly. But all the while  I was feeling uneasy in my gut with how it was portraying its transness, its victim advocacy and its conceptualization of the drug trade.  It all felt... at least to some small degree... exploitative.

I never truly got a sense of the characters in the film, what they actually were feeling. In a musical, emotions are supposed to come out in song, but the emotions presented seemed beside the plot of the film. I didn't connect with these characters like I wanted to, and every turn that sent the plot in a new direction seemed to put more distance between me and them.  I think the performances throughout were fabulous, but the material let them down.

I came out of the film feeling like I watched something very unique, but I didn't feel enriched by it. I didn't feel like the film ever really dealt properly with the material it was presenting. I was entranced, but not enlightened.

In watching the film, I was reminded of Annette, another askew musical by a French director that couldn't be more different, story-wise, and yet tonally felt so much the same.  Probably a very fucked up double bill to explore one night.

[I'll come back to all those Hallmarkies mentioned at the top of this review another day]

 

31 Days of Halloween: Midnight Mass

2021, Mike Flanagan (Gerald's Game) -- Netflix

Of note, this writing covers the three episodes (of a 7 run limited series) that we watched over two nights.

Speaking of comfort blankets, its nice knowing that something Mike Flanagan will come along pretty much every year. This is the third of his series for Netflix, but this time not even indirectly connected to A Haunting... But, he does bring back much of the cast from the previous two series, which is rather endearing as it shows he likes working with these people and that they like working with him. 

This time we leave a house for an island, a small isolated island off the coast of New England, not only isolated geographically, but also seemingly lost in time. Gone are the days of prosperous fishing, gone are the days when the young were not expected to leave. The island is emptying and those left behind are stuck in their ways, for better or worse. 

The world building for this island is meticulous, but not in the "look at the details!" way that Midsommar presented, but more in a grand way of filling out the background in which the characters inhabit. The houses are all low and flat, to have the nor'easters blow over them. Everything is weather worn and grey-green-brown. The electric street lamps are from a by-gone era, the roads are still only earth. The Sherriff's office is in the back of the convenience store. There is a bar, but we never visit it, as all our main characters are God Fearing Christians, well all but the recently hired (appointed? elected?) Sherriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli, iZombie) who is a devout Muslim, but one who converted himself. He less plays the odd duck on the island, and more the voice of reason in the furor to come. Everyone else we meet is a Catholic.

Into this small Christian community, there are two returns. Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford, Friday Night Lights) returns from "the mainland" after having spent 4 years (of a 4 to 10 year conviction) in jail for vehicular manslaughter -- he killed a teen girl in a drunk crash. He has lost everything and so returns to the island, to the home of his parents, to meet the terms of his parole. We immediately see that he is truly and wholly haunted by the image of the girl he killed, an eerie image of her face embedded with glass, reflecting the flashing lights of the first responder vehicles. He sees her every night. The second "return" is the arrival of a new priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater, Legion) who arrives to replace Monsignor Pruiit, an aging man who fell ill after his return from the Holy Land, and is recovering on the mainland. But things are not as they seem; well duh.

*Spoilers*

Given she is only a seven episode run, Flanagan doesn't leave much room for filler, thank the Lord. In episode one we get hints of something strange going on: Father Paul dragging a massive sea chest into the rectory with him, with a thumping coming from within, the kids hearing and seeing something on the island they canoe to, to drink and smoke, the death of all the stray cats that said island was inhabited it by, each one drained of blood before being washed up on shore by the first episode's storm. He is not going to play the mystery game with us, and by episode three we are secured in our understanding that a vampire has come to Crockett Island, a big leathery creature brought by Father Paul. 

But that is not the horror, the horror lies in the devout Christian faith being subverted by the corruption of this monster. Even Dracula relied on the connection between vampire mythos and Christian mythos. It is no coincidence that one drained by a vampire rises from the dead three nights later. It is no coincidence that a Christian mass involves drinking "the blood of Christ". And Father Paul, nee Pruitt, sees himself as having found not a demon, but an Angel of the Lord, in the Holy Land of all places, and has brought it to Crockett to heal the wounded, and bring youth to the aging.

And fuck, do I hate Bev Keane, the right hand of Father Pruitt and an utter cunt, excuse the word. She embodies all that is wrong with Christianity, all the corruption and bitterness and slander and hate, all masked in a friendly, saccharine, condescending veil.

I hope she gets what's coming to her.

31 Days of Halloween: Midnight Mass

2021, Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep) -- Netflix

OK, forgive us but we just used the next two nights, as well, to measuredly binge this 7 episode limited series. It was that good, where you want to keep on watching, but also not have it end.

 Nothing but spoilers from here on.

The remaining four episodes cover four key events: the death of Father Paul and his resurrection as a true vampire, the turning and subsequent true-death of Riley, the final plans for the islanders laid bare, and the final end of the island and all who lived upon. In writing that I didn't want to just throw it all there for you, but to comment on the apothegmatic manner in which Flanagan tells the tale. Each episode is integral, each episode tells us so much, and all in four short episodes. 

Of note, I am never apothegmatic, but I love the word.

We already knew this all involved a vampire, an old creature revealed in an Israeli desert, and brought back to the US by a priest who believes the monster to be an angel of the Lord. The ties to Christianity in this show are rather disturbing. I already mentioned that Stoker displayed those bones in Dracula but the manner in which Flanagan lays it out for us had me pondering, "Really? Wouldn't that be terrifying if it ALL was based on a vampire myth, one that took over the Judaist myths of the time." He is not just postulating a thematic connection, but an actual origin story of Christianity being less than Heavenly. Far less. But of course, the real monsters were the people. Mostly Bev.

OMG Bev, this woman! She comes off as sweet but stern, helpful but loyal, but SHE KILLED PRUITT ! I came to that realization while walking back from lunch today. We see Pruitt die, pink froth pouring from him, only to return a short moment later. No three days for him. I had assumed the constant drinking of wine mixed with old vampire blood had run its course, but it never occurred to me that Bev sought to supplant him. Her end goal? Hasten the change? Doubt she knew that much; more likely, she just wanted him out of the way so she could return to controlling the community that the doddering old Monsignor Pruitt had barely cared for all these years. She was the real power behind the altar. But little did she know what she was unleashing. Though once revealed, she rolls with the punches soooo smoothly. And the island is doomed. Bev sucks. Pun intended.

Riley has never really trusted Pruitt, but when the priest slips up about the disappearance of his new friend, and fellow recovering alcoholic Joe Collie, he comes to confront Father Paul. And the old vampire is revealed to him. And it takes him. And he is turned. Riley has been presented, thus far, as the main character, the person returning from off island, our view into its strangeness. That we are given an episode where it is very apparent (OK, it takes most of the episode for us to guess where it is going) we are losing him was shocking to me. I may have yelled at the screen. I did that a lot during this show.

Riley faces his fate, faces the sun, reveals to Erin what is happening on their island, and finally is received into a Heaven in which he does not believe. That final scene, so beautiful from his viewpoint, almost fully conflicting his scientific atheistic idea of what happens when you die, is less a long running final dream, and more a reveal of a beautiful true angel forgiving and welcoming him; it is so fucking tragic. It is so tragic because, seconds later we see what Erin sees, and hear her torturous screams. Her best friend, the man she has just confessed love for, and received it back in return, he has just burned up before her eyes. She has lost so much, but also been left with so much more terrible knowledge. She cannot escape the island like he asked her to, she must try to help.

I am recapping apparently. I didn't intend on it, but the economy of story is so well done, and I enjoyed it all so much, I want to impart upon you dear reader (all 3 of you) the tale that captivated, when so much (so so SO much) does not.

As the penultimate episode played out, Marmy commented, "Another cult viewing," commenting on how we went from the goofy evil cult of Midsommar to this show. I disagreed, believing she was applying her opinions of Catholicism (in much the way Flanagan has done) to this show, equating Catholics as Cultists. All religion is a cult? Maybe, but I disagreed, despite the evidence laid out before me. But as soon as Bev pulled out the plastic cups filled with her favourite rat killer, I retracted ... heavily. His parallels were overt and intended. Gah.

The Cult of Bev (by this time Pruitt seems as much a pawn as the rest) has setup the island for ... conversion. Easter Mass will be held at midnight. The boats of the island have been disabled. The ferries sent away. The power cut off. The cell tower sabotaged. They are cut off in the dark, and the non-Christians of Crockett (and there are some) are oblivious to what is going on, on their peaceful sleepy little island. But Erin, and now the doctor and her "miraculously" de-aged mother join the congregation, as much out of curiosity (what is the end game?) as fear (not joining means being outed as transgressors). And nervous Sheriff Hassan attends the congregation as well, as his lost son has also joined the flock, much to Hassan's sorrow. He joins to oversee. Bear witness, as you may.

Into the cult ceremy is introduced the Angel of the Lord -- a fucking demonic vampire with giant bat wings and full Nosferatu look. "Its a fucking demon!" I yell at the screen, but such is the sway of Bev (fuck Bev) some are shocked, but most follow suit. But not even her and Pruitt's control of the congregation can hold back the evil of born again vampires. They lose control to those that hunger. All goes to Hell. It is shocking, horrifying and bloody. Even Pruitt is shocked.

The final episode is about The End. Some escape, but that is not the point. Everything is lost. By giving into Bev blindly, they are all lost. The non-Christians become fodder for the Catholic vampires. Erin and survivors burn the boats, knowing that if these vampires reach the mainland... Bev and her fanatics are burning the island's structures, seeing fire as the new Biblical flood, something to wash the old world away, bringing on the new. Where will they sleep come dawn? In the nicely outfitted community centre paid for by Bev's embezzlement of Church funds. That is, until Erin and Hassan burn it down.

All the island burns. But Erin's faith in God is not burned away. Even as she dies, she does his Good Work and disables the master vampire. Even as she dies, she adjusts her beliefs to see her connection to everything. It is beautiful, it is peaceful. It is without doctrine. The sun rises, the new born vampires are not prepared enough to survive; even Bev's feeble attempts to bury herself are for naught. The island is cleansed, as she intended.

It was grand story telling filled with thinly veiled metaphor and allusion and oh so filled with great performances. It was blasphemous (so much so, I am surprised the protests were not everywhere -- I guess they are busy being anti-mask and anti-vax) and uplifting. As much as it was dismissive and derisive of Christianity, it also acknowledged loudly that Good People do Good Work. And that is always how I felt. I am not fond of Christianity and all its corruptions, but I do see Good People all around it. I just wish they were able to be a better influence on the structures, instead of more often weighed under the terrible things.

T&K's Xmas (2020) Advent Calendar: Day 23 - The 12 Dates Of Christmas

 A Toast to Hallmarkent
2011, d. James Hayman - Disney+

Not to be confused with this year's Hallmarkie On the 12th Date of Christmas or this year's HBO Max reality series of the same name, this is a Disney Family Channel original from 2011 starring Amy Smart (Crank, Crank 2: High Voltage) and Mark-Paul Gossler (Saved By The Bell [1989], Saved By The Bell [2020]).  It sort of pre-dates the Hallmark formulae but falls very much into that cheap-feel, made-for-TV holiday romance movie genre quite handily.  Somehow these movies (see also last year's advent calendar for Desperately Seeking Santa  and Dear Santa) that were made this century feel like movies made in the 80's or 90's.  The cheap-but-polished aesthetic of Hallmark has reshaped how we look at these films.

The Story
In this one Smart plays Kate, an advertising executive in New York (tplayed by Toronto - the cliched footage of New York montage that opens the film is actually footage of New York intercut with footage of Toronto) who is pining over her ex-boyfriend Jack.  She forgot about the Secret Santa at work, and I'm not sure if that was to show she's a bit scatterbrained or too focussed on Jack, or both.  Her work BFF received her Secret Santa gift and it was a jar of jam she hadn't opened yet, as well as the gift of harassment from another coworker.  She's out shopping for a gift for Jack on Christmas Eve because she "holiday dialed him...it's like drunk dialing without the alcohol", and buys him a two hundred dollar cashmere sweater.  She also has plans for a blind date at 5pm: drinks her stepmother Sally's godson, followed by them joining Sally and her dad for dinner.

Kate, wandering through The Bay in Eaton's Center, gets "accidentally" sprayed in the face with perfume (magical chimes tinkling) and passes out.  She comes to and races home, past the guy who for some reason is trying to set up lights on trees in the public park on Christmas Eve (a little late, bud) but the lights are all knotted up, and the elevator is out of order (which the super said he'd have fixed by Christmas), and her neighbour Mrs. Frumkin aggressively delivers her a cherry chip loaf, which Kate certainly doesn't seem to appreciate.  Kate's just a little bit of an a-hole. 

She goes to the bar to meet Miles, rudely pre-judging the lonely, Rivers Cuomo-looking guy sitting by himself smelling his breath.  Turns out he's waiting for Phyllis, and she's a bit more pleased with Miles Dufine when he steps forward and introduces himself.  He's slightly nervous but kind of charming, with the expected kind of wit for a holiday romance tv movie.  He had pre-ordered Kate a lager, but she hates beer and for some reason annoys the piss out of the waitress when she orders a white whine.  Kind of a stupid move, though, Miles, pre-ordering the lady's drink.  Anyway, Kate rudely watches her phone while Miles talks, even more rudely picks up the phone while he's mid sentence, and even more rudely says she's going to take off, meet her ex-boyfriend, but hopes they'll reconvene at Sally's place afterword.  Miles is noticeably and appropriately offended and put off, and leaves abruptly.  There's no chance Miles is going to Sally's.

Kate goes to meet Jack, full of over-eager hope, but Jack's there just to drop of his dog Max as he and his new girlfriend Nancy take off to the cabin together (which obviously was their thing).  Why Max can't take the dog to the cabin with them, I don't know.  Maybe the dog gets all barky when people have sex.

Back at Dad and Sally's house, it's sad.  Kate's being a real bitch to Dad's new wife, when Miles calls to tell Sally he's not coming for dinner.  Kate says she'll call him, but Sally tells her he's the sweetest guy in the world and she blew it.  "You can't go back and change it" she says, with no hint of immediate foreshadowing whatsoever.  Kate bemoans her loneliness.

A magical infomercial pops on television setting Max off and then teleports a sleeping Kate back to when she passed out in the perfume section.  She's clearly disoriented, and unfamiliar with time-loop scenarios.  She pulls her BFF out of the work party to share her recycled day with, pointing out the guy struggling with the lights, being even more rude to Mrs. Frumkin, generally being assholeish.  Her BFF postulates that maybe it's a dream... and Kate thinks that if it's a dream she "can behave any way I want."  Uhh, you kind of do that already you insensitive prat.

She puts on a slinky purple dress to tempt Jack away from his new girlfriend.  It's not going to go the way she thinks.  She's agressively weird towards Miles at their date (which she decides to keep knowing that Sally was really mad at her for breaking the date the first time, and she tells her BFF that Miles was a really nice guy), and Miles seems into it.  Miles smacks a little of desperation.  As they talk over each other - Kate trying to inform Miles pre-emptively about her phone call and "urgent meeting" - Miles says something about a wife, and it goes really bad again.

Kate, thinking her meetup with Jack's going to go differently this time because of a dress she's wearing, calls her Dad to tell her she's not coming to dinner.  She talks to Sally about Miles' wife, who, obviously, is dead, and Kate has feelings.  She finds out Jack is going to propose to Nancy. Max joins her for a lonely night in.  What's the time-share situation with Max for Kate and  Jack?  The weird infomercial pops on and the clock winds back.

Kate wakes up in the department store again. "Noooo!"
Some people don't know how to enjoy a time loop.
She goes to the doctor, hoping to get a scan to see if she has a brain tumor.  The ease of access to which she can get to visit her doctor is the real Christmas Miracle.  Kate still thinks getting Jack back is the answer.  So she goes to Jack's place and gets real weird to Jack, who is a really nice guy and very patient with this obsessed woman.

She heads to the bar early, where River Cuomo-looking dude is already waiting for Phyllis.  Kate chats him up a little.  Miles comes in (she notes he's arrived early too) and she blindsides him, starts chatting him up without revealing herself.  She starts asking about "the date" he's there for, then about his late wife.  "It's no great Lifetime channel tragedy" he says, and says she fell off a ladder cleaning gutters. Kate then tries to console Miles over the fact that she's going to ditch him later.  She arrives home to find Mrs. Frumkin's cherry chip loaf outside her door.  She utters an "Aww" and decides to thank Mrs. Frumkin, who hauls her inside her beautifully decorated apartment and they do some baking together.  Kate starts seeing what lonely old lady life is like together, but also bonds with Mrs. Frumkin. 

A lot of the conversations about this movie are about change and personal progress, and the ability to move on from the past.

Kate's dead asleep with Max when the infomercial (it's a partridge and pear pendant set, very tacky) pops on and time resets again.  Kate seems much more at ease in round four.  She races to head of Jack at the jewelry shop where he's about to buy Nancy's engagement ring.  Her stalker vibe turns a bit zen, and they have an easy conversation about where they went wrong (apparently Kate was obsessive about getting married and wasn't interested in what Jack wanted).  "Time to let go" she tells herself.  She asks about the guy in the park, who every year builds his girlfriend a lighted snowflake whether she wants to or not.  Kate asks the girlfriend, Leigh, if she wants a drink.  They go back to Kate's place and party like 11-year-old chugging whipped cream right out of the spray can, pissing off the neighbours.  Dad and Sally stop by when she didn't show up for dinner, bringing Miles with them.  Katie is a bit tipsy, but her and Miles go out for the evening, she learns Miles designs parks ("parkitect") and then he does a palm reading on her, as a pick-up thing which she's actually a little into.  She spills to Miles her fixation with Jack but shows signs of moving past it.  Miles is reasonably understanding.  Late in the evening Rivers is still there, waiting for Phyllis, and there's a misunderstanding, Jack storms off.  Kate and Rivers have a drink.

Date 5, Kate makes nice with the man who's always checking to see if she's ok.. "thanks for always being there for me Jim".  Kate waits around home for Miles' call rather than meeting at the bar, and they go Christmas tree shopping like people do on Christmas eve (I feel bad for that tree lot guy, he has a lot of trees left for Xmas Eve).  They go back to her place and decorate the apartment with WAAAY TOO MANY decorations for Kate to store year round.  Kate also made a cake and the head to Sally's for dinner.  Miles seems a bit overwhelmed, actually.  But Kate is seeing Sally in a new light, and she's admiring her Dad's relationship.  They go to Christmas midnight mass where they run into Mrs Frumkin, and time resets as they sing Joy To The World.

Date 6, Kate spends the afternoon with Jim, having cocoa and visits the Allan Gardens where Jim explains what being old is like.  Kate goes out and starts buying everything and anything, being a real bad driver, getting a tattoo, eating whatever she wants, dyes her hair, and brings her BFF, and Leigh from the park, to Mrs. Frumkins where they all bake together and dish until midnight, skipping Miles altogether.  Guess her date was with Jim.

Date 7. She helps Lee's boyfriend with his snowflake, makes it home in time for Miles' call, and she watches Miles' junior team he coaches play hockey.  Devon from Letterkenny tells her that they're all boys from a group home.  Miles is their coach, sometimes cook, sometimes tutor.  It turns out their captain, Michael took off from the group home.  But ignoring that Miles teaches Kate to skate, except she was a junior champion figure skater.  It's jarring every time they cut from a very Toronto location to the New York City skyline. 
Every. 
Time.
Kate takes Miles to a park which he "parkitected" and turns out she took the lights from snowflake guy and decorated the big tree there.  Just as Miles is about to kiss her, the clock strikes 12, day resets and she's on the floor of The Bay making kissy faces to Jim and company staring down at her.

Date 8.  It seems Kate is finally getting a sense of self, so she goes off and tells Jack her newfound sense of their relationship, which then leads to coffee, a very adult conversation, and new information about Kate's fear of loneliness.  Cut to dinner, when Sally is telling god-awful jokes.  Kate made dessert.  There's a weird moment, Miles storms out, as Miles does.  Kate gets confused, and clearly she's started falling in love with Miles but each reset is more difficult as a result.

Date 9.  Kate hurts.  So she goes day drinking, and Rivers is already is showing up just after lunch looking for Phyllis.  Poor Rivers, stood up, and desperately hanging out there all day.  Kate rips the bandaid off.  She greets Mrs. Frumkin rudely, but with first-name "we're good friends" familiarity.  She watches Extreme Hoarders in bed with Max, then gets up to see Mrs. Frumkin off to Mass, apologizing to her for her rudeness.  That actually got me a little teary.  Mrs. Frumkin is pretty awesome.

Date 10. Kate starts to help snowflake guy but then sees group home runaway Michael. She tries to confront him, but he runs away.  She kills the rest of the day then, Day 11, follows him to find he has a secret dog he's caring for.  She takes Michael to the rink, and convinces Miles the puppy is a good thing, and then asks Miles out on a date, not revealing that she actually was his date.  They have a nice evening, but the day resets.

Date 12.  Time to pull it all together. Kate wakes up, gives Jim a kiss.  She takes Rivers out for a makeover (he doesn't wind up looking any different).  She sets up Jim with Mrs. Frumkin.  They hit it off.  Kate sees Jack and Nancy and congratulates them.  She helps snowflake guy propose to Leigh.  She sets up Rivers with her BFF, and meets Miles for that drink. She invites all her new friends, including the boys from the group home to Sally and her Dad's for a big Christmas party.  Rivers and BFF are hitting it off.  Snowflake guy and Leigh are happily engaged.  The group home boys are having a blast.  Kate's sister and neices and nephews are there. And it's just all warm and Christmassy.  Everyone sing's this film's 12th rendition of "The 12 Days of Christmas".  Miles leaves to go to Mass and Kate follows him out and they kiss.  Michael Buble sings, the midnight bell chimes, and it starts snowing.

Cut to credits which are accompanied by a weirdly unnecessary highlight reel.

 The Draw:
After Just Another Christmas promised, but failed to deliver a time-loop Christmas, I needed to find one.  There's one called Christmas Every Day from '96, Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas from '99, Hallmark's Pete's Christmas from 2013, and I thought there was another Hallmarkie or Lifetime one but I can't remember the generic name of that one.

The Formulae:
Well, it's a rip on the Groundhog's Day formulae more than it is the Hallmarkie formulae (which hadn't quite been established yet), but there is the requisite Christmas tree lot scene and the hot cocoa and the lead actress with a figure-skating body-double, plus there's more than a handful of misunderstandings based on snippets of overheard conversations, but by using the time-loop formulae it sidesteps most of the usual tropes. 
Oh, and every minor character seems to be hooked up by the end.

Unformulae:
That'd be the time loop.  And actual alcohol consumption.  There's a few moments where people ask if certain drinks are spiked, but they're not.  But much of Miles and Kate meeting up is over drinks.

True Calling?
Yeah but no.  They don't really have 12 dates.  But there are 12 days she relives.  I would have maybe liked it if this were a standard kind of franchise where a mystical thing tells them they have 12 days to sort their shit out.

The Rewind:
Nothing really.  I needed to go back and see if that was really Alexander De Jordy from Letterkenny.  It was!  He looked so young.  He grew up a lot between 2011 and 2016.

The Regulars:
Jayne Eastwood, who plays Mrs Frumkin has been doing TV Christmas movies for years... and is in 3 this year alone (2 Lifetimes and 1 Hallmark).  She keeps busy.

Richard Fitzpatrick who plays Jim has done a few different Xmas movies over the years but he's not quite a regular.

Laura Miyata who plays BFF Miyoko is a regular Hallmarkie supporting player the past few years.

How does it Hallmark?
Much more enjoyable than almost all Hallmarks.  It's really sweet, turns Kate around as a Character very nicely (before we start to really dislike her) and this time loop plays out very, very well.

How does it movie?
It's TV movie quality...shot with that weird gauzy lens they liked to shoot Christmas movies with before Hallmark cleaned things up.  The story with a little comedic punch up, better production values (and likely some recasting of the roles) would serve as a very good movie movie.  It's just not up to that standard as is.

31 Days of Halloween: Carrie

2026 - Amazon

How do I write about TV again?

Every year, at least one TV show appears near-to or during the season. This year, we get at least three, which are automatically on the slate: Yaga which starts at the end of the month, the Newfoundland shot and based monster-in-the-water series Below that starts tomorrow on Netflix, and this one, the latest from favourite Mike Flanagan.

Insert Fanfare Emoji

There have been a lot of Carrie adaptations, the debut novel from Stephen King, going all the way back to the 1976 De Palma / Sissy Spacek movie. Then there is its "sequel", the terrible The Rage: Carrie 2 in the 90s, and the 2013 version with Chloë Grace Moretz, and there was also a 2002 made-for-TV movie written by Bryan Fuller; it was meant to be a backdoor pilot, but that never happened. I will also mention there were two stage productions, but I refuse to even dig into them.

This is Flanagan, whom we love love love, but I have to admit... I had no great anticipation for this one. I might have to admit no great fondness for the King story, despite it being his first. It was likely my fifth or six of his books. I might have soured on it due my own high school drama; nothing involving buckets of pig blood, but I do not look fondly back on those years. But I will watch it, and I will enjoy it despite getting in my own way.

It begins with the death of Carrie's father (Tahmoh Penikett, Dollhouse), a construction worker, but more importantly, a prep'er and anti-government whacko who kept to himself. Nobody at work knew him at all. It continues with the authorities finding Carrie(ta) and her mother (Samantha Sloyan, Midnight Mass) in the closet. Nobody knew they existed. But, I should say it begins with the simul-cast preamble, interviews with people regarding the incident that started in the high school gymnasium during prom, and ended with the entire school burned down, and most of the town. The same interviews explain that, pending funds being setup for the now widow and her daughter, Carrie (Summer H Howell, Night of the Reaper) has to go to school and mom has to work.

Smart move from Flanagan, as most people watching already know the story behind Carrie in that a young girl with powers gets a bucket of pigs blood poured over her and she ... explodes, taking everyone with her. Not literally, but powerful telepathic response. So, we know the ending, but do we know the story.

The setup is familiar enough. Carrie is new to this world, pretty much all of it. She's weird but resilient, open to every new experience. High school girls are demons, cliques within cliques. New people are fodder, new & weird even more juicy. Her first few days of homemade clothing, sexual awakening, popularity machinations and her first school shooting drill do not go well. We also see that there is an emerging conflict between Carrie and her mother, as Carrie begins to understand how much she has been kept from.

The episode ends as the torture begins. Carrie gets her first period, something her mother neglected to prepare her for ("my daughter is a child...") and the other gym class girls go wild on her, throwing feminine protection at her, while filming her confusion and panic. The episode truly ends with the introduction of something new, an Xavier style school of other girls with psychic powers, one who is sensitive to Carrie's awakenings.

Like all Flanagan, we begin with characters, good and bad, slow burning our way into a story. He's brought only a few of the usual suspects along so far, but I suspect more will come along.  Its a sold opener.

T&K's XMas (2024) Advent Calendar - Day 16: Holidazed, episode 1.

 2024, created by Claudia Grazioso - Hallmark/W Network

A little something outside the Hallmark seasonal norm, and showing the channel's commitment to not sitting still and resting on formulae alone, Holidazed is an 8-episode TV series that is, effectively, 6 intersecting Hallmark Holiday Movie stories, but not movies.

This is perhaps the evolution of the ensemble movie Hallmark has been trying more and more each year (think Haul out the Holly  or The Christmas House).  It's also maybe in direct competition with the Cherry Lane series of movies to see which format performs better: a series of movies or a weekly limited series?

Holidazed is set on a cul-de-sac and follows the six families that live in the neighborhood. Their lives naturally cross paths but each has their own specific story.  The first episode introduces all the families, their dynamics with each other, and their neighbours, and the complications that will need to be overcome.  Each family will have a dedicated episode, and I presume the finale will tie it all together somehow.

I recently wrote about the Netflix series Midnight Mass and what a masterclass it is in establishing its large cast, their relationships to one another, its setting, the series' ominous tone and hinting at what's to come. Holidazed isn't quite as deftly handled, but it does a decent job of weaving through the myriad of characters and how they relate to one another while setting up the complications that will drive their individual narratives.  What holds it back is it's almost too ambitious, with too many characters intermingling to keep every connection perfectly straightforward. As well, almost every premise is pretty cliche, so from the set-up it's like we know where it's going to go, based on Hallmarks of the past.

They are:
The Hill Family. Son Josh (Ian Harding) has returned home for the holidays, where his big city pretentiousness presents itself quite frequently. He's not an asshole about it, he's just a bit of an ass.  He apparently kept buying his parents new household gadgets for fitness or healthy eating and they were just too technical and non-traditional for them, but he kind of doesn't get it. He only sees his way. While heading out to pick up some healthy bowls for dinner in his parents car, he gets pulled over for talking on the phone not hands-free (he was talking to his fiancee who, to put it bluntly, is pretty emotionally cold and didn't care at all about joining him for Christmas). The cop is an old high-school acquaintance, Nora, who he says was always very "by the book" and she says he always though the rules didn't apply to him. He thinks he's charming and Nora is not charmed. Later Josh forgets to put the car in park and it crashes into a fire hydrant. He convinces Nora to get his penance immediately reduced to community service because he's supposed to be moving to Australia with the ice queen after Christmas. He also learns from his parents that Nora is a single mom after her husband died. So, big city big shot returns home to meet single parent he knew from his younger years and they clash at first. We know how this story will go, like every beat of it (especially since we see Josh connect with Nora's son over Legos briefly).

The Lin Family. Ted (Osric Chou) has brought his fiancee Marcus (Shawn Ahmed) home for the holidays. His mom (Sharon Crandall) is ecstatic to spend the time together and plan their wedding. Sister Ella (Jasmine Chen) brings up the topic of Nai Nai comes up and Dad (Stanley Jung) says he booked her on a trip to Palm Springs. Ted is relieved because he hasn't come out to Grandma yet, which Marcus is not thrilled with. Of course, the trip has issues and Nai Nai (Lucille Soong) is home for the holidays and eager to spend time with Marcus whom she believes is Ella's fiancee. Uh oh. Hijinks are bound to ensue before the truth has to come out (literally). Lucille Soong is a legendary character actor, and she's going to kill it in this hopefully not-too-contrived story.

The Woods Family. Lucy (Lindy Booth) runs an restaurant and has the total hots for contractor/handyman Cole (Steven Allerick). It seems mutual. But Lucy's estranged hard-travelling sister Sylvie (Rachelle Lefevre) is home for Hanukkah and she's already starting to dig her charming, worldly claws into Cole.  Lucy's daughter Annie has been best friends with neighbour Max Lewin forever, but now that they're teens things are changing. When popular girls Stephanie drops in, Max is all over her, which makes gives Annie new feelings. Two juvenile relationships, one which makes sense because teens are involved, the other is of the eye rolling middle-agers-shouldn't-act-like-teenagers variety. Hopefully it's more about the sibling drama than misunderstood romance cues.

The Lewin Family. It's going to be a tense Christmas at the Lewin household. Jennifer (Robinne Fanfair) has both her mother and father coming for dinner, but they divorced earlier in the year. Jennifer has just made partner at work and is tired of being put in the middle... and yet, mom Linda (Loretta Devine) manages to skirt having to tell Jennifer's dad, Robert (Dennis Haysbert) that she's bringing her new boyfriend.  Before the episode is over, the truth comes out (and that's before Linda arrives) and Robert seems more than happy that Linda has some other man to torture in his old age...except... when Linda arrives, her boyfriend is a strapping, handsome younger man (and not the Uber driver). This one is far fetched but seems like a great comedic set-up with both Devine and Haysbert... that's high wattage acting talent that should raise even mediocre material.

The Camarena Family. Manny (Tim Perez) has been in a long term feud with neighbour  Chuck Manetti-Hanahan (John C. McGinley) over the volume of Chuck's Christmas decorating. But the two are attempting (not really) to bury the hatchet as Manny's son Kevin has been dating Chuck's daughter Katie (Holland Roden). Chef Gaby (Noemi Gonzalez) returns home for the holidays with big news about her career, which is undercut by Kevin's love life which Gaby didn't know about. Turns out Katie was her high school bully, a fact that not even Katie seems aware of (as she is constantly hugging Gaby and trying to recall "old times" they shared). And then Gaby finds an engagement ring.... The trauma is deep here and I hope the episode featuring this family gets into it, and doesn't just cop out with Katie expressing what she was going through and playing on Gaby's sympathy. Own the damage you caused, Katie! This has so much potential, but I don't believe enough in Hallmark to deliver it. 

The Manetti-Hanahan Family. Chuck, as we've seen, thinks he owns the world, and is oblivious to how he impacts others. Connie (Virginia Madsen) is trying to organize the holidays and keep the peace at home and with the neighbours, and finds it exhausting. Clark (Giles Panton) returns home with his family in tow and from the second they exit the car they are mocked and berated for their trendy lifestyle choices (they're vegan now, but Rebecca [Lucie Guest] has brought all the food so she's no burden but it doesn't matter).  The Manetti-Hanahan household is an utter shit show and Katie is branded a traitor by her father and, like all the kids, finds being at home very difficult. She storms out and winds up staying at the Camarena's for the night (kicking Gaby out of her bed, because Kevin's parents are not letting them sleep in the same bed under their roof).  They're a lot. This is the only story that I don't know exactly where it's going. If we get Chuck having some sort of change of heart and self awareness I'm going to call bullshit, because he's not that kind of guy, I can tell already. Madsen is killing it in what I've seen so far from her, and McGinley is always fun to watch.

Will report back when all is said and done on how each story fared.

KsMIRT: ...into November (part 2... or.. better late than November)

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (eh..?) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  The last post was getting pretty long, so I broke it into 2 parts (why haven't I thought to do that before?).

Also This Month:
The Haunting of Hill House (2018, Netflix, 10/10 episodes) Creator: Mike Flanagan
The Franchise (2024, HBO max, 8/8 episodes) Creator: Jon Brown
Interior Chinatown (2024, Disney+, 10/10 episodes) Creator: Charles Yu
A Man on the Inside (2024, Neftlix, 8/8 episodes) Creator: Michael Schur

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The Haunting of Hill House 

Created by Mike Flanagan

The What 100: The Crain family moved into Hill House for a few months in the early '90's with the intent of renovating it and flipping it for a wild profit. What they didn't know but would soon enough learn, is the house was not only haunted, but some kind of place of holding for the afterlife. In the present day, the surviving members of the Crain family are still processing what they went through in their younger life, some in denial, some willfully ignoring, and some trying to forget. But Hill House isn't done with them yet.

(1 Great): Unlike Midnight Mass, which came out of the gate with one of the best first episodes since Lost, The Haunting of Hill House was a much slower burn. It took about three episodes before I settled into the rhythm of the series as each of the first five episodes dedicated its focus to one of the five Crain children.  The absolute best of these was episode five, which follows the youngest sibling Nell through her childhood traumas, and simultaneously explains her mindest as she got older. Her family never really understood her, and the previous four episodes painted a very different picture of Nell than what we get here. It's a devastating, beautiful, clever, and horrifying episode that builds so well off of what we were shown before.

(1 Good): The way in which the series jumps back and forth in time is largely a subject of point of view, and as such the truth of what is happening both in the past and in the present unfolds as a result of the shifting points of view. The result is a series that keeps peeling layers off episode after episode, and although it takes a couple episodes to really get going, it does fully sink you into those layers.  As usual, Flanagan takes his conceits of ghosts and psychic connections and builds a very human world around it, zeroing in on characters and their relationships to one another, and that becomes as much, if not more what's worth sinking into that the questions of what happened (both past and present).  The sixth episode, taking place at Shirley's funeral home, brings the family together with their estranged father for the first time in a very long time, and it's a doozy of an emotional roller coaster from airing of grievances, but also has plenty of enticingly creepy moments. It's like the first four episodes culminate in Episode 5, the events of which gives way for Episode 6 which acts as the slingshot that propels the series forward over the next four episodes.

(1 Bad): I could harp on Flanagan's penchant for monologues, but it's just something he clearly likes to do and his audience either needs to get over it or just move on from his work. I'm really not ready to do either. But I think for me the least enjoyable part of the series was the Dudleys (Annabeth Gish and Robert Longstreet), whose family were the longtime caretakers of Hill House. They were such background characters whose presence never much made sense to me. I guess I just am not familiar with such a concept of estate caretakers.  I felt like they either should have been incorporated more, or excised completely. A lot of their presence in the show did seem extraneous and when we finally get their story, also quite tragic, it felt very deus ex machina.

META: Were I to hazard a guess, just looking at the timing, Flanagan was working on The Haunting of Hill House at the same time as he was working on the adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, and the influence of Doctor Sleep really shows.  In many ways you could easily tie Hill House into the same universe that Doctor Sleep inhabits. Theo has a psychic ability (as did her mother) which could just be the Shining. The way that Flanagan employs ghosts is very similar to how they are employed in Doctor Sleep, and Hill House has a very similar vibe to the Overlook Hotel, and the way that Flanagan explains the Overlook in Doctor Sleep as almost a living entity is so similar here. Flanagan does tweak the concepts enough to not make the connection fully work, but it seems very much like Flanagan was enamoured with the ideas within Doctor Sleep and just wanted to play with them in a totally different context. Fair enough.

Flanagan's stable of performers are present, but it was the younger cast that impressed me, and shocked me with how many familiar young faces there were. Julian Hilliard who played young Luke (Oliver Jackson-Cohen played older Luke) was Tommy in Wandavision. Violet McGraw played young Nell (played by Victoria Pedretti in her older form) was also young Yelena in Black Widow and was in M3GAN and Doctor Sleep. And of course McKenna Grace playing young Theo (played in her older self by Kate Siegel) is one of the standout performers of the entire Hill House series and is also the star of the modern Ghostbusters franchise.  The young-old casting was uniformly great, and I especially liked how patriarch Hugh Crain was played so consistently by Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton...it was a real performance in tandem.

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The Franchise 
Created by Jon Brown

The What 100:  A satirical look behind the scenes on a big-budget superhero movie that is the latest in a Marvel- or DC-like franchise that is past its glory years and  trying to maintain relevance. The center of the series is Himesh Patel's first assistant director Daniel Kumar who seems to be the only one who legitimately cares about the property being filmed and is trying his damnedest to keep the machine functioning amidst the great many inflated egos, the war between the director and the studio heads, and trying to keep the energy up on an overtaxed crew. And then the studio sends his ex-girlfriend in as his new producer/boss.

(1 Great): You can't go wrong, I think ever, with Richard E. Grant, who plays an egocentric thespian who is too good for the material he's working with (but not too good for the money he's getting paid). He's largely background colour, but he pops every time he's on screen, as he is wont to do.

(1 Good): There are a few other great secondary character that are just joke machines, including Lolly Adefope as Dag, Daniel's Second A.D. (she really doesn't give a shit about any of it, but is ready to work her way up the ladder), Billy Magnussen as the heroic lead of Tecto:Eye of the Storm, Adam Randolph (whose ego is the thinnest sheet of glass, standing precariously on its edge), and Darren Goldstein's studio exec Pat Shannon (just swinging big dick energy everywhere, and teeters so close to reprehensible but comes out as one of the series' brightest spots).  But the series doesn't work at all without Patel shouldering the whole thing, and, let's face it, the guy is a star, and he does carry the whole thing on his back. He's likeable, vulnerable, but also flawed, and Patel has to do so much hiding of the character's true self putting on a different face for each of the other characters, with only spare moments to let his guard down and reveal the sensitive family man and old-school comic book nerd with ambitions and desires of his own.

(1 Bad): I enjoyed a lot of The Franchise but as a whole it just didn't fully click with me. I wondered, as a fan of the MCU (still) whether I was just being a sensitive fanboy at the jokes it was clearly making at its expense. But no, I'm not that sensitive a fanboy, and I liked a lot of those jokes. Largely I think this series --in exposing franchise filmmaking as a rather callous cold-hearted, profit-centric machine -- is missing exactly what it needs, which is heart. The people in this production largely don't care about what they're doing, and they don't care about each other, and that makes it hard as an audience member to care about it all as well.

META:  I can honestly say that any of the satire and lampooning of franchise filmmaking here is probably pretty accurate, if exaggerated, but this series isn't made with love, it is full on a barbed critique. It's a series that clearly dislikes the whole franchise filmmaking venture, and thinks of it as an entirely miserable experience for all, from start to finish. There's next to no room here for affection, with only the slightest glimmer of it in Patel's character, but its not put in front of the audience enough to care. 

It's also really hard to give us a 200 million dollar movie in a show whose operating budget is a small fraction of that. Tecto looks like an off-brand superhero movie from the '90's and doesn't ever feel like something that could even remotely be a successful movie. 

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Interior Chinatown
Created by Charles Yu

The What 100: Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang, Love Hard) is a busboy at his uncle's Chinese restaurant who dreams of something bigger in life, but seems resigned to his constrained fate...until he witnesses the kidnapping of a nail salon worker. The kidnapping brings the bright, shiny, quippy, dynamic police detectives of Black and White to Chinatown, where Willis can't seem to get noticed beyond a few cursory questions. But then a hot new detective (Chloe Bennett, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) joins the scene as a Chinatown expert, and she not only takes notice but puts Willis to work as his man on the inside. There's strange dealings going on in Chinatown, and at the precinct, and it all connects back to the disappearance of Willis' older brother.

(1 Great): This show is a trip. A legit trip. The premise, if not clear above, is that Willis is a background characters in a Law & Order-style TV series set in the late 1990s. The show blurs the line between its interior reality and the reality of a TV show as to be somewhat indistinguishable except that there are very blurry dividing lines between the two. There are times where the characters in a scene transition seemlessly into the background (and sometimes the foreground) of a commercial break, promoting a hard seltzer or stylish watch then resuming conversations. The visuals will often cut to a television set which then shows characters from the reality of Interior Chinatown as characters within Black & White or a  commercial or something else.  It is the wildest series I've watched since Mrs. Davis, another show which obfuscates its reality quite adeptly.  

(1 Good): I particularly loved how it flipped the dynamic of the background characters being the foreground protagonist and pushing the two detective characters into flimsy archetypes. But the reality of these characters, and other characters, whether lead or background, all start to shift as Willis starts infiltrating spaces he's not otherwise meant to be.  There are "awakenings" in a way, where the extras, or single-line supporting players start to find a voice within their reality, and my favourite exploration of this was with the Black & White leads, Detectives Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones, a complete unknown to me but comes alive in the series second half) and Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy, who I know only from the Comedy Bang Bang podcast but really breaks out here). Turner starts to question everything about his surroundings, and eventually just breaks free of them, while Green wants nothing more than to embrace everything about her trappings, to succeed, but she can't stand the cost of doing so.

(1 Bad): There wasn't really anything bad about this show. I was invested from moment one, and continued to be absolutely glued to every moment of the show as it played out. But if there was a critique, it would be that the main characters, Willis, his best friend Fatty (the always sarcastic and enjoyable Ronny Chieng, Shang-Chi), his mother Lily (a soulful performance from Diana Lin) and even Bennett's Detective Lana Lee all spend so much time apart from one another in their own story lines. Willis' distance from these other characters all has narrative context, and metanarrative context, and it's employed quite well. The disparate threads do all come together in the final episodes quite successfully, so I can't complain too much, except that I liked Yang and Chieng's dynamic together (with Chau Long's sweet doofus Carl as an interloping third in the duo).

META: It's all very, very meta. The narrative is clearly the lack of representation of Chinese Americans in American television and cinema. There's a total lack of respect, and a total disinterest in the mainstream to telling their stories, and letting them tell their stories. The narrative drive here is Willis taking ownership of his story, of exposing the systemic racism that has been holding him down, and along the way commenting on how, even outside of the entertainment industry the immigrant populaces are either ignored or targeted for displacement via gentrification, their culture subverted by the whims of capitalism.  It's a damn enjoyable series for its unique weirdness, but it's so much the better for having the underpinning of cultural criticism.

I freaking loved this show. One of my favourites of the year.

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A Man on the Inside 
Created by Michael Schur (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place)

The What 100: Charles (Ted Danson, Becker) is a widower and former professor who seems to be floating through life. He's got his routine, but it's unfulfilling, and he's emotionally distant from his only daughter (Mary Elisabeth Ellis, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and her family. Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada, Chicago Med) is a private investigator tasked with finding out who stole her client's mother's necklace - a family heirloom - in her nursing home. Julie needs a senior to be her man on the inside, and puts out an ad in the paper, the only place she can be sure to find her target audience. Charles, a big fan of John Le Carre, jumps at the chance to do spy work, and for lack of other viable options Julie is stuck with him. 

(1 Great): Fucking Ted Danson, man. The guy has been at it on television for almost 50 years and in the past five or so years he's just hit his peak. The Good Place gave him the best role of his career, but with A Man on the Inside he's at his most soulful and vulnerable.  

Danson plays Charles as a man carrying deep pain but incapable of addressing it. His wife had dementia and died suddenly from complications, and the experience was traumatic for him, but he didn't know how to process it. So he floats, navigating his daily routine that offers little surprise but little possibility for hurt either. In taking the job with Julie and coming to Pacific View, he doesn't just find work and purpose, though, instead he finds a community of contemporaries, and connections to people and passions and memories and experiences that awaken him from his fugue state. The work forces him out of his protective shell and in inquiring into other people's lives it opens him up to sharing his life back, and finding the pain he experienced is not unique. Danson sells the stoic nature of Charles, the giddiness of playing spy, the tenderness he has with a Pacific View patient with early signs of dementia, and ultimately opening up and connecting with his daughter Emily (in an episode where Charles visits Emily and her family following a loss at the retirement home, it finds Charles playing video games with his three grandsons and breaks down in that moment...it's both beautiful and devastating, and one of Danson's best-ever performances that makes me cry just thinking about it).

(1 Good): Brooklyn Nine-Nine veteran Stephanie Beatrix plays Didi, the manager of Pacific View. The first few episodes Didi is a very peripheral character, which seemed odd given Beatrix's core cast role in Schur's previous series. At first Didi seems suspicious of Charles' behaviour, and it seems like its setting something up, but by the end of the third episode Didi has locked her suspicions away, like Schur was pivoting on what his initial intent for the series was (from this odd detective comedy series, to longer form sitcom in a retirement home), But Didi gets a spotlight episode just past midway through the run which demands a lot from Beatrix, and she delivers so powerfully as a woman who cares for people, even within a corporate structure that really only cares about money. It's leadership, and forming a team of people who follow that leadership, it's not just a job.  And when Charles is eventually outed, the hurt from the deceit is experienced by many, but it is Didi who is the most devastated by it, and Beatrix makes you feel that so deeply, even though you are sympathetic to Charles. His intent was never to hurt anyone, but it happened despite the best intentions.

(1 Bad): No bad here. A little wonkiness in the episode-to-episode consistency. I don't know if it was the series who had unsteady legs, or if it was just me as a view and the expectations of what I thought the plan for the series was.  It's not a conventional narrative, and Schur uses Netflix and its lack of ad breaks to play around with TV sitcom structure in a way that doesn't always work fully, but never actually fails to deliver the showrunner's intent. I think the most awkward part of the series was the cutaways to Emily and her family, which seemed so outside the narrative of the rest of the show. And yet, Lady Kent and I felt so seen by modern parenting, and the way kids behave so distinctly from the way we behaved, it's hard to say it shouldn't belong (even if it could maybe be a whole other series). These moments with Emily and family are especially important though for when we get to that powerful scene of Charles with his grandsons. I don't think it would have worked half as powerfully if we hadn't gotten to know these kids before hand.

META: Strangely Michael Schur's first, and probably biggest success was The Office, a show I cannot tolerate to watch. I've tried, twice, and I find it unpalatable. Parks & Recreation on the other hand, after it ditched its Office clone vibes, became one of my all-time favourite comedy series. And everything Schur has done since then has been right up my alley. There are few other comedy creators that I trust as much as him, because his track record has proven himself (Bill Lawrence, maybe? Tina Fey and Robert Carlock possibly). And A Man on the Inside makes good on that trust, and shows how Schur continues to evolve as a creator. His interests are of a deep and curious nature as to different facets of human existence. In this case he's looking at people in the final years of their life who are in an establishment that, perhaps, people see as a place where they go so they can be ignored and forgotten about. A Man on the Inside shows there's still vitality there, a need for connection as much, if not more than a need for care. In some cases these are places where people where "put", but the point here is that for some it's a chosen place, a home and community where there's new shared experiences and connections. It's really quite beautiful. 

Another of my favourites this year.