Let’s start with the cast—Liev Schreiber, Nicole Kidman, Dakota Fanning, and Eve Hewson, whose acting career almost certainly has nothing to do with her being Bono’s kid, all give excellent performances. Donna Lynne Champlin nearly steals the series in a supporting role as the mainland detective sent to Nantucket to investigate a murder.

The mystery resolves in satisfying fashion, and some of the character development is skillfully done. While Liev and Nicole’s three boys are underwritten and two-dimensional (poor Billy Howle tries his best to instill his character with an arc that the writers didn’t provide), the women are all complicated and have interesting arcs.

And yet I have some issues.

Also there was some stuff I didn’t love about the show. (badump-BUM!)

A lot of this involves the last episode, so I’d recommend skipping the rest if you haven’t watched the show yet. (tl;dr— flawed but definitely compelling and worth watching).

First, the cliche of the humble, hardworking cops just trying to get to the bottom of the mystery grated on me. Especially because one detective is supposed to be from the Massachusetts State Police, which recent events have revealed to be an incredibly corrupt, incompetent agency.

But okay, I guess I can overlook that. There are shows with elves in them, and those aren’t real either.

But there’s a weird tonal shift in the last episode. What seemed to be a dark drama with moments of comic relief for five episodes is revealed to be a dark comedy. I just found this kind of jarring. And the stuff with Greer was, in my opinion, cheesy. There are plenty of icy WASP matriarchs out there whose iciness cannot be explained by the fact that they’re hiding their past as a sex worker, and to my mind, it’s more interesting to figure out how someone became a terrible person without having a Dickensian backstory.

Also, the big resolution of the story seems to be Greer self-actualizing as an honest person, but, like, that wasn’t really the conflict in the story. And honestly, every character but one who was horrible in the show gets a happy ending, which I found displeasing. We spent five episodes hating these people and we’re supposed to be glad that the murder of a guest helped them to lead authentic lives? Blecch!

Finally, the “cast in a dance number” opening credits was done first and better in Peacemaker.

#review #tv

The setting is the titular boarding school for incorrigibles, nestled on a mountain peak atop sheer rock walls. Oh yeah, there’s a monastery there too. The school is openly abusive—students are routinely sent to “the cooler,” a literal dungeon open to the outside air, as punishment, and then have to recite a creepy thing about how they deserved their punishment in front of the entire student body. In an early episode, a girl has her head shaved for disobedience (and then apparently decides she’s gonna make it work for her, as she continues to rock the buzz cut for at least three months of story time. Go Paz!).

But students (and some staff) soon find that there’s something even more sinister going on at the school than the abuse everybody knows about. Does it have to do with the ancient cult that used to meet on this site? Or the sinister guy who doesn’t work at the school but seems to be in charge of it somehow whose daughter has amnesia? Or the monks who may or may not be what they seem? The show does a wonderful job of keeping us off balance, as the students try to figure out exactly what the hell is going on while searching for missing comrades and trying to dodge an apparent serial killer.

Now, let’s be completely clear—there’s a lot that is preposterous about this show, and you have to be willing to put that stuff aside. Stuff like, “wow, these parents really don’t seem to care that multiple murders have taken place on this campus, huh?” or '“you know, for a place with such draconian discipline, it’s a bit weird that the students are essentially unsupervised and have no trouble being places they’re not supposed to be pretty much any time at all.”

Also, secondary characters tend to kind of disappear a lot, waved away with a “yeah, they left the school.” And there’s a significant departure after season 2 that never fully makes sense.

BUT—literally every mystery in the show, of which there are many, is ultimately resolved in satisfying fashion. Every single one! I’m so used to shows halfassing the ending or just hoping we’d forget about part of the mystery that it was incredibly satisfying to have every single thing wrapped up satisfactorily by the end.

If you’re squeamish about gore, there are five or six moments per season that you’ll want to avoid. But if you think a show about plucky kids trying to fight against overwhelming odds (while of course still negotiating high school hookups, because priorities!) in a spooky setting might be for you, you’re probably right!

#review #tv

Let’s start with season 4. I watch a lot of British murder shows, and in those, the script is never embarrassing and everyone in the entire cast is a good actor. That’s very much not the norm in American shows. (I’ve also been watching The Irrational with Jesse L. Martin, where the scripts are often quite creaky and there are some absolutely terrible performances. He’s charismatic and actually looks great in a porkpie hat, so there’s that. Also great queer representation.)

So, here, as in a British murder show, everyone can act, and some (both Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) are extraordinary. Of course, part of this has to do with the kind of script they’re working with. Women just don’t get to play complicated, messed-up characters that you root for anyway, whereas there are probably five shows like that about men on right now. So kudos to Issa Lopez for giving great actors a great script to sink their teeth into.

Also there are some great and haunting images throughout, and the fact that the whole thing takes place in the long arctic night gives the whole thing a disorienting, nightmarish quality that I really liked.

It’s also the perfect length—it was only as long as it needed to be to provide us with character arcs and the resolution of the central mystery. No bloat, which is rare in prestige TV! Which brings me to Season 1, which I watched while waiting for Season 4’s last episode to drop.

But first, a sidebar on copaganda. Oh, geez, both of these seasons really wallow in the copaganda cliche: Sure, they bend the rules and sometimes summarily execute people without arrest or trial, but it’s just because they care so much, dammit! They’re trying to live by a code in a hopelessly corrupt world! Ho-hum. I think it’s okay to watch this stuff as long as you realize that the cop who cares too much is like a dwarf in the Lord of the Rings movies and shows. Which is to say, imaginary. If you see a short guy with a luxurious beard out in the world, you should not assume that they’re a hard-drinkin’, axe-wieldin’, scrappy metalsmith. And similarly, if you see people in the world who look like the cops you see on TV, you should not expect them to share those cops’ qualities. (Except for the alcoholism which is rampant in both the real and fantasy cop populations.)

Okay, on to season 1. As in season 4, fantastic performances, a gripping plot, and absolutely stunning cinematography. As not in season 4, a bit of bloat, in my opinion. This 8-episode series could have probably been 6 episodes without missing much. I know Rust’s philosophizing made a big splash at the time, but I just didn’t feel like we needed to be reminded of it several times per episode. And then the episode where Rust went undercover felt like it was airlifted in from a different show. Sons of Anarchy, maybe.

But also, this show is very interested in how men steeped in toxic masculinity navigate their ideas of what a man should be, and this is just not a topic I find especially compelling. Maggie is the only woman of consequence in the series, and even she is really just a prop in the real love story between Marty and Rust. (I don’t mean that their love is sexual, but it’s clear that for both, their connection with the other is the most consequential relationship in their lives.)

So, I mean, don’t get me wrong. I liked it. I just didn’t love it the way I loved season 4.

Of course, my love for season 4 was contingent on them sticking the landing. And, in my opinion, they really did. (Spoilers ahead, obvi). I was initially a little pissed at the Scooby-Dooification of what appeared to be a fully supernatural event, but what happened at Tsalal station was so cool and unexpected and fit so perfectly that I couldn’t stay mad. Also there were clearly still some supernatural elements at play. Like the tongue, and the ghost who located the corpsesicle!

So: loved season 4, liked season 1, am following everyone’s advice and not watching seasons 2 or 3.

#review #TV

Anyway, Bodies actually concerns one body that is found in four different time periods and investigated by four different detectives. The performances are top notch, the script is smart and convoluted and features a number of those WTF twists we expect in a time-travel show. (Yes, Futurama fans, a character in this show does in fact do the nasty in the pasty and thereby become their own ancestor, just like Fred Ward in Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann).

But what I’d really like to talk about is the moral courage this show displays. This is gonna involve some spoilers, so…

The show has zero interest in debating whether the society Elias creates is worthwhile. It never gives any airtime at all to the idea that Elias’s actions might be justified. Killing half a million people is simply an evil act that must be stopped no matter what happened afterward.

Sad but true: an 8-part series on Netflix displays more moral courage than the entire American educational system. You may recall that in 1945, the United States of America incinerated two cities in Japan, killing an estimated quarter of a million people. When I was in school, we would have “debates” in history class where one side would argue that the mass slaughter of civilians was a good thing. They would usually win the debates because if you don’t accept the premise that killing lots of people is an evil act, you can justify pretty much anything.

There’s a great moment in one of the later episodes where a character is leaving on a mission to poison an 11-year-old child, and she says, “you told me it was just like a soldier firing a shot.” This is supposed to justify the murder to the murderer, but of course it indicts war to the viewer. Because he’s not wrong. Poison a kid or drop a bomb on their house—they’re just as dead either way, and any moral gymnastics you engage in to convince yourself that one is better than the other are bullshit.

Anyway, it’s a good show. I recommend it.

#review #TV

Fun adventure movies are few and far between. Pixar always wants you to cry, and Marvel somehow got a sense that they’re Important, and so the idea that you can have a good time at the movies watching a bunch of folks do something difficult and heroic seems to have gotten lost. I’m glad this movie found it.

On TV, I watched a really good fantasy show. Karen Pirie (on Britbox) doesn’t have magic or wizards or Owlbears, but it does feature a familiar fantasy trope: the incredibly competent cop who will stop at nothing to solve a case, even if it means taking on the entire power structure of the city.

If you can suspend your disbelief and remind yourself that this is only a fantasy, you’ll have a very good time with this well-acted, cleverly-plotted show. Lauren Lyle is especially winning in the title role, but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast. Of course it’s easier to turn in a good performance when you’re working from a good script, and Emer Kenny’s adaptation of Val McDermid’s novel (I was impressed enough by her 1979 to want to watch this because it was based on her writing) is really strong.

Fantasy media is fun, but it’s important to remember that if you see a guy in a robe on the street, he’s not going to be able to do any actual magic, and, similarly, you shouldn’t expect the folks in your town cosplaying dedicated, hyper-competent, deeply moral characters like Karen Pirie to actually be like that.

[Tangent: I watch a fair amount of British fantasy police shows, and everybody is DS this and DI that, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for a “DS Nuts” joke that nobody has thus far taken advantage of. I hope British TV will get on this ASAP.]

#review #tv #movie #fantasy

Dear Child is a German six-episode series about a young woman and a young girl who escape from domestic captivity and how the mystery of who they are and what happened to them unravels. It’s well-acted top to bottom, with Nalia Schuberth turning in a fantastically creepy performance as the child, Hannah. I hope Germany treats its child stars better than we do, or else that she takes the money and leaves the profession for ten years.

The Woman in The Window is a Netflix movie starring Amy Adams as an incredibly wealthy (that house! In Manhattan, yet!) agoraphobic in yet another riff on Rear Window. Here, as in Dear Child, the performances are fantastic, especially Amy Adams, who does a really fantastic job bringing a complicated character to life. Julianne Moore and Bryan Tyree Henry (you may remember him as the highlight of Bullet Train) are great in supporting roles, and Gary Oldman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie are all wasted in small roles where they’re not asked to do very much. This is especially true of Oldman, who yells three times, and Leigh, who has, I think, 2 lines. Just a weird flex to put such talented actors in roles where you don’t give them anything to show what they can do.

Both the show and the movie, though, fail to stick the landing. The twists in The Woman in the Window are pretty good, but the final twist was just kind of meh to me. I guess the big reveal felt pretty mundane compared to what came before. Masquerade was a terrible movie and No Way Out was a pretty good movie, and both of them had big reveals that made you go, “WHOA!”. That’s not the case here. My reaction was, “hm. Interesting.”

Also, fun fact: did you know that almost getting murdered can cure your agoraphobia? Apparently that’s the case! Why would a movie lie about such a thing!

Dear Child has a lot of very satisfying twists, but literally every punch in the series is telegraphed, so that when it lands, it doesn’t really land. Here’s an example that will spoil very little. One character puts a hand on another character’s hand when they’re sitting next to each other. The second character moves the first character’s hand away. Two episodes later there’s a big reveal that these two had an illicit affair. And, like, duh!

It’s like that with every twist in the show, but the most egregious (and here be veiled spoilers, so proceed carfully) is that there’s a character whose face isn’t shown at all through 5 episodes. So naturally I’m thinking, “oh, he’s a character we know from somewhere else!” Nope! Just a guy!

Anyway, both were entertaining and had five star potential and three and a half star execution.

#review #netflix #tv #movies

It’s about a small town in Tasmania that is rapidly gentrifying thanks to an influx of lesbians from the mainland, one of whom is long-suffering cop Dulcie. This is a great performance from Kate Box (Good God, imagine how hard middle school was for this woman), who essentially plays the straight man (comedically speaking) to most of the rest of the cast of quirky characters, led by Madeleine Semi as foul-mouthed, horny mainland detective Eddie. It’s kind of like if Northern Exposure was about a serial killer instead of some will-they-or-won’t-they bullshit.

One of the things I really love about crime fiction and television is that it allows for exploration of social issues without didacticism (usually). Deadloch does this really well, highlighting the aforementioned gentrification as well as the mistreatment of the indigenous people and the paternalistic cruelty of wealthy white people who do philanthropy for them. And, of course, how women are mistreated by men in their personal and professional lives. The only stumble, in my opinion, is this: Dulcie sees one of her indigenous neighbors has sprayed ACAB on their garbage cans and just kind of gives it an exasperated eyeroll. For a show that clearly sets out to skewer a lot of injustices, it’s a weird blind spot. Why even bring it up only to dismiss it?

My slight political objections aside, I still give this a full-throated recommendation. It’s one of the best crime shows I’ve watched in years. I’m really hoping for a season 2, though I suspect this is a lightning in a bottle situation that won’t be repeated. Catch it on Prime.

#TV #Review #Cops #Crime

Of course it’s about sexual abuse, so it features survivors telling their stories in graphic detail, so if that kind of thing is going to send you spiraling for a few days, please do not watch it.

I found it gross and awful and couldn’t stop watching. I very rarely watch TV by myself, and yet after starting this and getting about 15 minutes in, I found nearly 3 hours to continue it.

So: an excellent documentary with a huge content warning for sexual assault. That’s the review. Now the reflections.

I hope that as stories like this continue to emerge, we’ll start to change our perception of the ultra rich. The Hammer dynasty (Armand, Julian, Michael, Armie. Not MC, who is, as far as I know, a decent guy) is comprised of shockingly horrible people. And I don’t think they’re alone. For one thing, becoming ultra rich seems to require a lack of empathy for other humans that is almost certainly pathological. For another, with apologies to Master P, growing up with no limits seems to break something in the human brain. In short, the people who amass huge fortunes probably have serious personality disorders, and even if those aren’t passed down genetically, growing up ultra wealthy seems to lead to people becoming awful. So maybe we can stop lionizing these folks. They are the absolute scum of the earth, which is not the kind of term I throw around lightly.

It’s impossible to adequately praise the courage of the women who came forward to detail what Armie Hammer did to them without slipping into cliche. But to survive that kind of horrible trauma only to be targeted by horrible fans? To know that the person you’re exposing has enough money to both smear you and evade consequences for pretty much anything forever? That really is a profound bravery, and ultimately, self-sacrifice. Because they face the public vilification in hopes of saving other women from enduring what they endured.

This is in no way to diminish the aforementioned incredible courage, but something I noticed was that one of the Armie Hammer survivors was the CEO of an app company (so just regular rich, not ultra rich), and was able to just take off for multi-week vacations on a whim. I firmly believe in most organizations, the more money you make, the less important you are to the day to day functioning of the place. The boss never has to find anyone to cover their shift because it doesn’t matter if they show up or not.

Circling back to the toxic fans. I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to be able to admit when we’ve been conned. Armie Hammer successfully conned people into believing he was a certain kind of person (not a monster), and people who invested so much into admiring him would rather publicly attack a rape survivor than admit they were wrong. But here’s the thing. Cons, scams, cults, whatever—they don’t just work on stupid people. They work on all of us because they use the good parts of our personalities against us. So giving people the benefit of the doubt, showing forgiveness, believing in the necessity of working for a better world—these are all good things we don’t want to lose, and as long as we have them, people will con us. Armand Hammer didn’t amass a huge fortune by conning only dumb people. He conned everyone. I pride myself on my cynicism and was succesfully conned by two different employers, each one peddling idealism they didn’t believe. I’m susceptible to being conned again for the same reason.

Also, if you’re not a sociopath, they’re hard to spot. That’s why they can do so many crimes and become super wealthy! I, like most people, consider myself a good judge of character but was completely stunned to find that someone I used to work with was credibly accused of two violent crimes. Up until I read the details of their alleged crimes, I would have told you they were a warm, friendly, and very good-hearted person. But I appear to have been wrong about that. Or, anyway, those qualities somehow coexisted with violent rage. I would like to encourage us all to have some humility about our ability to judge people and not see our inability to immediately spot horrible people as our flaw. It’s not. It's the very qualities that make us not horrible that make us fall for these people. The problem isn’t us. It’s them.

#Review #EatTheRich

#TV