Such notes as I'd put together for this week are primarily for things coming out next week, and there are so many items I've mentioned in previous posts - including all of the various new items mentioned last week - that I haven't gotten around to watching.
I've been plowing through my first ever rewatch of The Sopranos, all the way through the still-controversial finale, and finished that up overnight Wednesday. The aim is to get in a rewatch of series prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, which I'd talked about several weeks ago. While, yes, it is a prequel to the series, much of what drives it for the audience is what will happen to the many characters decades later as seen in the series. I don't see it as a film that would draw someone into the series; it works best as a supplement. That'll be available on HBO Max neatly through the month of October, and I'll want to give it at least that one additional viewing now that I've refreshed myself on the full series.
Beyond that, my most recent viewing's included a couple of season wraps.
Evil (Paramount+) closed its second, 13-episode season with some character milestones and growing complications. It's fair to say the characters have been tied - tied themselves - into a knot of Gordian complexity. It's likely to take more than a single slice of a sword to resolve the complications. Leads Kristen (Katja Herbers) and David (Mike Colter) get to a particularly sticky turn in the closing frames of the season, and her character's moral polish has taken almost as much damage as her mother's (played by Christine Lahti). I'm curious to see what redemptive arcs, if any, are to come.
The cast is a joy to follow, so much so that I continue to be reluctant to single anyone out, as even the supporting players often shine.
Checking, I see that season one has disappeared from Netflix, where they'd cannily placed it to help fish for viewers (a move that worked -- that was where I watched it) and even from CBS.com, despite the first season being broadcast on the network. Paramount+ is the sole place to watch both seasons of the series. Exclusive content is all part of building a streaming service, I suppose.
Currently, my primary reasons to go to Paramount + are Evil, and the still-ongoing Star Trek animated action comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks. A fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery will begin next month.
I should note that third season of Evil was approved back in July, so that's off for us somewhere in 2022.
As I'm on the subject of Paramount+, I'll mention a new series that's just launched there this week. Starring Kate Beckinsale as a disgraced reporter who is looking for a way back for herself, making for potential moral and ethical complications as she latches onto the story about a woman who may have been falsely convicted of murder, it's Guilty Party. If you've watched the trailer then you know almost as much about it as I did about the show fifteen minutes ago.
It's being promoted as a dark comedy, and I think that's near the root of the show's likely conceptual problems. The danger of setting something up for humor is that often that's used as a cover for poor plotting, as it's in service of a joke.
This was one of those items that I wasn't aware of until it landed on my doorstep. The first two episodes of the series are available on Paramount+. As best I can tell it's set up as a 10-episode series, though I'd be more encouraged if it was being pitched clearly as a limited series -- so we'd know the aim is to give us a complete story rather than to get a nod for a second season and make those mortgage payments.
The initial critical response on the whole is a wait and see call, as few to none seem to be convinced the show has a real direction or can even justify its foundations -- the main character has a reputation as a star journalist we're told to just accept how good she is despite seeing no signs of it in her approach to anything, and she ends up working for a clickbait celebrity and fashion site... why? Just because it's frustrating to her? None of it can't be overcome, but the most positive calls to come out of the early episodes are that newcomer Jules Latimer, playing Toni Plimpton, a woman convicted of killing her husband the previous year, is the one to watch.
With episodes roughly half an hour long, it likely would have been a better call to either drop the entire series before the audience at once, or at least give more than the first two episodes. Give people a little more chance to get some traction.
New seasons of Archer run on FXX, and all are available on Hulu. Season 13 was approved for production by late September.
Today (October 15th), Amazon Prime sees the launch of a slasher style series based on horror film franchise, which was itself based on a 1973 novel of the same name. It's I Know What You Did Last Summer. I haven't watched any of it yet, and based on what I've seen and read of it I'm thinking I'm not part of the target audience, though it seems there's some confusion as to who the target audience is supposed to be. It may be fun (for me) to watch it and then revisit the three reviews I skimmed, as much to take note of what things are touchier subjects (no pun intended) for particular reviewers, as nudity seems to be pushing some reviewer's buttons more than violence and death. Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter even used the phrase "...unsightly and unexpected penises..." It could be fun to turn this experience into a psychological profile tool for some of these reviewers. The general nudity, including full frontal, seems to be rattling a few cages.
They opted to drop the first four episodes (each around 48 minutes, give or take) on this premier Friday, with one episode each Friday thereafter. That's half of the eight-episode limited series. I know that the hook of the show is reportedly revealed near the end of the first episode, and to expect attempts at shock value to be more prized than reason by the filmmakers. As with any of the items I mention in these pieces, if I get around to watching them I'll come back to this piece and add comments in green.
Sticking with that seasonal theme and primary target demographic, coming to Netflix October 20th: College student Benny, working part time as a chauffeur picks up two women, Blaire and Zoe, for a night of club-hopping across Los Angeles. Before long, Benny discovers there's something dangerously different about these two women, and that the night's dangerous in ways he'd never expected. It's Night Teeth (2021 1h 48m) Yes, it's not the smoothest of titles. It's almost like something an A.I. would have come up with if told to come up with a two-word title that hadn't been used before, that had two, key elements from the movie.
It seems to be a teen/young adult-focused item, and - again - so far I only have the trailer to go on. Hopefully it'll be at least fun, but for the moment I only have the trailer, and I'm not getting my hopes up.
The same day (also on Netflix) a comedy from France takes us back to the early peak of fearful excitement for the COVID-19 pandemic, as strangers living in the same building get to know each other during a three-month lockdown. Perhaps a tad too quirky, I found myself wondering if this is a film Jerry Lewis might have made. (I know, that's a dusty, cheap, lazy shot at the French. Still, it seemed at least a little warranted by some of the antics in the trailer.) I'm not familiar with Dany Boon, who co-wrote, directed and stars in Stuck Together (2021 1h 5m) That's the U.S. title they decided to go with, rather than the direct translation of 8 Humanity Street. Might it be genuinely funny? Anything's possible. Might it be interesting even just as a view of how others have been reacting to the pandemic, lockdown and general safety measures, and dealing with people? Sure, it could be.
I expect this will be available with the usual range of Netflix options, including dubbed into English, or French with English captions.
Arriving on Netflix next Friday, the 22nd, is the long-awaited second season of Locke & Key. I almost held off and made it part of next week's post, but wanted to mention it ahead of time in case, harking back to season one (we were still in the Consortium's first year, and it's odd to look back to when one of these Friday posts was on a single show), the week's lead time might find some either wanting to refresh themselves with a partial or full re-watch, or simply try it out if they hadn't already. The season two trailer is already starting to bring many of the details back. The same day, arriving both on HBO-Max and in theaters, is Dune (2021 155 m).
I'll confess, that while I've been peripherally aware of this being in development for the past couple years I have not been following any of the details. So much so that until I started looking for info for this piece, I didn't know whether this was going to be a feature film or a miniseries. Plans for new adaptations of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel have been announced as in the works in various places since shortly after the novel first hit, the majority of times ultimately falling through. I'm not involved in the process, certainly not being paid nor polled as part of a focus group, so I long ago decided to wait to see what runs the gauntlet and makes it to market.
As it turns out, this one's a feature film, covering roughly half of the 1965 novel. At least that's better than the 1984 attempt, where they aimed to handle the full thing in a single, albeit roughly 3-hour film (then cut to a ridiculous 137 minutes for theatrical release). Part of me is still thrown by the decision to go the route of a feature film again in a world where pay channels and streaming services are flourishing, and epic tales being adapted into series - where more of the characters and plot elements can have a chance to be explored and savored - seem to be doing well. The impression here seems to be that they are hoping to make this work after the fashion of Peter Jackson's adaptations of Tolkien.
I've only just finally gotten around to watching the trailer, despite being aware of when it debuted, and of the many people who seemed very appreciative of it at the time. Amazingly, all that's been reportedly done for the sequel/second half is that writing has begun on the script. This is almost shocking to me, as I'd have expected this to be one of those projects where all of the principal photography for both films would have been done at the same time, allowing additional time for post-production work. I know that Warner's decision to handle this as a simultaneous theatrical release and 31-day HBO-Max streamer greatly disappointed director Denis Villeneuve, for a combination of financial and artistic reasons - the latter including the filming of it for a theatrical showing. The project's vision was for the big screen, and it's upsetting to him to know that so many will be watching it on small ones.
As of this writing it appears that there hasn't been a formal approval given for the second film -- a fact that manages to surprise me each time it comes up. This just seems like the kind of project where both parts (or at least much of the second part, too) would have been filmed at the same time.
Shifting gears here at the end, I'm not ending this week's piece with an old horror or sci-fi film. It's not that there's a shortage of them to draw on, but last week I indirectly linked to three of them (if you go to that page, scroll down to the bottom where the links are for the three Vincent Price revenge films spotlighted), and I just wasn't in the mood this time.
While I was looking around for some other items, I saw that Tubi has the full four-season, 13-episode run of the period sleuth series Cadfael.
Adapted from The Cadfael Chronicles, a series of novels by Ellis Peters (pen name of linguist and scholar Edith Pargeter), they center on the (fictional) 12th century Benedictine monk Cadfael. He is what is known as a conversus, someone who entered monastic life after having lived a (for the times) long and full life out in the secular world, as a man in his forties. He had been both a sailor and a soldier, including service as a crusader in so-called the Holy Lands. It was there that he became a knowledgeable herbalist, learning it from the Muslims. His worldly experience and knowledge, an analytical turn of mind, and being a keen observer of the human condition, combine to find him becoming a sort of detective, primarily solving murders. Given his status within a religious order, and the complications of the church and crown, he has to take considerable care at times in how he approaches each mystery.
The source novels were set between the years of 1137 and 1145, a time known broadly as the Anarchy, when a dispute over the crown of England was going on between King Stephen and Empress Maud. Various historical events were woven into the stories, presumably to encourage readers to seek out more information on the period. Along with the political history, elements of then-contemporary culture, custom, and technology play parts in some of the stories. Each episode is a self-contained tale, running about 75 minutes. It's been roughly a quarter century since I saw these, so I can't recall if there were elements that made the order important, but I'd still defer to trying to watch them in order even just to give it the best chance of allowing the revelations to the audience about Cadfael's pre-monastic life to be doled out as intended.
Starring Derek Jacobi, and with scattered appearances by other faces familiar to various audiences over the years, these shows were produced by ITV between 1994 and '98. Here in the states, I saw them as part of PBS' Mystery! series.
As mentioned, these are currently on Tubi, and are also on imdb.tv (which can also be accessed through Amazon Prime), and most of them are on YouTube, too - so, all of these essentially free. The YouTube videos I've looked at are clean copies, so that might be the place to start. Otherwise I'd lean in favor of Tubi over imdb.tv, as the latter seems noticeably more aggressive with their commercials, but as all are free you can see which suits you best. Here's the first episode, "One Corpse Too Many"
Time to make my exit for the week. I hope you found something of interest to look into above, or in one of the previous installments. There's no shortage of things to watch, only of time. Take care, and come back next week. - Mike
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