Maybe this isn't the story we think it is - Dec 17 - Friday Video Distractions

 

   A week out from Christmas Eve, and I'm feeling especially frayed. Anxiety overload - professionally, personally, existentially - easily threatening to make me even more useless, which will then become part of the same, depressing, feedback loop.  It's no way to live.
     I've done you the small service of deleting the three paragraphs that followed - and expanded on - the above. No one's paying you to be my therapist, and it's off-topic for a blog series that's supposed to be about movies, tv, and streaming entertainment media.
     Once again, not much in the way of a focus this week.

     My recent/current favorite weekly fixes include series I've talked about before: Star Trek: Discovery (new episodes Thursday on Paramount+), Hawkeye (Wednesdays on Disney+) which just aired it's fifth and penultimate episode of the season, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Wednesdays on FXX), with its cast of people behaving very badly -- more characters who are only funny as characters, being that were they real people in one's life they would be horrors, Dexter: New Blood (Sundays on Showtime) which had nearly convinced me they were still too close to the sloppy mechanics of the series final season, when matters tightened up and got more interesting this past Sunday, and The Expanse (Fridays on Amazon Prime), the second episode of this final season being the reward I'll give myself for getting this piece posted.
     Today on Netflix, season two of supernatural adventure series The Witcher arrives.The titular character, aka Geralt of Rivia, is played by Henry Cavill. A superhuman monster-hunter, he's generally welcomed when he's needed, but otherwise shunned as a potential monster himself. Deep, dark forests, magic, castles and various schemers of schemes of revenge and conquest.
     When I first tried to get into the series, back in late 2019, it was initially a rough grind, but that had more to do with my natural defenses against epic fantasy. Too many attempted introductions of not merely characters but of kingdoms and Great Houses. I need a substantial hook into characters and events before I'm sufficiently interested even attempt to remember anyone's name - something that's almost as rudely true of me in real life as it is with fictional people and places. However, I did get back to it later and enjoyed it. (Though I don't seem to have made mention of that with a follow-up piece.) So, here's the trailer for this new season:

     I expect that, especially given the production delays that made for a two-ear gap between seasons, that it'll start with a recap/reintroduction.
     Currently in theaters, and set to arrive on Amazon Prime next Tuesday, the 21st, is the Alan Sorkin- written and directed Lucy & Desi biopic Being The Ricardos (2021 R  2h 5m). Regardless of how well one believes their comedy work has aged, they were an unconventional, powerhouse couple whose impact is still echoing. I've deliberately steered clear of even promotional material until now, and am interested primarily in the details, though I'm more than a little curious to see how Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem handle the lead roles -- not to mention seeing what J.K. Simmons and Nina Arienda do with their roles as William Frawley and Vivian Vance, though I don't know how much screen time those latter two will have.

      Over on HBO Max, I've been revisiting the still engaging The Matrix (1999), and (with less enthusiasm) the pair of 2003 sequel films, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, all as the lead-up to The Matrix Resurrections (2021  R  2h 28m), which will be arriving there (and in theaters) next Wednesday, the 22nd.
 

     Living in a world where our entertainments can reasonably convincingly be rendered to sight and sound, and where many of us over the past 21 months (at least) have been looking into screens far more of the time than at someone's in-person face, the nature of personal reality has arguably never been slipperier. The flux of reality & artificial reality have been themes for my entire conscious life, and have become so much more mainstream in the past 30 years. It's interesting to me to contemplate how this all seems to newer generations that have soaked in it since childhood as part of the cultural broth.
    I've been catching various movies recently, each of which deserves more attention than I'm prepared to give them via a write-up today. Among them was The Humans (2021 R for sexual subjects and language 108m) Written and directed by Stephen Karam, adapting his Broadway stage play. Set at Thanksgiving, it was released in theaters and on Showtime (where I saw it) the day before Thanksgiving.
     A six-character drama, three generations of the Blake family converge on the new-to-them, somewhat creepy Manhattan apartment of one of their daughters and her new husband. Numerous tensions are in play, old family items and more recent, unpleasant matters come to a head, but there are also warm moments.  The reading of something the family's living matriarch, Momo, now in the depths of sudden shouts of gibberish and general dementia, wrote back when she realized her faculties were beginning to slip, was my favorite part.
     I went into this with no information, completely unsure of what was to be offered, acting on a whim, and immediately being familiar with at least half of the cast: Richard Jenkins, Steven Yeun, and Amy Schumer. The crumbling, pre-war, duplex lends a creepy atmosphere to some of it, but I'll give you the advantage of telling you that there's nothing overtly supernatural going on. The haunts are all in characters' pasts and secrets. As with many an extended family gathering, it's a mixed bag of emotions. One has to choose which elements to emphasize, and which to allay.
     I'd only just recently become aware of a 1997,made-for-tv version of 12 Angry Men, made 40 years after the 1957 (math!) version that starred Henry Fonda. This newer version is available on available on YouTube, with commercial breaks. (I checked Tubi, but it's not available there. Both versions can be bought or rented on Amazon Prime.)  12 Angry Men (1997 1h 57m)

     It's a nice copy, and even has competent closed captioning -- as opposed to those where one's at the mercy of their interpreting software.
 

    Even though it's been more than a few years since I watched the 1957 version, I saw that more than once, and this is essentially the same screenplay. Each of the numbered jurors fills the same niche as they did in the earlier production, albeit now with a great deal more racial and cultural diversity. As the title locked in the gender of the main players, this newer version managed to work a woman in as the judge in the opening scene.
     The diametrically-opposed characters, initial hold-out juror #8, and the hot-tempered man, embodying toxic masculinity, estranged from his son for 14 years, juror #12, were played by Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott. In the earlier version they were played by Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, respectively.
     I've set up a graphic lining up half of the jurors, the 1957 version on the left, the '97 on the right, to give you a sense of the casting choices. These include the meek, mild #2, the analytical, non-perspiring #4, the intensely bigoted #10, and the slum-born guy with hard-won dignity, #5. I've just used the default imdb head-shots for each actor, rather than trying to clip them from scenes from each production, especially as the resolution of the made-for-tv 1997 version is lacking the sharpness and clarity of the '57 film.
    Over the years I've seen the story come up as the subject of articles and rants various times, most often for discussions of juror #8's methods (and sometimes motivations), how and why they butt up against the sanctity of legal procedure (lawyers most uniformly take issue with the lone juror's move concerning the knife), but otherwise the pieces tend to reveal much more about the commentator than the source. I just read a doozy of an oddly anonymous Conservative blogger's piece on it that was so absolute as to be unintentionally amusing, mainly revealing the bats in his attic and the rats and rot in his walls. I'm not going to validate his efforts with a link, though.
     I do wonder when the screenplay will be cast anew, and if it'll continue to resist tinkering and retooling to expand the core social agenda, choosing to address other elements such as gender identity the way race and religion are here, simply through expanded representation. All these years later, issues of race and socio-economic class distinctions remain as ponderous as ever, and deserve to be a focus.
     Shifting near the close to a different bit of streaming entertainment:
         A recent music video of a George Harrison song from 51 years ago is a multigenerational and multimedia star/figure affair, where every face is at least a cameo. No crowdshot bystanders.

     I became aware of it when a friend who is generally far more laid back about such things had an initial reaction to it, largely by the way it was being virally marketed: On the basis of said cameos. The problem was that for a (fellow) sexagenarian, as the video rolls on, there are more and more faces that fail to register. The press for the video must have presented it in my friend's view as a sort of pop cultural intelligence test, at least implying that the cool kids and cultural cognoscenti will be lighting up with recognition with each frame, and those who don't are, well, lacking. That he's a lifelong Beatle fan, and so may resent any move to put any distance between himself and one of their members' classic solo songs, probably provided a little of the shading.
     I hadn't seen it when he brought it up, and so it didn't linger in conversation for long, but it was odd to have the tagging note for it being a note of irritation for him. This isn't someone who's prone to being easily irritated.
     I remembered to look it up during a quiet part of the evening. Opening with Mark Hamill and Fred Armisen, it started easy, then started to wobble between people whose faces and names I immediately knew, those whose faces I recognized but couldn't name nor in some places immediately place, and an increasing number of "I have no idea" faces. Now I know, between a check of the credits, some quick, targeted searches, and pieces such as this one from Variety on the project.
     The song is George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord." Here's the video, for you to take a look:

    How much of it clicked for you? The people you immediately identified, the ones you recognized but had to look up, and the I-have-no-ideas?
     If nothing else, after all these years, it was at least nice to have so much buzz around "My Sweet Lord" without anyone bringing up the successful (subconscious) plagiarism suit concerning the Ronnie Mack/Chiffons "He's So Fine." A rambling, tortured string of litigation and schemes that stretched from the early '70s into the early 1990s.
    Much, Much, MUCH to do, I'll wrap this here. As next week's piece will fall on Christmas Eve, I'll try to give it a more seasonal tilt. I hope your preparations for the holidays as you know them are going well, and that you're not driving yourselves crazy over it. I hope to see you next week, and for each of us to be feeling calmer, saner, and happier. As a last ditch move I'll go for the former and the latter, sanity be damned! ::reminder to pick up more rum and eggnog, and maybe something a little more creative::  - Mike