What's To Watch? - Apr 8 - Talent and Rot: Neither Should Be Hidden

 

      Unlike last week, this Friday Amazon Prime has a new original (also having limited release in theaters) espionage thriller starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, and Jonathan Pryce.
     Ex-lovers and spies Henry (Pine) and Celia (Newton) meet for dinner, where reminiscences bring them back to a disastrous hijacking, with an agency-haunting aftermath. During the meal, it becomes clear that some old, deadly business is being concluded. It's All the Old Knives (2022   R  1h 41m)

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      Fame is interesting in its scope and lack thereof, along with how transient - ephemeral - it can be. We see it all the time - when we recognize it, of course - with sports, music, or general pop stars. People who can be known and followed by millions, yet some small divergence of tastes and/or geography, and they're reduced to a "Who...?"
     So it was for me and Jimmy Savile.

     A DJ who became a huge, "man of the people" style pop star, who generally wore his hair long as part of a branding gimmick, he hosted Top of the Pops for decades, and in large part he made a career of fundraising (mostly for special hospitals) and of becoming someone who could make wishes (particularly those of children) come true via a long-running tv program Jim'll Fix It. Friend and confidante of the British royal family, and of Prime Minister Thatcher, publicly meeting with Pope John Paul II, he was one of the most well-known, highly-regarded figures in the U.K. for most of the back half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. As it turns out, he was also - throughout it all - a pedophile.
     For good or ill, it seems that infamy outpaces fame. If I'd ever heard the name Jimmy Savile prior to his death, I cannot recall it. It was only once he was being posthumously, openly investigated, and then reviled, that I started to hear anything about the man.
     A two-part documentary covering it all appeared this past Wednesday on Netflix: Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story.

     While normally, traditionally, I would have steered around such a thing, for some reason I gave it a look and was drawn in. Again, there's something fascinating about how deeply "known" someone can be - a cultural fixture - by so many, while many millions of others have heard nothing. More importantly, and terrifyingly, is realizing how something so damaged and evil can hide in plain sight. Defined to popular satisfaction, regime-approved and all eccentricities written off as mere gimmicks, distracted otherwise by a string of Good Works, he was protected by a glamour. One of the true magics of the world, turned to dark purpose. An unsavory character, but a story I found fascinating. The two parts run nearly three hours total.
     Thematically, on the basis of evil hiding in plain sight, masked by the glamour of celebrity, Important Friends, and very public Good Works, it's an interesting companion piece to the four-part Showtime documentary We Need To Talk About Cosby that ran just this past February. (Has it really only been a little over a month?)

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     Begun April 1st, with a new episode set to appear each Friday, a new South Korean fantasy series about supernatural workers in the afterlife, policing suicides, has shown up on Netflix: Tomorrow. Our entrance to this is by a young, increasingly desperate job-hunter who acts to save someone who's sunk even deeper into despair than he has, unwittingly getting drawn into a whole new world and a major life detour.
     It's set to run 16 episodes, and I've just begun giving it a look.

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     As mentioned last week, we finally had the arrival of season five of Better Call Saul over on Netflix, joining the previous four seasons. It's been approximately two years since I'd seen these episodes as they aired week to week on AMC. With the sixth, final, season set to begin April 18th, I wanted to rewatch the previous season to get myself back up to speed. There were some vague notions of spreading it out over the course of the nearly two weeks in between. Have I met me?
     Yeah, I casually burned through the ten episodes in a few days.
     It's a detail-rich environment, yet I was surprised at how fresh in mind most of it was, though it was good to take the refresher. It not only gave me more time to get back into the characters, but it reminded me of a few details I'd forgotten, including that the season didn't end with a snap back to the present, so a potentially dicey situation still waits for us there.
     As with Breaking Bad, the series this one is largely a prequel to (though with bookends that are set well after that series wrapped) I expect to eventually go back and rewatch the full series. It even crossed my mind to do that during this gap before the final season begins, but that would be 50 episodes, running anywhere from 41 to 60 minutes each. I've done more than that in less time, but it's not a good idea.
     Anyway, I'll be more in on the series next week, when we're on the brink of the final season's start.

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      We otherwise seem to be in an odd spot, with significant releases coming in the middle of the month and later -- a little too soon to get to here.
     Instead, I'm continuing to enjoy series I've hit in previous Friday installments. Series that are still unfolding. Even just in my piece from two weeks ago, we have Atlanta (on FX, then on Hulu the following day), Moon Knight (Disney+), and a pleasantly unexpectedly engaging Julia Child biopic series.

     The Julia Child miniseries on HBO Max, Julia, has continued to pull me along. Without a doubt, were they not releasing this in weekly installments, and had dropped it all at once, I'd have moved through it a week ago. Sarah Lancashire has been delivering a moving performance as someone who is overtaken by unexpected fame. A woman who has had to navigate a life where she's too regularly felt like the unfeminine elephant in the room, and has developed an array of skills to navigate the world, is increasingly at sea in a world where her sudden and growing fame has people treating her in a way she's never known. A sudden intimacy and presumed friendliness that she can't help but be unnerved by after a life of being mostly treated as a preposterous figure. In the mix she's also getting to see that she's had more of an impact on people from well before all this, but she can't bring herself to really trust it.
     An undercurrent with Julia, established early in the story, is that she's hit menopause, and so is quietly dealing with the loss of the quiet, secret notion that she might ever become a mother. With its loss she realized how the simple, unspoken, possibility of it had been in some way sustaining.
     The supporting cast is wonderful. Among them is David Hyde Pierce as Julia's husband, Paul, an initially somewhat staid and priggish man who we come to realize genuinely loves his wife, and grows past his own professional disappointments to enjoy seeing her finally come into her own. Contrasting

with him in a small, but significant role is James Cromwell as Julia's father, John. He couldn't really see his daughter for who she is, too lodged in early life notions of her as am ungainly creature, with his fatherly duty being to use his relative wealth to help her find some place in the world, some part of him still believing that it's the only reason she ever found a husband. The other main male character in the cast is Russ Morash (played by Fran Kranz) an executive at public television station WGBH, who is taken on a journey with all this that he initially dismissed and fought against. The other men in the mix are relative supporting players. Most of the

significant parts in this story are women.
     Running parallel to Julia's own story are the other women who are navigating a world that too reflexively diminishes, even dismisses, them. While a few have solidly staked their claim and asserted their authority (such as Avis, ably played by Bebe Neuwirth), most have to take a route of quiet perseverance, acting more intelligently, tirelessly and boldly, frequently needing to nearly ask forgiveness for making smart moves while being the wrong gender. That latter path's the one walked by Alice Naman (Brittany Bradford), one of the initially lower-tier production people at WGBH, who is a young woman of color, and so operating with two strikes against her even in the relatively liberal environment of public television. She champions Julia's cause, and is instrumental in guarding the spark of it, helping to tend it into full blaze.
     Four episodes in as of this week, we're halfway through the story, it's in that sweet spot where I'm hungry for the rest of the story, but already feeling a little sad at it being over so soon.

     I've also begun to sink into Tokyo Vice (also on HBO Max), one of the shows I gave an introductory look at late in last week's post.

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     Despite that long ramble, I'm once again pressed by other circumstances, and have to wrap this up here for the week. A busy Friday ahead for me, and I already want a nap.  Today would have been the 61st birthday of someone special to me, who fell three days short of her 49th. I'm in need of a little, quiet, downtime, but I don't know if I'll get much of it. Miles to go.
    Take care. I'll catch you again in the ides. - Mike