Debuts, Departures, Dystopia and Debacle - Aug 12 - What's To Watch?

 

     Rolling into the heart of February!
     As discussed last week, this week's already seen the return of Resident Alien (Syfy) for the start of the back half of its second season, and the arrival of the third and final season of Locke & Key on Netflix. The former's going to be a week-to-week affair which should take us to the last week of September; this week's new episode quickly brought me back up to speed on the plot points; mid-March seems longer ago than it probably should. The latter series had all ten episodes land at once, and will most likely fall for me this weekend; at 61 I still have no portion-control skills.
     Casually watched fairly quickly - the longest episodes were 47 minutes, and there were only eight episodes for this season. Locke & Key's final season gave it an appropriate send-off, in part by changing the perspective on the nature of the keys. The very final scene had some formulaic winces, but we're left with a reasonably well-rounded and complete tale, while still having options open for someone to pick the story up somewhere in the future.
     This Sunday will see the third season finale of Evil arrive on Paramount+, with a Rockne S. O'Bannon script. This season was pared down from the 13 episodes each of the previous two seasons, to a mere ten. I can't be happy about that shrinkage. I'm curious to see the state of the characters by the roll of closing credits. A fourth season was greenlit last month, so barring a new national/global upheaval it seems reasonable to expect we'll see that season commence roughly next June -- a world away. If things go as planned I'll be a couple months into looking at a different set of walls by then.
     Watched that season finale of Evil around 4AM - a peaceful time of day to wake up, especially on a day when you know you can go back to sleep when you want. (Which I did... and I did.) The story moved fairly well along, including some intentional frustrations, and gave us an interesting starting place for next season. Now to see if Kirsten, her husband and daughters, and their allies all put their heads together to be sure they have as clear a picture as possible.
     A cleverly-written show, I'll be watching for the full fallout from the revelations in this season-ender... and to see what the tone of season four will be now that the season's pop-up book changed just ahead of the new season. Also, I'm wondering if Wallace Shawn's Father Ignatius will be sticking around for the new season.  
     Monday will see he final episode of Better Call Saul arrive on AMC. It's been a pleasure seeing the story unfold, and now we'll finally see the end of that journey. Grievous flaws and all, I'm still sympathetic to Jimmy/Saul, and Kim, and so am conflicted in figuring out what to realistically hope for. Self-destruction seems to be the theme, though.

     An odd item I came across on Amazon Prime recently is a 2017 film co-written and directed by Bill Watterson. A fantasy adventure comedy horror piece about a largely aimless 30 year-old with a history of never finishing anything. In a weekend plunge of creativity, with his girlfriend out of town, he creates something surreal. Using cardboard boxes and art supplies, he builds an elaborate labyrinth inside a fort - all in their apartment - that is vastly more than it appears to be. It's Dave Made a Maze (2017  NR  81m)

     It's a whimsical fantasy adventure piece, though it does ultimately stick with the horror category; however abstract and craft-y the carnage may be, it's of lasting consequence. The film's peppered with familiar faces and voices from various (often genre) shows, including actors from Criminal Minds, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Venture Brothers.
     As with nearly anything on Amazon Prime, I've no idea how long it's going to stay put, or more importantly how long it's going to remain as a free to Prime members item; things randomly slip back behind additional paywalls all the time. It's also available on Tubi, where there'll be some commercials, but it's much more likely to stay accessible. References along the way at least suggest that it is/has been part of both Shudder and Epix, so if you have either of those it's possible it may be found there. I currently do not, or else I would have checked.

     My experience with concert events has been minimal, both because I've never been a fan of large concentrations of people, and I've seldom seen one that was a good listening experience. Oh, some great performances have come out of live music events, but I've still found that the recordings from properly miked bands are the way to go if I really want to hear and enjoy it. Live and in-person the crowd's going to ultimately put me off, the chances I'll be able to hear anything clearly on-site are low, and sense of "connection" with the performers is almost guaranteed to be illusory. Your mileage may certainly vary, and I'm genuinely happy for fans of big venue, live music events -- I wish you weren't so routinely being absolutely ripped off by the criminal ticket sale system.
     Sometimes these things go so horribly wrong that no one can sanely claim anything to the contrary.
     Between HBO/HBO Max and Netflix there's roughly four hours of critical retrospective about the debacle that was Woodstock 1999. A tragic failure at almost every level, made so much worse by the unbridled, unprincipled greed behind the (nominal) organizers' actions. From food and water, to sanitation and security, organizational ineptitude, and a bottom line focus on maximizing profit, it was a perfect shitstorm.
     On HBO/HBO Max it's the 2021 documentary (that had previously been on Netflix, where I hadn't taken notice of it last year) Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (1h 50m)

     (Related aside, HBO Max also currently has a director's cut of the 1970 film about the 1969 Woodstock concert, for historical and cultural contrast.)
     Meanwhile, back on Netflix, there's the recently-arrived, three-part documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 (2022)

     The three-parter currently on Netflix has some issues, particularly in how it covers the sexual assault aspects. They seemed to manage to upset various viewers by simultaneously rushing through that aspect, while including graphic, insufficiently edited material that struck some as insensitive to the victims.

     Shifting back to the far more comforting world of a purely imaginary apocalypse:
     Arriving on AMC (with advance episodes appearing on AMC+, as they will doubtless stress during commercial breaks and most assuredly as the first episode ends - AMC in 2022 increasingly exists as marketing for an AMC+ streaming subscription) this Sunday is the first of a six-episode series set in the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead.
     These are to be six, separate slices of life, wherein we see how different people reacted to the catastrophic changes, survived (or failed to), and came to see that world. Stand-alone stories offering different perspectives on a catastrophically changed world. Tales of the Walking Dead.

     When The Walking Dead premiered back in 2010, I had already been having one of my personal worst years, with a death back in April that was a bookend of a nineteen month stretch of mostly surprise deaths that had been violently flipping my world since September of 2008. No need to relive those specifics here.

     I'd been a fan of Robert Kirkman's source series, The Walking Dead comic, since its debut in 2003 as a black and white comics version of "the zombie movie that never ends," which is how Kirkman framed the project in the first issue. His intention at the time being that aside from the normal market element of being canceled if it failed to sell well, this would be his own Romeroesque story of a zombie apocalypse that would go on and on. In the end, he pulled the plug on it in 2019 (confessing that he'd come close to doing so at one or two much earlier junctions in the story, changing plans mostly because the inspiration for new character and plot directions struck), not wanting it to become repetitive -- but that, too, is incidental.
     While I rode out the monthly comic through its unannounced end (Kirkman took pains to make it seem as if the comic was still going to be in production, only announcing the end of the story in what became its final issue), when the tv series went to its (very) roughly "mid-season" break in November of 2017, during their war with Negan's forces, I was finding it all too depressing against the day-to-day backdrop of a MAGA-infested U.S. out here in the so-called real world. While the tv show had made selective changes to the story from the comics, it was still following an outline of key events, so I had a good idea of what was coming for the characters. I wasn't in the mood for seeing them take the losses they would, nor to see them coming within a stroke of winning only to lose all over again, at least in the short term. So, I put it all on pause... and have yet to get back to it. That series is set to finally end just before Thanksgiving this year, btw, but that's not important now.
     The six-episode, standalone format for this new show will let me step back into that universe, no strings attached, for the first time since late 2017. That feels like just the right comfort level for me.

      Coming to Disney+ next Thursday, the 18th (why they shifted from Wednesdays as their new release day I've no idea), is the latest Marvel series. An action comedy starring Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) as Jennifer Walters, an attorney who also happens to be the cousin of Bruce Banner, aka The Incredible Hulk. It's a nine-episode first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

     I know, I know, "She-Hulk" was and will always be a terrible name. So blunt and unimaginative that it's barely juvenile. One of the more embarrassing ones. You're going to need to get past that.

     The thumbnail sketch reason for the leaden sobriquet is that in the late '70s Marvel's extremely one-sided contract with CBS (all the power was on CBS/Universal's side) for the Incredible Hulk tv movies and show, made Marvel vulnerable to CBS creating a female version, which they would then own outright. Show biz almost always moves to duplicate anything that's a success, the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferigno Incredible Hulk had been a hit for the network, and a successful, female-led spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man - The Bionic Woman - had been done a few years prior.
     To preempt any such move, Stan Lee and the folks at Marvel slapped this

character together and launched her in her own comics series. That this hadn't happened until 1980 is probably the most surprising part. Lousy name, and nearly as poor of an origin story - that's not worth yet another digression here; I'll touch on the comics origin next week, after we've seen how they decided to handle the specifics in the show.
     It's important to understand how powerless and unsophisticated Marvel was back in the day. As a business it had been hanging by its fingernails through much of the 1970s; had they not scored a  contract to do a comics version of a new, little property no one had many expectations for - Star Wars - in 1977 it's well within the realm of possibility that the company might have collapsed. They did, however, and George Lucas' project was an unprecedented success, and all involved got a dynamic new lease on life.
      So, the creation of a She-Hulk (shake, shake, shake-off the cringe) was a blunt legal move, neither a creatively- nor an even remotely aesthetically-driven one. The lackluster, formulaic series that ran for just over two years did little to improve on any of that. It existed as a staked claim, which was all that was required of it. The early item most to their credit was that they didn't copy the rage-driven creature model the Hulk had long since fallen into, with Jen, instead, retaining her personality (what there was of it initially) and intellect in the transformation.

     It would take later writers to infuse her with more personality, and then take her one step farther by giving her a fourth wall-breaking shtick. She would eventually make occasional, narrative side-comments to the audience or the writer, showing signs that she was aware she was a character in an entertainment. It would also find her eventually finding herself back to some version of the career she'd studied so long and hard for prior to some of her cousin's blood being transfused into her.
     In introducing the character, as is the case with the MCU in general, Disney has the benefit of those miles and years of developmental rough road from the comics. Knowing what ultimately worked, the screen version appears to have skipped fairly straight to it. The series will abound with guest-stars, some of whom have already been introduced elsewhere, others making their MCU debut. We'll get to see, in a snappy, action-comedy format, how much they manage to expand and firm up elements of the MCU over nine episodes.

     Meanwhile, Summer Under the Stars (that link pops out to an interactive page of the listings) month continues rolling out for TCM viewers, offering 24-hour spotlights of various stars. The next block, starting with today:
         Friday Aug 12:     Jane Powell
         Saturday Aug 13:    Marlon Brando
         Sunday Aug 14:     Elizabeth Taylor
         Monday Aug 15:    Randolph Scott
         Tuesday Aug 16:    Raquel Welch
         Wednesday Aug 17:    Spencer Tracy
         Thursday Aug 18:    Shelly Winters
         Friday Aug 19:    Toshiro Mifune

     So many interesting choices in the mix, few of them I'll have practical time for with the work week and currently limited DVR space - I've so much on there, much of it from TCM, that I've yet to make time for. Far too much in the week for me to make a good highlights list for, but one of the items that popped for me is 2PM on Tuesday, as part of Raquel's day. It's the 1973 Stephen Sondheim co-written (with Anthony Perkins), multi-star whodunnit The Last of Sheila. Here's the theatrical trailer from back in the day:

     For me it's been another draining week, including some very unwelcome health news, and I need to try to... I'm not quite sure. Distance myself from the stresses will have to be part of the process, though. There's much to sort out, and I'm aces at putting such things off. Getting myself to accept, usefully, that time is running out will be a challenge. I'm used to hiding in the margins and uncertainties, and evading what I'm told is inevitable. Those are tough behaviors to break, especially when I don't want to.
     I hope you've found something in the movies and shows above (and in previous Friday posts) of interest, and that we'll all make it back here safely next Friday. - Mike