Once Burnt... - Aug 19 - What's To Watch? - Mike

 

     Late Bonus: Netflix just dropped a surprise double episode addition to their recently-released Sandman series! Two, standalone tales from the source series, an animated version of "A Dream of A

Thousand Cats" (one of my favorite issues from the comics, and reportedly a small treasure trove of voice talent) and a live action one "Calliope." Haven't looked at them yet, but wanted to slip the update in here while we're still in Friday morning.
    A couple, quick items from this past week, which were (then looking forward) things from last Friday's post:
     The Monday series finale for Better Call Saul (AMC/AMC+), continued to set a very high bar for serial entertainment. High marks from beginning to end. Everyone involved with the show was justifiably proud of it. I look forward, in time, to a full series rewatch. All involved in that show can justifiably take pride in being part of it. I'll be very happy to discuss the series with those who are so-inclined, but don't want to spoil details for those who've yet to watch the show.
     Thursday's debut of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney+ was a pleasant turn, achieving an entertaining tone. Tatiana Maslany works out well as main character Jen Walters, much as was expected given her performances in general. They tidily, competently packed a considerable amount of exposition into a 30 minute main episode and a mid-credits scene. I'm looking forward to the remaining eight episodes.

     On the other hand...
     Few entertainment brands have traced the path that Benioff & Weiss' HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones did. For nearly its entire eight season run it had a fierce and devoted fan base, up until the final march of episodes in that oddly truncated final season.
     To say it went off the rails doesn't quite suffice. It wasn't even like the simple disappointment experienced by many of the fans of Lost, back in 2010, when the finale failed to deliver, as a great many of us knew it almost had to.

    No, with Game of Thrones, it wasn't even an implosion of fandom. It was more of a broad nullification. Something that so many had been spending so much time talking about, week to week, season to season, for eight years, suddenly went silent. It wasn't even vitriol, with fans' passions redirecting to ire. The show suddenly became something the majority of people who'd been so animated about for so long... didn't want to talk about anymore. It's as if a huge group of children suddenly all stop believing in Santa at the same time. A disappointment thick with embarrassment at having been so excited about it for so long in the first place. By just past mid-May 2019, it became a non-topic.
     Three years and three months later, a new prequel series finally arrives on HBO, set two centuries before the main events of Game of Thrones, it centers on pivotal events in the history of House Targaryen, the House of the Dragon.

     Certainly, to be fair, this is its own production, with a different showrunner, but I suspect there are many of us who won't be rushing to get attached to this.
     I'm sure that at some point I'll take a look, perhaps much sooner than I currently expect. At the moment, days away from it as I write this, there's no strong draw for me.

     While poking around Amazon Prime recently I came across a bit of holiday horror from out of the U.K. back in 2018. An increasingly paranoiac, claustrophobic tale of a particularly awful set of winter holidays; almost oddly prescient, coming well over a year before COVID and pandemic protocols. I was tempted to wait for a more seasonal posting somewhere in the Thanksgiving to Christmas block, but as it's something on Prime I thought it best to mention it now, while it's not behind an additional paywall.
     Nick (Sam Gittins), against all his better instincts, gives in to the pressure of his girlfriend, Annji (Neerja Naik) to take her with him for a holiday visit to his very white, working class, suburban family home. He knows it won't go well, but she prevails.
     There we have his well-intentioned, but almost manically muffled mum, Beth (Abigail Cruttenden), his deeply emotionally repressed, authoritarian father, Tony (Grant Masters) who is an obvious pressure-cooker, his father, "Grandad" (David Bradley), a real, old school concentration of toxic masculity and cultural xenophobia, who quickly makes us realize why Tony is as damaged as he is. Also, in short order, the group's rounded out with Nick's pregnant, mentally-/culturally-limited sister Kate (Holly Weston), and her overly-muscled husband, Scott (Kris Saddler), who we realize has filled the role of approval-seeking, manly man, surrogate son Tony had wished he had instead of Nick.
     We gradually learn that Nick's avoided a holiday visit for several years, and his returning with a girlfriend who's clearly outside the neighborhood gene pool is a thinly-concealed issue for his dad, granddad, and sister. You can tell it's going to be a wonderful Christmas.
     Tensions soon mount, and both Nick and Annji decide that come the morning, they'll make a quiet exit.
     It turns out that waiting wasn't a great idea.
     The morning finds the household trapped inside the suburban home, a mysterious, striated, metallic material blocking every door and window. Phone, Internet, and even the standard tv feed are all gone, though power remains and the tv screen spelling out in green text:  "STAY INDOORS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS."

     Things spiral downward from there, soon becoming obvious to the audience that this is some sort of twisted social experiment. The psychological test underpinnings are hinted at by the screenwriter via the choice of family name, Milgram, referring to a series of psych experiments conducted at Yale concerning obedience to authority, even when doing so is to act against one's best interests, while the family home is on Stanford Street, bringing to mind the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison experiment.
     The late-film reveal, as it takes a sudden turn regarding the actual threat, went over less well with the average audience member than I'm guessing the filmmakers hoped.
     It's Await Further Instructions (2018 TV-MA 91m)

      Paramount+ has another streaming & simultaneous theatrical release item arriving today. It's a prequel to the 2009 horror film Orphan - which is appropriately also available on Paramount+. Here Isabel Fuhrman reprises here role as Esther (which was also the title they used during filming), twelve years later in real time, playing an even younger version of the character than she did in '09. It's Orphan: First Kill

     It seems most likely this was driven simply by the success of the first film, and the ownership of a property that might make more money for them if they hit "repeat." That 2009 film did almost four times its $20 million production budget, so the studio must have been reasonably happy. I enjoyed that earlier film well enough, though it wasn't one that I've felt much of an urge to revisit. My presumption is that there are some distinct fetish itches the premise scratches, and that's often the backbone of a franchise.
     My current interest in it is mostly at a practical level, intrigued that an actress now in her mid-twenties is reprising an even younger version of a character she played when she was less than twelve... albeit of a character who (do I really need to post a spoiler alert for a twelve year-old movie?) turns out to be much, much older. Presumably the audience for this one are fans of the earlier film, so what was a twist in 2009 is now only a twist for the various other characters in the film. The audience knows the real score from the start, and is mostly waiting for the other characters to become aware of it one victim at a time.
    (As an aside on fetishes and formulas: An old friend of mine who was decades ago looking for any market interested in buying original fiction, once told me of some small-run specialty magazine that catered to people who had fantasies of giant women. Specifically of women who suddenly became giants. Would-be contributors were given tips such as including sight and sound descriptions of the clothes stretching beyond their limits, tearing and shredding. That was, to them, a vital element. It's a big, strange world out there.)

     Back to streaming, and sticking to Paramount+, next Thursday, the 25th, the third season of the animated Trek sit-com Star Trek: Lower Decks begins.

     That the series turned out to be both ultimately in-continuity and entertaining were pleasant surprises, so I'm casually looking forward to this new season.
     Oh, fans should note that whenever we get the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, there will be a Jonathan Frakes-directed episode which will involve a crossover by two of the Lower Decks characters, Mariner and Boimler, in a mixed live action & animation format. Given the different time periods of the shows (Strange New Worlds is pre-Kirk Enterprise, while Lower Decks is Next Generation era) it'll have to involve time travel.

     Back in the here and now, one last Paramount+ note: They very recently added five of the six seasons of the WB, then VH1 "reality" series The Surreal Life.

     The core premise is having a disparate group of celebrities (the term became very elastic over the show's various seasons) whose heydays were in the past - but understandably saw themselves as simply being between jobs - are brought together to live in an environment where they're forced to interact and compete in various events. At its best, you had celebrities from vastly different cultural regions getting to know each other as people beyond their reputations, and at worst, well, you had "reality stars" such as Omarosa.
     The show was an odd one for me to have gotten drawn into, but around 2004, via circumstances I don't clearly recall, I ended up watching the show. Unfortunately, presumably due to various legal issues, that 2004 season, the show's second, which was the one that drew me in, is the one missing from this block. That was the season where the house included a post-PTL televangelist "Christian" Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker), and legendary (I'm told) porn star Ron Jeremy. despite knowing how heavily manipulated and deceptively edited "reality" tv shows are, I found the interactions and the arc of their relationship once they got to connect as human beings, interesting.

     Still, as each season is its own, separate grouping, it's not as if a missing one busts up a narrative.
     Each of the five seasons here on the streamer have their potential points of faded pop-cultural interest, drawing from diverse pools - tv, music, sports, modeling, and, worst by far: other reality shows - such that I would think it was the rare audience member who didn't have at least a couple of "Who?!" reaction moments as each cast was introduced, the light of recognition flickering or blazing with others. At its best, the show presented opportunities to see something more in people who'd otherwise been long ago dismissively labeled, boxed and shelved, as they tried to be more than cliches and old jokes, and find a new lease on public life.
     I've yet to start revisiting these, but I expect the earliest ones - seasons one, three and four - to overall be the best revisits. Season five I recall being archly staged and deeply toxic, primarily because of Bronson Pinchot, Janice Dickinson and Omarosa Manigault, with the latter two (especially Omarosa) obviously gaming the show, knowing that playing the diva was how one would "win" by scoring the most screen time; for her that was the complete aim, relentlessly playing a character. As best I recall, season six simply lacked chemistry.
    I expect that each of the times I try to revisit these part of my brain is going to be rebelling, warning me much as it might were I to sit down to open and eat full "party size" bags of the most heavily-processed snacks. Letting others know they're there is as much as I wanted to accomplish here. Only you can decide whether or not this holds any appeal.

    Rolling through the back half of the month, TCM's Summer Under the Stars celebration continues. (That link is to an interactive page, listing all of the films.) Here are the actor spotlights from today through next Friday:
     Friday Aug 19:    Toshiro Mifune
     Saturday Aug 20:    Joan Crawford
     Sunday Aug 21:     Clint Eastwood
     Monday Aug 22:    Constance Bennett
     Tuesday Aug 23:    Mickey Rooney
     Wednesday Aug 24:    Jacqueline Bisset
     Thursday Aug 25:    Gilbert Roland
     Friday Aug 26:    Vivien Leigh

     As ever, entirely too many to attempt to curate here, all the more so given how many of them I've never seen. Oh, to have the financial security and time to be able to just give more of them a try. There are, as you'd expect, many of the films one associates with each of these actors, though those are often not the strongest draws for me. Hopping to the end of the list, to one week from now and the Vivien Leigh films, I've virtually no interest in rewatching Gone With the Wind again anytime soon - and that one dominates that Friday night, with a very long 1988 documentary on the making of it, preceding a showing of the film. No, my peak film of interest on that day would be mid-afternoon's Ship of Fools (1965).

     I'll try to remember to update this a little later, if I find that they've added this to either the TCM Watch online assortment (which would just be for a limited time) or if it ends up added as part of the TCM Hub that's a sub-section of HBO Max.

     Ending with a free-to-view item of dubious worth, it's a werewolf movie centering on a multi-millionaire who is also a world-traveling hunter. He's set his sights on an elusive, exotic creature: a werewolf. Having collected evidence of attacks matching key elements, then compiling a list of suspects (including his own wife) who happened to be at or near every one of these killings in various countries, he invites all of the suspects to his secluded estate for a weekend. There he informs them of the facts, his conclusion that one of them is a werewolf, and that with that weekend coinciding with the full moon, he intends to out and kill the creature. The estate is heavily covered by CCTV cameras, microphones and sensors.
     The film opens with a message to the audience that this is a detective story, in which they are to play the detective. Before the final scenes, there will be a 30-second "werewolf break" during which audience members can declare who they believe to be the werewolf. The device was added at the insistence of one of the producers, Milton Subotsky, who I suppose saw it as a marketing flourish akin to something William Castle might have come up with. Director Paul Arnett hated the gimmick, feeling that it was unnecessary and "stopped the film cold dead," though there were some who liked it, including critic Leonard Maltin.
     Based on a 1950 short story by James Blish ("There Shall Be No Darkness") it's The Beast Must Die! (1974  PG  1h 32m) (Not to be confused with a 1952 film with the same title, about a mystery writer who goes in search of the guilty party after his child is hit by a car.)
     Here's the trailer, and the full film is available to all over on Tubi.

      That's as much time as I have for this week, and almost certainly more time than you have to spare. Thanks for reading, I hope something here caught your attention, and that we all make it back here next Friday. - Mike