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 wasThe 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
Black Friday, and for this year it's the final Friday of the month. Next Wednesday it'll be December.
If you're here in the states, you at least have a shot at this being an
extended holiday weekend. Workplace and other complications, blended
with the all of the food prep, took over this past week through midday
Thursday, followed by too much food and a necessary collapse. Now I'm
regrouping, and trying to enjoy the momentary calm. Last Week's post still has some things I haven't yet gotten to (seriously, there's so much I've mentioned in this series of posts that I've not made the time for, that it's almost daunting), though I did watch and enjoy the full run of South Korean supernatural thriller Hellbound in the first half of last weekend.
I've generally been enjoying the CW's 4400, (which I wrote a little about back in October, before it was launched) a reboot of the 2004 series
built around the idea of 4400 people who had gone missing in wildly
disparate places over the course of decades, all mysteriously
reappearing in one spot, none of them appearing to have aged a day, and
none of them seeming to remember any passage of time since the moment
they disappeared. In each case they each gradually came/are coming to realize that
somewhere in the process each one picked up a different paranormal
ability. Even aside from other issues, the series concept is something to roll over in the viewers' mind at the level of wondering how it would be to be suddenly plucked from your life, then dropped back down years or even decades later. The people and world you knew, rolling on without you -- worse, them not being sure if something horrible happened to you, or if this was a choice you made. Depending upon how long the absence, there may not even be people to attempt to reconnect with. If there are, the reality is that they've gotten on with their lives -- lives that no longer included you. As a point of necessity, they adjusted. The space you occupied in their lives has in some way been filled. Are you even welcome anymore, or have you long since become settled business? So far I'm letting this new series unfold
as its own thing, rather than look to the earlier series (which ran 4
seasons/44 episodes) for how things were explained there. We've only had
five episodes so far, and the cast is large, so it's taking time to
establish and develop even just the characters they've been giving the
attention to. The new series finds the reappeared
people to mostly be people of color and minorities, though it also
includes gay and transgendered people such that the general sense seems
to be that what they have in common is that they're all representatives
of marginalized communities.
I
watched and enjoyed the first two episodes - newly-arrived this
Wednesday - of Disney's latest Marvel Cinematic Universe series: Hawkeye.
The start of a reluctant mentoring process, as the now mostly
former-Avenger finds himself tangled up in the life of a gifted superfan
during a holiday reconnect trip to New York with his kids. So
far it's the farthest along in the timeline that we've gone, with a
battered and weary Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) trying to reforge bonds
with his kids, and sort out his life while there's time. The situation
Thanos' bejeweled glove snap - and the similar corrections made by the
heroes -- left everyone's lives scarred. For Clint, specifically,
five years passed where his wife and children were gone - turned to
smoke - and he was in a dark, dark place, on a vengeance tour of
criminal and terrorist organizations as the sword-wielding Ronin. At
great sacrifice, the vanished were restored to being in a compromise
move (in Avengers: Endgame) which brought everyone back as they
were, to a world where the other half of the people had felt five, hard
years pass. As mentioned above, for Clint those
were
especially dark years. Part of what this series will be about is his
dealing with the legacy of his actions during that time, when he thought
his life as husband and father was dead. Humor and pathos, the present
and the past wash over him and the audience as we see events going back
to the 2012 Chitari invasion of New York - the debut of The Avengers -
and how it set the course for Kate Bishop, the above mentioned superfan,
who is well on the path to taking on the mantle of the man who inspired
her during the darkest day of her childhood. Part of the humor
mentioned above comes in the form of a Hamiltonesque musical, Rogers,
celebrating the life of the former Captain America. A production rife
with factual errors, and understandably more than a little difficult for
the long-suffering Clint to take in stride; the show is part of his
family trip itinerary in New York. Anyway, I've
been enjoying that so far. The first two episodes dropped this week, and
the remaining four will drop one per week, each Wednesday, through the
week before Christmas. Also as mentioned last week,
and also on Disney+, Thanksgiving saw the arrival of part one (of
three) of Peter Jackson's documentary Beatles: Get Back. I made it about halfway through that first
part
before the odd hours, the holiday prep work, and the extreme fat and
carbs of the holiday meal caught up with me. It's a terrific project for
any fan of the group, really taking us inside what were the final few
weeks of the Beatles, even though none of them really knew that's what
they'd turn out to be. That first episode starts
with a history of the group, going back to 1956 and the formation of The
Quarrymen, quickly moving up to where the events of this documentary
begin: The small stretch of time where the band was under the gun to
pull together what would be the Let It Be album. They had a
narrow window in which to adjust to a production space at Twickenham
studios, compose (in some cases dusting off old, unrecorded songs) and
rehearse the songs, and record them for both the album and a live
performance, and to do all this in 21 days. Indeed, the production space they're using is booked to be rebuilt for the filming of the Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers film The Magic Christian, immediately after they vacate. (That also reminds me that I wrote a little about that film back in September of 2020, during the first year of this blog. The piece even includes a still-working link where one can watch the film on YouTube.) The
mythology of these sessions in the past 50 years have been dominated by
the dark elements, as the enduring take-away from the album was that the
band broke up. This project is a fresh look at the reality, which
reveals a great deal of camaraderie among a quartet who were bonded by
years of collaboration, friendship, and head-spinning experiences. The second part arrives on Disney+ today, and the final one on Saturday. Shifting hard, I did want to take a moment to note an odd addition to my recent viewing. USA and
Syfy have been running a limited series (8 parts) continuing the story of Chucky,
the serial killer who mystically migrated his soul into a child's toy, a
Good Guy doll. I'd seen the early films in the franchise, going back to
the debut Child's Play (1988), but had long since lost count. It turns out there were seven films in the franchise, the most recent of which was 2017's Cult of Chucky.
This series follows the events of that film, and allowed them to have 8
hours (minus commercials) to both advance the story and answer numerous
questions its fan base had about the character's history. Somewhere
along the line in the movies, and particularly emphasized in this
series, the story's gotten enmeshed in gender fluidity, queer identity
and relationship issues, along with related (mostly) dysfunctional
family dynamics, and bullying. The series even features contemporary
versions of multiple characters from the film franchise, and even
includes a fourth wall busting part for Jennifer Tilly as Jennifer Tilly,
now inhabited by the soul of the homicidal character she played earlier
in the franchise - who turned out to be a big Tilly fan. If you have
a means of moving onto someone else's body, becoming your
favorite star becomes an option. It's a bit of a head-spinner, but
somehow it all, oddly, works. Here's the trailer for the series. The
resounding critical and fan success of this series, combined with the
general bombing of the recent attempt to reboot the franchise, seems to
put character and series creator Chuck Mancini in the driver's seat,
should he be interested in staying there. The eighth and final episode
will air next Tuesday. Whether or not there are plans to continue hasn't
been stated - at least not where I've seen - and I'm not sure how much
this project was built as a final word on the character. As it's a
property tied to corporate interests, and appears to be making money,
it's unlikely it's just going to be abandoned. It's
all very violent and profane, as you might expect. Somewhere in the
blur of quick research on the details someone stated that one of the odd
rules negotiated allowed the Chucky character to say the word "fuck" up
to 10 times in an episode. I find the accounting style intersection of
prudish decorum and someone's odd notions of artistic expression to be a
hoot, conceptually. It's a strange, new world out there. If you have
cable you almost certainly have Syfy and USA, which also means you have
access to these On Demand. Speaking of decorum defied, I was very happy to see that starting next Wednesday, December 1st, FXX will see the return of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia
for a new season - its 15th. This is the season dreamed up during the
pandemic, and the first new episode immediately takes us into what The
Gang was up to during it all. The remainder of the season appears to,
paradoxically, see them traveling more than usual. I'm looking forward
to it. They
remain a set characters one only wants to encounter as fiction - where
they're entertaining demons. No sane person would want real-life
versions of these characters anywhere near their lives. We'll be getting two episodes each week, with them appearing on Hulu the following day. That
same Wednesday, over on Netflix, we'll see the return (for a third and
final season) of that streamer's reboot of '60s series Lost In Space.
I was fairly recently able to let one fan know that this was coming
back for a final season, which was welcome news to him because he'd
presumed it had simply, quietly, been canceled as the second season
arrived way back on Christmas Eve 2019 -- just weeks shy of two years
ago.
The trailer reminded me I should do a little memory refreshing about
how and where everyone was left at the end of season two. The full series will arrive all at once, as things generally do on Netflix. There's
a long tradition of shows being created in other countries only to have
U.S. versions produced. One recent addition to that category is the
current CBS paranormal sitcom Ghosts.
The
thumbnail core is that a young couple inherits a run-down estate from a
recently-deceased, not-quite-aunt the wife didn't know about, they
check it out, and the idea to turn it into a bed & breakfast takes
root. There's some misgivings in the mix, but circumstances eventually
get the couple on the same page. An incident (more on that in a moment)
sees the wife momentarily killed, but revived. Upon recovering, she
gradually comes to realize that she can now see and hear the spirits of
the dead. Moreover, she learns that the estate she inherited has a
cohort of disparate spirits from various eras, all geographically bound
by their deaths, and apparently having some unresolved issues that
prevent them from doing what most spirits do -- disappearing into a
white light. The spirits have generally gone a
little buggy in their years of being incorporeal, unable to interact
with the world of the living, and doing so on an isolated piece of
property. Having a "Living" who can see and hear them is a great joy for
them, but a major distraction and general burden to poor Alison
(BBC)/Samantha (CBS), who constantly has to remind herself that they're
not physically there, and no one else can see or hear them. Their
appearances, including dress, are essentially how they were when they
died. As much as being able to interact with someone who's alive is a
treat for them, in general the living are an annoyance. Not only noisy
and intrusive, and inclined to rearrange the physical environment, the
sensation of having someone walk through them is disruptive and painful.
Consequently, when they overhear the plans to convert the place into a
bed & breakfast/hotel, potentially disrupting their afterlives with waves of vacationing invaders, they're strongly opposed. Initially they try to
use their abilities to scare the couple off. The
BBC One version began airing in 2019, is in its third series/season (the
six episode series already aired, but with a Christmas special coming),
and has been renewed for a fourth. Here in the states it's part of the
vast, deep archive of material to be found on HBO Max, which is where I'm catching up on it. Here's the BBC version's trailer. CBS
is still currently rolling out its first season of the show, and I
recently caught up with the 8 episodes aired so far via Paramount +. The U.S. version has
Rose McIver as the wife/one who can see and hear the ghosts, and it took
me a few beats to realize I knew her from her lead role on the CW
series iZombie (2015-19. There she was a reanimated, undead
character who could absorb the memories and personalities of others
(deceased) by eating their brains -- which makes this latest role a
little funnier. Here's the series trailer for the U.S. version. Early indications are that the U.S. version is going reasonably well for CBS, beating out the viewing numbers on all but Young Sheldon among CBS' sitcoms, but it's still far too early to tell if this will be enough to see it renewed for a second season. I've no idea what the show is costing them to produce, between the size of the cast, effects and whatever licensing agreement is involved with the folks across the pond. The
U.S. version's ghosts are largely North American analogues of those
found in the BBC version, perhaps the greatest difference in versions
being that while the BBC version's oldest ghost is a caveman, the U.S.
version is a viking. They each died due to a lightning strike, and each
have a ghostly ability to disrupt electrical lighting. In
general, both versions are entertaining and the characters varied (if
simple) enough to be interesting. The formulaic sitcom elements can wear
a little, primarily when a gag is telegraphed and one is faced with the
painful roll-out of some awkward situation anyone without severe brain
damage saw coming several beats earlier, but generally it's innocuous
fun, and we find ourselves wanting to find out more about some of the
characters' back stories, along with seeing if any of them will be
allowed to grow as characters. A quick TCM note for this Saturday: They have a theme pairing, with 8 pm (Eastern) showing It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and at 9:30 Alien
(1979). Each with the same core plot of a long space voyage where a
dangerous, alien stowaway is picking off the crew, one by one. The
earlier film's age and extremely limited effects budget is going to
suffer in the comparison - how far the tech and industry respect for the
genre changed over those 21 years! - but it was one of those
fondly-remembered films from childhood.
Certainly,
as ever, TCM has a wide and sometimes wild array of programming, so it
feels foolish to narrow the selection this way, but this was one of
those instances where the pairing was what made it pop for me. I'll be
recording them mainly for the intro and outro presentations for each, as
they're prime time selections and are almost certain to have them. I
don't know if a guest host is involved. As I don't have a ready link to a free copy of that film, I'll add both the trailer: ... and five and a half minute intro and outro piece from a TCM evening where guest-host/curator John Carpenter discussed the film with late, lamented TCM front-man Robert Osborne. Poor video, but a good frame of reference for the film. It's likely
I've forgotten to spotlight a few things, but not only are there still
too many things I've already brought up in recent columns that I haven't
made time for, I also simply don't want to delay this week's piece.
Nothing prevents me from adding something to this later in the day, if
it comes to mind. My personal schedule's largely
suspended for the holiday weekend, my hours in disarray, and I'm having
the twin urges to make a breakfast plate of Thanksgiving leftovers and
catch this week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery... because it's a semi-holiday Friday and I wanna. Once
more, I hope this finds you well, warm, fed, and with some time to
enjoy something. I hope to see you back here next Friday. -- Mike
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. 
