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

 

  (Notes for any who are revisiting any of these pieces: First, I apologize for any of the inevitable, broken links. Things get pulled from YouTube all the time. Second, for the most current streaming availability for anything, go to JustWatch and type in the name of the show or movie. Streaming platforms are swapping material all the time these days. That JustWatch link will pop out into its own window. - 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. Await Further Instructions, 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

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