Holiday weekend! What's To Watch? - July 1

 

      Friday once more! And, here in the U.S., it's an expanded, holiday weekend, with the 4th landing on Monday. It's difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday, given recent betrayals, but we make what we can of what we have. I couldn't help myself from coming back to echo one of the most distressing recent developments by the end of this piece - an obscure bit of sci-fi from nearly 30 years ago that was meant to be a cautionary tale about the path a rogue, partisan, selectively activist court has put us more firmly on.
      In the meantime, there's certainly no shortage of things to watch if one's looking for the relief of distraction -- and here's a little of it.

    Lost in the shuffle last time, I neglected to point out that Only Murders In the Building was returning for the start of its second season this past Tuesday on Hulu.
     Starring Steve Martin (co-creator), Martin Short and Selena Gomez, it follows this odd trio who were initially linked by being fans of a true crime podcast, but are now linked by a true-crime podcast of their own, focused on murders in which they've become entangled, which happened in the log-storied building they all live in. While I'd mentioned it several times subsequently, the introductory mention was back near the start of September last year.
     A busy week, I haven't gone through all three of the new episodes yet. Here's the trailer for the new season

     The season picks up moments after the last-minute twist ending of season one, so if you haven't given the show a try before here's an extra incentive to go start on it. You'll have the option those of us who followed it week-by-week didn't, to be able to roll into the next episode. I'd been unsure of how the cast would meld, and worried in particular about a sustained Martin Short character, but it all blended and balanced nicely, including most of the supporting players.

     Today, over on Netflix, we have "volume two" of season four of Stranger Things, wrapping this penultimate season. Whereas the episodes this season have been longer (each well over an hour long), and the first volume was seven episodes long, this back "half" are only two episodes (episodes 8 and 9), though that's with respective run times of 85 and 150 minutes each -- so 5 minutes shy of four hours.   Well, hey... holiday weekend, right?
     Presuming you're up to date on it, just waiting for this wrap to the season, here's the trailer for volume 2:

     For me, a very successful wrap for this penultimate season of the show. I appreciated the expanded length, affording us the time with the characters, unlike some of the noisier social media viewers who seemed to wanted it sped up. El's being powerless, and bullied, for instance, where the sustained beats of the beating were there to help us feel it, rather than reducing it to simple storytelling beats. I think some people just want want a blend of montages and a sizzle reel, worked into a synopsis. The only thing that bugged me along the way were the driving scenes where the driver kept turning for sustained bits of conversation with a passenger.

     While on recent arrivals on Netflix, here's more of a heads-up, just in the spirit of "this is there, too, if it looks interesting to you", than an actual recommendation. It's a Norwegian import, a sci-fi buddy comedy: Blasted (2022  TV-MA  1h 54m)

     Upon watching the trailer, my first thought was the writer and director are probably both big Edgar Wright fans. And, hey, I get it -- I'm a fan, too. Largely nostalgia-driven antics, where the child gets to re-emerge in the midst of adulthood and play with abandon as they once did, has an appeal. And it's not as if we can expect Simon Pegg and Nick Frost to regenerate and become eternally young so they can go back to making this sort of movie forever. I'm just thinking that - speaking for myself - it all looks a little frantically forced, and (taking some of the blame on myself) I may not be able to easily get past all that and arrive at a place where I can just enjoy these characters and this film as its own thing. As if fairly standard for Netflix, one can choose to leave the Norwegian soundtrack in place and rely on English subtitles, or opt for an English-dubbed version. You may not be carrying this baggage, though, and my prejudicial reflexes may be keeping me from enjoying some entertaining and even endearing characters/performers. Or it could be like watching a French film made by fanatic Jerry Lewis fans, trying to make their beat by beat version of a Jerry Lewis film.

     Meanwhile, over on Amazon Prime, a new Chris Pratt-starring action thriller series lands. In it, Pratt plays a Navy SEAL whose platoon is ambushed during a covert mission. He survives, returning home with confused, conflicting memories, survivor's guilt - even unsure how much of what went wrong may have been his fault - and gradually comes to realize there's a growing danger to him and his loved ones. It's The Terminal List

     Based on Jack Carr's novel of the same name, initial reviews have been less than kind. This has me expecting that much like Amazon's Jack Reacher series earlier this year, there will be those who will love it, catching the wave of the core theme and being detail-forgiving fans of the lead, and those who will have many moments of eye-rolling at simplistic formula and paint-by-numbers plotting. The heavier it leans on uniforms, flags, saluting, and other patriotic bric-a-brac intended to invoke notions of (misplaced) duty and (abused) honor, the less likely it's going to be to gain any traction with me. All that said, I usually enjoy Chris Pratt, and it looks to have a good cast, so I'm going to try to step into it with an open mind.
     The full, eight-episode season (each roughly an hour long, swinging from the 66 down to as few as 51 minutes) arrived today.
     I'll likely get to it along the way/eventually, though I'm reasonably sure that the first time I get to hit Amazon this weekend it'll be to watch this week's installment of The Boys. This week will be episode seven, the penultimate one of the season, with the finale landing July 8.

     I'm going to close this week on a more somber note, while simultaneously getting back to wrapping these with a free-to-all item, that anyone who can see this blog should also be able to watch at no cost. In this case that access is because it's on Tubi.

     This is a small-budget production that did extremely limited box office when it was released back in 1993. A science fiction film, done in a mock-documentary format, it's set in what was then fifty years into the future, but which at the moment, in 2022, is threatening to get here ahead of schedule. It's a story set in a dystopic future where abortion in the U.S. has been outlawed, and criminal charges are brought against those who even seek abortion in safe havens outside the U.S.
     We learn that a cascade of legal and social changes, and general erosion of personal rights, have codified personhood as beginning at conception, and those who are pregnant and attempt to leave the country seeking U.S.-illegal procedures can be charged with "fetal kidnapping." While barrier contraceptives are legal, IUD's are pointedly illegal. Culturally and collectively, feminism has not only become politically incorrect, but heavy historical revisionism has effectively wiped out any record of its positive impact on society.
     Released only in Los Angeles on Feburary 5, 1993 (hence the cumulative box office of $5000), it was released on video two years later. The movie is Rain Without Thunder (1993  PG-13 85 min). I don't even have a movie trailer to offer, but as mentioned above, it's available to be seen on Tubi.
     (The film was shot in 1992, when the Planned Parenthood v Casey case was being reviewed by the Supreme Court. That court ultimately ruled in favor of what was mostly an affirmation of Roe v Wade, though it teetered on the edge thanks to court appointments by both Reagan and Bush, and the trimester elements were replaced with those of fetal viability.)
     Most of the film's criticisms (aside from those coming from those who are ideologically opposed to the intent of the film -- likely the sort who are celebrating the Supreme Court's recent decision to rescind women's rights) are with it being a talking heads production, lacking in action and overt drama, between the mockumentary format and the characters (convincingly enough) being mostly systemically beaten down by the society they've been subject to most if not all of their lives. Collectively, it may be that it too aptly conveys the gray, beaten path it's showing us as a cautionary tale, while general audiences really want to see heroic rallying and optimistic turns. The intent of the film is to show us the bleak, cancerous outcome of complacency in the face of gradual erosion of rights, ideally in time for the audience to be galvanized to action. As I said, a cautionary tale -- it's not meant to uplift and reassure.
     Among the players, you should spot circa 1992 versions of Jeff Daniels and Ming-Na Wen, among other, familiar faces such as Betty Buckley, Linda Hunt, Ethan Phillips, Steve Zahn, and Robert Earl Jones, people whose faces and voices you'll likely recognize from television and movies, even if their names may not immediately pop for you.

     That's enough for this week, and hopefully not ending on too bleak a note. (The newflash announcements from the Supreme Court in just over the past week have been increasingly dismal, and not enough people are paying attention to it.) There's certainly enough entertainment to be easily had - see farther above, and previous weeks' posts. I also hope the gateway to your weekend opens smoothly and early, and it affords you some time to relax and get outside if the local weather's good for that sort of thing. See you back here on the 8th! -Mike

Litigators, Aliens, and Other Fearsome Things - May 27 - What's To Watch?

      Work's ramped up to see us potentially roaring out of May and into June, so it's been a long week at the lab, and I've much less time for watching and commenting -- or sleeping. Something has to give, right? Ideally most of us will be able to enjoy an extended holiday weekend once we've finished Friday obligations.

    Better Call Saul (AMC) is now better than halfway through its sixth and final season, and had its mid-season finale this past Monday -- it'll be back July 11th to start working through the final six episodes. This focused, mostly prequel series to Breaking Bad, has been excellent out of the gate, and with this being the final season everything is coming to a head in what is centrally the origin story for Saul Goodman, who started out as Jimmy McGill.
    After bringing a caper to a head, a dangerous parallel story came in to stun the characters and the audience in the final moments of this most recent episode.
   I really should (carefully) seek out some others who have been watching the show all along so I have someone to talk with about it before we hit that final stretch. No one in my immediate circle's been watching, many of them not even having gotten through Breaking Bad. Anyway, top-notch television, and I'm here at the point where I simultaneously want to see the final episodes, yet don't want it to be over. It's still funny to me to think back to when I first read the pitch for the series, and wondered why anyone would be interested in providing an origin story - and post-script - to a supporting player from Breaking Bad. Fortunately, they knew better.

    Today sees the final two episodes of the first season of Bosch: Legacy (over so soon?!) arrive on the free streamer Freevee. Continuing the story of detective Harry Bosch following the seven seasons of Bosch that ran over on Amazon Prime.  They managed to wrap most of the storylines up, but I'll warn you that they left us with a major cliffhanger. At least we know it's coming, as the series was given a season two go-ahead four days before this season launched. No word at this early date when we would expect season two, though.
     As noted in some earlier pieces, this new series' first season is in many ways Bosch season eight -- it just took advantage of a career milestone/change for the title character as an opportunity for a slightly different look and feel -- and theme song. We even had some nice bits of involvement from several members of the extended cast from the old show. Reportedly they're very interested in working with Connelly on other (spinoff?) series.
     All based on a series of novels by Michael Connelly, this leads me to a seque for something that arrived on Netflix back on May 13th -- though I took a week or so to get around to it. Connelly created at least one other character who went on to star in a series of novels: Mickey Haller, an attorney popularly known as "The Lincoln Lawyer" for his habit of conducting so much business from the back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car. Harry was created back in the 1992 novel The Black Echo, and is the more storied creation of Connelly, while Mickey Haller was created in 2005 with, suitably enough, The Lincoln Lawyer.
     While it's less likely to be something they'll handle in one of these live action series - which tend to be strewn with legal landmines - in the novels it was established that Harry and Marty are half-brothers via their father.
     Anyway, I enjoyed the ten-episode first season of The Lincoln Lawyer over on Netflix, and am hoping it's successful enough to be picked up for additional seasons. Here's the trailer:

    It manages to form satisfyingly complete arcs for at least a couple of stories, while leaving us in the final scene with a reminder that important, threatening mysteries remain.

     Speaking of Netflix, the first "half" of the long-awaited season four of Stranger Things arrives today. Seven episodes. (The final two, the second of which will be 2.5 hours, will arrive July 1st.) While it's not been quite three years since season three arrived on the Fourth of July, 2019, it somehow seems longer. Advance reviews have been encouraging.
    Here's the season four trailer

     If you're feeling a little at sea, here's a shot at a recap of season three that Netflix posted. It helped revive multiple details for me. I've yet to feel a strong urge for a series rewatch, so this is the right speed for me.

    
     I've now watched through the seven episodes of this portion ("half") of season four. We'll be getting the remaining two (one of which is supposed to be 2.5 hours long) come July 1st. The overall season will run nearly twice the length of any of the previous ones, with the episodes running longer. I didn't focus on that much while watching it, because I didn't feel it was being padded. It gave them more time to spread out over the cast. As ever, your mileage may vary.
     They have managed to recapture much of the early feel of the show, and this season has a distinct Nightmare On Elm Street theme running through it. Period pop cultural references throughout, of course, but for the most part it all worked for me, feeling no more forced than those actual things did when we went through them back in the '80s. 

    Meanwhile, the latest Star Wars series begins on Disney+. While they've been sticking to a Wednesday release schedule for new series - and the remainder of the series will be released on following Wednesdays - the premiere for this one is on Friday. Speculation is that there will be some event tie-in with the Star Wars event in Anaheim on the 27th. Or, it could be that they just wanted the direct, head-to-head holiday weekend competition with Stranger Things.
     Set mainly in the time between Episode Three and Four (Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope), we'll see Ewan McGregor reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader. As with all things Star Wars, I'm going to let them tell me the story, and not race to research all of the advance name-drops of other characters. It's the 6-episode miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi

    I'm somewhat on the fence with this mainly because it's trying to fill in a time period between the end of the prequel movies' Episode Three and 1977's A New Hope, and to do so regarding not just the lead character but some other prominent ones for that original movie. It's already stretching my credulity considerably, both in allowing what became Episode Four to remain intact, and in doubling down on the simple problem of where Ben chose to "hide"young Luke. If you can manage that bit of advanced mental yoga, then you may be able to enjoy the adventure being offered.
     With just two episodes down, though, it's already extremely difficult to even imagine the 1977 film that started it all managing to remain intact sans some selective memory wipes. It's likely a good time to remember that Star Wars has always been a fantasy series with a sci-fi setting and trappings, not science fiction. repeating "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." as a mind-clearing mantra may be a good recourse in the absence of some really good meds.

     I've just started watching an 8-episode series on Amazon Prime, a drama that hinges on a sci-fi premise. Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons star as an elderly couple, weighed down by the years but much more so by a profound loss many years earlier, who have a secret portal on their property that leads to a sort of observation deck on another planet. It's Night Sky

    Comedian Norm Macdonald was diagnosed with cancer back in 2012, but managed to keep it private. Jump ahead eight years to the summer of 2020, with his secret still kept, Norm was working on new material for a Netflix special when he needed to schedule a hospital procedure.

     Lori Jo Hoekstra, Macdonald's longtime producing partner laid it out as so:
“His test results were not good, so during the heart of COVID-19 pandemic and literally the night before going in for a procedure, he wanted to get this on tape just in case — as he put it — things went South. It was his intention to have a special to share if something happened.” He recorded an hour, in his living room, in a single take.
     The procedure went well, and the tape was tossed in a closet. A year later, though, Norm became very ill -- too ill to be able to film the material in front of an audience, as planned. Remembering the tape, he asked Hoeskstra to dig it out so he could watch it, which he did before he passed away last year. After watching he even suggested a self-deprecating title.
      Norm MacDonald: Nothing Special (1h 26 min) - which will include clips of various comedic contemporaries of Norm, recorded during the recent Netflix Is a Joke Fest - will be arriving on Netflix May 30th -- Memorial Day. Given the nature of the special, it's understandable that they didn't put together an elaborate promo piece, and didn't even post this teaser & clip before the day the special went live.

     That's going to be my next viewing stop here on Memorial Day -- after I take care of a few chores/obligations.
    
     Two days later, on June 2nd, Hulu will finally see the arrival of The Orville: New Horizons. It's been over three years since the final episode of season two of the show aired on Fox.

     It's been a long wait, and on more than one level I'm interested to see how this goes down. During those two seasons on Fox, the show was generally panned by critics (especially the first season), while scoring strongly with the audience. For one subset of the fans the "throwback" theme and feel of it struck a chord, and it became the Trek they wanted, as opposed to Star Trek: Discovery, which many of them at the time were rejecting. I've become a strong fan of Discovery, but even among those who haven't gone that way the recent debut of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - a series set aboard the Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike, set ten years before it became James T. Kirk's ship - seems to be enjoying almost universal praise. (Now four episodes in, I've certainly been enjoying it.) "Fans" being what they are, who knows how long that'll last, but for now at least official Trek has a series with a very human, accessible captain and relatively old school sensibilities. We'll see if the pandemic-delayed series' return, here in a new place, works well enough for them, or if the moment's passed.

     Finally, I noticed that today would have been the 100th birthday for Christopher Lee - gone nearly seven years. Wanting to end as many of these Friday pieces as I can with free-to-all items, if you go to Tubi you can search for things not only by title but by actor or director's names. It's best to put the name in quotes to help cut down on the false hits. Anyway, among their current offerings (and I'm not going to pretend in the least that these are the best choices among his esteemed career) there's the always entertaining Horror Express (1972  R  1h 30m), with friend and frequent co-star Peter Cushing, some wonderful scene-chewing by Telly Savalas, and an ancient, unique menace, Night of the Big Heat (1967, aka Island of the Burning Doomed), and a 2018 Rifftrax re-framing of 1977's Starship Invasions, an entertainingly bad sci-fi film that deserves the active ridicule. Free to watch, with modest commercial interruptions.

     As for sleep-starved me, I have to bury myself in calcs and reports today before I can get back to watching anything else! Wishing you (and, frankly, myself) luck in finding the quickest, safest exit to the weekend! See you next Friday, when, among other things, some twisted hyper-violence will be returning over on Amazon Prime. (No, I'm not referring to Bezos' union-busting.) -- Mike