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All the Light We Cannot See (2023)
A clean miss, one hopes Allied bombs landed truer than this melodramatic mush.
Well, this Netflix miniseries treatment of "All the Light We Cannot See" is pretty lousy. Boyoboy, did they ever screw up a good story. They amped up it up with cloying melodrama, watered down all depth of context, and rolled everything so heavily in WWII cliche the result can't be taken seriously. Too bad, as the novel is marvelous. The worst sin committed here is they've utterly failed to capture the book's warm sense of reverberating wonder over the precise perfections that drive and comprise the natural and scientific world. That was the most important thing the novel projected: that by slowing down and really studying the purported banalities surrounding us, one can perceive and revel in those natural wonders hidden in plain sight. This sappy version devolves into a painted by numbers dime store treatment of Nazis twirling mustaches and flat portrayals of war-tossed teens of altruistic heart, you can tell they are by how they stare longingly toward a desired world offstage, free of falling bombs and filled with held hands. Ughh. In the first episode, a minor character pukes into a pail, having imbibed too much schnapps, and then his character suddenly disappears. I know the feeling: watching this is to force saccharine down your throat, with hope for any narrative value rapidly disappearing. And no, Mark Ruffalo can't do much to help. Thanksgiving's coming up, and I'm gonna be thankful I didn't engage in this flat soap opera. We won the war, but lost this screenplay.
El Dorado (1966)
Ride, Boldly Ride, to the End of the Rainbow ...
Rio Bravo (1959) was the untested version of this story, but it was just sort of weird, with Dean Martin as the penitent drunk, ultimately a good guy. Ricky Nelson played the role later inhabited by the much, much better James Caan, in the first remake, this film. But Nelson could not act, he was cast based on his then-musical success, he booted every scene in Bravo, every single opportunity, he just destroyed. The 1966 version, this one, was by far the correct Hawks elixir for telling this story: of a drunken sheriff reluctantly backed up by an old friend, and his younger sidekick, an an aging colorful rifleman, against tall odds. Hawks' final take on essentially the same story, 1970's Rio Lobo, was.an attempt to tell the tale more darkly, but it didn't much succeed, except to keep padding the Duke's wallet. This version, the middle son of the trilogy, is the One. Blessed by timing, cinematography, chemistry among the excellent cast (even the two doctors inject interest into the story line), some appealing and meaningful female costars, a subtle and sly subtext of cynical humor in the script (beautifully channeled by Mitchum, here, and assisted by Wayne and Arthur Hunnicutt, as Bull), it all worked. Topped off with a great western song as opening theme. One criticism: only at the very end, did anybody among the band of bad guys either 1) think about posting a back door guard, or 2) show the slightest awareness about the tactical importance of denying easy exits/entrances from a back door, among the good guts in the cast. Seriously. Put a sniper on their back door, will ya?
Ozark: Outer Darkness (2018)
Taut, development-rich episode, with many sudden turns
This is an especially solid episode, filled to overbrimming with all the themes that make "Ozark" such a good show. The FBI closes in on both the Byrdes and the Snells. Tensions flare at the kids' high school. The Brydes lose a critical ally. Charles Wilkes makes an indecent proposal. Marty once again maneuvers their criminal enterprise out of yet another jam, and Rachel Garrison reveals a hidden secret to Marty. Jonah delivers a touching (and somewhat creepy) eulogy. A whole lot of tension flows in this episode, and sudden turns in story lines abound.
BUT, a nit (and a spoiler): How does Marty manage to substitute the bones he unearthed from an old Snell grave for the bones that the FBI dug up in the Snells' poppy fields? Online recaps shoot past this question, but there is no scene depicting how the swap is accomplished. I re-watched the episode specifically looking for that, and ... nothing. Just how easy can it be expected to be to bribe a lab technician under FBI supervision, which would be absolutely key to relieving the legal threat against Jacob Snell? But no such scene is presented in the episode. I strongly feel we should have seen such a scene, and more of Marty's slick-talking, tersed-lipped brio.
Maybe it was filmed, but got cut; as it was, this episode was longer than normal. But that really bugs me, because this show has so far been so careful in its attention to plot details. Drama, tension, paranoia, violence, subterfuge, deception, risk, panic, depression, intrigue ... depictions of all those things are what makes this show so good, but the structure wilts if you make a script continuity error like this one. How Does Marty Orchestrate the Swap-Out of the Bones? C'mon, now. I know that may seem like pointless nit-pickery to some, but if not for that gaffe, I'd have given this episode a 9.
The Shape of Water (2017)
Love at the interface between water and air
It's romantic, it's blue-gray-green, it's wet, it's passionate. It's really hard to classify. This film defies any form of convenient categorization, as is typical with the adult fantasy fables crafted by Guillermo del Toro, he of the visually poetic mind. This is lush romance, adult fairy tale, violent cold war thriller, supernatural fable, dark comedy, social justice parable, and horror film, all in one lush, wet, subterranean visual dance.
Del Toro has mixed those ingredients before (with the exception of the dance number dream sequence), most beautifully in his master work from 2006, "Pan's Labyrinth." And he brought captivating, otherworldly mysticism to sequences of the two Hellboy films he directed. His films glue the eyes to the screen. You cannot look away.
Here, not all of this exotic mix works, but the parts that do work, Really work, and are decorated by lush production design by Paul Austerberry, many shades of blue-gray-green. A joke is made about it when a "teal" car gets purchased in the plot. The love affair is the most effective thread, in an extremely powerful way, as a mesmerizingly emotive Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a cleaning woman who is mute. She befriends the "Asset," played with great physical grace by Doug Jones, an amphibian man who is the subject of a cruel government experimentation program under way in a murky underground lab in Baltimore. Think Creature of the Black Lagoon treated as a Cold War asset. The Amphib-man is intelligent, peaceful at heart, and is graced with amazing healing powers, he was worshiped as an aquagod by the locals in the Amazon basin, before he was captured and brought in a tank to the States.
Elisa yearns for a soulful connection, and as she joins the overnight cleaning crews at the lab, she draws the Amphib-man out, tempting him with hard-boiled eggs and Benny Goodman records. She teaches him Sign. He teaches her about his pure heart. The year is 1962, and the lab's secret government staff seek a leg up on the Soviets. It's thought the Amphib-man's unique twinned breathing systems could yield an advantage in the space race.
That thread is mostly window dressing, it doesn't work so well as did the fight between partisans and fascists in the Spanish Civil War context that was so deftly applied to "Pan's Labyrinth," but it serves to lay out a twisted homicidal antagonist, a true believer, Col. Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with sadistic perversion. It's amazing to contrast these heavy roles he gets now with his part as Fred, the Wrestle Mania fan from "Groundhog Day." As Strickland blithely tortures the Amphib-man and domineers his yellow-housed family, Elisa flies under his radar and enlists her coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and best friend from her apartment building, Giles (Richard Jenkins), to spring the Amphib-man from his laboratory prison, with an assist by a sympathetic scientist, Dr. Hoffstetler, played with a proud ethical posture by Michael Stuhlbarg, amidst a subplot of Soviet spying (which also doesn't work so well; I would have preferred more of the budding human-Merman romance thread).
Spencer's Zelda is the film's incisive comic relief, and she can read Elisa's moods in detail, setting up a mirthful exchange when Zelda discovers that Elisa has ... consummated her bond with the Amphib-man. The line, and the explanatory miming, is flatly hilarious, I won't spoil it. Zelda is Elisa's workplace touchstone, her defender and translator, her unquestioning friend. Spencer hits a home run with the role, another one for her after "Hidden Figures."
Jenkins is also fantastic, as professional illustrator Giles, fired from his ad agency because he's gay, and bereft of the special contact of love, which is also Elisa's condition. She struggles to express to Giles why she loves the Amphib-man: "When he looks at me, he does not see how I am incomplete." (Her muteness.) "He just sees Me." Giles, too, is beguiled by the pure heart of the persecuted merman, despite an unfortunate incident with one of Giles' pet cats. The tragedy of the story is the emotional weight of being alone, a condition shared by Elisa, Giles, and the Amphib-man. None of them are complete, all of them yearn for contact.
About Doug Jones, he of the virtuosity in acting while clad in layers of prosthetic latex: he was the magical Faun, as well as the monstrous Pale Man in "Pan's Labyrinth," he was another merman, Abe Sapien, in the Hellboy films by del Toro, and now he's Lt. Saru in Star Trek Discovery. All roles in which his height and athletic posture help him act sensitively while covered in layers of prosthetics. In this film, he's like Elisa: mute from the human perspective, but his vocalizations are appropriately intense (which were credited to del Toro).
Del Toro simply does not make Hollywood formula films. Every item he directs winds up being a singular entry of entrancing strangeness, some working better than others. But every one of them unique and special. I wonder what he might do with a conventional script, something not immersed in the mists of fantasy. But then again, he seems most happy plumbing those shrouded, tragic, romantic depths. More power to him.
Ozark (2017)
Dirty deeds done dirt cheap in the Ozark lakelands
When did Jason Bateman become such a good actor? And director? This show transplants a "Breaking Bad-ish" plot from the desert Southwest to the green Midwest, and it's great. The parallels with that show are many, except there's less overall initial innocence, and the kids find out the truth far faster. It stars Bateman, Laura Linney and a solid supporting cast. It's extremely well-written, and drips with regional accuracy, showing us the seamy underside of southern Missouri drug crime, mixed with the crisis-a-minute foibles of a displaced suburban family. One season made so far, and the show got green-lit for a 2nd. It's tense, brittle, darkly funny in a desperate way, bleakly emotional and overbrimming with class consciousness.
Bateman sheds his typically comic skin and goes dark, cool, plotting, cynical, icy, playing Marty Byrde, a calculating money manager from the Chicago suburbs who gets in over his head as a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel, fronted by Esai Morales as the coldly homicidal Camino Del Rio. Linney is excellent as always, as Marty's wife Wendy, a mom trying to grasp at fraying threads of family identity, and hold everything together. Two young actors, Sofia Hublitz and Skylar Gaetner, are terrific as their frantic, frightened, confused kids, teen Charlotte and tween Jonah.
When things go sideways with the drug gang in Chicago, Marty barely convinces Morales to let him relocate to the Ozarks of Missouri, where he promises that the lakefront brims with under-managed small businesses and real estate parcels, terrain ripe as fronts for laundering activity. The family has 48 hours to split Chicago and a week to set up credible laundering operations. The kids are crudely uprooted, and circumstances in the Ozarks both freak them out and force them to grow up far too quickly. They intermix with a clan of trailer-dwelling locals, with mixed results, at first being sized up as easy marks, foolish city folk ripe for exploiting, but then the locals see how smart a business analyst Marty really is, and they begin to realign themselves in partnership with him. Julia Garner plays a 19-year-old sharpie, Ruth Langmore, with sly survivalism. She rules the Langmore compound of two adult male relatives and two younger male cousins; nobody screws with Ruth, and don't you dare eat her last can of Pringles. She comes to appreciate the opportunities Marty represents faster than anyone else.
Within a couple of weeks, he has his hands on the tillers of multiple area businesses: marina/bar, strip club, real estate agency, church, funeral home, and has drawn the attention of the local sheriff more than once. The stakes rise geometrically as Marty enters a three-way partnership with the Mexico cartel and the Snells, Jacob and Lisa, an infamous, and powerful, regional clan who control the region's heroin trade, and who have understandings with local law enforcement. The Byrdes gain an unexpected and unusual ally in Mr. Buddy Dyker (Harris Yulin), the terminally ill man who sells his lakefront home to them in exchange for the right to live out his remaining days in the basement of the house. He moves from creepy to clever to vital. Jason Harner and McKinley Belcher play a pair of obsessive FBI agents intent on nailing Marty and his Mexican bosses, and not too troubled by their unethical methodology.
Something occurs to me about "Ozark." That part of the country has increasingly come under writers' lenses, in the same way the New York-New Jersey Italian American experience did earlier. A dramatic test bed for crime stories. The novels of Daniel Woodrell, especially, draw some scary, desperate Ozark hills portraits, and do so with veritas, because he grew up down there and still lives in that region. This show hits the right visual and social notes: turkey vultures pinwheel languidly overhead, while dirty deeds get done dirt cheap down below, with particular emphasis on the rigging of dockside electrical junction boxes for the purposes of seemingly accidental electrocutions. All of this is set against a blue-green vista of remote lakeland life, both naturally beautiful and socially poisonous. Marty Byrde jumps from crisis to crisis, using his raw intelligence to feverishly protect his family from the dangers he himself exposed them to. It's wicked, cruel, sly, funny, dark and beguiling stuff.
High Fidelity (2000)
Smart, emotional romantic comedy filled with male angst
Top Five favorite lines from "High Fidelity" (an appreciation) ...
5) "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
4) (Bruce Springsteen cameo) "You call your old girlfriends, you ask them how they are and see if they've forgiven you. They'd feel good, maybe. But you'd feel better."
3) "How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?"
2) "Get your patchouli stink outta my store!"
1) "Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians."
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
One of the best Bond films, with a stand-alone star
This was the sixth Bond film, and the only one starring George Lazenby as Bond. He was surprisingly good, despite a pair of outwardly jutting bat ears and a slight edge of goofiness. Lazenby had been an unknown male model before winning this role, then he ridiculously declined to ever act as Bond again, a decision he later publicly regretted.
So, its stand-alone nature makes it unique in the Bond catalog, but on its own merits, it's one of the very best films of the entire series, with a sinister Telly Savalas bringing actual physically threatening demeanor to the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and Diana Rigg as a captivating heroine, a Bond girl with evident brains, guts and ample self-determination. It features a taut, no-nonsense script, with a tongue-in-cheek opening teaser sequence. ("This never happened to the other fellow," the other fellow being Sean Connery, who had walked away from the franchise after "You Only Live Twice," then returned in one later last official performance, "Diamonds Are Forever.")
Savalas was menacing and smoothly evil, this time Blofeld is threatening global destruction of major foodstuffs crops as the means of an enormous extortion scheme, biological warfare to be delivered by a cadre of brainwashed beauties, Blofeld's Angels of Death. The flick boasts rich location settings in Portugal and Switzerland, plus some of the best alpine action scenes ever filmed in the entire Bond series, capped by that wicked fight during the long, long bobsled run. The score by John Barry was excellent, as was Peter Hunt's direction.
Critics at the time found Lazenby merely passable, but I found him to be droll, emotive and athletic in the proper proportions, big ears or not. Savalas and Rigg brought their late 60s star power to bear, and the result both shakes and stirs, especially with the shocking ending. This film is among those few in the Bond series that is worthy of repeated viewing, it's right up there with "Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Skyfall." (Note that I refuse to designate one of the two droning, spiritless Timothy Dalton Bond entries as among the best.)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
McDormand leads a trio of incredible performances
Director Martin McDonagh is a playwright by main trade, so he directs, and writes, films with great, pointed, nimble dialogue. He wrote and directed "In Bruges," and "Seven Psychopaths." He outdoes himself with this script, which is chock full of acid repartee and blistering verbal exchanges. The film tells a story weighted with heavy emotional freight, but does so with so many hilarious moments of dark comedy that when the downer emotional interludes roll around again, you're trying to catch up and reset your face: laughter clouds into sober reflection of harsh situations, then here comes the laughter again.
That pendulum effect is thanks to three masterful performances: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell, caught up in the festering pain over a violent murder, in a (fictional) small Missouri town. McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, divorcée, whose daughter was killed 7 months earlier, and her disgust with the lack of progress by the local police in investigating the crime eventually boils over into protest and outright militancy. McDormand's set-jaw grit here is captivating. It's been 20 years since her Oscar for "Fargo," and this role makes her a shoe-in for another nomination. You cheer her on in every move she makes, even when she crosses the line into vigilantism. Fed up with waiting for her daughter's killers to be caught, she rents three decrepit billboards on a sleepy stretch of blacktop outside town, and has them emblazoned with an accusatory question aimed squarely at the town's Chief of Police Willoughby (Harrelson, intelligent, wryly funny, genuinely principled, and going through a personal crisis of his own). A member of his force, Officer Dixon (Rockwell, playing the dullard, yokel, racist cop routine to drawling, violent, moronic perfection, lords but he's good), takes the billboards as a frontal attack on the police force, a slight he has no intention of letting slide, despite the fact Mildred is clearly within her free speech rights in having posted the message they carry.
The supporting cast are also great. Caleb Landry Jones plays Red, the billboard ad salesman, young, hesitant, a bit vulnerable. Lucas Hedges plays Mildred's son, Robbie, mortified at his mom's activist behavior, but ultimately on her side, and also deeply damaged by his sister's killing. The police desk sergeant is cleverly played by Zeljko Ivanek, he frequently winces over Dixon's astonishing stupidity. Sandy Martin plays Dixon's ethically challenged hick mother with notes of frightening credibility. Peter Dinklage puts in a sly performance as the "town midget," a very decent, smart guy who befriends Mildred. Short of stature or not, Dinklage is one very good actor. John Hawkes, from "Deadwood," plays Mildred's sour ex husband, he turns in some well-charged scenes. Clark Peters, from "The Wire," plays a senior cop who takes over the Ebbing police station after a series of events has sent it into chaos. Nick Searcy plays a venal, condescending local priest, whom Mildred totally verbally stiff-arms, comparing him to a gang member and inviting him to finish his tea and then "get the f--k out of my kitchen."
There are a couple of nit-picky details in the plot that make no sense (the full-size fire extinguisher just happening to be handy in the station wagon, and the threatening, but disconnected, menace of a stranger's visit to Mildred's gift shop), but they're minor annoyances in the scheme of a script brimming with emotional intelligence, a rarity in modern movie houses. The partnership that develops at the end is also extremely odd, and their plan is more than slightly vague, not to mention morally flawed, but the film's basic message seems to override that by earnestly saying: grief can destroy you, but grief coupled with inaction will drive you insane, and then destroy you. Great movie.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
In Space, no one can hear you Yawn
The chief problem here is, all of those old Alien motifs – slimy power jaws, lunging facehuggers, and acid blood – have been repeatedly seen and mined already, Ridley, old bean. They're just no longer particularly scary to us any more. Seriously, this is easily the least-scary Alien film ever made, by a long stone's throw. Even the overlong and talky "Alien 3" had more scare power in it, here and there, than this humid dud does.
I gave "Prometheus" a D-minus, a failing grade. The film made not a whit, not an ounce of sense, and none of the characters were likable at all, except Dr. Shaw, sorta, and the synthetic being, David the droid, with his Lawrence of Arabia complex. "Covenant" is just a sliver better than "Prometheus," thanks to being many orders of magnitude less impenetrably, metaphysically preachy: at least "Covenant" delivers a rapid-fire body count, some mildly interesting space flight scenes and some lush planetary vistas amid misty forested moors. Ridley does love his cloud-wreathed mountain vistas. And at least the characters here don't engage in patently moronic middle school dialogue, a common aggravating feature of "Prometheus." But it's not very much better. Not even the bad guy here is all that interesting (I'll try not to spoil that one, but, jeez, it's so frickin' obvious).
Other than a few background attributes – visuals, atmospherics, set design, prosthetics – "Covenant" has very little to offer worth spending the time it takes to watch. The cast is populated with lots of folks you're not given time to get to know, thus you do not care about any of them at all. The acting is, well, to call it fundamental would be being nice. Only Michael Fassbender (playing two androids, David from "Prometheus" and a new model, Walter) and Katherine Waterston as 3rd officer Daniels, perform above the bare minimal expectations.
Basic premise: As we board the UCSCC Covenant, its prime crew is in cryosleep, set to be awakened seven years from now, when the ship approaches Origae-6, a world previously identified as a target for terraforming and colonization. Aboard ship are 2,000 adult colonists, also in cold sleep, and thousands more human embryos, being preserved to become a new generation on the destination world.
As android Walter minds the store, a surprise solar flare seriously damages the ship's power systems, compelling the onboard computer – yes it's named Mother – and Walter, to wake them up during the emergency. After they stabilize the ship, they detect an odd signal which contains a human voice, coming from a much closer-at- hand star system, and scans confirm that one of its five planets is Earthlike. So Earthlike, in fact, that it seems like a better colony destination than Origae-6 is supposed to be. So, against Daniels' protest, Capt. Oram (Billy Crudup) decides they should divert to check out the newfound planet and find out who sent that signal.
Sigh. The whole rest of the movie follows the same ridiculous pattern laid down in "Prometheus," in which supposedly highly-trained scientists, the cream of Earth's intellectual crop, just decide to up and ignore EVERY SINGLE CONCEIVABLE aspect of scientific caution regarding injecting themselves into an alien environment. Worse yet, they keep doing it, in stages, throughout the middle act of the film. Forehead slap-inducing stuff.
Remember the zoologist in "Prometheus" who, upon coming upon a snakelike alien creature with a weird flattened sucker-like upper appendage, emerging from a murky pool of water in the bowels of an unexplained crashed and derelict alien spacecraft, then decides the smart scientific thing to do is to coo in sweet-talk-to-your-dog tones to the snake-thing, "Heyyy, babyy, hiya, sweetheart, how are Yoooo?" And then snake-thing's flat head whips forward and attaches itself irrevocably to that dumbass's face? "Covenant" is chock-full of stuff like that. Are these scientists the vanguard of Earth's desperate attempts to perpetuate the human species, or are these in fact the dumbest scientists who could be found for this mission, and Earth sent them away to be rid of their dull asses?
Fast-forward: Various biological versions of the alien xenomorph start a-busily-getting' born (we find out how that process has been facilitated a bit later), then they rapidly attack the crew one by one, you get lots of screaming, blood splatters, futile weapons fire, face-eating, general unfocused panic. But we do get our required "Prometheus" tie-in. The second alien ship found on LV-223, the one David's dismembered head could fly, apparently crashed on this Engineers world years earlier, with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and David aboard. Or so David says.
We wind up with a last battle aboard the Covenant up in orbit, and then we get a not-at-all-a-surprise reveal at the end. Which is as set-up and primed for a three-quel as it possibly could be. But by then you don't effing care, because not a single minute of the 2:03 show you just watched made you care at all where this franchise goes next, because it showed you absolutely Nothing New, and told you Nothing you didn't know already about the ethos of this now totally dramatically bankrupt series.
I gave "Prometheus" a D-minus because it was sluggish, confused, childish, illogical and not particularly entertaining. I have to give "Covenant" a D, or 3 out of 10 stars, because it commits those same sins all over again, plus adds being repetitive atop it, like a stinking black-green alien cherry sitting atop a frisson of Just Plain Stupid alien resin. If not for the quality visuals and Fassbender's performance, I'd give this thing a big, wet, whopping F. Somebody really needs to take the keys away from Ridley, gently. Because in the space inside his head covering this series of stories, he can't hear us Yawn.
Brockmire (2017)
The seamy, rye-soaked, hilarious underbelly of bottom-drawer baseball
"Brockmire," starring Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet, is frankly hilarious. (The highlight of this show are the jokes in the dialogue, so summarizing the plot so far doesn't really amount to the disclosure of too many spoilers.) This has to be the show meant to be created just for Azaria (and primarily by Azaria), although it began as one of a set of Funny Or Die videos. He plays an on-the-precipice-of-irretrievably-washed-up baseball announcer Jim Brockmire, whose acidly cynical prose and foulest of mouths serves up a nonstop flood of hardball commentary and darkly comic social poetry. He hates the world, people, his life and his part in it, and yet he loves baseball because of its potential for purity and poetry, but also for how ridiculous a spectacle it can often be. Brockmire, who had been among the gold standard of announcers in the bigs, gets fired for cause by a team in K.C. after an extended, alcohol-fueled, on-air rant about deviant sex practices involving his ex-wife, later succinctly captured by the term "Lucy-ed." After wandering in overseas venues for 10 years (including a stint calling cockfights in Manila), he alights in Morristown, Pa., an economically dispirited town where the local off-off-off market semipro ball club, the Frackers, must compete with meth, the other low-cost form of recreation in the area. The team are a sorry lot of uniquely untalented, skinny geeks, plus several morbidly obese hackers, and one former big leaguer of actual talent and Latin origin, Uribe (played with swagger by Hemky Madera), who has tons of la Postura. All of the Frackers worship Brockmire for the sake of his middle aged bad boy YouTube profile, of which, as the show begins, Brockmire himself was wholly unaware. While overseas, he missed the whole Internet thing, which eventually involved Drake writing a lyric about him "keeping it Brockmire." Peet plays a smart baseball idealist and owner of a local bar that she inherited from her Dad, who was a Pirates fan. She sold her house and took out a mortgage on the bar to buy the downtrodden, fleabag Frackers. She gradually convinces Brockmire of the insane gonzo quality of him doing play by play commentary over the P.A. system in the stadium, for perhaps the worst pro ballclub in existence, but she has plans to build up the team's public persona. Tyrel Jackson Williams plays a socially awkward tech geek who becomes Brockmire's social media assistant, and he adds the vibe of someone fascinated while watching a car wreck's aftermath. There's a gag in which one shirtless local fans busies himself by stripping and repairing a lawnmower engine in an otherwise vacant section of the stands. The writing in this show is outrageously, caustically, and obscenely funny, and Azaria's glibly sour delivery is damned near perfect. Yes, it's gimmicky. But it's the best kind of gimmicky. As Brockmire's call of an improbable grand slam homer, with three severely obese players jamming the bases (they all got hit in their capacious guts or asses by pitched balls), unwinds over the stadium P.A., "OHhhh, that ball cannot go to Jewish heaven because it got TATTOOED! One THOUSAND pounds of finely cured Italian meat come waddling home, folks, it's a Grand Salami!" The language and sexual innuendo here are not for the prude, it's IFC that's airing this, so that shouldn't be a surprise. One wonders, as others have pointed out here, how far the writing can take this concept. The first season is 8 half-hour episodes, and a second set of 8 has been ordered. The Bad News Bears was outrageously funny, once, in a single perfect film, but the sequel films and the attempted TV show couldn't recapture its magic. It appears, however, that cameos by baseball media figures are on tap for Brockmire, as well as the very funny beer ad that aired with episode 3. In the meantime, batter up, Brockmire's acid wit is at the plate, and the rye (and wry) is being poured.
Mars (2016)
Worthy effort, but some plot points are as thin as Martian atmo
So, the National Geographic Channel has delved into new terrain: a dramatic miniseries. Well, sort of. In an effort to pull itself up out of the morass of cable channels increasingly viewed as nonessential, the NGC is trying to leave behind its raft of fairly unscientific low-budget reality shows set in Alaska. "MARS" is the first serious effort in that direction, and it's hard to be definitive after just two episodes, but this mix of documentary and fictional content is an awkward mix of sometimes inspiring and aggravatingly thin in spots. The concept is worthy, and the show's ability to teach is important. The tone is a good deal more serious than Ridley Scott's somewhat syrupy take on Andy Wier's fantastic book, "The Martian," in which we got to hear Matt Damon make the same joke about bad Seventies music at least a half-dozen times. The "MARS" format jumps between present-day scientists and advocates of an effort to colonize Mars, to a fictional first crewed mission, set in 2033. It's got a sort of a "we wouldn't be trying this if it hadn't been for the visionaries back in the 2010s" vibe, all of which creates a tenuous tie to N.G.'s documentary DNA. The tone is earnest, the crew is precisely multicultural and multinational, the effects are generally not bad, and neither is the acting.
But I detect budgetary issues which feel like they're dragging the show down. This thing is backed by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and apparently they spent about $20M on it. That's not a lot for a miniseries, although that makes it Nat Geo's most expensive venture yet, and it's only 6 episodes long. Much of the 2033 imagery scrimps on expected effects shots such as the launch of spacecraft Daedalus (we only see an exhaust plume). The sets inside the ship and in mission control are very sparingly designed: we see a starkly simple spacecraft control room, a gear-up room, the obligatory equipment corridor, the door of an airlock and an EVA elevator. We don't see any crew living space or exercise areas in any serious way, no hydroponics bay, no life support section, in a ship that has to make a 7-month flight. Because the first episode chooses to focus on them arriving at Mars, rather than the long trip necessary to fly there, perhaps this can be excused, but if you want to teach young people about space exploration, you'd think dealing with the ship in some detail would matter, right?
The press briefing room for the multinational Mars space authority looks like the lobby of a San Francisco boutique hotel. Mission Control (set in Austria for what exact reasons, now?) looks like a Google working pods environment. Launch Pad 39-A looks like ... Launch Pad 39-A, pretty much the way it's looked since the start of the shuttle program, which is illogical from a space engineering point of view. More troubling: some of the tech processes are badly off-kilter. Most noteworthy is that Daedalus is depicted as a SpaceX-style landing and takeoff craft, and it's pretty big, meaning the booster system required to get it off the ground of Earth would be GINORMOUS, with a correspondingly huge weight burden during launch. But again, we don't get to see that.
Most vexing, the moments of crisis in the fictional story raise questions about why there aren't a series of more flexibly designed backup and fail-safe systems available to the Daedalus crew. They keep getting backed into corners where they only have one daunting, long-shot chance to pull their situation out of the fire. That may be dramatic, and it may provide good classroom teaching moments, but it's just not very realistic, nor does it reflect good science. If your plan is to ride your bike to the park, your backup in case a tire goes flat is walking the bike back home. Flying to and landing on Mars offers no such room for makeshift error.
The budget impact was painfully displayed in Episode 2. There were zoomed shots of pressure suit gloves, and they clearly don't look the way airtight gloves will look, they look like open-weave fabric. They're ski gloves, O.K.? There's a scene in which the rear axle of the rover cracks open, and one of the crew has to go EVA to inspect the damage, but we don't see an airlock sequence, and the rest of the crew are just sitting there in the rover without their helmets on, so they're not cycling the air in the rover into reserve tanks, either. The show seems riddled with scientifically lazy stuff like that.
The documentary portions of the show are really the worthier part. Real footage from SpaceX reusable booster landing attempts, and from U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly's year-long mission aboard the ISS, provide meaningful technical context regarding the massive series of challenges we'll have to solve to make travel to and habitation on another planet a reality. An assortment of experts and space advocates explain why it's mandatory to establish a self- sustaining population on Mars (which we now know has subsurface water ice, the building block needed to gain a credible toehold on the red planet). Advocates insist we must populate Mars, to hold true to our quest for knowledge, to spur development of vital new technologies, to gird multinational cooperation, to feed our noble spirit of outreach, etc. But their strongest argument for planting our feet on Mars is to create a backup human presence in the event of an extinction event on Earth. "MARS" is trying hard to be stirring. We'll see if it gets more details right than wrong, and remains compelling. I hope it gets better during the final four episodes, because it covers vital exploratory ground.
Westworld (2016)
An HBO one-and-done
I was a fan of the original film, (1973), but far less of its sequel, Future world (1976). The new HBO reboot ... is ... I am sorry to report ... a huge steaming Piece of Crap. This terrain, the story line of a classification of humanoids graced with the appearance of human DNA structure, yet clearly being the result of something that was contrived, has been far better covered by the writers behind the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris are engaged in a naked cash grab, here. This show STINKS. It is destined to be tossed atop the one-and-done pile of HBO-backed shows. Seriously. Again, this show STINKS. Do not waste your time. Watch the original 1973 film, that's all you need to do. This P.O.S. show is backed by the serial reboot criminal, J.J. Abrams. How many stories will that loser try to re-tell, and rely on the clueless views of his target audience of Millennials, who twitch and flinch and flex defensively when anybody over the age of 45 informs them that they're being cynically Jobbed? I have a Dream .. a dream of a world in which J.J. Abrams is not the driving force behind over-hyped shows and films. Hey, 29-somethings, maybe, just maybe, intelligent people have thought about films and music before you managed to graduate from grade school.
The Secret Life of Pets (2016)
Missed opportunity with a potentially great concept
MILD SPOILERS INCLUDED: This review is guided by an adult viewpoint, because I think Illumination Entertainment seeks to grab for that same brass ring Pixar once held: the animated feature that could fill kids with unquestioning delight, and simultaneously raise adults' eyebrows in a knowing fashion. The kids will likely give "Pets" far more love than I'm prepared to, based on that assumption.
O.K., this was the first time I've actually gone out to see an I.E. animated feature (the Despicable Me movies). Yes, that means this was accompanied by a Minions short; I am sure that fact alone might cause some of you to squirm in discomfiture. How many Minions are there and how can we safely exterminate them en masse? After the unpleasantness of the Minions short, "Pets" was not bad. But it was also not anywhere near as great as the trailers had me hoping it could be, given it was graced with a great, simple "Toy Story"-style concept: Wondering what your beloved pet animals do all day while you're off at school or work. Ohh, to be able to channel the flickering walnut-sized consciousness of beloved pets I've known: The diminutive Teddy Bubbles of Santa Monica, for instance.
But, alas. To borrow a baseball analogy, this was the animation equivalent of a deep sacrifice fly ball that scored a lone run, when a 4-run-rally inning is what was totally expected. Animation: 8, Voice acting: 7, Story: 5, Dialogue and one-liners: 4. The kids will appreciate it, mostly, but I liked the voice acting and the lavishly detailed backgrounds. New York City has never been bathed in this much munificent golden light, not even in "You've Got Mail," that adult Manhattan fairy tale.
Yet, the writers badly disappointed by taking the very easiest ways out, in almost every sequence, and they also badly over-relied on gusto voice performances from actors like Kevin Hart, Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Lake Bell, and Albert Brooks (very funny as a kept raptor with a conscience about his role as a predator). Jenny Slate is terrific as a toyish-looking Pomeranian, Gidget, with a heart of gold and an edge of steel to her determination as she insists (spoiler alert) that the allied pets gear up to go rescue the missing dogs, her love interest, Max, and his recent roommate addition, the seemingly oafish Duke. Slate's voice performance is the strongest of the film, and it sets the tone for the the moral underpinning of the story: that there are good pet owners in the world, like Max and Duke's, Katie, and that every pet deserves such an owner.
At the blustery end of the vocal spectrum, Hart's rabbit chews more digital scenery than 10 other characters combined, and his raging is both maddeningly called-for by the vaguely unfocused script, and yet at the same time it's also a prime example of how the film fails to genuinely engage our emotions. A fluffy white bunny, emotionally conflicted about humans, leads an animal revolution, and screams so much in the process (spoiler alert) that he poops himself. Hah. Ha, hah, umm, ha. Hmm. Give those quality voices funnier, more innovative lines, and something more creative to do (spoiler alert) than keep trying to evade an NYC Animal Control van, and you've got a potential game-altering 3-run home run on your hands.
This one was cute, but, sadly, not really stirring, like a visually splendid birthday cake that turns out to be baked in a flavor that's just not your favorite. And this one is really not at all necessary to see before it streams. Also ... no sequel is really desired. Although, given Hollywood's by-the-reboots mentality now and the competitive nature of the animated features market, we'll likely get one anyway. And hey, in this so-far absolutely horrid year for Hollywood, this one's already a hit, it's made $80M in profit after only 5 days' run. To me, that speaks volumes about how desperately weak 2016 has so far been in film. The Infiltrator, and Ghostbusters: rescue us. Star Trek surely won't.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
J.J. the Green-Lit Auteur ...
J.J., the Green-Lit Auteur, Had a very handy Knack, For taking beloved Stories, And giving them his reboot Smack,
All of the big film Houses, Have his number on Speed-Dial, They always ask young J.J., to lend to them his flashy Style,
Then one hazy L.A. day, Disney came to Say: J.J. with your eyes so Bright, Won't you end our profits Blight?
Then how the Execs loved Him, As they rolled in piles of Cash, "J.J. the Green-Lit Auteur, Your touch it always yields a Smash!"
J.J., the Green-Lit Auteur, Never used his own Ideas, And when you watch his Movies, You will often sayyy, ohhh, Puhleeeze!"
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
An action explosion with an actual brain, and no regard for gonads
This re-imagined Mad Max film is deserving of every positive review it has received. It's one of those most rare things: a major Hollywood action film with a meaningful plot, an emotional soul and very important points to make about politics, despotism, gender roles and ecology. Yes, it's extremely violent (it's a Mad Max film), but the story assumes that modern society has fallen, and brute force rules in the resulting scramble for resources. You don't tell that story by filming folks engaged in diplomacy.
Director George Miller pulls very few punches here. Humans are set against each other as enemies in furious vehicular battles, and are shown using each other as fodder, as shields, as meat targeted in their cross hairs. It's not for the squeamish. Sam Peckinpah might have flinched a couple of times.
The film carries some cautionary aspects: there's only one person of color in any primary role, and women are shown endangered and exploited. Yet the core of the film is Imperator Furiosa, a female warrior played with grim ferocity by Charlize Theron. She seeks redemption for the bad things she has done, and is willing to chance all in a risky, hurtling plunge to escape her living hell. She and Max, as played with brooding taciturn energy by Tom Hardy, form the tautest of action duos, a partnership driven at first by accident, then murderous animosity, then edgy distrust, and later by mutual respect. Max is only reluctantly saddled with the role of knight errant. He's a battered, cynical, doubtful vagabond pressed into helping Furiosa through a gradual escalation of increasingly bad craziness.
The plot follows Furiosa's rebellion against one of the more fundamentally brutal despots committed to film, a warlord named Immortan Joe, who holds absolute sway over a teeming cluster of humans because he controls the only dependable fresh water supply for thousands of square miles, doling it out from a cliff top keep called the Citadel. His body is racked by radiation deformities, he breathes through a mask styled as a death grin, and his progeny suffer from chronic birth defects. He essentially holds enslaved a captive harem of women whom he calls wives, but the women have no choice in the matter. Furiosa, a trusted mercenary fighter for Joe, launches her long-plotted revolt by smuggling five young concubines out of the Citadel in a tanker truck war rig, a vehicle with such a rugged, beastly aspect that it becomes a character in its own right, the air intakes on its supercharger breathing in the desert air lustily as the behemoth thunders forward like a mechanical dinosaur.
Immortan Joe is extremely angered by all of this. He brooks no interference with his expansive lordship and absolute power. "Do not become addicted to water," he admonishes his vassals, "It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence." (Joe is played with psychotic relish by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who also played the bad guy, Toecutter, in the very first Mad Max film.) Joe froths and seethes with malignant furor. Discovering Furiosa's betrayal, he unleashes his dogs of desert hard-scape war, a cadre of true believing fanatic War Boys, who ride a gloriously outlandish collection of vehicles styled after glossy but mutilated classic cars. The mayhem begins.
Two other similarly antisocial warlords join Joe's trek for revenge upon Furiosa. The People Eater is the ruler of Gastown, a refining enclave to the south. He has a deformed foot and a disdain for Joe's family problems. And then there's a reckless firebrand known as the Bullet Farmer, a man who still has the ability to manufacture ammunition, who lacks patience for Joe's tactics, which he considers far too gentle. So, water, gasoline and bullets form the power triumvirate in this twisted pseudo-society.
Tensely allied now with Max, Furiosa's party runs, fights, hides. A stray skinny War Boy, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), realizes the error of his thinking and joins the group, but before that change he is an imprint of the personality cult Immortan Joe has created. As his lone vehicle continues to trail the fleeing war tanker into a dangerously violent electrical storm, he exclaims, in rapture, "Oh, what a day, what a Lovely Day!"
During the last third of the film, the tanker meets a band of deep desert survivors, women called the Vuvalini, and we learn of Furiosa's tragic background. It's at this point her despair finally inspires Max into a pragmatic suggestion. The tactic Max suggests is a calculation which equally weighs their options, the risks, and the ethical demands of the situation.
Now, I must say I find utterly ridiculous the criticisms leveled at the film by various "men's rights" groups, who decry it as a deliberate attempt by Hollywood to "trick" men into going to see a seemingly masculine action flick, only to discover to their distaste that it's really an extended piece of "feminist propaganda." One oft-quoted post bitterly complains: "NOBODY barks orders at Mad Max." That's a mindset not only ludicrous, but seriously lacking in testicular fortitude, a hugely ironic fault in such a misogynistic argument.
With this reboot, George Miller has hit a grand slam home run clear out of the park of typically low Hollywood action expectations. This one sets a new bar, just as "Saving Private Ryan" did for war films in 1998. "Fury Road" isn't just a great action film, it's a great piece of social commentary, full of sound, fury, swirling red dust, crashing vehicles, explosions and enough little bits of petty madness to fill several typical action mill flicks. "Fury Road" delivers the bang, and does so without being brain-dead. On the contrary, the heart and thought embedded here are strong enough to inspire some heated debate, and a long list of critical plaudits. When's the last time you recall an action movie doing that?