Mea Culpa - Sept 16 - What's To Watch?

  

     (Late additions in blue.)
   Another personally challenging week, in which no professional plan went unchallenged and largely derailed, approaches a tantalizing finish. I'm trying to remain hopeful and sufficiently focused to do a little more than simply make it to a collapse on the shores of the fleeting refuge of another weekend.
 

   Being around the middle of September, I was casually reminded of yet another wave of tv anniversaries significant to childhood (and even one that was in itself utterly insignificant to me on its own in its own time, which will be the last item I'll hit this week), among them 57th anniversaries for increasingly surrealist comedy Green Acres today, and the strange, three-year journey that was pitched and begun as a spacefaring Swiss Family Robinson adventure, but morphed into an increasingly child-minded, campy affair, Lost In Space, yesterday. This past Monday was the 56th anniversary of another childhood favorite, the sentimental, emotionally idyllic and easy target for cynicism, Family Affair.

      However, back to the present and near future, at least briefly.
     Much of my current series watching newly-arrived this week lies waiting for me, another victim of the twin, adult responsibilities of workplace demands and an attempt to find healthful, restorative patches of sleep, free time otherwise made additionally scarce by having to straighten out a few financial matters and getting a long, surprise phone call from an elderly friend from comics fandom circles, which was a relief since I'd been getting a creeping fear that he'd passed away during some months of silence.
     Consequently, Resident Alien (Syfy), Archer (FX & Hulu), Welcome To Wrexham (again, FX & Hulu), Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount +), among others wait for me to reach the weekend.

    TCM continues to roll out so much, around the clock, and experience has shown me that while I will not like everything, there's a high likelihood that future favorites (via the past) await me if I just happen to take the time to check them out. Even just sticking to the known, I see that Saturday night at 10:15 (all times Eastern -- adjust accordingly) they'll be running Stand By Me (1986), which I have seen, but just before it at 8 it's Running On Empty (1988), a Sydney Lumet film which I've never made time for, but which I've found myself interested in even just for a little of the long-gone River Phoenix and a 34-year younger version of Christine Lahti, who I've seen in many things over the years but never bothered to put a name to the face until her current, ongoing role on the Paramount + series Evil.
     Sunday at 5:45 they're running (for the second time in the past month or so) The Last of Sheila (1973) a mixed bag star vehicle whodunnit which grew out of an actual party game a blend of celebrities played.
     And if you're looking for an odd splash of late year holidays roughly three months early, Monday at 10 they'll be running A Christmas Story (1983), which as one of those films that's gotten the back-to-back showings for 24 hours treatment, and seems to evoke spontaneous responses of "You'll shoot your eye out!" whenever it's mentioned, I'm almost certain it's familiar territory. Still, here's the trailer.

  I don't know... I still have a positive feeling about the film, but given how many of the beats they just played there just watching the trailer scratched most of my itch for now. I may just wait 'til nearer the holidays.
  In a similarly forced-nostalgia bid, just before that at 8pm is Wood Allen's Radio Days (1987).

     (If you happen to be in the "I can't watch anything from Woody Allen anymore" camp... well, I hope you get over that eventually. If you decide to only source your entertainments from moral paragons you're going to miss out on the majority of what's out there, and inadvertently bury the efforts of a great many other actors and production people who had nothing to do with the director's private life decisions.)
     Buried at 2am on Wednesday is Elia Kazan's timeless (especially in an era where we always seem to be in a campaign season) media and political power of illusion film A Face In the Crowd (1957).

From 6am 'til 8 it'll be all Sophia Loren items, then at 8 it's a focus on Joan Collins until 4am the next day.
     4am Wednesday is a crime thriller starring Stacy Keach as a depressed, alcoholic cop who has to team up with British security expert (played by Edward Fox) to work outside the law to rescue the latter man's wife and daughter from kidnappers. The extra twist is that the security man's current wife is the cop's ex. It's all very grindhouse, and I can readily see why I wouldn't have paid it any attention back in '77, but it has some odd, sleazy, formulaic appeal now. That's The Squeeze (1977). Here's the trailer.

     I see there's what appears to be a full version of it over on YouTube, too.
     8am brings silent-era Hitchcock, with the family running a boarding house wondering if their new tenant is Jack the Ripper. That's The Lodger (1927). Here's a fairly clean version of it.

     Hitchcock's back (with sound) at 4:45 that afternoon, with the murder-swapping Strangers On a Train (1951).

     Quite a good bit to follow, including Casablanca (1942) at 10:25 Thursday night, and almost 24 hours later it's Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young pair on a killing spree in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) 

      The ten-episode fourth and final season of Donald Glover's occasionally Twilight Zone level comedy-drama Atlanta began on FX last night, arriving on Hulu today. (Another thing added to the likely weekend list.) That'll be running through November 10th/11th, on FX and Hulu, respectively.
 

    The core series revolves around Glover's character, Earnest "Earn" Marks, a college dropout and music manager who is navigating the career of his client, rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry). Other series regulars include Lakeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz. Along the way it deals with matters of business, ethnicity, culture, and existentialism. Actual musical performances are seldom in the spotlight.
     As noted the various other times I've brought this series up over the past several years, on the face of it this is a particularly odd item for me to have been drawn into, given that I don't have much regard for hip hop, and generally don't even consider rap to be music, though I know that the definitions have only become more blurred over the decades each style has been in play. It was primarily my regard for the talents and intelligence of Glover that drew my attention to the project back in 2016, with the often challenging (socially, culturally, emotionally and conceptually) material and performances quickly making me a fan.
     With just this final ten episodes to go, I'm torn between wanting see as much of what happens to the main characters, and wanting to see how many of these remaining episodes may be stand-alone ones, which deal with characters we've never met before and will not see again, where characters and events

can become extreme. Season three, effectively, had three such episodes, where the story told was nothing that moved the series' characters along, but instead examined harsh and/or bizarre events, connecting them to the series only inasmuch as two of these were dreams that Earn had. These were episodes 1 "Three Slaps", 4 "The Big Payback", and 9 "Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga." The first of these was loosely based on the Hart family murders, centering on a blameless kid with far more sense than the nominal adults in the piece, falls into the depths of the foster system. The other two were more distinctly

Twilight Zonish scenarios. The first imagines a sudden program of reparations being extracted from people based on their ancestors, while in the second a multimillionaire alumnus of a high school returns to offer full college scholarships to students based on their "blackness," which he and two others judge as a tribunal. Any of these can be viewed by a newcomer to the series, as no background info is required and nothing about the main characters is potentially spoiled. Just pick one and jump in.
     While the series has been a substantial critical success, winning multiple awards (including a Peabody) the lack of discussion it seems to get in my own (meager) social circles has me believing it's not reaching so many people who would appreciate it, and could benefit from the perspective shifts and general mind-stretching. Granted, there are some I know who would likely go ballistic watching some of them ("The Big Payback" being a good example from season three), but in general I do wish more people at least had seen these standalone eps.
     Here's the trailer for this current season.

     Oh, while mentioning Hulu, I did want to note that the 2018 Peter Dinklage. post-apocalypse movie I'd mentioned a couple Fridays back, I Think We're Alone Now, is as of today also available on Hulu. At last check is was still accessible to Prime members over on Amazon, but things suddenly, quietly, slip back behind paywalls over there, so I wanted to mention this new option.

     I'm going to close with an odd item that cannot be regarded as a recommendation, as I'll soon belabor, nor even something that's going to be truly watchable unless you're in just the right company and likely on the right self-medications. However, it's free, and mercifully finite, and one can more sanely skip around through it as a fishing expedition for familiar faces, many of whom must have been at career nadirs.
    For this, those of us who have been around long enough to do so, must cast our minds carelessly back, back, back... to September of 1976. We survived the damp firecracker that was The Bicentennial, and as we headed toward fall we were still in the era where just after the new school year began there would be some small consolation come the weekend, with the arrival of the latest batch of Saturday morning cartoons and kids programming. In 1976, that big debut Saturday was September 11th -- 25 years shy of other infamous associations.
     I was fifteen that year, and my days of paying much attention to what was new on Saturday morning were left a good six years behind me, though with a brother five years younger than me I was exposed to some of it still. Either way, I didn't have any clear recollections of the show I'm about to burn some time looking back on.

    One of the new shows was a live-action half hour on NBC, starring a pre-Love Boat (that would start in '77) Fred "Gopher" Grandy as Walt, a criminology student working as the overnight security for a wax museum. A "crime computer" he cobbled together while on the job inadvertently brought three of the waxwork monster figures to some semblance of life, albeit now imbued with altruistic intent. (This, in striking contrast, to the monsters Grandy would ally himself with come the late '80s, when he became a Republican member of the House of Representatives. What evil lurks in the hearts of men, indeed!)
     Back to 1976 and Monster Squad, yeah, it's a premise for a kids show, and that's as much detail as they were going to give it.
     It was the trio of Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's Monster. Those were, respectively, played by Henry Polic II, Buck Kartalian and Michael Lane, each with a faint, pop cultural footprint of his own. (Internet search engines await you.) Polic I mainly only knew from when he picked up a guest celebrity gig on a week of Super Password in the mid-80s, then hosted by an old buddy of his, Bert Convy, but others may remember him as Jerry Silver on the '80s sitcom Webster, or perhaps as the Sheriff of Nottingham on Mel Brook's tv bomb of 1975, the Dick Gautier-starring, Robin Hood parody When Things Were Rotten. Come to think of it, Rotten had exactly the same number of episodes air as this kids' program did: 13. I wonder if Polic was starting to feel like the Flying Dutchman of NBC by the spring of '77?

     Oh, the kids' show in question was appropriately enough (and as I slipped in a couple paragraphs back) called Monster Squad. Not to be confused with the 1987 kids' movie of the same name. In the tv version there was scant compelling reason to believe the Wolfman had nards. (Sorry, Buck.)
     Aside from occasionally smashing through a door or window, the monsters of Monster Squad didn't seem to be physically imposing. In my recent

sampling of the show I didn't see anything that could really be called a fight scene. Light grappling and tandem staggering about until someone appeared to be restrained. (All hints of testosterone had been expunged from children's television by 1969, after all, following congressional scapegoating and fundraising committee sessions circa 1968.)
     The show was developed by Stanley Ralph Ross, a former advertiser who came to be a writer on the 1960s Batman and Monkees shows, and had a hand in the development of the Wonder Woman tv efforts. With Monster Squad it's most apt to channel the '60s Batman series. This is particularly the case when it came to the villain du jour and that villain's henchmen.

     However, Monster Squad didn't have a fraction of the gravitas that 1966's Batman series did, so the level of celebrity here was pretty strictly familiar faces from tv, occasionally giving us someone whose fame was off in the then-future, as was the case for series lead Fred Grandy.
     The series' villains do make for some fun moments not only for those of us sufficiently old enough to have steeped at length in '60s tv, but for tv and movie buffs who enjoy spotting actors in unlikely places they were likely to omit from their professional resumes. This week's masthead pic, for instance, is Al Mancini, who in the first episode

of Monster Squad played beneath probably less make-up than he came to wish, as toadying, themed henchman Bumble Bee to Alice Ghostly's Queen Bee. Al compiled a fine list of film and tv credits, including roles in both the big screen's 1967 The Dirty Dozen and small screen's Patrick McGoohan classic The Prisoner that same year, to 1990s Coen Bros. classic Miller's Crossing.
     The series also included former Catwoman and sex-tease robot Julie Newmar (Ultra Witch), lightly rumored funnyman Avery Schreiber (The Weatherman), Jesus Christ Superstar's Pontius Pilate Barry Dennen (Mr. Mephisto), Vito Scotti

(Albert/Alberta, a sideshow hermaphrodite-styled villain), Sid Haig and white-haired and bespectacled Edward Andrews (No Face), Marty Allen (Lorenzo Musica - one of those parody naming touches that's reminiscent of '66 Batman), Johnny Brown (Dandy Andy), Arthur Malet (The Wizard), Geoffrey Lewis (The Skull), Jonathan Harris (The Astrologer) -- and if any of those names elude you, if you're significantly over 50 the faces won't. There are plenty more in the mix who will likely pop in

memory as they appear, either as henchmen or other characters.
     All thirteen episodes are available on YouTube, and someone's even grouped them such that one can just hit play and watch them run one after another - whether that's a sadistic or a masochistic scenario depends on whether or not one's strapped to a chair and has their eyes propped open.
     Here's the main link to the assortment over on YouTube. Thirteen episodes, each about 24 minutes, most of those minutes likely a bit too painful to just sit through in real time, so don't be reluctant to skip along through each, or change the play speed. Most of this will be time you'll want a refund on when you're on your deathbed.

     I know, a less than inspiring point to end with, but there you have it. I still have the Purgatory of a workday Friday of a week that so far has defied any attempts at plans, so in my way I'm paying for it.
Friday evening, if I don't just drop off after prepping dinner, I'll likely remember one or two other recent items (I know I had some others in mind along the way, but mislaid them) and add them as notes in blue.
     Until next week, take care. - Mike