What's To Watch? - Sept. 23 - Mike N.

 

   One day I'll get more organized... I'll likely die a few hours later, but it'll be something while it lasts!
     I'm once again bowled over by the speed of time's passage. A week from now we'll be on the final day of September. October's nearly here, and even a couple of items this week are heralding October. The exhausting press of day-to-day obligations, made worse by having to adapt to unexpected work issues, sees me too tired to get to so much that needs to be taken care of -- including myself.
     Instead, too often, I'll instead collapse and watch something until I'm too tired to pay attention.

     This Wednesday, Disney+ launched a new series set in the Star Wars universe. Set about 8 years before Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star (known to the Star Wars cognoscenti as The Battle of Yavin), this introduces us to a fresh slate of characters and some new locations. Mainly people who are either trying to work as a part of the Empire, live their lives as free of the Empire's entanglements as they can, or are part of a growing resistance movement against the fascist press of its boot.
     Andor centers on Cassian Andor, whose story we are pulled into in two different time-frames, the present and his childhood, the stories told in parallel during the opening three episodes of the series that dropped this week. It was a good choice to lead with the trio of episodes, as we come away from them with a much better sense of who Andor is, while still leaving plenty of story to tell.
    It's overall more adult and hard-edged than what one would expect either of Disney or the Star Wars franchise. Created by Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy, we're getting characters with wear and miles on them, and human complexity. There's no overt fairy tale feel to it, though there is a quest involved.  Here's the trailer:

     I went quickly through the first three episodes, and am interested to see where it goes.

     An odd bit I stumbled across on Netflix was a 17 minute, black & white, film by David Lynch. And to say it's "by" Lynch, in this instance, means that he's written, directed, and also stars in it. Set in a locked-down train station, it's a stage piece with a single, spare setting, Lynch is a detective chain-smoking and verbally drilling down on a murder suspect who had expected to be out of town and in the clear half an hour ago. The suspect? A talking monkey. (I gave him the star treatment up top this week.) It's a marvelous, dense in the best sense, piece, it even includes a song (co-written by Lynch) by one of the players. Plenty of non sequitur wordplay, yet it all gels. Again, only 17 minutes long. If you have Netflix I don't believe you'll regret giving this the time. It's What Did Jack Do? (2020  17m) Given the running time, it would hardly do to have a trailer. Just go watch it.

     Despite being recommended by multiple sources, I'd not made the time to watch any of the FX on Hulu series Reservation Dogs - currently nearing the end of its second season. The Peabody and Independent Spirit Award-winning series has gotten a great deal of coverage since debuting in 2021. It's a teen comedy drama, with the writers and directors all being indigenous peoples, along with most of the cast, and is shot entirely in Oklahoma. In some ways it's an insulated community, but it's also one that's been soaking in a media stream from the outside world. Here we get to visit with kids who are into Rap/Hip Hop, and Quentin Tarantino films, but have also been raised in a culture where family and community are powerful forces, and people are steeped in notions of a spirit world overlaid on the mundane one, where the dead are never really gone, and spirit visions are part of the mix.
     Given the ethnic and cultural angle and emphasis, when it was first being talked about I'd hear reviews and interviews on public radio, which while sounding encouraging wasn't an automatic indication of quality entertainment. As it rolled on, though, the accolades began to pile up, and the interview material added to the encouragement.
    I recently gave it a try, and have been enjoying it greatly. That's a nice aspect of letting something build up. These are a roughly half hour format, so it can go by quickly. I'm trying to not burn through them too rapidly, but I get into a groove and new-to-me shows tend to be assimilated pretty quickly.
    Next Wednesday (Sept. 28th) the second season will round out with its10th episode, at which point there will be 18 episodes awaiting any newcomers. Here's the trailer for the first season:

     It's alternately funny and touching, and part of this weekend I've been continuing my roll through it, getting into season two.
     As of today there's been no formal word of a pick-up for season three, but it's difficult to imagine they're going to shut it down and walk away from it this early.

     I didn't watch NBC's Quantum Leap from its original five season run (1989-1993), nor have I watched it in syndication. It's not that I have anything distinctly against it. The premise, about a scientist, Dr. Sam Beckett (played by Scott Bakula) whose time travel project was in danger of being shut down for lack of progress, so he made the dangerous decision to try it on himself. He essentially became lost in time, and would find his mind inhabiting the body of someone native to the time he'd arrived in, had partial amnesia concerning his real identity, and would be there until something that had gone wrong in the timeline was corrected. He was aided in this by a hologram of his friend, Admiral Al

Calvicci (played by Dean Stockwell) - which only Beckett could see and hear - and information from the project's supercomputer, Ziggy. Upon solving the given time disruption puzzle, he'd be free to "leap" out of that time period, ideally back to his own time and body -- but, of course, he'd instead find himself somewhere - and someone - else. Built in was a gimmick to keep it from becoming too overtly a costume drama: the traveler can only go to years in which he was alive. So, no cavemen, dinosaurs, Revolutionary or Civil Wars, etc. Somewhat infamously for the fan base, the series ended with something of a non-ending. Sam didn't make it home.
     What I knew of it I picked up peripherally, and just did a couple minutes of reading to pin down the specifics. So, it's a show I have zero nostalgia for, though I know many have been huge fans of it. Even now, I'm finding that most of my interest in it is in wondering how well or poorly the gender, race, etc.-bending aspects of the original show -- as Beckett could find himself as anyone -- were handled. It will probably make for some interesting compare and contrasts with similar situations in the new series.
     This past Monday saw the arrival of a new version of the show, set 30 years after Dr. Beckett disappeared into the time-stream. A new scientist, for reasons that are a driving mystery for this new series, surprises the rest of his team by quietly exiting his own engagement party to get to the lab and make a leap into the time stream. This leaves his concerned colleagues (one of whom is also his fiance) trying to figure out both why he did it and how to get him home. All of the project history with Beckett is still in place, including the mystery of what became of him, and the project even has the latest incarnation of Ziggy to work with, so the fans of he earlier show automatically have investments in the new one.
     These days, NBC is essentially a feeding channel for material that'll be available on the Peacock streaming service, and as I'm not a paid Peacock subscriber I pretty much have to get it via NBC. As that's in a commercial broadcast format there'll be commercials, so DVRing it lets me take 30-second leaps through commercial blocks, which is about the limit I'll deal with for commercial-driven fare.
     I watched the first episode, with its leap to 1985, and it was about what I expected. I'm curious enough to be interested in what they eventually find out, but hardly burning with curiosity. Whether or not I keep up with it is going to be a week-to-week thing, as I don't don't tend to keep much free space on the DVR. If I miss keeping up with it for a week, and end up deleting the episode rather the watch it, I'll likely tap out of the series until such time as I decide to add Peacock to my streaming services... if ever.
     Anyway, here's the trailer:

     Next Tuesday, the 27th, Netflix will see the arrival of another questionable Rob Zombie project. This time it's a reboot of '60s monster family comedy The Munsters. Between people who received reviewers' copies, those who reflexively grab pirate downloads, or Aussies, as Netflix made it available there a week earlier it seems, there have been plenty of reviews floating around this week already. As it's the Internet, and Rob's understandably something of a target already (I still resent the time spent watching House of 1000 Corpses) finding anyone saying anything the least complimentary about it is more difficult than starting that hen's tooth collection.
     For good or ill -- most likely the latter -- here's the trailer. I can pretty quickly agree with some of the early comments that it would have been a better move to present it in black and white, as the colors are too garish.

     It's such a trainwreck of a trailer that it almost seems intentionally bad.

     Tonight at 10 (Eastern) on AMC, they'll show the first two episodes of the third season of the Shudder series Creepshow. Shudder members, which also means AMC+ subscribers, have had access to this for a full year now, and Shudder/AMC+ will be launching season four today, too. All marketing signs point to AMC+, so they will waste no time letting AMC viewers know that they can sign up for AMC+ to immediately see both the rest of season three, and whatever of 4 has arrived.
     For now, I just have the AMC access, so it'll be the first two stories of season three, "Mums" and "Queen Bee" my DVR will be catching tonight.  Here's the season three trailer:

     This past Saturday, the 18th, would have been the 105th birthday for prolific voice actress June Foray. She was best known as the voices of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick, Cindy Lou Who, Lucifer from Disney's Cinderella, Granny (Tweety Bird's and Sylvester's owner) from the Friz Freling-directed cartoons from Warner Bros, along with so many other roles. Her career began in the early 1930s in radio, where she initially had to write her own material. She passed away less than three months before her 100th birthday.
     The tribute drawing to the left was by artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who often does memorial pieces as a means of processing the communal loss. (This one throws me a little because it's not at all a typical Sienkiewicz piece. There may have been too much of a style dissonance between his usual approach and the desire to hold true to the styles for the various characters he's surrounded her with.)
     Here's a collection of clips, sampling a range of her performances over the decades.

      ...and I've run out of road for another week!
     Next Friday we'll be on the brink of October. Take care, and let's make it back here intact. - Mike