What's To Watch? - Oct. 14 - Legacies and Action (?!!) - Mike N.

 

     As mentioned last week, arriving on Netflix today is the fourth and final, eight-episode season of a USA series starring Bill Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose. I enjoyed the three seasons I've seen (especially season three) and hope this final one lives up to that level. Each season involves its own, separate case, with Harry being the constant.  The stories focus on the psychology behind tragic events, revealing the truth in layers, often involving shifts in perspective. Unlike the mechanics of a law enforcement system, often to the chagrin of colleagues and the local prosecutors, Harry is more intent on uncovering why someone did what they did, especially as it's sometimes something of a mystery even to the person who committed the acts. The trailer tells me that there's more direct carry-over from season three in terms of at least one character -- which should be a good thing -- and that Harry's finally retired.
     It's The Sinner. Here's the trailer for this season.

     I'll be trying not to greedily take this in, but I've enjoyed the series and so may be inclined to wolf it down naturally. On the other hand, season three saw me taking frequent breaks within each episode, as I paused to ponder, likely presenting a picture of blossoming senility had anyone been around to hear me positing aloud, as I'm sure I wasn't keeping all of it just in my head.
 
   One of the recent Netflix additions (it arrived October 5th) I got to sometime this past weekend stars Jaeden Martell and Donald Sutherland, from writer/director John Lee Hancock, who brought us last year's Denzel Washington/Rami Malek/Jared Leto crime drama The Little Things (Which I talked about back early in 2021, once it hit HBO Max.)
     In this new film, Martell plays Craig (the mid-late teens version, which is for most of the film) a small town kid who is chosen by the town's reclusive, rather forbidding, not-to-be-crossed, billionaire (the titular Mr. Harrington, played with studied severity by now 87 year-old Sutherland) to come read to him for several hours, three times a week. Their relationship spans Craig's teen years, the forging of a bond, and leads us to some potentially creepy turns and a need to make a decision about the use of

power.
     While watching it, the pacing and narration quickly betrayed that it was either an adaptation of a Stephen King story I hadn't read (it was) or done very much in the same style, though it was more kind-hearted in some specifics than I'd expect from more concentrated King. This is with specific reference to the de rigeur, mundane evils visited upon Craig. I tend to avoid depictions of cruelty, and knowing that it's both a King-ish story, set in a small town and involving a kid and school, chance of at least borderline sadistic bully were high. True to expectations, they're there, but we're sped through those bits - which also weren't compounded by being sustained, serial cruelties - in a fashion that I appreciated.

     I'm sure the story's source was noted prominently during the opening credits, but my attention must have been a little off, and I didn't note it. (Probably distracted by Wes and Sadie, two cats who were interested in whatever I'd set myself up with to eat.)
     The source story turns out to be a novella, part of a 2020 collection of four novellas, titled If It Bleeds. This gave me one more reason to pick up a copy, as I'm interested to see if King himself took a lighter hand on the darker elements, or if that's Hancock's own filter at work.
        It's Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022  PG-13  1h 44m)

     It doesn't spiral off into full horror and menace, presenting more of an arc of growth for the two, main characters. A tidy enough tale.
  

  Not quite on-target for me, but perhaps for you or someone you know, next Wednesday (the 19th) a new teen fantasy adventure film that should (is meant to) scratch much the same itch as the Harry Potter films, lands on Netflix. Two academies of sorts, one for champions of good, the other for evil, exist, and through some selection process likely candidates are plucked from the world outside and dropped into the one better suited to their nature. But how foolproof is the selection process? Wluld you feel pure enough to be an agent of good? Does anyone who is truly an agent of evil think of themselves as such? Aren't the greatest villains the heroes of their own stories?
     From producer, director and screenwriter Paul Fieg, it's The School for Good and Evil (Netflix 2022 PG-13 2h 27m)

     Among Fieg's credits is the creation of the gone-too-soon comedy series Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000).

     Every so often, there's some small desire to see - at home, and for no more cost than the time spent - a movie that simply bombed. This past June an intended action thriller starring Gerard Butler landed in theaters with a dull thud. An estranged couple is driving to the wife's parents' house to leave her there for some requested time apart. Stopping for gas, she goes inside the convenience store while he mans the pump, and he loses sight of her. Then he can't find her, and the clerk is no help. He speaks with the police, then goes to his in-laws' place, where it leads to suspicions and an argument, as they knew of the rising tensions between the couple.
     Threads are pulled, with information revealed via various flashbacks. and it all begins to unravel a little easier than it should. Unfortunately, that's not a clever screenwriting ploy... but simply lazy screenwriting. It's mostly a recycled excuse to have a man with no special skills or background, purportedly fueled by sheer passion, to go vigilante.
     It's Last Seen Alive (2022 R  95m)

     I like Gerard Butler, and have generally rooted for him. He's an interesting man with a troubled, but layered and nuanced past - a graduate of the University of Glasgow School of Law. He came within a week of becoming an officially qualified lawyer, but his late nights drinking led to missing enough work at the law firm that he was fired. Freed of that path and its obligations, he headed to London with the vague intent of becoming famous. A series of unrelated jobs followed until an old connection from his time spent as a teenager in the Scottish Youth Theater provided an entree to an audition, where his "vigour and enthusiasm" impressed the director. A mix of stage, cinema and tv roles followed, and it's mostly been a successful run for him, despite various injuries. He's been in recovery from both alcohol and painkillers since 2012.
     Thinking back, it was likely the camaraderie between Gerard and his fellow Scot (at least in terms of where he came of age) Craig Ferguson, another man who had a troubled past with alcohol and drugs. These were during various appearances made on the latter's much-missed late night show, that found me rooting for the actor. Here a fan's, spliced together, reel of five appearances over a stretch of years. The easy, enthusiastic banter between them is a winning combination.

     For a more well-coordinated and exhaustively-paced action item, I could suggest a recent Netflix arrival from South Korea. Carter (2022 R 2h 12m) is very much in the style and pacing of a video game, including being highly reminiscent of 2015's Hardcore Henry, save for that film having a strict first-person shooter perspective, where the audience was seeing everything through the eyes of the

protagonist. As with in Henry, we're following a character who awakens with no knowledge of who he is, why he's there, and is immediately pressed into violent action while being guided by a voice from an unseen source. The voice tells him his name is Carter.
     Immediately prior to this we get a scene of a busload of operatives heading, with a radio news soundtrack that lets us know the major news story concerns a viral outbreak that can fully infect a person within five minutes in the right environment, amping their strength and moving them to violence. We'll see a small touch of that before long, but the majority of the almost non-stop violence and action for most of the movie is Carter vs. agents from more than one organization trying to take him down.
     Much bloody violence, increasingly dizzying, stunt-packed, chase and fight scenes, and it felt like far more casual nudity than I ever remember seeing in one of these Korean productions.
     The relentless pace of action through most of the movie becomes exhausting to even watch. As of this writing I paused it with some 38 minutes to go, so I've yet to see the end. On the one hand, there's a great deal of (special effects-enhanced) action, almost any type of stunt I can think of, camera perspectives that spin us around for views from nearly every perspective, and it's fun, but there's an

overload point. I had to take a break because I was starting to glaze over.
     There are non-Asian actors in the mix, mainly attributed to CIA involvement, and I was surprised to suddenly see Michael Colter's (Marvel Netflix's Luke Cage, and one of the leads in Paramount+'s Evil series) smiling face.
     The North and South Korean politics are in play, directly and indirectly reminding me of how much the 1950s Communism vs Capitalism East/West proxy war seemingly indelibly defines the region's culture to a degree that it sometimes strikes me as borderline parody. A deep-baked, predatory capitalism in South Korea that some seem to celebrate, but which so often proves a cultural burden. This strikes me almost every time I watch a contemporary South Korean movie or series, playing a foundational part in things such as Squid Game. But, I digress.
     Here's the trailer. Again, it's Carter.

     Man, though, if a young Jackie Chan had grown up trying to emulate the stunts in this movie without the aid of special effects (as he'd done back in the 20th century, watching Hollywood fare, he'd have been dead before we ever heard of him.

     It's been a finale week for a couple of items I've been watching.
 

    Thursday saw the season ender for Disney+'s Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney At Law, which has been a fun, nine episodes that expanded the MCU, adding characters, linking them and some existing characters (such as Wong, and Matt Murdock/Daredevil), and doing so with actively fourth wall-busting self-awareness by the title character, and humor in general, while not doing so in a truly dismissive way. The finale went a step farther and had some fun taking some self-effacing shots at the MCU formula and the universe's overlord, Kevin Feige.
     Today, over on Amazon Prime, the season finale for the Lord of the Rings prequel (set thousands of years earlier) Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, arrives. Done largely in the style of the Peter Jackson movie adaptations, if you enjoyed those you likely enjoyed this. Not being a fan of unadulterated Tolkien, these things work far better for me than the source material did. Filtering it through a fan presses it more into a story form, whereas Tolkien himself seemed to write a history/bible for Middle Earth, which is (mis-?)remembered from my teens as being a slog. Your mileage may well vary.
     Momentarily back on Disney+, the Star Wars series Andor has reached the halfway mark for its first season. Six episodes down, six more to go, with another twelve-episode season to come in what we see of a tale of the insurgency against the empire. The 24 episodes in total are meant to lead us up to the events of Rogue One (2016), which itself is followed immediately by Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).  
     
     Wanting to end with something both seasonal and free for all, especially since most of this week's suggestions turned out to be Netflix fare, we'll go back to 1974 and Dan Curtis' made-for (British) tv adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Screenplay by Richard Matheson. In several ways a period piece of the 1970s, Jack Palance brings us a hairy-chested count. It may be worth noting that this was likely the first adaptation that made a point of merging the fictional character with the historical inspiration, Vlad the Impaler.
     This was Curtis' second collaboration with raspy-voice, scene-chewing, Jack Palance, as six year's earlier the actor starred in his production of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

     Finally aired in February 1974, U.S. audiences would have seen this back in October 1973, save for American politics and two other blood-suckers of a different stripe. The broadcast was preempted by then-president Richard Nixon addressing the nation over the resignation of vice president Spiro Agnew, who had just pleaded no contest to tax evasion, one of many things he was under investigation for. Ol' Spiro, it seems, had at least kept his hands out of the Watergate mess that would finally end Nixon's reign, being too busy with extortion, kick-backs and various profit-taking from positions of power and authority. Hey, he was a classic Law and Order politician, which was part of the reason Nixon picked him back in '68. The more things change... Anyway, it was bad enough they were out there, there was no need to reach so directly into our homes and screw with our entertainment. It was truly an age of monsters.
     Here's a trailer from back in the day. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974  1h 38m)

     You can most easily watch it at no cost, with some commercials, on Tubi, though it's also available to rent or buy via YouTube, Amazon, etc.

     One more workday for me to get through this week, and I'm hoping to reach it a little less exhausted than I have the previous two weekends. Ha! I want a couple million dollars free and clear and to be 24 again, too! Whee!
     I've not the slightest doubt that I've neglected several current and soon-to-arrive items, but I'm out of time again.
     When we get together next Friday we'll be picking up speed on the back half October... whatever that means. Time's speeding past at a brutal pace, and a damp chill's creeping into my joints. Hey, do I have time for a quick nap before work? No, don't answer... - Mike