What's To Watch? - Nov 25 - Possibilities in Play

 

    This is an odd holiday block of days for me, in part as half the household that was here for Thanksgiving last year now lives elsewhere, and I'm suddenly dropped back into a new version of a pattern from years ago, where I'll be going to someone else's house for Thanksgiving, but as I'll then be coming back home I still stuck with prepping for cooking here. One of the aims with Thanksgiving for me is being able to coast on ample leftovers, through Friday into Saturday, ideally not having to go anywhere between the time I get home Thursday night until the following Monday.
     The blog-related takeaway is that time's going to be limited, and such discretionary time and energy as I might have as Thursday rolls on was very uncertain. So, I wanted to have something in place, set to auto-publish at the usual 7am on Friday, and so I set this up early. Always (always) room for improvement, it was good knowing there was something ready and in place. I had a little quiet time pre-dawn Friday to come back for some nips, tucks and additions.

    This week on Disney+, the first season of the Star Wars series Andor wrapped with its 12th episode. (This episode does have a post-credits scene, btw.) Utterly accessible, someone could step into this, cold, with no prior Star Wars knowledge, and be fine so long as they don't mind being dropped into the deep end of the pool.
     There are no jedi, much less any Skywalkers. It's a tale about the intrinsic evil of imperial rule, how the social insulation of privilege can leave people willfully blind to the suffering being felt elsewhere, and is ultimately mostly the tale of an insurgency. With this season-ender we're officially halfway through the story arc - we will have another 12-episode season of the show, which all told will connect to the 2016 film Rogue One. Emotionally engaging, it deepens the Star Wars universe, providing a much richer context than the relative fairy tale that Lucas started to tell us back in 1977.

     Over on Netflix, as mentioned last week, this Wednesday saw the arrival of the 8-episode series Wednesday -- about Wednesday Addams. A teen adventure/coming of age story, it was easy to casually melt into, such that I've now already seen half of it.
     Speaking of Netflix, one item that landed this past Friday -- and I know it's one I read about, and for some reason thought I'd put that into one of these columns, is the fantasy adventure film Slumberland (2022   1h 57m), more or less based on Winsor McCay's early 1900s comic strip Little

Nemo in Slumberland. I know that when I looked into it earlier it was clear that substantial changes had been made beyond the simple gender-flip of making this version's Nemo female. Amongst the critical complaints are at least some claims that the spirit of the source strip had often been traded for spectacle. In an era where complaints about "political correctness" have been term-swapped to "woke", I'm leery of many people's disgruntlement, and the dogwhistle references often inherent in it. Then again, matters could be muddied here by the simple sin of poor filmmaking. As is most often the case, I won't be surprised to find some of both.
     I'll get to it eventually -- possibly sooner just because it's a single movie rather than another series -- at which point I'll aim to take it on its own merits. It's been some years since I've done more than look at a random installment of the source strip, which had elements rooted in some of the casual racism one readily found in the mainstream in the first quarter of the 20th century. So, I'm not going to be as strongly inclined to fault it for violation of canon. Here's the trailer:

     Taken on its own, from the trailer, setting aside any knowledge of McCay's work, this looks like a potentially sweet, fun -- if by-the-numbers, and effects-dependent -- little film.

     A film from earlier in the year, which I would have liked to see on a big screen (but which also

demands at least a second watch), finally made it to one of the services I'm subscribed to (Showtime), so I finally got to see it the other day. A science fiction action comedy drama that relies on the notion of the multiverse -- that there are alternate universes created each time a decision is made, branching out into an ever-expanding tree of separately-realized possibilities. Begging the nagging questions of personal roads not traveled, it ups the game substantially by posing the possibility of multiple versions of a single person being able to tap into each others' life experiences and skills.
     Starring Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a character we quickly misread, though over the increasingly bizarre course of the film we get to understand why she behaves as she does. Yeoh broke into films decades ago as an action star who did her own stunts, which becomes key to many of the scenes in this film. The original screenplay was written with Jackie Chan in mind, but he passed on the project and it was rewritten for Yeoh.
     An increasingly mad romp that leaves us with much to consider, it's Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022  R 140m)

      The small, but deceptively strong main cast includes Jamie Lee Curtis (seen in the opening image of this week's column), Ke Huy Quan (who we knew from his mid-80s child star days as Temple of Doom sidekick "Short Round" and maybe from being part of The Goonies - the latter a film that looms large for many in a generation younger than mine), Stephanie Hsu, and long-time character actor James Hong. By the end I definitely had the strong sense that former child star Quan has so much to offer; I hope we'll be seeing him more often in front of the camera.
     It's a film with a great deal to offer beyond the madcap, martial action. The importance of empathy,  recognizing that we are each an at least partially unsettled, complex series of choices, of being present in one's life, of remaining playful, and how each of these are vital to the quality of life. It'll warrant rewatching. 

      Arriving today on Disney+ is James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Oddly enough, this in-continuity bit of sentimental fluff closes out Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The trailer lays out the arc of it fairly clearly. I expected it to intentionally flirt with schmaltz, and I suppose it technically does, but I really enjoyed it.

     It ended up being just the right level of sentimentality, in-character humor, and even touches of universe-building, that I wanted. I expect I'll be rewatching this fairly soon.
     Next May we'll get these characters back together for Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3, which will almost certainly be the last time Gunn and this gang will be back together on these characters. This is especially so now that he's barely into the first of a four-year contract as the creative controlling head over at Warner Discovery's DCU operations -- tasked with bringing more of his magic to the universe inhabited by Superman, Batman, etc.
     All of that finds me wanting to rewatch Gunn's first season of Peacemaker, which was a marvelous mix of whimsy, sentiment and style, over on HBO Max... with the bonus of the opening credits dance number embedded early in each episode. So far I've never not wanted to watch and listen to this when I come across it.

     We at least have Gunn's assurances from back in August (when new Warner Discovery corporate overlord Zaslav was swinging the axe at full strength at original streaming projects) that the series is "safe", and that filming on the second season is set to begin sometime in 2023.

     In a very different vein, this week's TCM Underground (early Saturday morning, starting at 2:15 am) is a double feature on the same topic. The first is a documentary centered on the second.
     1984's Wes Craven film A Nightmare on Elm Street had been a huge financial success for New Line Cinema, turning a $1.1 million investment into $57 million in box office. That a sequel was to be turned out as quickly as possible was a capitalistic certainty. The script that emerged leaned on possession (though the initial pitch included a possessed pregnancy, as a sort of homage to Rosemary's Baby, ended up being passed on, later becoming the seed for the fifth movie in the franchise), and Wes Craven disliked it, along with plans to manifest Freddy more in the physical world, a move he saw as diminishing the character, enough that he passed on directing. The cash-grab sensibilities of the money men ultimately in charge even went so far as to initially decide to cut even Robert Englund out of the title role, instead employing someone else in a rubber mask. Shot scenes soon convinced them how big a mistake that would have been, as the replacement had none of Englund's physical style
     While I ultimately remember liking the first Nightmare film, as best I recall I only ever saw it on cable, and I wasn't a devoted fan of what quickly became a franchise. I vaguely recall seeing a trailer for it and never considered going out to see it. I eventually, wanly, caught it on HBO, I suspect, but almost years later and out of sequence.
     Anyway, back to this TCM double feature: As it turns out the second film in what had become a franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, has achieved cult status as a gay film, the subtext strongly suggesting Jesse, the film's male lead, is a repressed homosexual. That the actor playing the character, Mark Patton, was gay but at the time closeted during an era where to be "out" was to be a target with drastically narrowed professional prospects, has all become part of the story. My casual interface with these films as a franchise meant that all of this went past me in the dark, so I'm just now catching up. Even just doing some quick catch-up reading on it, though, makes so much of it desperately obvious. However, this was the mid-'80s. The U.S.A. in its second Reagan term. A nation so largely in denial of reality, complete with subtexts of cruelty to any and all "Others" as an essential fortifier.
    Anyway, TCM will first be running Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street (2019), the documentary

 ...followed, now properly framed, by the film it focused on, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

     It's likely the most interesting lens to (re)visit the film with.

     While, officially, following this holiday weekend we have several weeks of business-as-usual  before we drop back into nearly full holiday mode for the final one to two weeks of the year, for me Thanksgiving weekend starts it all. At least one foot will be in holiday territory for the remainder of the year. Sure, it makes January all the harder to take, but, perhaps selfishly and myopically, I'm not going to focus on that now.
     That's what I have for this week, though I know there's plenty more in play. Enjoy the weekend - I know that for many here in the states there was either traveling to visit others, or hosting travelers, so I hope that's gone well, and everyone makes it home safely. When we next get back together... it'll be December! Wow. - Mike