As these Friday spots are all about things to watch, the weather's not so much an issue unless it's giving you another reason to stay inside and settle in.
Over on Hulu (that's for those of us here in the U.S., the rest of the world can see it on Disney+), a Japanese horror series started posting episodes December 28th. Two episodes that first week, then one every Wednesday since, for what is supposed to be a seven episode season.
Set in a picturesque, rural, Japanese village, there are some dark doings. The locals know to steer clear of the Goto family. A newly-appointed residential policeman (officially known as a Chuzai) moves to the village with his wife and daughter. He's to assume the duties of his recently, suddenly disappeared predecessor, and to investigate said disappearance. It's Gannibal.
This is an adaptation of a popular manga series.
Starting on HBO and HBO Max this Sunday, the 15th, is the long-awaited adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us. A 9-episode series, it's set in a world altered by a fungal infection that horribly overtakes the infected, repurposing them to spread it to new hosts.
Set some two decades into the crisis, the series' primary focus is on Joel (played by The Mandelorian's Pedro Pascal), who is smuggling and protecting Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey, who made a a huge splash as the stoic, young Lyonna Mormont on Game of Thrones), who is immune to the infection. For those familiar with the game, this first season arc is meant to cover the scope of that first game.
It doesn't take much of a look to realize there were some turns along the way with respect to changes made in redevelopments of the game that turned at least some once-vocal fans of the original game into much less enthusiastic ones. It's almost, but not quite like the disconnect someone who was never a Game of Thrones fan to have noted between most of the show's run and what happened to the fan base during especially the late stages of the final season.
I'm curious, but at the moment I prefer to just take in at least the beginning of the series before I go digging for the roots of the fan offense.
A quick side note on HBO Max: New ownership has led to some sweeping changes on the streamer in the past several months, including a fairly brutal wave of cancellations and removal of content so as to avoid having to continue to pay the those content providers. Expectations seem to be that they'll likely be looking to sell some/much of it to other services, which seems counter-intuitive to the idea of building up a streaming service by constantly growing their exclusive content. Then again, I'm not faced with how much it costs month to month to maintain old inventory in deals where royalties have to continue to be paid.
This year is set to be a transformative one for them, as they lean into folding in the Discovery content (which so far interests me not one bit), and ahead of all that they're just about to hit subscribers with a jump from $14.99/mo to $15.99. We'll see how that works out.
This past weekend - I almost added it to last week's post, but it would have been added to a Friday post sometime Saturday night, which seemed too after the fact - a new Christian Bale film landed on Netflix. I hadn't been looking for nor expecting it, and the timing with the 2022 date threw me a little. It turns out it's one of those Netflix originals where the did a limited theatrical release first. In this case it hit some theaters December 23rd, before arriving on Netflix January 6th.
Set in 1830, Bale plays celebrated, retired detective Augustus Landor, asked to investigate an incident at the U.S. Military Academy as West Point. A cadet is dead, seemingly having hung himself, but then someone removed the heart from his body while it was in the morgue.
A cadet at the Academy approaches Landor, expressing interest in the case and wishing to be of assistance. Meaning next to nothing to anyone in 1830, but a great deal to us in the audience, this odd, Southern gentleman cadet is Edgar Allen Poe - played by Harry Melling. As we would expect, the mystery deepens and even managed to darken further, and along the way we find out more about both Poe and Detective Landor.
It's The Pale Blue Eye (2022 128m) To save you the time of diving for the info, the events are not based on any actual events. The closest intersection with reality is that a young E.A. Poe did attend West Point... for approximately seven months, before being expelled. It's not an environment conducive to a poet. The story in all other respects is pure fabrication, courtesy of Louis Bayard's 2003 novel of the same name.
Good performances from an interesting cast, including Lucy Boynton, Robert Duvall, Gillian Anderson, and Timothy Spall, with a multi-layered story. Ultimately a shade convoluted, but engaging and entertaining between the mysteries and the relationships. Also a nice touch or two as characters' words come back to reveal them.
Also around on Netflix ahead of last weekend, but not something I looked at in tome for last week's piece, is an import from Austria. A mystery thriller miniseries, in which a woman. Blum, who runs a funeral home in a scenic mountain town whose main business is the ski resort, is faced with a tragic accident that grows more suspicious as time passes. She's is emotionally closed off by nature, but is also focused and determined, and her investigation soon gains a vengeful energy.
Purely in her imagination, she often has conversations with her dead charges, which help her work through her thoughts, a habit that reinforces the title. It's the six-episode series Woman of the Dead (2022) (Totenfrau in German.)
Normally, I'd just drop a trailer here as self-explanatory, but the ones available are of limited use unless one speaks German or Hindi, or for some derangement of mind doesn't mind it being interspersed with some video tabloid abomination. I'm going to go with the German one on the basis that the visuals lay things out fairly well -- or at least as well as one would want in a trailer. After all, there have to remain reasons for watching the show itself, eh?
A German language production, Netflix provides the standard raft of language and caption options. As the dubbing generally wasn't bad, I watched it dubbed into English, with captions -- because I always have captions on. A week heavy with distractions, I was only most of the way through episode 2 when I took a break, so less than a third of the way through the series.
One quick mention: Earlier this week Disney+ finally pinned down when Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will be hitting the streamer: February 1st. I enjoyed it in the theater, and am looking forward to a more leisurely home viewing. Most of the fan backlash and distaste was over the significant overhaul of Namor, the Sub-mariner, from his ethnicity and appearance, to his origins. I was ultimately fine with the choices they made - not only understanding why they made them, but honestly believing that for a cinematic universe they gave us a much richer well to draw from. Time will tell.
This loosely leads me finishing up with a grid of 29 movies set to come out in 2023 that someone judged would of interest to what I guess is broadly and confusingly referenced as "genre" fans. Comics, toy, game, horror, sci-fi and action franchises, mostly.
An odd one tossed in there with fanciful "print the legend" fare Cocaine Bear, and an Oppenheimer biopic that I'm guessing mostly made the cut because it's by screenwriter and director Christopher Nolan, has Robert Downey Jr. in the cast, and Nolan's both shooting it using IMAX and large-frame stock, and had made a big deal of using actual explosives to simulate the Trinity test explosion instead of tasking that to a digital effects company. (It's an odd claim of authenticity. Should we be looking for the "Actual damage to the physical world, including some trauma to countless living creatures, was assured by this production." claim in the closing credits? Really, it wouldn't have occurred to me to fold that into this group.
Into another likely busy work day Friday for me, including nudging myself to get some key things done out in the Real World. A phone call and appointment to make as one of them, and then into a weekend with some substantial work to be done at home. Good luck to us all!
See you again next Friday! - Mike
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