What's To Watch? - Feb 17 - Revisitations, and Folk of Fantasy & Fable

 

       A rough week coming out of a sometimes, personally scary weekend.
     Ideally this will be self-publishing Friday morning, with me rolling into a holiday weekend in the late afternoon. Next Monday's Presidents' Day, and the company I work for has it as one of its odd holidays. Yay us. I know these three-day weekends tend to feel as if they go even more quickly than the standard variety, but I'll be trying to enjoy and otherwise make the reasonable best of it. Trying to achieve that unicorn blend of rest, enjoyment, and accomplishment.
 

    Despite, or perhaps at least in part because of, the way it's been both compartmentalized and formulaic, I've been continuing enjoy the week-to-week of HBO's The Last of Us. Last week they gave us the weekly dose a couple days early (at least over on HBO Max), presumably because Sunday night had one of the last, remaining, true mass-media events -- The Superbowl. Sure, I didn't watch any of it - I only brought up a page so I could check in on the score periodically, because the hometown team was in play and the win or loss would be spinning some of the mood in the coming work week - but reportedly some 113 million people did. In a world with so many entertainment options, so many ways to access narrowly-appealing entertainments, having that many people focused on the same thing at the same time has been getting rarer and rarer over the course of the past couple decades in particular.

     As mentioned last week, this Thursday saw the return of Star Trek: Picard, for the beginning of its third season, which will wrap the series and is expected to be the end of the story for the lead character. In the meantime, the general theme is getting the Next Generation band back together for a final adventure. No one has really been pleased at the thought of 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis being the swan song for that iteration of the series, and these final ten episodes are intended to remedy that... along with likely making a play for some subset of the cast to see some more adventures. In the meantime, we'll be catching up, one by one, on each member of the cast as they get back together for the first time in over two decades -- something that's meant to apply to the in-timeline characters themselves, too.
     I haven't gotten to this week's episode of Poker Face (Peacock) yet, but unless it's some bizarre anomaly I expect it'll be a tidy entertainment, like the previous six episodes. I'll likely get to that before Friday's gone. The ten-episode season will be wrapping March 9th, and that'll come too quickly all on its own.
     Most of the rest of my viewing since last time has been odd comfort-watching during a personally trying stretch, which among other things has seen me alternate between moving through series rewatches of Frasier, and of Grimm.
 

    I don't imagine I need to tell anyone about Kelsey Grammar's award-winning, 11-season sitcom, which ran from 1993 to 2004. A new series, picking up on the character nearly 20 years since we last saw him, is currently filming; no release date's been set, but the first couple episodes have been shot.
    Grammar, at least with respect to the character of Frasier Crane, is one of those cases where I've so far successfully kept my impressions of the actor and the role separate, enjoying the latter (and his supporting cast) more than sufficiently to not let Grammar's own politics interfere with my enjoyment. Revisiting the series (I'm currently wandering through the first half of season three, so plenty of road to go) has been mostly pleasant.  Frasier is currently on both Hulu and Peacock.
     Grimm was another NBC series, a supernatural adventure with a cop show structure (I believe "fantasy police procedural drama" is the current tag), that ran six seasons/123 episodes from 2011 to 2017, and had a scheduled ending so they got to wrap the show up via a shorter final season, rather than have it end trying for a renewal. Portland Oregon-based Detective Nicholas Burkhardt starts seeing things he can't explain, and just as he's questioning his own sanity he starts to be let in on a family secret and a legacy that includes some enhanced abilities.
     

The Grimm fairy tales, as it turns out, are loosely based on a variety of different creatures - subset races of beings who usually appear to be normal human beings, but who have animal-linked aspects. Broadly self-referenced as Wesen (pronounced VES-en), they have human-animal hybrid faces and aspects that come to the fore generally when they want to, a process they refer to as woge (VOH-guh).
     This is my first time back through the show for a series rewatch since it aired, and it's been interesting to me to see what I do and don't remember. No reason to make this into a personal travelogue, but I've been loosely tracing the timeline of show airings with things that were going on in my life at the time, realizing that while I was taking weekly refuge from life pressures in new episodes, those same life pressures were some degree of distraction, hence the slippage of so many plot details from memory. Consequently, there have been points where I didn't remember what was about to happen until just before it happened.

    It was another of those fantasy legacy series, where a main character is suddenly thrust into a completely new world view as some inherited legacy caught up with them, and they had to learn about it all on their feet. Much as, say, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they not only had to learn a centuries-deep lore while encountering supernatural beings, but find success and distinction in handling their duties in non-traditional ways, including bringing friends and loved ones into the mix, and being open to befriending beings that their lore and traditions would have just seen them exterminate. New vulnerabilities, but new opportunities, too. Fantasy adventures with subtexts on the importance of embracing diversity and the dangers of vilifying the Other. So, a laudable message dressed up with special effects, martial arts, plots and general violence.
     I've been revisiting Grimm on Peacock.

     I've also been taking side-trips down the rabbit hole of some early 1950s anthology television, fairly readily found on YouTube, specifically the drama series Suspense and the sci-fi drama Tales of Tomorrow. The rabbit holes for each often involve dives after the actors, directors and writers, most often because they were people whose peaks of career fame came years later. Catching the relatively youthful faces of a James Doohan here, a Rod Steiger there, Brian Keith there (though he was going by Robert Keith jr. then), Darren McGavin over there, and seeing early directing credits for Robert Mulligan, all as some quick examples. It makes for rich mining operations, and I'd prefer to organize a focused piece on some of it for a future Friday, as I don't have the time for this week.

     Scrambling a little, I'll note that the second (and final) season of Amazon Prime's period fantasy adventure Carnival Row arrived there today. (Well, the beginning of it.) Various races of creatures we think of as mythological, each with its own set of abilities, are real here, and due to the pressures of war in their native lands they've become an refugee/immigrant population in human cities. Orlando Bloom stars.
     This season will have ten episodes, the first two of which landed today, with two to follow each Friday through March 17th.
     Here's the season two trailer.

     Also arriving there today is a fantasy romantic drama starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. Based on A.S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye", Swinton plays a professor who releases a djinn (Elba) from his bottle prison, he offering her three wished in exchange for his freedom, but her being canny enough to be concerned that the wishes are a trick. Said djinn then tells her stories from his millennia of existence.
     Critically praised - including a six minute standing ovation at Cannes - but a box office bomb ($19 million gross vs $60 million budget), it's Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022 R  108 m)

     I didn't spot it casually (didn't know to look for it at the time) while taking a quick look at Netflix Thursday, but I'm told that 2022 Viola Davis vehicle and much-discussed (where such things are discussed) Academy-snub The Woman King has just landed there for U.S. audiences.

     In a very different vein, the third and (currently) final season of the new Animaniacs has arrived today on Hulu.

     Ideally, this Saturday morning I'll be getting out to see the official kick-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase 5, with Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023  PG-13  2h 5m).  My theater of choice for most of the past decade closed this past week (part of Regal cinema's fiscal restructuring), but I'm going to go back to another location I used to frequent back in the aughts to see if that'll become my new default. (We have plenty of theater options fairly close at hand, but I'm deliberately trying to steer clear of the most modern and popular ones, because I'd much rather be in a theater with as few people as possible.)
     My impression is that the film itself, along with the mid- and post-credits scenes, will be setting some key MCU points in motion, and that we'll soon know that's why they've been so close-mouthed about multiple Disney+ series we're supposed to be seeing any time now... which they've yet to run promo spots or set dates for.

  

     As we get deeper into their universe-building, I continue to be interested both in the immediate choices made and in where it's being steered. Some mild amusement in seeing the continuing parade of critics more intent on being The One to presage the decline and fall of superhero cinema than they are of pretty much anything else.
     Not so different than the time-traveling Kang himself, we aging comics fans can isolate past versions of ourselves and even derive some entertainment in realizing how earlier versions of ourselves would have loved or loathed the decisions being made here in the 21st century. Here, nearest I've been to the end of my own timeline, I'm enjoying the perspective shifts I can afford myself at least as much as I can what's objectively making its way to the screen. Always in flux, at least until something stops.
     Meanwhile, I know they're getting deeper into that trouble zone of trying to reward the stalwart, all-consuming fan who's steeped in at least the cinematic lore, while still managing to draw in newer or casual fans who have a growing reluctance because they're afraid they have days of streaming homework to do, between movies and series, to catch up. Bad friends/fans exacerbate this by getting a little too high and haughty on their personal stockpile of knowledge, giving the impression to newcomers and casuals that only with decades of study will they achieve the True Fan state of Understanding (...and then generally indulge in kvetching and griping endlessly about how far wrong, wrong, Wrong the cinematic shepherds have gone, teeth clenched and fists balled, raised to the skies. But that's another set of problems.)
     It's the challenge for any successful, episodic franchise - and certainly something continuity-driven comics themselves have had to deal with over the decades: Satisfying the long-term fan while always remembering that each new item has to be intrinsically entertaining and self-explanatory to satisfactorily be someone's starting point. The potential fan has to bend a little too, though, and not expect to understand all aspects immediately. Nothing works that way. If you think it does, then it just proves you're not really paying attention.
     Delayed by a day, I got out to see Quantumania Sunday morning instead.
     I started getting my thoughts on it typed out, and that first draft disgorge became too much for a quick paste-in here. I may give it a second pass, add some images, post it elsewhere and link to it here, but not right now. My holiday Monday-extended weekend is fading fast, and I'm trying to get enough things done to blunt the despair of the unwelcome coming week.
     As they're continuing to introduce Kang asynchronously over a variety of shows and movies (starting with last year's season one of Loki, then here in this film) I'm not sure what people were expecting of him in an Ant Man film. We're meeting the character strongly out-of-sequence, and keep in mind this is someone who will be the Big Threat in what appears to be two movies in 2025 - in Phase 6 - so this is a fairly slow burn. For now it's as much about assembling the tools that will allow some drastic reshuffling as it is about anything else. For the Marvel comics fans of deep vintage, I wholly understand the initial reaction to some of the silliness, and to the versions of some things we're being given, but in the context of this story I would remind you that we're getting Kang in pieces, and this particular piece is from somewhere far, far along his timeline -- nowhere near as far as we saw in the first season of Loki, but still far enough along that he'd already been a scourge to the multiverse.
     Exiled, trapped and bitter, the version of M.O.D.O.K. he rejiggered a pawn that had fallen into his hands into a private joke. A twisted, contemptuous gesture. Stuck in this weird backwater, having tested himself across countless realities before he was sent away by concerned peers, such empathy as he is capable of has largely been blunted. Scraps of it were resuscitated during his time working with Janet - where she became "real" to him as a fellow castaway and colleague - but even that was largely buried as soon as she opposed him. Scant else has any sense of weight and reality to it for him, aside from being potential adds to his lists of conquests.
     Anyway, while hardly a favorite, I can't say I hated it. As an old-school Marvel fan, I understand some of the angst some continue to feel over choices made in the MCU, but I don't see anything here worth rising to such passions over. It may be that it's worth considering the parallels between Kang/Immortus over the long, winding course of his life, and the life of a dedicated comics fan. What's going to entertain or enrage us is likely to change over time, and the ability of much of anything to enrage us is likely to shrink over time. Whether one sees those changes as maturation or decrepitude is also going to at least in part be a function of age and passion.   
     I also like to keep in mind that from the comics side, Kang as Kang - as The Conqueror - beyond the flash of it, has never really been a favorite character. Not a character with any attractive depth. Honestly, he's a prick. Born into a golden age of safety and satiety, he wanted to go to a time where he could fight and dominate -- seemingly for most of it overlooking the fact that he was using centuries-advanced tech to accomplish it, as if that wasn't cheating -- get everyone to bend the knee to him, and then go conquer some more. Really, he only starts to become interesting once he reaches a point, following both many successes and multiple defeats, that he finally starts to evaluate it.  That as a time-traveler he's essentially had arguments between his sage and sedate "dad" self and his horribly-extended, angry, rebellious self, also adds some interest. But Kang himself, in his usual mode? Not someone I've really enjoyed nor felt empathetic to.    

     I may add notes in blue as I roll into and through the weekend, but for the moment that's what I have for this week. Here's to surviving, and finding a personal way to thrive... and to keeping yourself entertained along the way. - Mike.