What's To Watch? - Feb 3 - Clues & Motivations

 

    We seem to have escaped the Groundhog Day loop for another year, and we're rolling into the first weekend of February. I hope you've been faring well. I'm feeling worn and off-balance, which is, unfortunately, feeling all too familiar. I have some tasks set for Friday that are personally very difficult, which is always the worst kind of difficult, no?
     While I've still been watching more than I likely should - other things are being neglected - it's been a lighter viewing load, so less for me to talk about.

     Before hitting the new items, I'll tout a  couple of the better ones I've already talked up in one or more previous Friday columns:

     Rian Johnson's mystery of the week series, starring Natasha Lyonne, exclusive to Peacock - Poker Face - gave us the first four episodes last week, and added the fifth yesterday, and there hasn't been a bad moment in the mix. The character and the formula work, and so far show no sign of wearing out any welcomes. This past week's episode did a very nice job of flipping audience expectations and how they were reading some of the characters. The only blind eye the series really asks the viewer to turn is perhaps to the matter of someone finding a string of jobs while she's deliberately avoiding some powerful and connected people who are under pressure to find her. Still, she's smart, glib, attractive, excellent at reading people, and likely isn't too picky about type of work and pay, so maybe that still can work for short term gigs even in 2023.
     It's only going to be a 10-episode season, so we're already halfway through it. I simultaneously want the back half of the season, and am already lamenting the (hopeful) wait for season two.

     HBO/HBO Max's post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us is now three episodes in and continues to impress. This past weekend's episode took a character from the game adventure, and made a full episode of his life with another character.

    In "Long, Long Time", we experience much of the stretch from 2003, when the cordyceps plague quickly took everything apart, and the military took drastic, sometimes tragic action to relocate and preserve some, while pre-emptively killing off others much as one might burn large sections of forest to create a fire break. The dead can't be infected.
     In adapting the game to a dramatic series there have been changes, because what makes for good gameplay isn't going to work, note for note, as a drama. There is a Bill and Frank in the game, but their arc is different, and undefined - partnership and friendship is about as much as we could know, aside from us knowing that what happened to Frank helped harden Bill's heart against the dangers of caring for someone else. The show went a different direction, with a different message, about having someone to care for being essential, and fleshed out the Bill and Frank story. Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett play Nick and Frank in the episode.
     The story modifications are making for another culture war moment for some.

     It being February, containing Valentine's Day, it seems appropriate to include at least one romantic comedy each week. So, I'll add the recently-arrived (a week ago, on January 27th) Netflix film You People (118m). The film plays with a relationship developing from a chance meeting and misunderstanding between White, Jewish Ezra (Jonah Hill) and Black, raised Muslim Amira (Lauren London), and the related fallout involving friends and especially family.

     I've steered clear of full reviews, and otherwise see that the reception's decidedly mixed. The cast and trailer have me thinking there's some promise here -- with expectations appropriately lowered, as I'm going to presume the comedy's kept broad. I may give this a try sometime this weekend.

   Listed as a superhero comedy, a British series arrived late this past month here in the U.S. on Hulu (outside the U.S. it's on Disney+), set in a world where on their 18th birthday nearly everyone suddenly expresses some superpower. Aside from the familiar standards of super strength or speed, or flight, there's shape-shifting, teleportation, telepathy, and basically anything that might occur to someone. Sense emotions? Understand animals? Channel the dead? Phase through solid objects? Affect the flow of time? Make anyone one talks to unable to tell a lie? There are a variety of bizarre, niche powers in the mix, too, but those are more fun to take as they come. We see people whose power should allow them to write their own ticket, instead, failing to do so, and being exploited for basic wages.
     Principally the series follows Jen, now 25, who has yet to manifest a power.The powers are a metaphor for adult success, and so Jen is in that failure to launch category, affecting her social life in general, and status within the family. On the family front, an extra complication is that her mother has long since remarried, so it's a blended family. Her father is dead. That one of her best mates can channel the dead at least gives Jen selective access to her late father, so there's that.
     The series leans on the comedy label, which is to say one's not meant to get lost in the weeds with many serious questions. You're free to weigh all of the aspects of the powers and what should be happening in the world as a result, but don't hold your breath waiting for the series to join you in that effort.
     All of this, is... Extraordinary

     The 8-episode first season is all there, and a second season was green lit a couple days before the show debuted, so more will be coming.
     It's hardly MENSA material, but it's a fun gimmick to play with. Popcorn viewing. Burning through two or three episodes at a clip is fairly easy, but I still have two or three to go, so I'm not sure where Jen and friends are left at the end of season one. This was something I mostly just stumbled across this week, a reminder that it had probably been a couple weeks since I last checked in on Hulu.

     Now that I was back to looking around Hulu, I just started to check out a new ABC crime procedural centered on yet another quirky, neuro-divergent, detective, this one being Will Trent.

    Abandoned by his parents as a child, Will grew up in the deeply flawed Atlanta foster system. As we discover during the first two episodes, he has a learning disability which he has figured workarounds for. His mind works differently, he sees the world from a different perspective, which proves invaluable for his chosen profession as a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), but frequently puts him at odds with others. When we meet him he's particularly alienated, as his work investigating police corruption led to the arrests of multiple officers, so the general hostility toward him from much of law enforcement is fairly raw and open. As the GBI and Atlanta Police Department not only have to work together, but share the same building, contact and abrasion are a daily affair.
     His direct superior, Amada Wagner (played by storied Wire alum, Sonja Sohn), has protected and nurtured Trent, and in general has been watching for potential talent in the ranks. She has assigned one of the APD officers, Faith Mitchell (played by Iantha Richardson), to work with Trent, granting her temporary status with the GBI. Wagner's spotted a possibly matched, complementary set of skills, and is playing sensei, pairing them to improve the other, perhaps both professionally and as people.

     The show airs Tuesday nights at 10 Eastern, available on Hulu the next day.
     Georgia-born author Karin Slaughter has written 13 novels (well, two were novellas) in her Will Trent series since 2006, so this is another case of trying to tap source material with some potential legs for a long run. The adaptation of the stories to the screen is keyed to develop that tv audience, and there has been some critical reaction that some of the changes may alienate fans of the novels who would be looking for a cleaner transfer. The series premise has the flaw of treating Trent's condition as something that could have been effectively concealed during all of his training and rising from the ranks, so it requires some suspension of belief by the audience. I was generally just watching it for entertainment, but there was at least one other bit, late in the second episode, that didn't seem to make any sense. It was a minor thing, and didn't involve the detectives, but it bothered me mostly inasmuch that it's a sign of low vigilance. If you happen to spot it, make mention of it.
     [Side note: The foster care survivor who uses the experience as a driver to defend others who are essentially powerless is reminiscent of Michael Connelly's LA homicide Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, though Bosch is a considerably different, far more aggressive sort than Will Trent. Bosch has been the star of 24 of Connelly's novels, and has been portrayed on the screen by Titus Welliver for seven seasons on Amazon Prime's Bosch, and then into a spin-off/continuation series as a private detective on Freevee (formerly imdbtv, an ad-driven streamer), Bosch: Legacy, that's heading toward its second season -- all worth checking out.]
     So far I've only watched the first two of the five Will Trent episodes that have been broadcast - curiously they combine to be a single case/story, which I'd traditionally expect to be put out as a tv movie, but I guess they were looking to get viewers in the habit of a weekly schedule. For some reason they're not putting a new one on next Tuesday, but it's set to be back the following week.

    Next Tuesday, the 7th, a Cannes and Sundance award-winning documentary from last year, and another Oscar contender, arrives on HBO/HBO Max. All That Breathes (2022 91m).

     
     More of my other viewing recently has been for items that moved through TCM, a mix of familiar revisits - including Sidney Lumet's directorial debut, 12 Angry Men (1957) - and a couple of utterly unconnected films from 1975: Mr. Ricco and Cooley High.
     Mr. Ricco was an odd crime drama, starring Dean Martin as a defense attorney. It was reportedly a film Martin was contractually obligated to do for MGM, as part of his casino contract. Some others had mentioned it derisively in that context, and had seen what they wanted to see, as while it was by-the-numbers for the period, it wasn't quite the sleepwalking event they'd claimed to have seen. As a point of morbid coincidence, it had an early supporting role by Cindy Williams, who died back on the 25th though no one seemed to hear about it for five days. The overlap was such that I'm thinking of her during the time I watched the film as Schrödinger's Shirley, simultaneously both alive and dead.

     Cooley High was a coming-of-age film set in 1964 Chicago, and largely drew on writer Eric Monte's experiences. It was highly successful at the time, and has been referenced as a key item in Black cinema, but little of that was reaching 14 year old me, out in suburbia. From there, any ads for it were lost in the noise of star Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs sudden tv fame on Welcome Back, Kotter, and the confusion of a mostly downward spiral of blacksploitation films -- an association Cooley High most definitely did not deserve. I'm glad I at least got to correct that for myself.

     The full film's available on YouTube, too, with commercial breaks.

     A completely other path saw me note that the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel of the same name, A Scanner Darkly (2006 R  1h 40m) is available over on Tubi -- and I see is also available on YouTube. I was fortunate to have one of the 17 locations the film was briefly released to back in the summer of 2006 as one of our nearby theaters, where I and then 14 year-old son, Nick, saw it.
     It's a peculiar work, whose production was riddled with problems in large part due to the decision to do a particular form of rotoscope - a process where artists trace over the film, frame by frame, to impart an animated feel. A special software and set of artistic protocols was used in order to make it consistent, but most of the people working on it struggled to even begin to learn how to use the software, and management of them was lax to nonexistant. Serious delays and cost overruns led to more drastic actions, that still involved considerable delays, a ballooning budget, and all in service of a film that was never going to be targeted to a mainstream audience. I find it hard to believe that anyone who was in a position to sign off on it ever saw it in any terms other than how much money it would lose.  

   The film's leads are an interesting mix of careers in transition: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and Rory Cochrane. While the name, face and voice meant absolutely nothing to me back at the time, I see that a bullhorn-wielding street preacher was played by alt-right conspiracy theorist and general cultural deficit Alex Jones. The film was written and directed by Richard Linklater.
     Set in a near-future, it's centered on high-tech police state methods during a drug addiction epidemic. Layers of security protocols meant that even law enforcement didn't know, in the field, whether those they were dealing with were genuine or other undercover operatives.
     Here's the trailer from back in 2006.

     As you'd expect, it's not an upbeat film -- and as mentioned earlier, it was never going to be mainstream one. All that said, it's s small wonder it was made.

     That's all the time I have for this week. Take care, and we'll see what's come and coming up next Friday. - Mike