Television

What I Watched August 2019

/ skoce / 1 Comment

Movies

Focus – This movie is a really unfortunate near miss. It stars Margo Robbie and Will Smith as con artist. They work together for a while, but Smith feels they are growing too close so he leaves her. A year or so later, they encounter each other elsewhere, with Smith in the middle of another con and Robbie apparently with the mark. The movie just never quite hits with the force it feels like it should, like it is jogging instead of sprinting. Still, it is pretty enjoyable. ***

Dora the Explorer – read review here. ***1/2

The Kitchen – read review here. **

Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw – read review here. ****

Carol – This movie is excellent. It is a kind of languorous romance between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It is just really, really well made. *****

Ready or Not – read review here. ****

Angel Has Fallen – read review here. **

TV

GLOW S3 – This has always been a show with a strong ensemble, and this season really puts the focus on that ensemble. For once, the show’s best moments aren’t really tied to its main characters, but instead to the supporting crew. It doesn’t all work, I don’t think RHonda and Bash get more interesting with more time devoted to them, but for the most part it makes GLOW a deeper, more interesting show. It isn’t like Marc Maron, Betty Gilpin and Allison Brie stopped being excellent, but they are excellent in slightly smaller quantities this season. I hope we get more of this show.

She-Ra S3 – This show continues to be really good children’s entertainment. I am not sure I like the strategy of doing short, relatively frequent releases of batches of episodes. That is pretty much how I lost track of the second half of Voltron, a show I was really enjoying. So far, the first 25 or so episodes of She-Ra have been really strong. It feels like things are about to undergo a major shift after this; the relationship between Catra and Adora seems well and truly broken at this point.

Fleabag S1&2 – I heard so many good things about this show that I felt like I had to give it a watch. I am glad I did, Fleabag very nearly lived up to its lofty reputation. Since I am writing this post, I kind of want to compare it with Friends from College a few shows down, as that shows primary flaw highlights how good Fleabag is. This is a show about flawed characters, but it manages to nail the melding of comedy and drama. The characters are occasionally awful, but the show shows you them either trying to be better or reveling in their awfulness. You may laugh at their flaws, but you still want to see them do better. Friends from College has bad people who can’t admit that they are bad people and is unclear if you are supposed to root for them or laugh at them. This is an excellent show.

The Tick S2 – I kind of lost track of this show after the first half-season, but I caught up with the rest of it a couple of weeks ago. For a show titled The Tick it sure does lose track of the character The Tick for long tracks of time. I am not complaining about the focus on Arthur, but really there didn’t seem to be much for the Tick to do for much of this show. For the most part, it is a more serious, more focused superhero parody than the previous version of this show. It is mostly a lot of fun to just hang around on the world of the show, but I found that it didn’t really stick with me after it ended. That is how I ended up losing track of the show for the better part of a year. Still, it was good enough and I am sad that the show is gone.

Dear White People S3 – I don’t know what to say. The first two seasons of this show were favorites of mine, but this season feels a little unfocused. It felt a little less trenchant and incisive. Not bad in any way, but the excellence of the first two seasons is a hard standard to maintain and I feel like this one slipped a little bit. I don’t really have anything else to say. Watch it; it is still good.

Last Chance U S4 – I have only been vaguely aware of this show until now, but this latest season was pretty interesting. It is a tragedy; it starts with a team with title aspirations that collapses completely. It is pretty hard to watch at times, with the coach really making himself look like a heel. It is both sad and really entertaining.

Rocko’s Modern Life Static Cling – This feels like it should be more. It is good, but it feels like a couple of episodes of Rocko jammed together. That is not a bad thing, but it is kind of odd for a cartoon that has been over for twenty years. It was a good pair of episodes and had a good message, but they felt pretty insubstantial. Hopefully this gets some youngsters to watch Rocko’s Modern Life. It was a favorite of mine growing up.

Veronica Mars S4 – I didn’t really watch the first three seasons of Veronica Mars. I’ve seen bits of it, way back when, but I didn’t really watch it. I did watch season 4, which is close to everything I want in a TV show. It is a big murder mystery with fun characters. It manages to do both lightness and heaviness without either feeling like they are straining the tone. I didn’t really care for the ending, which felt kind of cheap. I feel like there is a lot I am missing having not seen much of the previous Veronica Mars stuff, but I enjoyed what I saw here.

Friends From College S2 – I absolutely hated the first season of this show, but people told me that the second season was a major improvement. I guess they weren’t wrong; season two is better than season one, but it is still not good. Not one of these people are likeable. The drama and comedy in this series don’t meet, much of it on the unlikeable characters. The drama requires the viewer investing in their stories, but the comedy comes from their inherent awfulness. It just doesn’t work.

Mindhunter S2 – I am not quite as in love with this show as a lot of people seem to be. I mean, the show is good, but this season seemed to get kind of lost in a plot it had no way of solving. Maybe it is just that I didn’t pay as close attention as I should have, but my mind wandered. Maybe my mind wandering says enough about what I thought of this season. The Atlanta child murders do not make for a satisfying case, mostly because of how unresolved it remains. The highlights of the first season were the highlights, there were very few of them in this season. Still, people seem to really like this show.

Magnum PI S3&4 – I’ve written about this show in a post that will be going up soon. I love it more than I should. This show is just about perfect comfort food.

Cannon Busters – I watch some anime, but not a lot. When this showed up, I was pretty interested. The trailers showed echoes of shows like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo and Trigun, which make up a large portion of the anime I really like. The show is fine. It is almost exactly what I wanted, but the parts where it isn’t quite what I wanted are a big miss. The show never quite grows out of being an echo of other shows, and never actually becomes its own thing.

Recap of the Titans 1

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Season 2 Episode 1: Trigon

I am trying something new here. For the next twelve weeks, a new episode of Titans will be hitting the DCUniverse app. I am going to write a review of each one.

‘Trigon’ pick up where things left off almost a year ago. Rachel/Raven’s father, the demon Trigon, has shown up. Donna and Kory are stuck outside the farmhouse where this demon summoning is occurring. Inside, Raven and Gar are on the run from Dick. Dick has turned evil, thanks to the events in the hallucinatory finale last season. As Raven and Gar escape from the demonically controlled Dick, back-up arrives; Hawk and Dove have teamed up with Jason Todd and tracked the team down. Together with Kory and Donna they try to get into the farmhouse to help.

That turns out to be exactly what Trigon wanted. Each member of the team goes through the same thing Dick did; visions that get them to give in to their dark side. There are some interesting ways that happens here. Donna faces the death of her father, Kori finishing her mission to stop Raven from summoning Trigon, etc. It is a good look at characters who maybe didn’t quite get the focus that some of the others did in the last season. It ends with everyone, save Gar, turned to the demonic side. The now evil team then assaults Gar, until he can snap Raven out of her evil trance. Then Raven uses her powers to do the same for Dick. While this was going on, Trigon has assumed his true demon form and killed Raven’s mother. Raven confronts him and pretty summarily defeats him. With Trigon gone, the team goes back to normal.

Then the show moves into wrap up; the various characters go their separate ways. Dick has a little heart to heart with Bruce Wayne and decides to officially bring the Titans back, with Jason, Raven and Gar sticking around to be on the team. Donna, Hawk and Dove go back to their lives, while Kori heads to her home planet.  Meanwhile, Deathstroke the Terminator has heard the Titans are back and decides to come out of retirement to take them on.

There is no getting around this: this episode is not really the first of a new season, it is the finale of last season. I don’t know why DC decided to hold it back for this season; I would guess there were some reshoots at the end once they knew the show was coming back for a second season.  Adding in the bit with Bruce and the final reveal seem like late additions. That makes it hard to dig into, though, because it has been a year since the set ups that this episode pays off.  It took me a while to remember exactly how things left off, especially with characters like Hawk and Dove. Once the show finishes with the Trigon plot, which is fairly well executed horror themed superhero stuff, it does get into setting up the coming season. At least, I hope that is what it was doing. The team goes their separate ways, but other than Hawk and Dove I find it hard to believe they won’t all be back. And I would bet against Hawk and Dove coming back.

While the immediate problem has been solved, the larger problems these damaged teens and no longer teens have issues to sort out. Dick appears to have wrestled with his dark side, for now, and Raven is ready to do something other than run from her devil daddy. The big revelation of this episode is Slade Wilson, i.e. Deathstroke. In the comics, he makes for a much more interesting villain than Trigon, who has never been all that interesting.  Deathstroke manages to be both obviously evil, he is an assassin who spends a lot of his time trying to kill teenagers, but also to have some depth. With Deathstroke working to tear this nascent team apart, I am sure things will get interesting fast.

The other thing that needs to be addressed with the show is the darkness that seemed to kind of doom the show’s reception last year.  A lot of people seem to have written it off from the first trailer, which is really doing what is a very good show a disservice.  There is darkness in this show, but it has only rarely felt out of place. There is darkness inherent is so many of these characters. The first season, and this episode, primarily focused on Raven and Dick. Raven’s story is straight up dark; she is the child of a literal demon. Fighting her demonic heritage is a big part of her character. Dick is a dark character if you really look at it. His parents were murdered by the mob and he was taken in by a billionaire who suffered a similar tragedy and decided to take revenge on the very concept of crime. He has not lead a normal life, or on free of darkness. Now, comic book Dick Grayson is usually notable for how bright a character he is, especially in the context of Batman characters. This show, at least so far, has gone a different direction, but not one that is unheard of. That said, this episode feels like it purged a lot of the remaining overt darkness. I don’t expect the show to be lightness from here on, but I expect the buoyancy that shined in the middle episodes of last season to take over a little more.

That is all for this week, but I am really ready for the actual start of the new season next week.

Marvel Netflix

/ skoce / Leave a comment

The Netflix Marvel team up started with such high hopes and genuine success that the sorry state it ended up in as it winds down with Jessica Jones’ third season is really disappointing. Well, Jessica Jones S3 is not all that disappointing; it is a good deal better than the kind of miserable second season and a solid, if still flawed, grace note to end this whole endeavor. But the project ends up feeling kind of disappointing.

Netflix’s Marvel partnership started strong with Daredevil, but the problems that would hamper everything going forward were already present. It was too long, with 13 hour long episodes to tell a story that did not need to be anywhere near that long. It was also pretty dour, fitting for that season of that show but still true. These loosely connected shows, though, exhibited an uncanny ability to lean into their flaws. It seemed like anything that was a problem in a previous show would be doubled down on in the next show or season. That is how we got to the nadir with the first season of Iron Fist, a good four or five hours of story spread thinly across thirteen, done with seriousness and grimness entirely unfitting for a show about a man who grew up in a city of magical martial artists and can conjure mystical powers in his fist. I have no idea what the streaming numbers look like, but I know my interest was already well and truly waning at that point. I faded a bit more with each season down the stretch, though I would rate Jessica Jones season 1 a little better than Daredevil’s first, and eventually I kind of lost interest in each show. I hoped Iron Fist would be the one to pull me back. Of the four characters originally chosen for this Defenders project, he is the only one that is the most consistently fun in the comics. Daredevil is almost never fun. Jessica Jones can be fun, but her stories tend to be more serious noir detective stories. Luke Cage is kind of in the middle; he can be tremendously fun, especially when teaming up with Iron Fist, but also lends himself to serious work.

One thing all of these shows, save Daredevil, consistently failed to do was reflect what made their comics entertaining. The shows all seemed to shy from their comic roots. They pulled the characters and set ups, as well as bits of plots and stories, but left everything else behind. This was especially the relationships between the characters. I’ll be honest, seeing those develop was one of the things I was most interested in and it never happened. I am sure there are good, production related reasons for that, but it doesn’t make it any less disappointing. I’d rather have had one season of Danny and Luke teaming up in Heroes for Hire than both shows’ season 2s. The fact that the two characters, most famous for teaming up with each other, barely interacted outside of Defenders, was a mistake and a disappointment. It is why seeing Luke Cage and Jessica Jones in Jessica Jones season one dissipate was disappointing. It is not that that is the only story about them that matters, but that it is the story I most wanted to see. The shows also did that in format. They all wanted to be important, “prestige” television, even when that was not the best fit for the characters. Jessica Jones is a private investigator, the fact that the show couldn’t find things to fill the dead space in seasons was sheer ineptitude. They could have taken some cues from mysteries or procedurals, but those shows aren’t “prestige” so that was not the route taken. It is also true with costuming. Daredevil had a Daredevil costume, but the other shows ran as far away as they could from their comic looks. That sort of mocking the comics bullshit worked with X-Men in 1999, but twenty years later it is pretty sorry. If you are going to make a show about Hellcat, have her dress like Hellcat. Iron Fist is a silly character, give him a silly costume.

Jessica Jones was the best series of the group. I had the best overall season, and its sophomore effort was not quite the unmitigated disaster that Daredevil season two was. Even that show had a problem with spinning its wheels with one interminable season long plot every time out. The biggest problem with all of the Marvel Netflix shows is that they were just good enough to keep me watching. There was always a scene, or a story or a performance that made me want to see more, even though I rarely walked away from a show actually enjoying it. And they started to figure things out at the end. The two shows that got season 3s improved from their season 2s. Iron Fist Season 2 was shortened. Maybe they were slowly righting the ship.

Now, the Marvel Netflix partnership is over. Most new Marvel shows are going to be on Disney+, and actually tied to the MCU, unlike the unfulfilled promise of the Netflix shows. Maybe they will be good, maybe not. Marvel also still has some other outlier TV shows going on some networks. Hulu’s Runaways, a show whose first season disappointed me and I have yet to get to the second, is still ongoing. There is also a Cloak and Dagger show that I think is still running. The interesting, but flawed, The Gifted has ended, as has the even more interesting Legion, which with Fox being bought by Disney opens up the X-Men for a completely fresh start. TV networks seem determined to find the absolute maximum amount of superhero content that can be created and they don’t seem to think they’ve reached it yet. Continue reading →

What I Watched July 2019

/ skoce / 1 Comment

Movies

Point Blank – A “buddy” action movie with Anthony Mackie and Frank Grillo. It is fine. ***

Toy Story 4 – read review here.

Yesterday – read review here.

Late Night – read review here.

Men in Black: International – read review here.

Spider-Man: Far From Home – read review here.

Stuber – read review here.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – read review here.

Megamind – This is a fairly solid Dreamworks movie from a decade or so ago. It is a superhero movie, where the Superman analogue uses a plot by the titular villain to fake his death and retire. Megamind has no idea how to deal with success and tries to create a new hero to fight. It isn’t anything groundbreaking, but it is reasonably fun. ***1/2

Secret Obsession – A woman is attacked, but manages to escape with her life. Unfortunately, she has amnesia about what happened. She goes home with her husband, which builds to a thriller about who attacked her. It is fine, if nonsensical. **1/2

The Lion King – read review here.

Jack of All Trades – A documentary about baseball cards, but also about one of the director reconnecting with his dad. It goes some interesting places, but it fails to really fully tell either story. ***

Peterloo – Maybe this would be different if I was more familiar with the historical event it is based on, but I didn’t much care for this. It is dry and, frankly, boring. I’m not asking for action or anything; I want characters that stand out in some way or more interesting dialogue. Its fine, I guess, but I didn’t much care for it. **1/2

Inglourious Basterds – I believe that this is Tarantino’s masterpiece. I guess most of his movies could be called masterpieces, but in my opinion this movie is his best. From that opening scene, where Hans Landa shows the viewer exactly who he is as he slowly closes the net around a French farmer and the Jewish family hiding under the floorboards, to the violent finale, this movie is impossible to look away from. *****

Under the Silver Lake – I hated this movie. It is a kind of paranoid mystery starring a 20 something Los Angeles douche. It just never did anything to get me to care about this creep or the mystery he was investigating. *1/2

Pulp Fiction – I went back to this movie after seeing Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood to see if it still holds up. It does. I think Tarantino has really improved as a filmmaker since this movie, but this is still a lot of fun to watch. *****

TV

Frankenstein’s Monster’s Monster, Frankenstein – This is a perfect piece of entertainment. It is full on nonsense. David Harbour plays David Harbour III, as well as his father David Harbour, Jr. As the son he looks into what happened to his celebrated actor father, while watching a play his father produced for TV about Frankenstein. The play is weird, the dad is weird, David is surprised by literally everything, Alfred Molina shows up for some reason, and maybe there was a murder. I don’t know why Netflix made this 30 minutes of weirdness, but my only complaint is that it is only 30 minutes long.

Stranger Things 3 – I feel like a show I like this much should inspire more from me in a review. I loved season 3; it turned itself into a big 80’s action movie instead of the smaller scale sci-fi thriller the first season was. It is not unlike the transformation of Rambo after First Blood. Or maybe Alien to Aliens. It is still a fun synthesis of tons of 80’s classics that also manages to create some very interesting and compelling characters. It is a show that knows exactly what it is and executes that perfectly. This show is great.

Always Sunny 13 – This show has still got it. The struggles without a full season of Dennis are dealt with perfectly. I liked the remake episode on the plane. I liked Mindy Kaling as the equally awful but actually competent Dennis replacement. This show is just so good.

3 Below Part 2 – I’ve really been enjoying these Arcadia shows. This one feels kind of truncated, like it was supposed to run another season but had to ramp up to the end here. Still, I liked it a lot.

Daredevil S3 – I genuinely hated the second season of Daredevil. I guess The Punisher was fine, but all the Hand/Stick/Elektra/Ninja stuff fell completely flat. Luckily, all that crap is gone. Instead, we get all new crap. Okay, not really. Instead, we get mostly a retread of the first season. The first season was really good so that isn’t really a bad thing. It can’t quite recapture that magic, though. Mostly because to keep this plot going for the full 13 hours, a lot of characters have to be really stupid to keep Kingpin around and not in jail. It is fine.

Kakugurui XX – I can’t explain why I watched the first season of this, let alone a second. It is an anime set in a high school with all kinds of rituals set up around weird gambling games. The fly in the ointment is newcomer Yumeko, who loves to gamble, but only for the thrill of it. She doesn’t seem to care if she wins or loses. After her arrival last season, the Student Council President calls an election, which brings in a whole lot of poorly explained intrigue. Also, votes in the election are actually casino chips. The show is here just for weird gambles and Yumeko getting sexually aroused from the act of gambling.

The Boys – Seriously, I am writing a full post about his show. Not because it is the best or most interesting thing on TV, but because I have things to say about this. I guess it is worth watching.

Magnum PI S2 – So Magnum is back on Amazon Prime to stream, and I am going to try to get through it. I love this show; it uses its setting to work with a variety of tones and styles for mysteries. You get sun drenched but tonally dark noirs, thrillers building out of the characters’ Vietnam history, and jokey mysteries just messing around in the Hawaiian surf. The fact that it all feels of a piece is amazing, and a testament to the cast. This is just a really good show that should be even more well remembered than it is.

White Dragon – This could be called “Also, A White Guy was There.” No offense to John Simm, who is fine as the protagonist, but his character is completely unnecessary. He gets a message from his wife, who is later reported killed in Hong Kong. Once there, he learns that his wife had another family. He and her other husband reluctantly team up to find who killed their wife and why. It is a pretty bog standard thriller.

Costume Quest – Hey Costume Quest was fun little game, an RPG where changing Halloween costumes was akin to change class. This is a fun little cartoon, though since every day can’t be Halloween it kind of strains the premise a little bit. Still, it is fine.

What I Watched June 2019

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies

Backdraft 2 – I don’t know why someone thought we needed a sequel to mid-tier hit from the 90’s; we didn’t. This movie is shockingly competent, if not especially good. I mean, it is full blown nonsense and I can’t recommend it to anybody. But I kind of enjoyed a bit. **

Hot Fuzz – Yup, I still love it. *****

Murder Mystery – I can’t remember the last time I genuinely enjoyed an Adam Sandler movie. This movie almost leans into the criticisms of Sandler movies being an excuse to take a vacation on the production company’s dime, but it somehow works. There just appears to be more effort put in here, on the scripting and directing, than other movies. It isn’t the best mystery I’ve ever seen, but is just kind of works. This movie isn’t great, but I think it is slightly on the side of good. ***

Good Sam – Just a straight up Hallmark romance movie. I watched it for Tiya Sircar, who I knew from The Good Place. There is no reason to watch this movie. There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes, but I don’t know why you would. **

Planes, Trains and Automobiles – This movie kind of sneaks up on you. This movie does a good job of keeping the viewer’s sympathy in between Martin and Candy. Martin’s character could have been more hateful, but you see from the start that he is actually a good guy who is getting stressed. Candy’s is kind of insufferable, but even early on he seems like a generally decent guy. The whole movie just worms its way into your affections. There aren’t many Thanksgiving movies, but with one this good do we need any others. ****1/2

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – This movie holds up shockingly well. The turtles still look good; those are some excellent special effects. Maybe there is too much nostalgia for me to adequately judge this movie, but I think it is genuinely excellent. ****

Wheels on Meals – Hey, you know who is great? Jackie Chan. You know who else is great? Sammo Hung. One final great thing: this movie. It is just so full of energy, such great fight choreography. The fight near the end it just excellent. I loved this movie. ****1/2

Rocketman – Read Review here.

Yesterday – Read Review here.

Late Night – Read Review here.

TV

Documentary Now S3 – I’ve really liked everything I’ve seen from this series. The third season expands things somewhat. Instead of all of the fake documentaries involving Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, there are a lot of guest stars, from Michael Keaton to Cate Blanchett to John Mulaney. There is also still a lot of Fred Armisen. These are still pitch perfect fake documentaries. They are funny, but there is also a humanity there. Even the subjects that are the source of comedy get a touch of empathy before the end. This show is just pretty much everything I want out of television.

When They See Us – Is this a TV mini-series or a nearly four hour movie broken up into smaller chunks? It doesn’t matter. What it is is one of the best things you can watch on any screen. When They See Us tells the story of the Central Park 5, a group of young black and Hispanic boys railroaded by the New York police and wrongfully convicted of rape and assault. This show digs in and tells the story from their heartbreaking perspective. It shows how the cultural climate of the time, egged on in part by a degenerate con man, a rapist himself, who called for their death before any evidence was shown, helped lead to this miscarriage of justice. It shows the struggles of their families as they try to get through it. It shows how the stigma followed them afterwards until they were able to prove their innocence. It is wonderfully acted, wonderfully shot, and completely heartbreaking. This is just one of the best things of the year.

Good Omens – I really wish I had encountered this book, and more Terry Pratchett in general, when I was younger. I’ve got it on my kindle and expect to enjoy it when I finally get around to it, but judging by this show it is something that would have really made an impact on me as a teenager. If I was prepared to handle it; there is still some part of my very conservative, fundamentalist Christian upbringing existing that recoils at the blasphemy here. I unabashedly love this show. Michael Sheen and David Tennant are great as the central angel and demon who are trying to prevent the apocalypse that is supposedly the plan of both sides, motivated by concerns like how hard it will be to get a good meal when all the humans are dead. Around them are a ton of other interesting, and more vital to the eventual outcome, characters, like the young woman with the book of always correct prophesies or the new witch-hunter who has problems with technology. The central conflict rest on the shoulders of a normal young boy who, it turns out, is the antichrist. It is a perfect combination of cleverness and irreverence.

Jessica Jones S3 – I’ve got a big post-mortem about the entire Marvel Netflix project in the works, waiting only on me finishing the third season of Daredevil, so I will have more to say about this there. For now, I’ll say that season 3 of Jessica Jones is a bounce back after the near disaster of season 2. It does have a complete dud of a villain, but the conflicts between its primary cast are good and believable. I don’t really like where it left things, but that is where it had to leave things after the season that was.

Hanna – I really can’t say why I stuck with this to the end. It’s not bad; it is actually quite well produced, but the show never really clicked with me. The central plot, of genetically engineered super-soldier that just happens to be a young girl, is a lot more interesting in theory than in practice.

What I Watched May 2019

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies:

Knocking Down the House – This pretty solid political documentary managed to catch lightning in a bottle. It focused on several left-leaning primary campaigns in the 2016 election, all of which save one ended in defeat for the candidate they were following, save one. That one, though, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So it follows the earnestness of these progressive primary challenges and just so happens to catch a surprising political upset and the beginning of a political star. It is very interesting, which is what you want out of a documentary. ****

The Hustle – read review here. **1/2

Long Shot – read review here. ****

The Bank Job – A solid Jason Statham vehicle that is based on a true story, though I think that is loose here. Someone is blackmailing the royal family with nude photos, stored in a deposit box at a bank. Jason Statham is hired to rob the bank, but he knows nothing of this other motive; he’s in it because he needs the money. What follows is a solid heist movie. ***

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile – This movie isn’t perfect, but I liked it. Zac Efron does a great job as Bundy, and the movie wisely does not focus on his crimes, but more on his eventual capture. It lets it focus, for a while at least, more on Lily Collins’s character as she deals with not knowing whether the man she is living with is actually a serial killer or if it is a case of mistaken identity. It doesn’t shy away from what Ted Bundy was, either. It is right in the title. Still, it doesn’t quite have anything to say other than what the title says. ***

Wine Country – A sort of hang out movie with a great cast of SNL alums. It is never quite as good as you want it to be, mostly because there are a few too many characters for any of them to get the room they need, but it is still a largely really enjoyable movie with some big laughs. ****

Detective Pikachu – read review here. ****

John Wick 3 – read review here. *****

Tolkien – read review here. ***1/2

Aladdin – read review here. ****

Rim of the World – This movie from McG is trying desperately to ape kids movies from the 80s and it mostly succeeds. It doesn’t succeed on an E.T. level, or even a Gremlins level, but it manages something around Explorers. It is fine, I could see a kid of the right age really latching on to it, but it is a mess in some ways. Still, I enjoyed it. ***

See You Yesterday – This movie is excellent. It is a time travel movie that starts out fooling you into believing you are in for a romp, with a Michael J. Fox cameo that echoes Back to the Future. It then turns into something altogether more thoughtful. The two protagonists have created a working time machine. Unfortunately, they have to test it out to save one of the character’s brother from getting shot by police. So they keep looping the same afternoon, trying to stop it and things keep getting worse before somewhat salvaging the situation. Despite that premise, it never gets too heavy. It is just really good. ****

Take Me Home Tonight – I’ve seen most of this movie before, but I forgot that I actually kind of really like it. I like Topher Grace, and [other guy] is a fun as well. It has some misses and some lulls, but overall I’ve found it to be very enjoyable. ***½

The Last Summer – It’s fine. This is a teen romantic comedy about how a bunch of kids spend their last summer before college. It spreads its attention really thin amongst a lot of characters, but manages to be just on the charming side of things. ***

American Experience: The Island Murder – This is truly an American story. A woman reports being raped and beaten, so the authorities round up the nearest brown people they can find and accuse them of the crime. Even as the criminality of the white family involved becomes not just apparent but blatant, the prosecutors, hounded by the Navy brass who are involved, just keep on going after the obvious scapegoats, despite no evidence and their involvement and plenty of evidence corroborating their alibi. What could be more American? ***

Always Be My Maybe – A pretty solid rom-com starring Ali Wong and Randall Park as high school sweethearts who have grown apart. But they end up meeting back up and a rom-com happens. It is pretty fun, with a great Keanu Reeves appearance. It is just a solid execution of a formula. ****

TV:

Dead to Me S1 – The cast is great. The premise is a little too soapy for me. The twists just get a little too ridiculous. I did like the slow reveal of just how awful James Marsden’s character is, as he comes off reasonable early on and each subsequent time he shows up he looks worse and worse. The heightened stuff in this show doesn’t work that well for me. I still liked the show, but only liked it, not loved it.

The Punisher S2 – There is a really good Assault on Precinct 13 episode early on in the second season of the Punisher. You might as well stop watching there, because little past that is worthwhile. I didn’t hate it, but I really only kept going out of some masochistic desire to watch all of the Netflix Marvel stuff. Only Daredevil S3 and Jessica Jones S3 remain.

Doom Patrol S1 – This show needs its own post. I loved it. I loved every weird, nonsensical moment of it. It is a show about a superhero team of fundamentally broken characters, all in different ways. Their struggles are reflected in their powers. The stand out, to me at least, is Robotman. Cliff Steele was a famous race car driver who was seemingly killed, along with his wife and daughter, in an accident. Except the Chief saved his brain and put it in a robot body. He has super strength and invulnerability, but can’t feel anything. He has also become just as inhuman on the outside as he feels on the inside. Because Cliff Steele was kind of a jerk. He is not really central to the conflict of the season, but he is the driving force on the team. The rest are content with or at least accepting of their exile from the world, but Cliff can’t take it. He wants to do things. He may be trying to be a better person, even though he might not be a person anymore. He is also filled with self-loathing, and maybe does not feel he deserves to live. I kind of love it.

Catch-22 – This show is kind of stuck between two modes. It is both a satire and a straight drama, but it doesn’t quite manage to square its two different genres. Which is a shame, because each of them is great. The heightened stuff is marvelous, with the amoral [], the officers sole focus on getting promotions. The weird bureaucratic decisions made all over the place and the slow break down of the protagonist as he is trapped forever running dangerous bombing missions. Then there is the true drama that deals with the horrors of war that also works, when the two are juxtaposed it all kind of falls apart. I wish it worked better, because this is so close to being something I really loved, but it misses just enough to leave me a little disappointed.

The Flash S5 – I want to do a post going into all of the superhero TV shows, a genre that is kind of getting away from me, so I am not going to say much about this year’s season of The Flash (or the other DC CW shows). I thought it was a step up from the last season. The show still seems to always want to lean into its weaknesses, but this season had some good stuff.

Supergirl S4 – Supergirl bit off more than it could chew early on, but I think it managed to kind of bring things in for a landing. I am glad it didn’t let [bad guy] get redemption. He didn’t deserve it. I really liked the Dreamer and Brainy stuff. I hope the show doesn’t turn Lena into a villain. Solid, but flawed.

Legends of Tomorrow S4 – It couldn’t keep up the excellence of Season 3, but the drop off was slight. This show, despite no longer really being based on anything that resembles the comics origins of a few of the characters, is the best superhero show on (broadcast) tv. I can’t wait for next season.

Brooklyn 99 S6 – Each additional episode of Brooklyn 99 feels like an unexpected gift. I don’t know that this season was anything exceptional, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina S2 – I think this show could benefit from shorter episodes. There is a lot it does well. Honestly, it does almost everything well. But at the end of each episode I feel kind of exhausted. It always feels like a little too much, and that it is a little too slowly paced. The cast is great, and I really enjoyed this season, but it feels like it could be tightened up a little bit. It is no Netflix Marvel show when it comes to bloat, and the overall stories are solid, but if you are not in it for a long haul binge, it is kind of tough on an episode to episode watch.

Bob’s Burgers S9 – I don’t know that I have much to say about Bob’s Burgers. The show is great, it continues to be great. There were some really excellent episodes this season, and some that were merely fine. This show is one of my favorites ever, and though it has been running for a long time it hasn’t started slipping.

Ken Burns Civil War – A solid, long recounting of the major events of the Civil War. It is a Ken Burns documentary, you should know what you are getting. The biggest problem with it is how prominently it features talking head Shelby Foote, who is a nonsense lost-causer. His presence provides “balance” by having someone who is wrong and loves the Confederacy. Otherwise, I really enjoyed it.

She-Ra S2 – More She-Ra goodness, but only a little more. After spending the first season getting to know the world and characters, the second season has started to dig more deeply into those characters. There just aren’t enough episodes here.

Roman Empire: The Mad Empire – A sort of half-drama, half-historical reenactment of the reign of Caligula. It is fine, the history part kind of hampered by the fact that most commonly used historical sources are not especially reliable, which makes telling the “true” story completely impossible. Still, it is fine.

White Gold S2 – I wasn’t a huge fan of the first season of this show, but I think it improved a lot this time around, even if it wasn’t quite as focused. Maybe I just knew a little more of what to expect from it this time around. The problem is that I don’t really like any of the characters. It is certainly possible to have a show were all the characters are monsters, look at Always Sunny, but this seems like it kind of wants you to care about them. Still, it is pretty funny.

Tuca & Bertie S1 – This might just be a little too weird for me. There are a lot of great moments, and it handles some heavy issues well, but it is just strange in a way that doesn’t quite work for me. I don’t know what to say. It is a great show; give it a shot. But one of its strengths is having a specific voice and tone which may not work for everyone.

What I Watched April 2019

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies

Observe and Report – God, this is dark. Just pitch black. Seth Rogen is a mall cop with delusions of being a cop. He just keeps pushing things further and further, supposedly towards his goal, but his understanding of everything is fucked up. Just watching how deep he goes just amanges to be more funny that disturbing. ****

The Legend of Cocaine Island – This is a wild ride. In the midst of the recession, a man learns of an urban legend of cocaine buried on an island near Florida. He hatches a plan to go get it. This documentary tells how it all went wrong. It is really enjoyable. ***1/2

Hellboy – read review here. *1/2

Shazam – read review here. *****

Austin Powers in Goldmember – I’ve written about the Austin Powers movies before. I watched this as background noise while studying for finals. ****

Avengers: Infinity War – I liked this better on a rewatch. It is still a two and half hour climax that somehow ends with an anti-climax. It’s pretty good. ****

Thor: Ragnarok – I liked this a lot when it came out, but I think I like it even more now. Like, it might be my favorite Marvel movie. Everytime I watch it, it gets better. *****

Avengers: Endgame – read review here. ***1/2

Snatch – It feels like a long time since I’ve watched this. I have long been a fan of Guy Ritchie, and this is maybe his best. It intercuts between a handful of groups at various levels of criminality in the London underworld. Some are just trying to get by, some are running the game. Their stories collide and intersect in humorous and deadly ways. It is a lot of fun. *****

TV

I Think You Should Leave, with Tim Robinson – I went into this with no expectations, and it might be my favorite TV show I’ve seen all year. It is six short episodes of sketch comedy from Tim Robinson. Most of the sketches start with someone telling a lie and continue as that lie snowballs. It is such a simple conceit, but they take it in so many interesting ways. I am going to spend the next few months gushing about this show to anyone who will listen; telling them about how Scrooge saves Christmas or how skeletons use bones and/or worms for money. There are a few dud sketches, but there are so many great ones it is hard to care.

Santa Clarita Diet – I am really sad this turned out to be the last season of this Netflix show. It has been one of the service bright spots since it started. A zombie sitcom should have been a tired idea, but Santa Clarita Diet made it work. A big part of its success was the perfect comic timing, both in the writing and between its leads. Timothy Olyphant, Drew Barrymore, Liv Hewson, and Skyler Gisondo are all great. Olyphant and Barrymore especially, who are astoundingly believable as a married couple. The fact that it managed to combine the comedy with really solid heart, with making the viewer care about its characters more and more as the show went on is the biggest reason why it was so disappointing to see it cancelled. Another good Netflix show bites the dust.

Doom Patrol – Since this ends next month, I’ll write something more about it then, but this show is really good. I thought DC Universe’s Titans was better than expected, this is one of the best superhero TV shows ever made. It captures something that works for me perfectly in the self-loathing of most of its characters. That is something I’ve always related to, and it is used to great effect here.

Shrill – This stars SNL’s Aidy Bryant as a writer who struggles with having internalized the world dismissal of herself because of her weight. It manages to be pretty funny while only rarely really living up to its title. It is a solid comedy.

The Staircase – A solid documentary series about a man accused of murdering his wife. It originally follows him and his defense team as he goes through trial. There are a pair of coda series that deal with the aftermath. It might be a little too long. The best part is seeing it go into detail of how they plan his defense and seeing how it plays out in court. That is especially interesting to me, since I am currently in law school. This is really good.

The Orville – This show morphed from a comedy version of Star Trek: The Next Generation into just Star Trek: The Next Generation. The crew of the Orville is not quite as competent as that of the Enterprise, but the result is largely the same. This season expanded things from the last season, and was well worth watching for any fan of Star Trek. It isn’t a perfect show, but it is a good one.

Traitors – This was a big disappointment. It is about an English woman getting wrapped up in spying for the Americans on British citizens, looking for Soviet sympathizers. It just never really gets past the starting point. I wanted more. I love Michael Stuhlbarg, and thought the star Emma Appleton was really good, but the show just seemed kind of muted.

Bosch S5 – There is something comforting about this show. It isn’t great; it is just a solidly very good cop drama. The solving of a handful of cases, one major case and a few peripheral ones, play out over the course of ten episodes. It rarely goes too big, and balances its characters various interests. It is just very good TV. This season was no exception.

What I Watched March 2019

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies

Saving Mr. Banks – It is well enough made, though even though the rosy picture of Disney doesn’t really ring true.  Still, it is hard to argue against Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson. ***

Behind the Curve – This is a somewhat tragic documentary looking at flat-earthers.  It is tragic because these sad individuals can’t help buy debunk themselves as they try to prove their theories.  It just stinks of societal failure. ***1/2

Triple Frontier – This is another close thing.  It is kind of a strange heist movie.  A bunch of vets get a plan to rob a South American drug lord, but find a lot more money than they expected.  The early part goes faster and smoother than the usual heist movie, but it is followed by a painstaking escape sequence.  It mostly works, but it feels really close to being something actually special. ***1/2

Aliens – Aliens is great, but you already know that. *****

Big Trouble in Little China – Kurt Russell is amazing in this.  His incompetent bravado is just perfect.  Jack Burton is a sidekick, comic relief character that thinks he’s the protagonist.  It is wonderful. *****

Cobra – I did not like this at all.  It is stupid and mean and not particularly exciting.  It feels like Stallone trying too hard. **1/2

Labyrinth – Yup, it is still a delight. ****

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – I didn’t realize how much of a creep Ferris is in this, but that doesn’t really make the movie any less entertaining.  It is a lot of fun. ****1/2

Invaders From Mars – ehh, not for me. **

Hot Rod – This movie deserves to be remembered as a comedy classic.  It is one of my favorite “recent” comedies. It is so great. *****

Captain Marvel – read review here. ****

Dumbo – read review here. **1/2

The Highwaymen – I kind of loved this.  It is unusual to get a movie about the public enemies era that doesn’t sympathize at all with the criminals.  Here, it is all from the point of view of the cops, who struggle to catch Bonnie and Clyde.  I just liked seeing Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson giving old man speeches. ****

The Dirt – Last year, I didn’t much care for Bohemian Rhapsody; it was kind of a badly made movie buoyed by some genuinely great music.  This is the same, but with not nearly as good music. **

TV

Black Lightning – The second season of Black Lightning is over and while I still think the show is great, it kind of feels like this season started getting away from the creators here.  It expanded in scope, but could not quite wrangle that new scope into a coherent season.  I expect some dropped threads to be picked up in the next season, but some stuff, like the stuff about the new racist principal, was either poorly conceived or poorly explained.  Still, I think the show is generally excellent and look forward to next season.

After Life – I don’t have much to say here. This show is bad. It is an unlikable combination of mean and smug.  Gervais has made quality television before, but he has put together quite the string of misses lately.

The Widow – This has a lot in common with Black Earth Rising, though The Widow adds a lot of action thriller stuff to it.  Kate Beckinsale stars as a widow whose husband died in a plane crash.  Only she finds evidence that he might have survived and she heads to Africa to get to the bottom of things.  She stumbles into many hornets nest and learns some terrible truths.  It is solidly entertaining, largely thanks to Beckinsale and Charles Dance, but feels like it would have worked better if trimmed by a couple of episodes.

Pen15 – This show is well made, but it is hard to watch.  It hits close to home, even accounting for the difference in genders between me and the protagonists.  This is a crushingly accurate depiction of being a teenager at around the turn of the century.

Turn Up Charlie – This show should be bad.  It is strange, with Idris Elba playing a washed up, one hit wonder DJ who is desperate to regain his fame who ends up working as a nanny for his famous childhood friend.  It is an odd set up.  But Elba is great and the show is much more charming than it might first appear to be.  It is definitely worth a watch.

Iron Fist S2 – It says a lot about how bad the first season of Iron Fist was that the second season could improve so much and still not really be any good.  This show is just kind of out there in no man’s land.  The tone of the Netflix  Marvel shows was established by Daredevil and the other characters work, to varying degrees, with that tone.  It isn’t the only choice, but that dark, grounded-ish world works for Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and especially The Punisher.  But that it is hard to fit Iron Fist into that mold with its super-powered martial arts masters.  The character needs to be something campier and sillier than the Netflix tone allows for.  This second season pushes things closer that way, but it is still sapping the fun out of Iron Fist instead of forcing the fun onto Netflix.  The big improvement comes from the show realizing how much Danny sucks, and therefore moves a lot of the work off him.  I don’t want to blame it on Finn Jones, who is trying as hard as he can.  But he can’t convincingly fake fight and isn’t helped out by another part of the show to fake it.  In a show that is supposedly about one of the greatest martial artists in the world, him not being able to appear to fight is a problem.  By making him a lovable (or at least potentially lovable) goof, the show is a lot less tedious.  It also cuts things down by about 5 hours, but still manages to have the same ratio of plot to filler, so that isn’t really an improvement.  I intend to get to the rest of Marvel’s Netflix shows, hopefully by the time Jessica Jones hits, but I can’t say I’m sad to see them go.

Arrested Development S5 Part 2 – The word that comes to mind when analyzing this (hopefully) last batch of Arrested Development episodes is timing.  Because the timing of these episodes is terrible.  Timing was one of the strengths of the original run of Arrested Development.  The show just seemed to know when to drop which joke, the actors all seemed to know just how to play off each other.  It was like watching recent Golden State Warriors games. Everything was in sync.  Here, everything just feels mistimed. It spends too long on jokes that don’t work and brushes by good one.  Also, the satire was perfectly poised to deal with the social climate of the early aughts.  However, a lot has changed since then.  This whole season has felt like a once great athlete playing past their prime.  To keep the basketball comparison, it is like watching Jordan on the Wizards.  You can still see what made him special, but it’s not really there anymore.  While it might just be too long since Arrested Development’s heyday for this to really hit.  The huge break between the first half of this season and the second did it no favors.  It loses any momentum it could have built up.  I am going to have to go back and watch the whole season in one go to see if it works better.  I don’t know what to say about this; the show is a pale shadow of one of my all-time favorite shows.  Arrested Development went a long ways in defining my sense of humor.  Stumbling onto the first season was like having everything click in my head, discovering that this is what I like.  But the magic is gone. I’m sad to see this show go, but it really feels like the time.

What I Watched

/ skoce / Leave a comment

Movies
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – see this post.  I love this movie. Lots of favorites here; Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Martin Freeman. *****

The Salvation – After watching Polar, Netflix recommended this other Mads Mikkelsen movie. It is a Western about a recent immigrant. After he settles in the west, he sends for his wife and son. When they arrive, they are quickly murdered. So Mikkelson’s Jon sets out for revenge, but then the brother of the murderer seeks his own revenge, setting off a destructive cycle. It’s nothing special, but it’s okay. ***

Ant-Man and The Wasp – I still enjoyed this a lot. Charming and fun, if inconsequential.****

Velvet Buzzsaw – I appreciate that this is a movie for somebody. That somebody is not me. This is a horror movie about the modern art world. It doesn’t appear to have much to say about art and it is not particularly scary (it is not scary enough that I watched it) but it is at least interesting. ***

Polar – This is some kind of weird mix of John Wick and Suicide Squad. I can’t fault anyone involved, least of all Mads Mikkelsen, but this movie is mostly not good. It is kind of entertaining in a wild and sort of awful way. Honestly, if it sounds at all interesting give it a try. I don’t think it’s good, but I had a decent time watching it. **1/2

High Flying Bird – Steven Soderbergh directed this movie about a fictional NBA lockout, with Andre Holland starring as an agent who manipulates things in an attempt to end the lockout. It is pretty great, with human characters and understandable viewpoints. It is a great sports movie that actually features very little of its sport. *****

Close – Noomi Rapace stars in a tight little action thriller. Rapace is a bodyguard, hired to protect a teenage girl. She saves the girl from an attempt on her life, but they can’t tell if it came from unknown enemies or from her own step-mother, with whom they have a fractious relationship. It is solid, if unspectacular. ***1/2

Alita: Battle Angel – read review here. ***

Hot Fuzz – This movie is an absolute favorite, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. I can watch this movie forever. *****

The Breaker Upperers – I might be being fooled by New Zealand accents, but this is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It is two women who run a business breaking up couples for a fee. For various reasons, they have to reexamine their business model. It is great. ****

Paddleton – This is an touching and occasionally amusing comedy/drama starring Ray Romano and Mark Duplass. The two play friends and neighbors. Duplass’s character gets diagnosed with cancer and Romano helps him navigate the end of his life. It is very much a downer, but it is well made and intermittently amusing. ***1/2

TV

The ABC Murders – There is a lot here to like in the adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Poirot mystery. They change somethings, in the backstory as much in the actual mystery, that seemed like a strange choice, but it is still really well made. John Malkovich is great as Poirot and I am starting to really like it when Rupert Grint shows up in things. It’s good, especially if you are not a Christie purist.

Russian Doll – Another show I want to really write about, but just don’t have the time. This is a Groundhog day type of story that goes in some interesting directions. It is just about a perfect show.

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes – Its fine. There are better true crime series. The most interesting thing was hearing all the men talk about how irresistible Bundy was to woman and hearing all the women talk about how creepy he was if you spent more than ten minutes with him.

Black Earth Rising – I don’t know. There is a lot to like about this mini-series. The performances of John Goodman and Michaela Coel. I am generally interested in the subject matter of International criminal justice. This show just kind of goes too wide at times, a little melodramatic in ways that doesn’t seem to suit the show. Still, it does a lot well. It focuses a lot on the effects of colonialism and how even well intentioned attempts to counteract them only work to perpetuate the problems. But the show is also just kind of disappointingly all over the place, tonally.

You – I don’t think this show is for me. You follows the worlds biggest creep as he creeps on the object of his infatuation. The show does its best to keep the viewer at least partially on the side of protagonist/psychopath Joe, but I couldn’t forget the crazy enough to buy into anything else. I guess I am little too old for the social media aspect to resonate either. I’m on twitter, but I don’t share life details with people I’d avoid on the street. (to paraphrase Shawn Spencer of Psych)

Hilda – This was recommended to me several times, but it took me a while to get through it. That is mostly because it is pitched at a slightly younger audience than I am used to. However, the further you get into this show, the more its depth and heart show through. It is a fun mix of a modern world with a whole bunch of fantastic and mythological creatures. Hilda is amazingly empathetic towards whatever creature has shown up in any given week. The show’s dynamic doesn’t quite click until she makes friends with Frida and David. Adding those two characters gives Hilda consistent counterpoints to bounce off of, and really shows how she is special. The whole show is permeated with this sense of wonder that is utterly delightful. It is a great show.

One Day at a Time S3 – Another solid outing for this Netflix critical darling. This season digs deeper into its characters, while never losing that classic sitcom format. Previously, I’ve that format restrictive, but as with classic sitcoms, it gets better the longer the show goes on. Sure, eventually it will hit a tipping point where the quality of the writing, mostly due to having to find more stories to squeeze out of the set up, starts to go down, but by then the viewer is so comfortable with the characters and setting that it still feels like a warm blanket. One Day at a Time is hitting that warm blanket stage.

Big Mouth S1&2 – This falls into a similar category as Sex Education from earlier this year. It is a well made show, frequently really funny. It is a show providing good information to people who no longer need it. I don’t know how much it would actually appeal to kids the age of those on the show. I like all the people involved and frequently really like the show, but my reaction is more of a shrug and it’s fine.

The Umbrella Academy – Netflix is moving on from Marvel, but they are staying the superhero business. The first season of The Umbrella Academy is maybe better than any of Netflix’s Marvel shows. I kind of want to write a long blog post about his show, instead of a tiny review, but for now I’ll just say a few things. First, plotting is not this shows strong point. It does great stuff with setting and character, but the plot is chaos. That is partly the point; this dysfunctional family can’t even get things together to face the apocalypse, but sometimes you can lose track of each episode as it goes. Again, the character work is great. You really get where nearly every character is coming from, though I think it is impossible not to side with some over others. It is a delightful sort of weird. The most part most indicative of the overall tone is in the first episode, when all of the siblings dance separately to “I Think We’re Alone Now.” It is almost too on the nose in a perfect way. This is a really good show.

Lorena – A solid docu-series that recontextualizes the Lorena Bobbitt story from the 90’s. It does a really good job of showing how a salacious story like this gets distorted in popular culture. At the time everything was focused on John Bobbitt and his version of the story, and Lorena was largely dismissed as a crazy woman. This series takes a fresh look at the story, and goes further, looking at what has happened since, and creates a clearer look at the incident, which shows Lorena as more of a victim. It also shows how genuinely gross people like Howard Stern, Geraldo Rivera, and Alan Dershowitz were in dealing with this story.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Comparative Study

/ skoce / 1 Comment

On a whim, I rewatched The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. Afterwards, a bout of curiosity led me to look up the movie on wikipedia, which took me down a rabbit hole that left me shocked to discover that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not a particularly well regarded movie. I was foolish enough to think it would be loved simply because it is great. Instead, it seems stuck in that that weird gray zone where fans of the previous versions don’t like it because it changed some things and non-fans don’t like it for a combination of thinking they are missing too much for not being familiar with the radio/book/tv version or were just never going to like it because Douglas Adams had a particular voice and that voice was understandably not for everybody. I really only understand the last one. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is an excellent movie in its own right, even if isn’t the definitive version of the story.

Part of my disconnect is likely that I backed into The Hitchhiker’s Guide. I saw the movie first. I loved it. Being the reader that I am, the first thing I did after watching it was track down the book. Which I also loved. I haven’t returned to the book much, mostly because nearly all of the best bits are in the movie and it can be experienced in less than two hours. I didn’t get deep into Adams; I didn’t read the rest of the series or any of his other work. I just moved on to other things, and this movie became a pleasant memory from college.

In reading up on the movie’s reputation I found numerous complaints about how the movie missed the spirit of the earlier versions, which I find preposterous. That spirit, embodied by clever wordplay, sly jokes, understated darkness, and general absurdity, is in the movie in spades. The movie translates most of the first book word for word; the first book is just really short. I reread the book after rewatching the movie; I still think the movie got most of it. Not everything translated off the page perfectly, and some portions weren’t really attempted, but the heart of the book come across perfectly.

After reading the book, I watched the 1981 TV version on Amazon, hoping it would provide the Rosetta Stone for understanding why fans of the property were not especially big fans of the movie. It did, in a way. (Here’s the line that would get me hate mail if anyone read my blog.) The TV version reminded me forcefully that nostalgia is a hell of a drug. This version looks cheap and is so shapeless and meandering as to make the book look like it was plotted with clockwork precision. The book already had a tendency to just move on to the next thing when it was done with the joke. The TV show does the same, except the pacing of each scene is bloated and sagging. Structurally, the show is barely a show at all. It feels much like a sketch show, with each episode moving to a completely different setting and concept that just so happens to carry over some of the same cast. A lot of it feels like a radio play set to film. All the acting is done in the dialogue; there is little of interest actually happening on screen. This is not meant to be read as a screed against good dialogue, only to note that TV is a visual medium and maybe the show should have had something worth watching on screen. There are some good creature designs, but it is mostly a lot of people standing and talking. Two-headed Zaphod is a straight up disaster, with his second head being almost as well realized as the one on Michael Scott’s halloween costume. The show simply looks bad.

This. This looks really bad.

A lot of disdain for the movie came from people praising the TV show and I simply don’t get it. I can understand people not liking the changes and additions (more on those later) to the movie from the book, but the TV show praise is baffling to me. A lot of that praise is for the performances, although the reasons for that, other than simple nostalgia, elude me. Again, many of these feel like performances for radio. They recede on screen, leaving the settings to do a lot of the acting. It makes it hard for me to even compare the performances. Zaphod is fine, though he seems to be struggling under the costume to give the character any energy. David Dixon makes Ford the most dynamic character on the show, but even he has a tendency to get lost in the shuffle. Simon Jones as Arthur Dent suffers the most as the show goes on. He is great early, but as the other characters show up, he all but disappears, even when the rest of the cast actually disappears. Trillian is a mess. I guess I see how people who grew up with these versions could prefer them, but they are mostly just fine mouthpieces for good dialogue that bring little else to the table. Honestly, I am glad the TV series was not the first version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I experienced, because I doubt I would have been a fan.

The movie, though, does have quite a few changes and additions from the book. Mostly, those are in the name of giving some form to the shapeless book. Part of the charm of the book—and the TV series I assume—is that scattered nature. It starts big, with the destruction of the Earth, but after that things just sort of happen. Revelations come fast and frequent, usually with little bearing on what came before it or what comes after. That was never going to fly in a movie version. So it added something of a quest to the search for Magrathea, which was something of a fait accompli in the book and show. Now, the crew has to get directions from Zaphod’s enemy Humma Kavula, which leads to a detour to Vogsphere. Those things were added for the movie. Honestly, they fit in almost seamlessly, though some of the humor is a little slapstick. Not significantly more so than stuff like a sperm whale crashing to the ground from outer space, but there is some. Outside of a knee-jerk dislike of everything new, there are two differences I’ve seen get a lot of hate. Understandably is the change in the nature of the relationship between Trillian and Arthur. Adding romance is the one change that really feels like a Hollywood change and not just an “accepted rules of storytelling” change. The romance is not needed to for cohesion or structure, it is just there. It doesn’t ruin the movie or anything, but if feels somewhat unnecessary. Inexplicably, people also hate the opening musical number. “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish” is a delight. Opening the movie with a satirical musical number ostensibly sung by dolphins tells the viewer exactly what they are in for. It is visually interesting, something the couldn’t be done in the book; it does, however, bring in something from the book in a visually interesting way.

I watched the movie again after rereading the book and watching the show. My esteem for the movie is undiminished. I love the cast; they are almost to a person better than the show performances. I guess I understand how people could prefer Dixon’s Ford to Mos Def’s chill version, but I liked Def’s take. It works with what is in the book. Otherwise, movie performances all the way. Especially Sam Rockwell’s Zaphod, who is an energetic mix of George W Bush and Elvis. Seeing people crap on the musical number to start the movie, then watching that musical number again cemented for me the idea the movie was never going to be successful. It had been too long and fans had too strong an idea of what had to be there for the movie to work. So movie gets dinged because some mildly funny dialogue got left on the cutting room floor or a stinger joke just before the credits suggest that the restaurant at the end of the universe is at a certain place and not a certain time. I mean, the movie left out all the jokes about digital watches. How can it purport to be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy without jokes about digital watches?

The movie is not a perfect translation of the book, which is what it most closely mirrors. But it it certainly a more effective film translation than the TV series. I might track down the radio version some day; I am not opposed to audio only entertainment (note: I should write someday about how I first experienced Star Wars through the radio versions). Maybe that version is the best version. For now, I’ll stick with book as the ideal form and the movie for when I just need to be entertained. On its own merits, the movie is excellent.