Shogun (Hulu): TV Review - A Leafless Branch

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!*!***

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A beautiful but dramatically and emotionally empty series that features quality craftsmanship across the board yet never rises to become must-see.

Shogun, the highly-acclaimed ten-episode mini-series based on the James Clavell book of the same name, just finished its original run on the streaming service Hulu…and I have some thoughts.

The series, which began streaming on February 27th and concluded on April 23rd, was created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks and stars Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis.

Shogun tells the fictional tale of John Blackthorne (Jarvis), an English sailor marooned in 1600s Japan, who must navigate the customs and culture of his new land and serve as an advisor/political pawn to Lord Taranaga (Sanada), the powerful lord of Kanto. A critical side story involves Blackthorne falling in love with his translator Lady Mariko (Sawai).

Shogun is a strange series in that I watched each episode as it rolled out weekly and yet never thought about the show for a single second when it wasn’t playing in front of me. I never once mused or anticipated about what would come in the following episode and very often entirely forgot what had happened in the episode I had just watched. For example, I watched the final episode five days ago and cannot remember much of anything from it.

In this way Shogun is like so much of tv in this bloated streaming era, in that it is eye-candy that comes and goes without the slightest impact one way or the other.

Another show I watched recently, Netflix’s Three Body Problem, was similar in that it generated lots of manufactured light, especially in terms of cultural discission, but exactly zero heat. The big difference between though Three Body Problem and Shogun though is that Three Body Problem was a thoroughly second-rate production that looked unconscionably cheap…whereas Shogun is undeniably a top-notch production that looks more expansive than it probably was.

Shogun is a beautiful production that is exquisitely shot, professionally acted, and boasts superb production design and costumes…and yet…as good as the show looks and all the pieces are near perfect, it still seems oddly forgettable, or better yet – irrelevant, as a whole.

To the show’s credit, it does believably transport you back to 1600’s Japan, and that can be enjoyable, but it never rouses enough interest in its characters to cross the threshold from interesting to emotionally or dramatically impactful.

The thing that struck me most about Shogun was that it was, much to its credit, shot and framed like a feature film. Rarely were objects of interest set center frame, which was a refreshing change since center-framing has become standard, particularly in television, in our wholly unfortunate era of Tik Tok. So often nowadays television cinematography has all the skill and artistry of a grandmother using a disposable instamatic on a family trip to Disney. Thankfully, Shogun never suffers from this lack of attention or visual care.

Also compelling are many of the performances.

Anna Sawai, in particular, is quite good as Lady Mariko, the tormented translator who must contain her emotions and control Blackthorne. I last saw Sawai in the Apple TV series Monarch, and thought she wasn’t quite yet ready for prime time, but here she is sharp and sexy…a luminous and alluring presence filled with a vivid and visceral inner life she masterfully fights to contain.

Hiroyuki Sanada too does solid work as the scheming Taranaga. Sanada is so unrelenting in his performance that it is actually surprising when Taranaga isn’t quite as smart as you believe he is.

Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne gives an intriguing performance, as he at once feels out of place yet also somewhat magnetic. Jarvis never quite earns the emotional arc his character takes, but to his credit he is game and never shies from the challenge or the camera.

The CGI used in Shogun is worth mentioning as well as the wide shots of Osaka are obviously fake but still impressive to behold. As are the fight sequences – with a few notable exceptions…like when Lady Mariko morphs into a girl power goddess and slays some samurai.

Despite all of the positive attributes present in Shogun, it just never grips you by the heart or throat and forces you to care. Ultimately, I didn’t actually care about any of the characters in Shogun…not really. And the usual cultural storytelling instincts we have become accustomed to are not satisfied in the story because it ends not with a compelling climax but with understated subtlety.

I have never read Clavell’s book, nor have I watched the 1980 mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and the great Toshiro Mifune. Maybe if I had I would have more attachment to the characters and investment in the story. But I didn’t and I don’t.

At the end of the day Shogun is a beautiful but forgettable piece of television that I desperately wanted to love because of the subject matter, but never did. The series is simply something to watch to pass the time, and requires little emotional investment and negligible dramatic payoff.

I didn’t hate Shogun, not at all, but I didn’t love it either. It’s an impressive piece of television solely for the craft on display, but in my opinion is not compelling enough to be considered must-see.

I respect the craftsmanship on display in Shogun enough that my recommendation is to watch the first episode and see if it grabs you, and then proceed accordingly.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

3 Body Problem (Netflix): TV Review - A Sci-Fi Slog Worth Skipping

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A second-rate sci-fi series that is saddled with an abysmal cast.

Netflix’s new science fiction series, 3 Body Problem, follows the travails of a group of five former Oxford University physics students as they are thrust into a life-threatening mystery that has turned the world of science on its head.

The series, which premiered March 21st, is from the creators of the HBO’s Game of Thrones, D.B Weiss and David Benioff, and is based on the book The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. The show has been getting a lot of hype since it premiered so I figured I’d check it out.

3 Body Problem opens with a scene set during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China. It is a riveting scene that is eerily reminiscent of the scene at the finale of season one in Benioff and Weiss’s Game of Thrones where Ned Stark is charged with treason and to the shock of viewers who hadn’t read the book, publicly beheaded.

Unfortunately, 3 Body Problem’s compelling opening is the apex of the series, and everything goes downhill from there…and fast. After watching the entire eight episodes of season one I can confidently report that the hype surrounding this show is definitely much ado about absolutely nothing.

The basic premise of 3 Body Problem is that there are a number of strange deaths among the smartest scientists in the world…many die seemingly by suicide. Those investigating the deaths think that the scientists killed themselves because in recent months science, physics in particular, has been turned on its head due to bizarre anomalies found during tests and experiments.

A group of five friends who all went to Oxford together and studied physics, are hit hard by the deaths, particularly the death of one of their teachers.

And thus begins the journey to understanding what is happening and why it’s happening. This journey goes from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to modern day Oxford to the inside of a video game and goodness knows where else.

Ironically, 3 Body Problem has three main problems…the acting, the writing and the production.

Let’s start with the acting. This show boasts one of the worst casts in a major television program in recent memory. This cast, specifically Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzalez and Alex Sharp, is so atrocious as to be an albatross around the neck of the tantalizing premise of this sci fi venture. These actors are so bad I wouldn’t be comfortable casting them in background roles in a dinner theatre production.

Hong and Gonzalez have critical roles that are the backbone of the show, and they are utterly abysmal to the point of being amateurish. Adepo and Sharp are no better but their roles are slightly less critical, and so their egregious work is less fatal to the production.

Hong, who plays Jin Cheng – a brilliant physicist tasked with figuring out the scientific mystery at the middle of the drama, is just not ready for prime time as an actress as she is totally devoid of any skill or charisma. She gives a try-hard yet wooden performance that is very difficult to tolerate even for a little bit.

Eiza Gonzalez, who plays Augie Salazar – a successful scientist/entrepreneur, is just as bad as Hong. Gonzalez is entirely incapable of creating a character or bringing any life to the one she portrays. There’s a lot of preening, but not much acting…or any good acting.

Jovan Adepo plays Saul Durand, a sort of genius libertine who eventually finds his place in the world despite not wanting it. Adepo is at best a dullard on-screen, and is so anti-magnetic as to be invisible.

There are some decent actors in the cast but in smaller roles. For instance, Liam Cunningham, a veteran of stage and screen – most notably in Game of Thrones, plays Thomas Wade, a sharp-witted and tongued spymaster. The problem with Cunningham is that whenever he is on-screen you are reminded of what professional acting looks like and it highlights how awful the rest of the cast is.

The acclaimed Jonathan Pryce is in the show too…albeit quite briefly, but he doesn’t do much and his character is never fully fleshed out. Adding to the issues with Pryce’s character is that he is often seen in flashbacks – and is roughly forty years younger or so, and is played by Ben Schnetzer. I like both Ben Schnetzer and Jonathan Pryce as actors, but they look and sound nothing alike…and this combination makes their storyline at best incompetent and at worst incoherent.

I’ve intentionally avoided getting into the details of the story of 3 Body Problem because it has twists and turns and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. I haven’t read the book so it was all new to me, and frankly, it became less and less interesting as each episode passed. Which brings us to the second problem with the series…the writing.

The story unfolds like a supernatural murder mystery and then devolves into a really trite piece of generic sci-fi non-drama that is as dopey and dull an eight-hours of television as you’ll find.

The storytelling starts off great with the captivating scene of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, but then it loses all steam and becomes exceedingly banal and boring.

One of the biggest issues with the writing is the dialogue, which when combined with the wooden line readings from the two-bit cast, becomes cringe-worthy to the point of hilarity.

The third and final problem with 3 Body Problem is that it looks really cheap, like some low-rent Sci-Fi channel throwaway show and not some prestige TV hopeful from the makers of Game of Thrones.

I really liked Game of Thrones…until I didn’t, but what that show had going for it was a superior cast, supreme acting, gorgeous cinematography and sublime production design…not to mention a plethora of nudity, sex and violence. 3 Body Problem has not a single one of those things.

3 Body Problem desperately needs viewers to care about its leads in order for its premise to work, but the acting is so poor that the series can never rise above its cliched writing and cheap-looking production and become even remotely compelling or worthwhile.

The entire first season seems to exist for no other reason than to set-up a second (and presumably third) season…but this is nothing but business and has zero to do with drama. The drama that the show so urgently needs is never earned and falls entirely flat.  

Weiss and Benioff famously fouled up Game of Thrones after meticulously and miraculously piecing the sprawling story together over its first six/seven seasons. It wasn’t until the final season that Game of Thrones went off the rails. 3 Body Problem saves a lot of time and falls flat on its face after about fifteen minutes, so it gets right to its failure.

The bottom line is that 3 Body Problem is an astonishingly forgettable piece of television that is not worthy of your time or attention. As I am fond of saying, I watched this so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Echo (Disney +): TV Review - The Cries of Failure Echo Forever

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW HAS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and idiotic waste of time.

Echo is the new Marvel five-episode mini-series streaming on Disney + and Hulu. The show stars Alaqua Cox in the title role, with supporting turns from Vincent D’Onofrio and Graham Greene.

Echo, in case you don’t know, is a Native American woman named Maya who is a master martial artist who is also deaf and has lost a leg. The character was first introduced to the MCU in the Disney + series Hawkeye.

I liked Hawkeye a great deal, and thought Echo was an interesting and intriguing hench woman. As a peripheral character she added depth to that show, but as the lead in a project she falls decidedly flat.

Echo is an absolute mess of a show. I’d call it an unmitigated disaster but disasters are more interesting.

The plot for Echo is laughably bad, the execution of it even worse. The action anemic and the acting atrocious.

Echo is categorized under the banner of Marvel Spotlight, which means it is supposed to be a stand-alone series, but if you haven’t seen Hawkeye, Echo will make absolutely no sense. Although to be fair, even if you have seen Hawkeye, Echo will still not make any sense.

Echo is set in Oklahoma, where Maya goes to get away from trouble in New York City and reconnect with her family and her native American roots.

The show leans heavily into Maya’s Native American lineage, and it is littered with flashbacks to the birth of Native people and the mysterious power Maya’s family has inherited from them. When these flashbacks aren’t incoherent, they are idiotic.

We also see flashbacks of how Maya lost her leg, and how a deep rift grew among her family. None of it is interesting or even adequately rendered.

Alaqua Cox stars as Maya, and she herself is actually deaf in real life, and also has lost a leg. One can only imagine the diversity, equity and inclusion orgasm Kevin Feige and Bob Iger experienced when they found a deaf, one-legged Native Woman to put in one of their projects. If Ms. Cox had been trans and/or queer too Iger and Feige’s loins would’ve gone thermo-nuclear.

Let me say first off that I’m glad that Cox has found acting work because it cannot be easy to be deaf and one-legged and get a lot of auditions. But it also must be said that Alaqua Cox isn’t exactly Meryl Streep as she is…by her nature, a very limited actress. The rest of the cast aren’t exactly the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

A major issue when committing to cast from a very specific ethnic group, in this case Native Americans, is that the talent pool is very, very limited. There are fewer actors to choose from and among that group there are even fewer good ones. Echo is populated by third-rate native actors and actresses that are entirely out of their league even on a silly series like this one.

The same thing happened with Martin Scorsese’s recent film Killers of the Flower Moon, where the Native actresses, in particular, were really dreadful. Lily Gladstone did solid work in the film, but besides her the cast is noticeably sub-par.

In Echo, Alaqua Cox is…not good, but she is someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged playing someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged…so she has that going for her. Besides that, she is quite wooden and impenetrable.

Graham Green is usually a very good actor, but even he is awful in this show. He plays a grandfather type figure to Maya and he seems to be fluctuating between sleepwalking and play acting.

My old friend Vincent D’Onofrio reprises his role as Kingpin in Echo and it is an embarrassment, not so much because of D’Onofrio’s acting, but because of how demeaning the entire enterprise is to the iconic character.

D’Onofrio was perfect as Kingpin in the Netflix series Daredevil, which for my money is easily the very best Marvel series ever made. But after a brief appearance in the Hawkeye finale, and now here in Echo, Kingpin’s status as a big, brutish badass, is in danger of being revoked.

Disney is reviving the Daredevil series and is returning the majority of the cast, but one cannot help but fear, if not expect, that they will completely fuck it up just like they’ve fucked everything else up in recent years. The castration of Kingpin in Echo points to the likelihood of the Daredevil series being neutered as well.

Disney is a disaster area and Marvel (and Star Wars) is in a state of such rapid decline and decay as to be shocking considering it stood at its apex just 5 years ago the culmination of its Infinity War saga.

Disney and Marvel’s addiction to feminization and diversity has sapped the MCU of its mythological meaning and its narrative and dramatic purpose.

Marvel has been turned into a weapon for cultural engineering instead of being a myth-making, and money printing, machine. Disney’s princess brigade has successfully castrated and feminized both Marvel and Star Wars, and both franchises are now left empty husks of their former selves.

As I have been saying all along, the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey are two completely different things, and you cannot simply replace a hero with a heroine and expect it to resonate in the collective consciousness. In other words, Disney/Marvel’s feminization/princess-ification of their franchises does not, as they hope, empower women, but rather strips the stories of all of their psychological, mythological and archetypal power.

Echo is a bad series not because it stars a twice disabled, Native American woman. No, Echo is a bad series because Disney/Marvel think that if a series stars a twice disabled, Native American woman that is all it needs. To Disney/Marvel, the show doesn’t need to be good…it just needs to be.

This is why diversity, equity and inclusion is such a cancer, it’s because diversity becomes the main focus, and quality is reduced to an after-thought if it is thought of at all.

In conclusion, Echo is a complete waste of time. The show is shoddy, shitty and stupid. I watched Echo so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Ahsoka (Disney +): TV Review - The Force is Female...and Boring as Fuck

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a poorly written, poorly acted (with the lone exception being Ray Stevenson) series that further diminishes the Star Wars brand.

This past week Ahsoka, the most recent of Disney’s Star Wars series, concluded its eight-episode first season on Disney +. The series, which is a spin-off from The Mandalorian and stars Rosario Dawson in the title character, follows Jedi Warrior Ahsoka Tano as she investigates a potential threat to the New Republic in the wake of the fall of the Empire.

If I’m being kind, I would declare that Ahsoka is completely and entirely forgettable. If I’m being honest, I would say it is an embarrassment. This series, like so much of Disney’s Star Wars material, is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst an absolute atrocity.

Ahsoka’s failings are numerous and include, but are not limited to, completely ignoring any sort of previously set rules for the Star Wars universe. For example, the “rules of the force” are abandoned entirely, as is the deadly nature of the light saber, a once fearsome weapon which is turned into a mere flesh wound maker on Ahsoka.

Besides destroying the most fundamental of things from Star Wars canon, one of the other major issues with Ahsoka is the abysmal acting and inferior cast.

I remember seeing Rosario Dawson when she made her big screen debut in the unnerving Larry Clark film Kids (1995). Dawson was a natural screen presence and absolutely magnetic in Kids, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. Over the ensuing decades Dawson has become not just a bad actress, but a terrible one. She was so atrocious in the recent Hulu series Dopesick as to be shocking. Here in Ahsoka she is so uncomfortable on screen that it left me actually perplexed. If I saw one more scene where a wooden Dawson as Ahsoka just folded her arms and stared blankly at her scene partner, I was going to light myself on fire. Dawson folds her arms so often on Ahsoka that if you did a drinking game where you did a shot every time she crosses her arms in an episode…you’d die.

Then there’s Dawson’s awkward, anti-athleticism in the fight scenes. To be fair, the fight scenes on Ahsoka are poorly staged, poorly shot and poorly executed. They all seem slow, dull and like they’re being performed underwater, but Dawson in particular moves like an arthritic, elderly woman in a nursing home….as opposed to the mere unathletic middle-aged woman she is.  

The younger actresses in the cast fare no better in terms of fighting or acting either.

Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Sabine Wren, a Mandolorian and former Jedi apprentice to Ahsoka. Wren is an egregiously poorly written character, but Bordizzo doesn’t help matters by being so vacant in the role. Sabine is supposed to be the energizing force in the series but she’s so vacuous as to invisible. Making matters worse is that Bordizzo is just as bad as Dawson in the action sequences despite being half her age.

Diana Lee Inosanto, daughter of famed martial artist Dan Inosanto (under whom I trained many moons ago), plays Morgan Elsbeth, and unfortunately, is not a good actress. Inosanto is terribly stilted and uncomfortable to watch as she’s devoid of even the slightest bit of presence. Even her fight scenes are yawn-inducing, which is shocking considering her impressive lineage.

Then there’s Eman Esfandi who plays Ezra Bridgers. Esfandi looks like a guy who would be cast to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary re-enactment, and has that same level of talent too. Esfandi has all the charisma of a tumbleweed and seems like a background actor who mistakenly stumbled in front of the camera.

The big bad in the series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, underwhelmingly played by Lars Mikkelsen. Thrawn is an epic character in the Star Wars universe and here he is reduced to loitering through each scene which he so barely inhabits.

The most striking thing about Ahsoka is Ray Stevenson, who plays Baylon Skoll, a Dark Jedi who stands in the way of Ahsoka as she pursues the truth. Stevenson is literally the only actor in the entire series who brings any inner life to his character. He’s also the only actor with presence and gravitas. When Stevenson is on-screen he effortlessly demands your attention. Stevenson is one of those British actors who is just highly skilled and a master craftsman. His skill and craftsmanship are subtle but extremely effective and the rest of the cast would have done well to learn from him.

Baylon Skoll is also the only interesting character in the whole series, but unfortunately, he is sidelined for the majority of it. Even worse, Stevenson tragically died after filming the series, which is a terrible loss for all of us…made all the worse in that Baylon Skoll will never get his own series.

That Stevenson, who had a bit of a knock around career despite being a fine actor, is the best actor in this series by a mile says a great deal. In contrast, Andor, another Star Wars series, was littered with top notch performances by people with similar careers and backgrounds to Stevenson. Why the hell can’t Disney just cast decent actors like Stevenson in EVERY Star Wars series and movie and in every role?

The writing on Ahsoka is as bad as there’s ever been in a Star Wars series, which is quite an accomplishment. The plot is incomprehensible to the point of being just plain silly (lightsabers can’t kill, there are stormtrooper zombies, witches, and space whales…yes…fucking space whales), and the dialogue is Junior High School drama club level of bad.

Of course, there’s the usual Star Wars nostalgia injection to placate old timers hungry for their lost youth, this time in the form of Anakin Skywalker, the always dreadful Hayden Christensen, and C3PO. One would need to be lobotomized to care the slightest about either cameo.

Since Disney bought Star Wars back in 2012, the franchise has undergone a transformation that has left it bereft of the things that made it noteworthy in the first place. To be fair, Lucas hadn’t exactly crushed it with his lackluster prequel trilogy, but Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars output makes the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather trilogy.

Since the Disney takeover of the galaxy far, far away, the studio and Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy have, for some reason, decided to declare that “The Force is Female”. The problem is that the female force, whether in films or series, has proven to be boring as fuck.

Why Disney has leaned so far into gender politics in Star Wars that they’ve stumbled over their own sagging tits is beyond me. Star Wars has, for the most part, been something boys have nerded out over since it hit big screens back in the 70s. The animating myth and archetype of Star Wars is, as Joseph Campbell told us, a masculine one. Disney’s intention to turn the franchise mythos into a girl power vehicle is so obviously self-defeating as to be demented as it neuters the Star Wars myth and renders its archetypes psychologically powerless, diminishes the Star Wars brand and alienates the core audience.

That Disney is also castrating their Marvel myth and brand with the same diminishing creative, artistic and commercial results, only makes the decision to feminize Star Wars all the more perplexing.

The bottom line is that the Star Wars franchise in general, and Ahsoka in particular, are symptoms…and Disney is the disease. Disney’s steadfast determination to inject cultural politics into all of their franchise material and ignore artistic and dramatic quality has aggressively corroded the value of Star Wars (and Marvel) to an astonishing degree.

Star Wars tv series like Ahsoka should be slam dunks for Disney as the franchise is chock full of fascinating stories and characters, and yet the studio consistently churns out underwhelming, if not abysmal, series that act as little more than cultural political vehicles that ultimately actively destroy what people used to love about Star Wars.

In conclusion, Ahsoka is simply not worth your time or energy. Even hardcore, rabid Star Wars fans should skip Ahsoka as it really is a blight on the brand.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Encounters (Netflix): A Documentary Mini-series Review - The Truth is Out There...But Not So Much in Here

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

 My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Newbies to the UFO story might find this a decent if uneven place to dip their toe into the topic. Viewers more informed on the UFO phenomenon won’t find much useful in this tepid and tame mini-series.

Encounters is the new four-episode docu-series on Netflix that explores four different UFO mass sightings at four different locations across the globe. The series, which premiered on the streaming service September 27th, is garnering some attention because it is produced by Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin.

As someone who has had a longtime interest in the subject of UFOs, and who has read and watched a great deal about the phenomenon, I was excited to see Encounters. With UFOs, or as they’ve now been deemed UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomenon), finally being publicly taken seriously by governments and the media after years of being scoffed at, the opportunity for quality documentaries to inform audiences and initiate further investigation is at an all-time high.

Prior to Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment producing Encounters, other high profile Hollywood producers/directors have stepped into the UFO breach in recent years in similar fashion. JJ Abrams’ 2021 docu-series titled UFO, is one example.

Encounters is very similar in some ways to Abrams’ UFO as both are four-part docu-series, both cover a lot of familiar ground that UFO afficionados will know well, and both are decent enough starting places for the uninitiated to dip their toe into the UFO subject. Unfortunately, both are also, despite their best intentions, middle-of-the-road, rather forgettable projects.

Unlike Abrams’ UFO series, Encounters for the most part stays away from the UFO hot topics that have made headlines in the last five years or so and instead focuses on four mass sightings in recent and not-so-recent history.

The first episode is about the 2008 sighting by hundreds of people in Stephensville, Texas.

This first episode is, like all the others, very well shot and professionally produced. The witnesses presented aren’t just credible but are interesting, and their stories are compelling. Even more compelling is the radar evidence discovered after a FOIA request that backs up the claims of those who saw UFOs and saw F-16s quickly chase after them.

One minor issue I had with the first episode is that it never mentions that Stephensville, Texas is very close to the home of George W. Bush, who was President of the United States at the time of the UFO incident. This seemed a curious omission in recounting the tale.

Episode two covers the 1994 encounter at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe. This incident is fascinating, but the episode is a bit bumpy. For instance, 60 students claim to have seen a UFO and an alien in broad daylight, but one student, who is now a grown man, claims he made the whole thing up and everyone else just went with it and now believe the delusion. I understand wanting to show both sides of an argument, but this lone student seems, frankly, unhinged, and his testimony about it being a hoax feels, ironically enough, absurd in the face of the counter evidence.

This episode is noteworthy solely because it introduces the remarkable Dr. John Mack, the late Harvard psychiatrist who in the 1990s began to take the alien abduction phenomenon seriously.

John Mack’s story is worthy of an extensive documentary all its own, but Encounters is only able to give a brief background on his astounding career and the impact he had on the subject. One can only hope that a more extensive documentary on Mack is produced, but for the time being this quick review in episode two will hopefully pique newbie’s interest in the man and his work.

Episode three examines the 1977 Broad Haven Triangle incident, in which a bevy of Welsh school boys and townspeople witnessed UFOs and aliens. This episode was the weakest of the bunch as it never streamlines its storytelling or clarifies the bizarre incidents in question.

The incident itself is fascinating, as all of the children who witnessed it were quickly separated by skeptical teachers and asked to draw what they saw, and drew the same thing. The counter point is that at that time the culture was awash in UFOs and so all people, not just children, had a foundational understanding of what UFOs would look like and thus rendered them in unison upon request.

Much of the other witnesses in the Broad Haven case tell interesting stories but they feel less compelling, and frankly less believable, than the three other incidents examined in this series.

The final episode looks at the plethora of UFO sightings in Fukushima, Japan after the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

This episode features the very best video evidence in the series, but also wanders down some pretty bizarre, and frankly, unhelpful paths when interviewing residents of the area.

For example, one woman, a drama teacher and pseudo-spiritualist, claims she is an alien and is inhabiting a body on earth to witness the great transformation that is happening. This woman, who is like every other new age kook I’ve ever met, and trust me when I tell you I’ve met a hefty number of them, suffers from the shadow disease of new age-ism, namely egregious narcissism. Why the producers would include such an obviously low-credibility nutjob like this woman is beyond me as it demeans the topic and diminishes the mini-series.

The spiritual element of UFOs is a big topic in this episode as the cultural differences between East and West are explored, with the East being more open to UFOs as some sort of spiritual phenomenon rather than a physical one.

The Fukushima UFO case is one of the more evidence-based ones, so it makes the producers decision to focus on more esoteric subjects rather than on the actual evidence very counter-productive and dismaying.

On the whole, Encounters is disappointing for someone like me as I know a lot about these incidents already, and the series doesn’t really bring anything new to the fore.

To someone with any background in UFOs, Encounters is decidedly tame and feels rather out of date. If the series came out a decade ago it would’ve felt much more relevant and interesting.

That said, if you spend the majority of your time in the mainstream and are a newbie to the UFO subject, then Amblin’s Encounters could be a decent enough place to dip your toe into the topic, as would be JJ Abrams’ tepid UFO series.

But if you want to take a serious look at the subject of UFOs, I would recommend starting with the work of documentarian James Fox, whose films Out of the Blue (2003), I Know What I Saw (2009) and Phenomenon (2020), are as good and as informative as it gets in the genre.

With those three films as your foundation, you’ll have a solid understanding of the history of the subject and how we got where we are today, and what might come tomorrow.

As for Encounters, despite covering some truly vital incidents, it never rises to be anything more than a brief overview of a topic worthy of so much more.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Winning Time (HBO) Season Two: A Review – 'Winning Time' Plays a Losing Game

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!***

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Great topic. Poor execution. Bad series.

Winning Time, the HBO series that chronicles the Los Angeles Lakers tumultuous rule atop the NBA during the 1980s, finished its second, and later announced, final, season on Sunday night, and it wasn’t so much an airball as it was a brick that landed with a resounding thud.

Watching Winning Time has been one of the more frustrating experiences for me as a cultural critic and basketball fan who was fortunate enough to live through the events portrayed in the series because the story it attempts to tell is so fascinating, interesting and dramatically compelling, and yet the series has consistently missed the target on every attempt.

The first season was a frustrating and muddled mess, but at least it had a bit of edge to it as it dramatized the rather uncomfortably voracious, and sometimes predacious, sexual appetites of both Lakers owner Jerry Buss and the team’s young superstar Magic Johnson.

Buss’ crude and problematic sexual behavior was well-known and, of course, so were Magic’s sexual escapades as they led to the HIV infection that ended of his career, which makes those stories vital to tell. But there can be little doubt that current Lakers owner Jeannie Buss, Jerry Buss’ daughter, was uncomfortable with that level of truthful examination and pressured the producers to be less edgy in their portrayal of her father…and probably Magic too, as Winning Time decidedly lost its balls in season two in regards to Buss and Magic’s failings.

Jerry Buss in season two was transformed from a creepy old-man, wannabe playboy into a broken-hearted victim of lost love, and Magic went from being a hopeless horn dog into a sexless monk who only had eyes for his hometown girl, and eventual wife, Cookie. Neither of these storylines was in the least bit compelling but they ate up the majority of season two.

Another indication of the producers genuflecting to Jeannie Buss is that her new husband, comedian/actor Jay Mohr, was given a small role in season two as an agent.

Interestingly enough, Winning Time did not change its very odd and at-odds-with-reality approach to Jerry West, the team’s GM and former iconic player. West, one of the greatest players and executives in league history, was made out to be a raving lunatic in need of institutionalization in season one – and the real Jerry West publicly complained about it, but he’s treated not much better in season two.

The problems with season two are numerous, chief among them is that it tries to cover so much ground and end ups rushing through most everything.

Season one had ten episodes and covered the team from drafting Magic in 1979 to winning the championship in his rookie year (1979/80). Season two has only seven episodes and has the gargantuan task of chronicling the 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984 seasons…which is a hell of a lot as the Lakers went through major coaching and personnel changes as well as three NBA finals, winning one.

In addition to that Herculean task, the show also struggles to have a discernible protagonist upon whom it can focus the majority of its attention. Season two stumbles between Jerry Buss, Magic and Pat Riley as the drivers of the story and while all of them are worthy of being front and center in a tv series, none of them get adequate story time here to fully flesh out their character and fully realize their story arcs.

The antagonist is a shifting target as well…as it is sometimes snooty head coach Jerry Westhead, and often-times the boogie man of racist archrival Boston Celtics, their fans and the team’s star Larry Bird.

It is certainly not surprising in this day and age that race and racism is centered in a story, but the racial angle in Winning Time is never effectively manifested. For instance, the Celtics’ only sins are that they have more white players than usual in the NBA. None of them are overtly racist, their only crime is being white. In fact, the only people who comment on race are the black players on the Lakers, for example, Kareem calls Larry Bird a “punk ass white boy”.

The series also makes stuff up about Boston fans attacking the Lakers’ team bus after an NBA finals game in 1984. It seems to greatly undermine the series’ thesis of Boston and its fan’s being rabidly racist when the writers/producers have to concoct a pseudo-racist incident in order to make their point. It seems obvious to say but if you have to make things up in order to show groups of people (or individuals) as racist, then that probably means that the alleged racism in question didn’t exist in the first place.

Larry Bird is made out to be some sneering devil incarnate, which I suppose the Lakers and their fans felt he actually was at the time, but in reality, for all his trash talk and fearless play, Bird was as shy and progressive a soul as any human being despite being an absolute killer on the court.

Unfortunately, with the series being cancelled after season two which ended with the climax of the contentious 1984 finals, which is the height of unintentional comedy as the Celtics won the series, which must’ve tortured the blatantly pro-Lakers/anti-Celtics makers of this series. (As an aside, I attended the infamous game 5 of this series in the furnace known as Boston Garden, and laughed deliriously as Kareem, sitting a mere 50 feet from me, sucked on an oxygen mask as he tried to survive the sweltering, suffocating heat). The series ending its story in 1984 means viewers never get to see Bird and Magic’s bitter rivalry transform into real life friendship on screen. Although to be honest, I can’t imagine the series would be any more effective portraying that than they have been portraying anything else.

The acting in Winning Time has always grated as it gravitated much too close to caricature for my taste, and it always failed to re-create the basketball with any sort of realism.

For example, Quincy Isaiah plays Magic Johnson. Isaiah does a decent job in portraying Magic in the dramatic scenes, and has a passing resemblance to him, but Isaiah on the basketball court is an embarrassment. First off, he is a chubby guy with a paunch, which is difficult to overlook. I mean, you knew there was going to be a second season so why not bust your ass with a personal trainer and get into shape? Secondly, he is awful at basketball…and can’t even fake being a player. If I saw Isaiah as Magic do one more – jump in the air/fake left/ pass right move, I was going to gauge my eyes out. Although to be fair, that repetitious basketball garbage wasn’t nearly as bad as the endless phone calls between Magic and Cookie where he tries to sweet talk her. Yikes.

A different type of example is Solomon Hughes, who plays Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Hughes is actually quite good in the role and perfectly captures Kareem’s brooding and distant personality. And Hughes is even a respectable basketball player (he played briefly in the NBA) so he passes that physical test. My one problem with Hughes is that he’s playing Kareem Abdul Jabbar, one of the greatest players of all time, and yet he never attempts to replicate Kareem’s signature shot, the skyhook. That’s like playing Elvis and not learning how to shake your hips. I can go out into my driveway right now and mimic Kareem and take ten skyhooks and hit maybe five of them…so why couldn’t Hughes work on that one shot and get it down? I mean, it’s not like he needs to be able to actually score in a real game, they’re playing on a film set so everything is fake…so why not?

A positive example of this is that Sean Patrick Small, who plays Larry Bird, actually tries to shoot in a similar fashion to Bird. His rendition of Bird’s shot isn’t a perfect replica but its close enough and believable enough. Small also has a passing resemblance to Bird, which is a compliment to his playing of the role but on the street would probably be fighting words, and he actually does a solid job in the dramatic scenes.

The same cannot be said for my old friend Adrien Brody who plays legendary coach Pat Riley. Riley is a master motivator who looks like a male super model but Brody is a phony and dullard who face looks like someone took a baseball bat to a Jack-O-Lantern that had melted in the summer sun. That Adrien Brody has won an Oscar is remarkable considering his shallow and toothless portrayal of Riley in Winning Time, as Brody lacks the presence and gravitas of the real-life Riley, and commands zero respect on the screen.

Jason Segal as feckless coach Paul Westhead is no better. Segal is an uncomfortable dramatic actor who relies on shallow mannerisms instead of depth of character and acting skill, and his Westhead barely registers as caricature, never mind character.

Jason Clarke is usually a good actor but his Jerry West is on another planet as he’s a one-note crazy person. West is one of the most remarkable people in NBA history and yet here he’s reduced to a yelling machine.

On the bright side, John C. Reilly really is terrific as Jerry Buss. Reilly never loses his grip on the enigmatic Buss despite being saddled with a below average script. It is a shame that Winning Time never lives up to the quality work that John C. Reilly does in it.

Another bright spot was Hadley Robinson. who plays Jeannie Buss and is quite compelling, but unfortunately the script never gives her anywhere to go or anything to do. She is nothing but a second-thought in the story and that’s a shame as in real life Jeannie has lived a very interesting life.

I didn’t like Winning Time, as it felt, despite its big budget, like a rather flimsy series that was better in in thought than in execution. But the truth is that I’m not like most people as I’m not looking to be distracted or mildly entertained by a tv series. I’m actually looking for something great, something transcendent and Winning Time sure as hell isn’t that. Greatness, which was the hallmark of the showtime Lakers on the 1980s, is nearly non-existent in modern day film and tv, so rare as to be virtually non-existent.

I realize my standards may be higher than other people’s so I try to watch things through more lenient and forgiving eyes. Which begs the question… is Winning Time at least entertaining? Frankly the answer to that is…not really. The series is, at its heart…just a sort of silly exercise, as it has the feel of grown-ups play acting…and not very well.

The bottom line is that as a member of the prime target audience for Winning Time, I wish it were better and I wish it succeeded…but it isn’t and it didn’t…and now its cancelled…so it ultimately doesn’t really matter.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Painkiller (Netflix): A Miniseries Review - An Uncomfortably Dumb Take on the Opioid Holocaust

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This miserable mess of a miniseries is so abysmal it dishonors the actual victims of the opioid epidemic.

Like many people, the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged this country for the last quarter of a century, has had a direct and profound impact upon my life. The particulars of my situation are personal, so I won’t share them here, but just know that the topic of the 21st century’s plague of opioid addiction is one which holds great importance to me and of which I know a great deal. So, when Painkiller, the new six-episode Netflix miniseries debuted on the streaming service on August 10th, I was very interested.  

The series, based upon the nonfiction book Painkiller: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier as well as an article in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain”, dramatizes the story of the deplorable Sackler family - owners of Purdue Pharma, and the powerful drug they developed and deceptively marketed, Oxycontin, an opioid equivalent to heroin which sparked an epidemic of addiction across America that has killed over a million people and devastated the lives of at least five times that.

I’ve read both Meier’s book and Keefe’s article, as well as all of the other relevant gospels about the opioid epidemic, like Dopesick by Beth Macy and American Overdose by Chris McGreal (as well as Dreamland by Sam Quinones about the heroin trade). I found all of the books to be indispensable in trying to understand the magnitude of the evil unleashed by the Sacklers and the insidious and insipid corruption endemic in America. (I recommend them all but if I had to list them I’d say 1. Dopesick 2. Painkiller 3. American Overdose…I’d also say that Dreamland is absolutely, without question, essential reading not just on the topic of opioids but in general.)

The Sackler family pharma empire was started by Arthur Sackler who in the 1950’s turned medicine into a marketing and sales business. In the 1960’s Arthur came up with brilliant marketing plan for Valium and masterfully inflicted mother’s little helper onto an unsuspecting public. Thirty years later his nephew Richard would do the same with Oxycontin, which unleashed an opioid apocalypse upon America.

The scope and scale of the Sackler family’s diabolical nature is difficult to grasp as normal human beings simply cannot even begin to comprehend the rapacious evil of malicious and malignant mega-sociopaths. But normal people can grasp the consequences of the Sackler family’s inherent evil because they were the ones who suffered under it. For the last twenty-five years no one has been safe from Oxycontin’s spread. Rich, poor, urban, rural, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew someone who was devastated by the opioid epidemic that went across this country like a blitzkrieg.

Some areas were originally harder hit than others. Western Virginia for instance, was initially targeted by the Sackler machine because it had high rates of disability claims, which in the Sackler’s eyes meant high need for opiates and addicts-in-waiting. If you look at a map and draw a circle around Western Virginia which encompasses South-Western West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky, the release of Oxycontin and its accompanying marketing campaign was the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb being dropped at its epicenter. In its wake, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, died and families and communities were destroyed. I read one statistic that left me shocked which said that in some of the counties in this area 75% of children in schools were being raised by someone other than their birth parents because of the opioid epidemic. The magnitude of this catastrophe is nearly impossible to comprehend.

Of course, rural Virgina, West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky weren’t the only places the be obliterated the by Sackler’s scorched-earth Oxycontin campaign, as it was nationwide. And it should come as no surprise to anyone with a brain between their ears that in corruption riddled-America it was operatives and bureaucrats from both political parties that pushed Oxycontin through the FDA approval process and then exerted influence to make sure that the Sacklers got off scot-free for their crimes. Corruption makes for strange bedfellows as people like the Democrat douchebags like Saint James Comey and Clinton lackey Mary Jo White, as well as Republican uber-scumbag supreme Rudy Giuliani all played big parts in covering the Sackler’s asses.

But enough of what actually happened during the Oxycontin-fueled, Sackler-family-instigated opioid crisis, let’s get to Painkiller which attempts to dramatize these events.

Unfortunately, Painkiller, which is created by Micah Fitzeman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and directed by Peter Berg, is absolutely atrocious, an utterly abysmal affair, so much so that it does a tremendous disservice to the victims, living and dead, of the Sackler slaughter.

The series attempts to tell a vast story by using four narratives that are meant to tie together. There’s the story of Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), president of Purdue Pharma and driving force of the Oxycontin express. Then there’s Edie Flowers (Uzo Uduba) – an assistant U.S. attorney, who is sort of a narrator to events. There’s also new Purdue Pharma Oxycontin saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) as well as the story of working-class addict Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch).

The biggest problems with Painkiller are the uneven tone, the atrocious casting and equally awful acting.

Let’s start with the tone. Each episode starts with real parents of people who have died from opioid overdose, and their stories, as brief as they are, are absolutely heartbreaking. You can feel the profound depth of their pain just by hearing them speak a few words, or in their inability to speak a few words. Seeing the genuine and devastating pain of these parents and then contrasting it with the phony baloney, tone deaf bullshit which follows in the dramatization of the epidemic which killed their children, feels very uncomfortable if not outright disrespectful.

For example, the Richard Sackler storyline is so ridiculous as to be absurd. Richard is haunted by the ghost of his evil uncle Arthur, and has conversations with him. Yes, that’s not a misprint, this actually happens throughout the series. Richard lives in a pseudo fantasy world which borders on the slapstick. It is impossible to take this garbage seriously, especially when it is preceded by real people struggling to keep their shit together as they briefly recount the hell that is the loss of a child.

Then there’s the grounded story of Glen Kryger, who struggles with addiction to Oxycontin. The tone of this is more serious, and it feels like the rest of the series should follow suit, but none of it does.

Jumping from Richard Sackler’s fantasy life to Kryger’s reality hell to the odd capitalism porn of saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer’s life and then to the entirely extraneous (and fictional because the character is made up) history of Edie Flowers is enough to cause whiplash and induce vomiting.

As for the acting, let’s start with Matthew Broderick. Broderick as Richard Sackler is an embarrassment. Fat Ferris fakes his way through the role and never even remotely touches the ground. He hams his way through scene after scene with the vitality of mule on barbiturates and the charisma of cadaver in the hot sun. Equally awful is the seemingly always awful Clark Gregg, who plays the ghost of Sackler sparked epidemic past in the form of Richard’s uncle Arthur Sackler, the guy who started the whole Sackler shit sandwich from which we have to take a bite.

Both Broderick and Gregg are embarrassingly bad in their roles, and they aren’t helped by Peter Berg’s asinine direction.

Peter Berg is, at his very best, a third-rate directing talent, but at his core he is a visionless, talentless, hack. His direction on this series is no less than disgraceful. The uneven tone, which varies widely between gritty realism and absurdist fantasy, is so poorly executed as to be offensive to anyone who has suffered as a result of the Sackler scourge.

Berg’s incompetence, ineptitude and inability to make anything dramatically coherent should come as no surprise considering his horseshit filmography, but considering the stakes involved with Painkiller, it is still a major disappointment.

As for the rest of the cast, Uzo Aduba, who has somehow won three Emmys, is an absolute mystery to me. Never has an actress so devoid of talent, skill and charisma been so overly praised and honored. Adding to the entire issue with the series, Uduba’s character Edie Flowers is totally made up. I would assume the producers felt they needed a woman of color to bring the black girl magic to the opioid epidemic (they needed a heroine to fight heroin!) and to sassily stand up to all those evil white men who made it happen. Of course, that isn’t what happened in real life…and shoehorning diversity and inclusion into a story about an epidemic that killed vastly more white people than black, feels pretty disgusting to me (btw…. The Hulu miniseries Dopesick did the same thing, no doubt for the same reason, creating Rosario Dawson’s DEA agent character out of thin air just to appease the diversity gods. God help us all), as does trying to shoehorn the crack epidemic and race into the story, and then somehow attempting to give a black crack dealer absolution for their sins. Could it be that the black crack dealer and Richard Sackler are both vile animals worthy of violence upon them? Or is that too complex for simpleton twats like Peter Berg and company?

Ultimately, Aduba is an egregious bore and a grievous burden to the story. We don’t need her character and we certainly don’t need her and her aggressively amateurish acting which feels like a petulant child pouting and preening in order to get more ice cream.

Dina Shahabi plays Britt, a morally and ethically compromised Oxycontin super saleswoman who is absolutely wild about capitalism…and she is maybe the worst actress I’ve seen in a major film or tv project in the last decade…which is saying a lot. Shahabi is so transparently dreadful and in over her head as to be painful. If I saw a child in a middle school play act this badly, I would not only demand their drama teacher be fired but also physically assault them (the teacher not the child!)  for their crimes against the art of drama.

West Duchovny, daughter of David Duchovny and Tea Leoni and this week’s winner of the Hollywood Nepotism Award, is a pretty blonde who plays Shannon Schaeffer, Britt’s pretty blonde protégé/salesgirl. Duchovny is considerably better than Shahabi, but that doesn’t mean she’s particularly good….because she isn’t.

On the bright side, Taylor Kitsch is a good actor and he does superb work as Glen, a forty-something mechanic who gets hurt and goes down the Oxy rabbit hole to hell. Kitsch has always been a good actor, but the fact that he’s able to rise above the shit swamp that is Painkiller and acquit himself so well where others fail so miserably, speaks to his talent and skill.

Carolina Bartczak, who plays Lily, Glen’s wife, also brings a refreshing bit of realism to her role and does some solid work as well.

As much as I like Kitsch and Bartczak and found the Kryger family storyline to be the most compelling, I also found it to be an inadequate representation of the horrors of the opioid holocaust. Glen Kryger is no one’s child. We never meet his parents. We never get to know any younger people ravaged by the Sackler scourge, which I think is a missed opportunity as it would’ve been even more impactful.

As previously mentioned, Dopesick, based upon the Beth Macy book of the same name, was a Hulu miniseries that premiered in October of 2021. It covers the same exact ground as Painkiller but is much more thorough, accurate and effective. I thought Dopesick was very flawed but worth watching for Michael Keaton’s absolutely stunning performance. As flawed as it was, Dopesick looks like The Godfather and Citizen Kane combined when compared to Painkiller.

The bottom line is that the story of the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic is vitally important and to have this terrible tale told in such a frivolous, flippant and glib way is, frankly, blasphemous if not criminal.

Peter Berg, Matthew Broderick and the rest of the sorry sons of bitches who made Painkiller should be ashamed of themselves for trying to exploit the devastation of real people, and for doing so in such a shoddy and shitty manner.

I wholly encourage you to skip Painkiller the series and instead go read the book Painkiller, as well as Dopesick, Dreamland, and American Overdose. It is absolutely vital that people understand what happened with the Sacklers, the corruption in modern America, and the intimate horrors of the opioid epidemic. The scope and scale of this story is vast but reading these books will help you understand, in gruesome, minute detail, the world we live in and the evil and vile people running it, and how the powers that be see us regular folks as nothing more than disposable cannon fodder for their misery-inducing, money making machines.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Jury Duty: A TV Review - Guilty of Being Funny

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Brevity is the soul of wit and this quick hitting reality/hoax series is brief and funny.

I finally got around to watching Jury Duty, the much-talked-about reality/hoax/sitcom series that premiered in April of this year on Amazon, and I have some thoughts.

The premise of Jury Duty is that a collection of people are called to serve jury duty for a civil trial in Los Angeles. But the twist is that the entire trial is fake, and all of the jurors except one – the target of the hoax, are actors who are in on the scam, as are the fake judge, bailiff, plaintiff and defendant.

The thing about Jury Duty that really surprised me was that unlike nearly every other reality tv show ever made, it actually left me with some hope for humanity.

The “regular guy” who is the target of the hoax is Ronald Gladden, who is the most normal of normal guys imaginable, and he is a really good dude. He treats everyone, no matter how weird or annoying they may be…and they are often very weird and very annoying, with not just respect but with genuine kindness. He also takes his civil duty as a juror seriously and doesn’t just bide his time on jury duty but actually fully engages with the process.

Watching Ronald navigate some very potentially uncomfortable-to-the-point-of-being-ludicrous situations with grace and good-nature restored some of my long-lost hope in humanity.  

The reality, pardon the pun, is that the majority of people in the world are like Ronald, but the vast majority of reality tv, the most loathsome of television genres, is about rewarding boorish behavior and spotlighting self-serving, self-centered, fame-whoring anti-Ronalds.

For this reason, I was skeptical of even giving Jury Duty a try as I assumed it was the usual soulless formula of talentless/narcissistic people masquerading as real people acting like fake people reality tv bullshit that always leaves me irritated, aggravated and depressed. But watching Ronald thoughtfully negotiate through the bizarre situations he is thrust into, and do it with such a pleasant and appealing attitude, not only left me laughing but also optimistic…not a state I’m used to.

Jury duty in real life is like spending time in Darwin’s waiting room, and the series Jury Duty is no different as the fake jurors are a perfect and hilarious encapsulation of the army of morons and misfits that inhabit our world.

For example, there’s Todd, the socially awkward pseudo-inventor, who never fails to be incessantly weird. The actor who plays Todd, David Brown, is remarkable as he repeatedly does the most insane and inane things but never even approaches breaking character or laughing…a Herculean accomplishment.

Joining Todd is Noah, the clueless Mormon, and the far-out floozy Jeannie, who is hungry to take Noah’s virginity.

There’s also the crotchety old lady, Barbara, and Ken, a slow-talking Korean, who are unique enough to be realistic but not so odd as to raise red flags. The same is true of Nikki the bailiff, who I never expected to NOT be a real-life bailiff.

The “star” of the show is actor James Marsden who plays a hyper-narcissistic version of himself. This version of Marsden is constantly talking about his fame and his movies and even gets his own private bailiff so he can stay at home and not be sequestered with the riff raff at a hotel for the trial. Ronald takes all of Marsden’s celebrity quirks in stride and with a smile…even when Marsden takes egregious advantage of him in the most odious (literally) of ways.

I am a pretty tough audience, but Jury Duty was actually able to make me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, something that rarely happens when I watch tv.

The last show that had me laughing and cringing this much was last year’s bizarre, pseudo-reality show The Rehearsal on HBO. In fact, The Rehearsal and Jury Duty would be a fascinating and fantastic double feature to watch back-to-back, as they somewhat inhabit the same documentary/hoax genre but approach it in very different ways.

Jury Duty is a breezy watch, as each of its eight episodes average a brisk 24 minutes or so and keep you engaged the whole time.

So, if you want to experience the absurdist humor of serving on a jury without having to experience the hell of actually serving on a jury, then I strongly recommend you hop into the bizarro-world of Jury Duty.

My final verdict on this show is that it is NOT GUILTY of being the usual reality tv junk and is definitely GUILTY of being funny…and maybe…just maybe…a little bit profound…or at least inspirational.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Ted Lasso - Season Three: A Review - Feminized and Unfunny

****THIS REVIEW REVEALS PLOT POINTS!!! THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This once great show is now truly awful.

Season one of Ted Lasso premiered on the fledgling streaming service Apple TV+ back in August of 2020, a very toxic, turbulent and tumultuous time as the U.S. presidential election between Trump and Biden was kicking into high gear.

The amusing show about a good-natured simpleton from Middle America thrown into the cutthroat swamp of high stakes British football became a phenomenon for the sole reason that it was relentlessly benign in a culture growing more aggressively malignant by the moment.

Ted Lasso, both the show and the character, was like a cool breeze on a sweltering day as its optimism was a satisfying reprieve from the suffocating negativity that had, and has, come to dominate American discourse.

The first season was crisp, concise and comedically coherent. It featured a charming, Emmy-winning performance from Jason Sudeikis as the fish-out-of-water title character, and also from an ensemble cast portraying a wide array of amusing soccer misfits.

Unfortunately, the show fell into the trap of believing all the “nice-guy” hype surrounding it and as a result lost its way on season two, which premiered in July of 2021. Gone were the numerous obstacles Ted had to face in season one, like a boss yearning for his failure, and in their place came nothing but vacuous soft smiles and vapid platitudes.

As bad as season two was, it pales in comparison to the atrocity that is season three, which premiered on March 15, 2023 and is supposedly the series finale.

To be as succinct as possible, Ted Lasso season three is a steaming pile of shite.

Season three feels like it was written by a group of liberal, Los Angeles, wine moms who simply can’t comprehend anyone disagreeing with their insipid, insidious and ideologically impotent beliefs, and who ban anyone who dare do such a hateful and hurtful thing.

The show’s infectiously benign nature featured in season one is now long gone, replaced by phony and flaccid politically correct posturing that is egregiously unfunny and frankly repulsive for its shameless pandering.

All of the male characters are now completely castrated, as is all of the conflict and therefore comedy. Gay themes, women’s empowerment and immigration politics take center stage, while comedy exits stage left. Gay story lines or political topics would be fine for the show to explore if there were actual comedy to extract from them, but conflict is necessary for comedy and season three of Ted Lasso is deathly allergic to any and all conflict.

For example, the gay relationships on display are embraced whole-heartedly by every single character with no exceptions. The working-class Brits and the third-world immigrants on the AFC Richmond roster not only accept but celebrate their gay teammate instantaneously…how realistic. The only holdout among the team is because the gay player lied, not because he’s gay. No players even good-naturedly tease the gay player, never mind torment him. Ted Lasso even gives a speech saying basically that being accepting of the gay player isn’t enough…you have to actively affirm his sexual preference.

Then there’s the gay relationship public relations tart Keely (Juno Temple) gets in to with her female venture capitalist boss Jack (Jodi Balfour). First off, it’s very odd that neither of Keely’s ex-lovers, Jamie and Roy, notice her new sexual orientation or comment on it at all.

In addition, if Jack were a man, she’d be easy to peg as a sexual predator and asshole, but because she’s a lesbian no one bats an eye to her controlling and predatory behavior.

Counter to that, Rupert (Anthony Head), former owner of AFC Richmond and ex-husband to its current owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddington), is a philandering, low-life piece of shit and that is made abundantly clear as the show goes out of its way to punish and humiliate him. What makes a rich lech like Rupert different than Jack? He’s using his money and power to sexually exploit women…just like Jack…but Rupert has a penis which apparently makes him the devil.

Ted Lasso is infected with a virulent misandry and repugnant male-phobia as it seemingly can’t do anything but hate and ridicule men. All of the male characters are weak-kneed caricatures of what faux feminists think men should be, as opposed to what they really are.

For example, most real men (but certainly not all) would accept their gay teammate, but they would also relentlessly bust his balls…and the gay teammate would feel accepted because his buddies were busting his balls like they bust everybody else’s balls. This is how actual men behave around one another and communicate with one another.

And then there’s the ridiculous immigration garbage. Sam (Toheeb Jimoh), a Nigerian player on Richmond, gets into a Twitter kerfuffle with some British politician over turning away boats of African immigrants. You think the working-class British players on the team might have some different opinions on immigration than Sam? You think Jamie Tarrt (Phil Dunster), the Manchester-born, blue-collar boy who is thrilled to play for the English national team, might want to tell Sam to shut the fuck up and go back to Nigeria – the country he so desperately wants to represent in the World Cup? You think a real football rough guy like Roy Kent might think “England for the English” and might get in Sam’s face over it?

A clash between Sam and Jamie over immigration might actually be really funny, since neither one of them are particularly bright (poor Sam seems mildly retarded as all he ever does is smile). Instead, the show just has Sam’s restaurant trashed by supposed white supremacists and then the whole team comes together to clean it up. How hysterically funny. Just kidding…it isn’t.

The worst character of all is team owner Rebecca, played with nauseous self-righteousness by Emmy winner Hannah Waddingham. Rebecca is no longer the villain – because it is forbidden for women to be villains on Ted Lasso, instead she is now a picture of feminist power…yet does little more than smile every two seconds like a brain-damaged toddler.

That Rebecca, who only owns the team because she was a bartender who fucked the married owner – Rupert – who she then divorced and took for half his fortune, is held up as a paragon of modern feminist virtue and entrepreneurial verve is one of the more unintentionally funny things in the entire show. That the big conclusion to Rebecca and Keely’s stories – is that they decide to start an AFC Richmond Women’s soccer team, made me laugh out loud for its impotence, idiocy and desperate pandering. As an aside…the only thing in the world worse than women’s soccer…is women’s basketball.

What isn’t funny about Ted Lasso is poor Ted Lasso, who is now reduced to just blurting out his inane, folksy words of wisdom like a coked-up Tony Robbins with Tourette’s. Sudeikis is obviously mailing it in at this point and his Lasso is as lackluster as it is deeply depressing.

What is even more bizarre than its total lack of comedy and humor is that season three of Ted Lasso makes virtually no sense in terms of storylines.

Nate the “wunderkid” (Nick Mohammed), has a story arc that is so incoherent it boggles the mind. The same is true of alleged tough guy Roy Kent, played by Brett Goldstein, who is as believable as a tough guy as Richard Simmons. Both Roy and Jamie Tartt were two of the more interesting characters at the start of the show and season three turns them into eunuchs and then takes a gigantic, sloppy shit right on top of them leaving behind an odious mess.

To be clear, I absolutely fucking hated Ted Lasso season three. FUCKING HATED IT. Part of why I hated it is because I liked season one so much. But after season one all the male characters got castrated and all the funny went right out of the show.

If you hate men and hate to laugh yet love soft smiles accompanied by gentle guitar and piano music, then season three of Ted Lasso is definitely for you. If you don’t…then Ted Lasso is not for you and you should avoid it at all costs as it will only infuriate you with its cornucopia of feminized anti-comedy.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Barry (HBO): Final Season Review - Lights Out for Glorious Dark Comedy

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: WATCH IT. This very dark comedy which features stellar writing, acting directing and action sequences, is as good, and as weird, as it gets.

Last week was a big one at HBO. The true crime miniseries Love and Death starring Elizabeth Olsen concluded, the prestige TV king-of-the-moment Succession unveiled its much-anticipated series finale, and the sterling streaming service HBO Max was tossed into the trash heap of history and replaced by the god-awful garbage streaming service Max. What a week! Oh…and lost amongst all that the best TV comedy series of the 21st Century and maybe the darkest comedy of all-time, Barry, came to its conclusion after four stellar seasons.

Barry, which is created by and stars Bill Hader, aired its finale on HBO right after Succession’s finale, and thus no one is talking about it which I think is a shame because while I thoroughly enjoyed Succession, I think Barry is at the very least its comedy equivalent, if not better.

If you haven’t watched Barry – and I know a lot of you haven’t, you really should. And I will make this series/season review totally spoiler free in order to encourage you to take the Barry plunge.

Barry tells the tale of Barry Berkman (Bill Hader), a former Marine war veteran who post-war works as an assassin. Barry finds himself in Los Angeles and ultimately ends up in an acting class taught by the esteemed Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). Barry gets the acting bug and tries to juggle his newfound emotional growth fueled by Cousineau’s acting classes with his rather cold-blooded occupation of killer-for-hire.

Seasons one and two of Barry were spectacular as they masterfully eviscerated the world of acting, acting classes, acting teachers and Hollywood. As someone who navigated all of those horribly inane things in real life, I found Barry to be not just insanely funny but astonishingly insightful.

Season three was a major shift for Barry as the series became much more surreal and existential. This shift at first was confusing and off-putting, but once it took hold (or I took hold of it) it elevated the show to extraordinary heights, morphing it from being an insightful comedy to a deeply and darkly profound one.

What made Barry such a remarkable viewing experience was that in addition to fantastic filmmaking, exquisite action sequences, great writing and even greater acting, every major character had a distinct and compelling dramatic arc that played out in completely unpredictable ways.

For example, Barry went from being a compliant soldier and cold-blooded killer to grappling with his conscience, his past, his mortality and God. Monroe Fuches, Barry’s murder-for-hire handler, went to hell and back and came out a considerably different man. Gene Cousineau, Barry’s self-absorbed acting teacher, went on an absurd roller coaster ride and ended up where he always wanted to be but not how he expected to be there. Barry’s self-absorbed girlfriend Sally went on a tumultuous journey but could never escape from her true, awful self. Chechen gangster NoHo Hank went from being a throwaway punchline to being a heartbreaking Shakespearean dramatic figure.

These captivating characters arcs were elevated by truly stunning performances across the board. In the first two seasons in particular, Henry Winkler as Gene Cousineau was as good as anyone has ever been in a television comedy. Winkler’s Cousineau was every acting teacher I’ve ever had…part Jesus Christ, part John Wayne Gacy, part Hitler, part Richard Simmons, part Mao and all arrogant, egotistical, insecure asshole, and Winkler’s singular, relentless brilliance made him must see tv.

Stephen Root as Fuches was incredible across all four seasons but was utterly sublime in season four. Root brought an extraordinary yet subtle sensitivity to this seemingly obtuse role and it was an absolute joy to behold.

Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank went from giving hysterical line readings in the first few seasons to giving a deeply-felt and moving turn as a broken man in season four.

Sarah Goldberg was fantastic as the narcissistic Sally from the get go but in season four she allowed the character’s narcissism to devour her from the inside out. Goldberg’s work in this series was really and truly special.

All of the acting in this series was top-notch. Obviously, Bill Hader was brilliant as the endearing sociopath Barry and carried the series in his subdued and subtle way from start to finish. But even actors in small roles rose to the occasion on Barry, like the fantastic and often under-appreciated Eddie Alfano, who was superb in a supporting role as a thoughtful but dim-witted tough guy in season four.

The final season of Barry is more akin to the existentially soaked sur-reality of season three than the more straight-forward comedy of seasons one and two. Season four, like season three, is filled with much psychological symbolism and often feels like a bizarre dream.

The threat not just of death but of divine judgement hovers over season four like a funnel cloud looking for the perfect place to touch ground. All the characters feel like ghosts haunting their own lives or like dream characters unable to wake from a recurring nightmare.

This may not sound like a fun comedy to you, and in some ways, it isn’t fun despite being funny, but make no mistake, it is a comedy, an extremely dark comedy, just not like any we’ve seen before.

Barry’s finale episode was as gloriously weird as everything that preceded it, and ultimately, and this is no spoiler, you could argue that no one ended up the “winner” in Barry…except, of course, the viewer.

But I must say that I felt the finale did stumble in its final sequence. Again, I won’t give anything away, but for a series that was so exquisitely profound for its first 31 ¾ episodes, the final sequence of the series was impossibly, almost irrevocably, trite.

The ending sequence felt so beneath the philosophical profundity of everything that came before it that it felt like either a lame joke or a cheap cop out. An ending that disappointing and unsatisfying can make you question an entire series in hindsight. While I feel strongly about that sequence’s failure, I don’t feel that strongly about it, and can see the wider point Hader was trying to make…notice I didn’t say “deeper point”, but that wider point was too banal and cliched and well beneath the standard that the great Bill Hader had set with his groundbreaking series.

So, yes, I was disappointed with how Barry ended, but I wasn’t on the whole I wasn’t disappointed with season four or the series overall. To me, Barry is the best comedy series HBO has ever produced. Veep is a close second, but I felt Veep stumbled in its final season more substantially way than Barry did in its final sequence. Since I am discussing the greatest HBO comedies of all-time I know people will ask so let me be very clear, I am not a Curb Your Enthusiasm guy in any way, shape or form. I simply cannot get through a single episode of that shitty show. I just don’t understand the appeal of Larry David in the least as I find him not only actively unfunny but aggressively repulsive.

In conclusion, Barry’s final season is a strange and surreal one but is both very funny and deeply profound despite missing the mark with the last sequence in the last episode.

If you haven’t watched Barry or you bailed on during the weirdness of season three, my recommendation is to go back and watch it all from start to finish. It isn’t what you think it is and isn’t what you expect, which is why it is so worthwhile.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Succession (HBO): Final Season Review - All's Well That Ends Well...Enough

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME SEASON 4 SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!****

Season 4 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Overall Series Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: WATCH IT. Great acting and great writing make for some great TV.

Succession is dead. Long live Succession.

The HBO prestige drama about the dysfunctional Roy family and its mega-media empire had its season four and series finale last night.

For its four seasons Succession has been a glorious dramatic feast served in an era where both film and television have consistently fed us mostly middling, mind-numbing, middlebrow mush.

Watching patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) and his ne’er-do-well offspring Kendall, Shiv and Roman run roughshod over America and its culture was insidiously entertaining but also bone chilling because of its unnerving similarity to the real-world.

The Roys are part Murdoch (Fox), part Redstone (Viacom/CBS/Paramount), part Cox (Cox Communications) and part Roberts (Comcast), and like them all, entirely awful.

Despite being a toxic brew of capitalism porn and media mogul soap opera, Succession never failed to be a joy to behold and the reason for that is two-fold.

First, the acting was superb across the board. Secondly, the dialogue brought to life by these actors was razor sharp and never failed to be anything but modern-day Shakespeare.

That all said, season four was the weakest of the Succession seasons. It wasn’t terrible at all, in fact, it featured the greatest episode not only of the series (episode 3) but of any series in recent memory. But it felt like season four was less dramatically and narratively crisp as the seasons that preceded it.

Part of the issue with season four was that it didn’t earn much of the drama it tried to use. For example, the political election storyline felt trite and shallow because the stakes of the election were not sufficiently developed, and then when they were upon us felt artificially heightened…much like our own real elections.

The same was true for the climax of the finale. Without giving too much away, there is a confrontation between the siblings at a crucial moment that rang surprisingly hollow and underwhelming because it just seemed forced and manufactured, which is not something that happened throughout the run of the series.

This crucial confrontation needed more lead time in order to be more developed and more believable. Unfortunately, the lack of believability around this confrontation undercut the dramatic momentum of the episode, season and series.

Season four was also hamstrung by killing off its most compelling character, Logan, early in the season. Logan was the center of the Succession universe and while it was amusing watching the Roy children try and fill the gaping void left in his absence, it was never quite as profound as when Logan was sitting atop the throne.

Speaking of King Lear…oops…I mean Logan, Brian Cox was absolutely phenomenal in this series. Cox’s Shakespearean speechifying was as good as it gets and has ever gotten in television. Cox’s Logan was a combustible and curmudgeonly king and we should all bow down to his combativeness.

Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy was also spectacular. Watching Roman go full Fredo…and you never go full Fredo, in the final season was extraordinary. Culkin’s ability to bring Roman’s self-loathing and searing, rapier wit to life with such skill and verve was among the show’s highlights.

Sarah Snook’s oh so human, desperate and transparently wounded Shiv was a consistent pleasure to watch as she was Lady MacBeth, Goneril and Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) all rolled in to one.

Jeremy Strong was outstanding as Kendall, the broken boy who would be king but can’t get out of his own way. Strong’s unrelenting commitment to the vacuous and vacant Kendall was impressive.

In season four, Alexander Skarsgard was exquisite as Swedish tech guru Lukas Mattson. Skarsgard was so great in season four as the GoJo CEO he basically took over the show with his quirky, nerd guy darkness.

But of all the great actors on Succession, nobody tops Matthew Macfadyen who played Shiv’s pain sponge, sycophant husband Tom Wambsgans. Tom reeked of shameless ambition and sweaty desperation but never succumbed to self-pity, only to self-interest.

Tom’s whipping boy, cousin Greg, played by Nicholas Braun, yearned to be part of the amoral and incompetent Roy sibling “quad” and would do anything to make it happen or to make anything happen for himself. Braun was outstanding as he stole scenes and episodes with his priceless line readings and his character’s insecure maneuvering and backdoor bravado.

I suppose the reason why, despite its faults and despite having watched the finale on the new, annoyingly glitchy, streaming service Max (fuck you, Max!), I liked Succession so much was that it accurately spoke to our current time and current predicament.  

Watching a Shakespearean-esque dramatization of the ruling elite and ownership class of America, filled with an endless supply of second and third-rate fucktard, mid-wit nepo-babies devoid of balls but ravenous for power, who surround themselves with sycophantic psychopaths whose only ambition is to hold onto their own tiny, Mordor adjacent fiefdoms, was as entertaining as it was unnerving because this is exactly how empires, like America, fail and fall.

For instance, anyone who is even remotely aware can see that America’s ruling class are a decidedly spent force. For God’s sake we are on our way to having another election between fourth-rate, incompetent shitstains Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In a country of over 350 million people, it is impossible that we must choose between a compulsively lying, narcissistic, dementia-addled, pedophile politician and a bloated, incoherent, shameless, compulsively lying, nepo-brat, failure.

Of course, the truth is we only have a choice between these two asshats because we don’t actually have any choice…only the illusion of choice. Succession makes it clear that the decision between who rules and who is ruled is not a decision at all…it’s simply theatre, meant to entertain and distract while the Logan Roys and Lukas Mattsons – the ruling elites of the world, sit on high and pull all the strings.

It was great fun while it lasted, but Succession, like America’s global empire and the dollar’s dominance, is over…and frankly…it needed to be over. Succession needed to end because it ran out of runway for its drama and the American empire needed to end because it, like all empires before it, has grown much too decadent and depraved whilst wearing the crown to survive.

America will no doubt deeply miss its empirical power when it’s gone because if Succession has taught us anything it’s that while being in power is a cold, barren, miserable, sterile, lonely, painful existence, life without power is much, much worse.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Love and Death (HBO) - Miniseries Review: Trite True Crime Deep in the Heart of Texas

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a great cast this is just another true crime retread with a prestige tv veneer.

The HBO miniseries Love and Death, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons and tells the true story of an extra-marital affair and murder in the small town of Wylie, Texas in 1980, finished its seven-episode run on Thursday.

The series, which was written by David E. Kelley, recounts the salacious tale of Candy Montgomery, a mild-mannered Texas housewife and church choir member who has an affair with a fellow married church member Allan Gore. Months after the affair ends Allan’s wife Betty is found brutally murdered with an axe.

Despite the fact that this is apparently a well-known tale and has already been made into a Hulu miniseries (Candy – starring Jessica Biel – which I have not seen), I did not know the Candy Montgomery story prior to watching Love and Death and so I won’t recount it in detail here for you in order to preserve spoilers for any of you who are in the same boat as I am.

The verdict regarding Love and Death is that it’s little more than a true-crime, Lifetime movie with an HBO prestige veneer and some top-notch acting.

Elizabeth Olsen is particularly good as Candy, as she masterfully captures the performative nature of a certain breed of Southern woman. Candy’s mask is so effective it even fools Candy into thinking she’s not who she really is.

As evidenced by her breakout role in Martha, Marcy, Mae, Marlene (2011), Olsen is a terrific actress but her career seems to be a bit stuck at the moment after getting caught in the MCU cul-de-sac. Her performances in the MCU films as Scarlet Witch have not been notable, but her work in the MCU TV series Wandavision was magnificent for the intriguing first half of that flawed season.

One can only hope that Olsen has put the MCU in the rearview mirror and now that she’s financially secure can explore more interesting projects and roles. Love and Death may have been her attempt at doing that, but unfortunately the series never lives up to her stellar work in it.

Jesse Plemons is also very good as the subdued and rather odd character Allan Gore, who sports a hairdo that is a first ballot Hellacious Haircut Hall of Famer.

Plemons is a master at filling quiet characters with a peculiar and pulsating inner life, and his Allan, who we are told has a “perfectly formed penis” – good for him, is bustling just under the surface and behind those curiously dead eyes but is always assiduously contained and constrained.

Plemons is one of the more oddly compelling actors of his generation and it’s always a treat when he’s on screen, even here in the tepid Love and Death, but he deserves better than this series.

Tom Pelphrey, who recently made a name for himself in the Netflix show Ozark, is terrific in the under-written role of the passionate and combative lawyer Don Crowder. After reading the post script at the end of the series I have to say that Crowder’s life seems to be much more interesting post Love and Death than it is during this story, and would prefer to have seen that tale told.

And finally, Lily Rabe does the very best she can with the unfinished character Betty Gore, and she too deserved much better than what was written for her.

As good as the cast is across the board, the problem with Love and Death is without a doubt the overrated writer David E. Kelley, who simply never elevates the story or makes it more than just another recounting of a true crime in a culture awash in true crime.

Kelley is considered one of the untouchables in Hollywood but I’ve never understood his appeal. Doogie Howser, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies are his most famous series and they’re all egregiously awful to the point of being entirely unwatchable. I’ve never liked a single one of his shows and never understood why others fawn all over him.

The failure of Love and Death lies at the feet of Kelley, who across his career has seemed allergic to insight and addicted to disingenuousness. Kelley’s consistent vacuousness as a writer and his vapidity as a storyteller infects Love and Death and leaves it completely devoid of profundity and power.

Love and Death reminded me of another true crime story given the HBO prestige treatment last year, The Staircase. That series, which starred Colin Firth and Toni Collette, was intriguing on its salacious surface but once you dig in to it there was nothing there…as it was devoid of even an ounce of drama or insight.

Like The Staircase, Love and Death is underwhelming as the longer the series went on the less interesting it became until finally you only finish watching it out of a demented sense of obligation or in my case, completion OCD.

Ultimately, Love and Death plays acts at being meaningful but is a rather vacant exercise in true crime exploitation and failed titillation. If you haven’t watched the series then trust me when I tell you that you never need to start. And if you have watched it then I assume, like me, you either regret the time committed or have entirely forgotten it.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023

TV Round Up - Thoughts on Succession, The Mandalorian, White Lotus, JK Rowling and more!

I was going through my notes and thought I’d share some thoughts on various tv shows that have come and gone that I failed to properly review. If you are looking for something to watch maybe these mini-reviews will be useful.

I also had some not-so-brief thoughts on some current shows…The Mandalorian and Succession, as well as some observations regarding JK Rowling and a potential HBO Max Harry Potter series. Enjoy!!

White Lotus –

HBO Max

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. Over-rated garbage.

Season Two of White Lotus was all the rage this past fall. It became that show that critics and fans fawn over and that generates all sorts of cultural buzz. I watched season two when it originally aired but didn’t write a review of it for a variety of reasons…one of which is that I greatly disliked it and the thought of writing about it depressed me.

The first season of White Lotus – set in Hawaii, grew on me as it went along but the second season got worse as it went along. I watched season two – set in Sicily, beginning to end in hopes of it improving…but it never did and ended up being nothing but a grating chore.

The things that irritated about this show are too numerous to list in full but here’s a select few of them.  

Jennifer Coolidge, aka Stifler’s mom, seems like a nice person and I suppose it is all well and good that she’s having a career renaissance, but her clueless Tanya character which returns for season two is no longer quirky and amusing but aggressively annoying. Coolidge’s act, which may not be much of an act, wears incredibly thin the more time you spend with her. We all would’ve been better off if she was left behind in Hawaii.

Also annoying is that apparently every hotel manager in the entire world is gay…and in the case of Valentina in Sicily, gay and incredibly boring.

The elaborate plot of season two is so beyond ridiculous as to be absurd. None of the characters are relatable or even remotely likable. I spent the entire series loathing everyone and praying for everyone, especially Audrey Plaza’s Harper, Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia, Michael Imperioli’s Dominic (Imperioli is exposed as an awful actor in this show to a shocking degree) and Adam DiMarco’s repulsive Albie, to all die heinous deaths.

On the bright side…Meghann Fahy delivers the best moment of the entire series in her scene on the beach with her husband’s supposed best friend. Fahy was the lone bright spot in this massively over-hyped and over-rated show.

I’ll never understand why this show became a thing.

Slow Horses –

Apple TV+

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. Series has some charm but never figures out what it wants to be.

Season one of Slow Horses wasn’t much to write home about…Gary Oldman’s hysterical flatulence aside. It was too slow and too fast all at the same time.

Season two starts off with more promise than season one, but it ends up being just as underwhelming.

The show should be a rather small-scale story of bureaucratic intrigue, but it constantly goes for these over-expansive, James Bond-ian scale storylines that just seem rushed, cheap and totally unbelievable.

Oldman is, as usual, great, and the rest of the cast give solid performances, but the writing never lives up to their stellar work.

This is just one of those shows that just can’t figure out what it wants and needs to be…and thus ends up being nothing.

Black Bird –

Apple TV+

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. A mess of a mini-series. Incredibly poorly written. Paul Walter Hauser is great as the bad guy and deserved better.

This mini-series, developed by Dennis Lehane based on an alleged true story, is so amateurish as to be astonishing. The writing and casting of this series is so bad it made my stomach hurt.  

Taran Egerton plays a bad guy who agrees to go into prison to get a serial killer to confess. There’s not a single moment where Egerton is believable. Not one.

Sepidah Moafi plays an FBI agent and she is so miscast, and so terrible in the role, I’m surprised my tv didn’t spontaneously explode while watching it.

My old friend Greg Kinnear, one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, is saddled with an abysmal role as a small-town cop that is never fleshed out or given any logical narrative.

The best thing about the show is Paul Walter Hauser, who is truly great as the twisted serial killer. Hauser is unquestionably one of the very best actors working on the planet right now. I hope he is given opportunities in much better projects going forward.

Bottom line is that this script is atrocious and this show is beyond ridiculous, as it’s a pyramid of inanities upon inanities.

The Mandalorian –

Disney Plus

No rating yet

Thoughts on the first 5…no wait…6 episodes of the 8-episode third season.

Season one and two of The Mandalorian grew on me as they went along and as the series became the flagship of Disney +. But season three has been a very, very bumpy ride over the first five episodes of the eight-episode season.

The drop off from season two to season three has been considerable. Mando now seems to have gone from searching to wandering…and that has sucked much of the drama out of the show. The season three story feels very scattered and unfocused and the execution of that story feels alarmingly cheap and decidedly second-rate. The writing is, unfortunately, just egregiously bad.

Maybe the series can get its mojo back in the three final episodes of this season…but that seems highly unlikely…and The Mandalorian mojo may very well be lost forever.

****Ok…so I wrote the previous paragraphs BEFORE I watched episode six of The Mandalorian. And now I’ve watched episode 6 and…holy fuck…things have changed…and not for the better.

Season 3 episode 6 of The Mandalorian is arguably the very worst Star Wars related event to have occurred in the history of the franchise…which is saying quite a bit. This is the Jar Jar Binks of episodes. This episode is so bad it makes the absolute shit shows that were Obi Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett seem like passable Star Wars entertainment.

Episode 3 is the most amateurish and cheap piece of garbage imaginable. The script, written by Jon Favreau, is abysmal and embarrassing. The directing, by famed actress Bryce Dallas Howard, is shameful and humiliating. The ignominious cameos in the episode by the rotund non-actress Lizzo, Jack Black and a decrepit Christopher Lloyd, are undeniably mortifying and resolutely cringe.

You’d be hard pressed to find anything anywhere as awful as the diarrhea of cutesy-ness that was Baby Yoda doing a front flip to be by Lizzo’s side…or watching him use the force to help her cheat and win at some stupid space game. Watching Lizzo knight Baby Yoda may have been the lowest point in American pop culture history.

Equally idiotic and incoherent was the story about Christopher Lloyd’s character who is maybe a bad guy or maybe a good guy. The conclusion of that narrative is so trite and throwaway as to be absurd. It’s like a kid playing with Star Wars figurines got called to dinner so they just gave their play session a generic ending and walked away.

The Mandalorian is apparently not about Din Djarin (Mando) and Grogu (Baby Yoda) anymore and instead has turned its flaccid dramatic focus to Bo-Katan Kryze, played by a gaunt and ghastly Katee Sackhoff. Sackhoff, who once upon a time was so good in Battlestar Galactica, is a dullard on The Mandalorian, and the nonsensical narrative turn of her not wearing her Mandalorian helmet has only made things worse as we are forced to see her lifeless eyes.

The bottom line is that Episode 6 was so bad it wasn’t a jumping of the shark, it was a Kessel Run over a trillion space sharks. This show is done. It simply cannot recover from such an egregious episode.

It’s a shame…at one point it seemed like The Mandalorian was going to save Star Wars. Now it seems that The Mandalorian is the final nail in its coffin.

Succession –

HBO Max

No rating yet

Thoughts on the first 2 episodes of the 10-episode fourth and final season

The final season of Succession is here and as enjoyable as it is to marinate in this capitalism porn, the truth is that the producers were very wise to make this the last season. The show, which is two episodes into its ten-episode finale, is well shot, well written and well-acted, but season four does feel like the series narratively repeating itself.

As glorious as it is to watch a dramatization of the palace intrigue amongst the villainous Murdoch/Redstone/Cox clans who run America’s media empires, the show thus far in season four seems to be rehashing the same battles from previous seasons just with characters taking on different roles in the melo-drama.

That said, watching Succession is a pure joy because the writing is so crisp and the performances so committed that it feels like a modern-day version of Shakespeare.  

Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Matthew MacFayden, Allen Ruck, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong and Nicholas Braun are fantastic as the Roy extended family, and the supporting actors are equally outstanding.

As sad as it will be to see Succession go, season four is showing signs that the story has run its course, so best to enjoy it while it’s here and be glad it’s not going to sully its reputation by dragging on uselessly for another three seasons.

FUTURE HARRY POTTER SERIES

HBO MAX

So, I saw in the news that HBO is maybe going to make a tv series remake of the Harry Potter books, with each of the seven original books getting its own season.

I don’t really care one way or the other about the Harry Potter franchise, be it the books, movies or anything else. But what struck me as I read the stories about this potential series is something that has struck for many years but which I never took the time to write about (that I remember)….namely that every article about the potential new series mentioned that “transphobic” creator JK Rowling would be involved in the show.

What bothers me about this is that JK Rowling being “transphobic” is an opinion, not a fact, and yet it showed up in every news article I read about this series…and in every article I’ve read about JK Rowling in recent years.

Coincidentally, I was helping my young son with his school work the other day and one of the assignments was to place a series of statements into one of two categories, ”fact” or “opinion”.

The statements were things like “there are 8 planets”, which would be considered a fact, and “apples are better than oranges”, which is an opinion. My son being the precocious lad that he is even pushed back against the 8 planets thing saying “that’s only if you don’t count dwarf planets”. Which is true…but in the spirit of the assignment we labelled it a fact since it said “there are 8 planets” not “there are ONLY 8 planets”.

The most intriguing statement in the assignment was “you shouldn’t eat too much candy”. My son’s instinct was to say it was a fact, because it is true that you shouldn’t eat too much candy. But…as we kicked the idea around, we got very philosophical…pondering how much is “too much” and who is the one to decide what is “too much”? “Too much” for me might be “not enough” for you.

We even got Clintonian as we parsed what is “candy”? We can all agree a chocolate bar is candy…but is a caramel apple candy? Are chocolate covered almonds candy? Is bubblegum candy?

The conclusion we came to was that “you shouldn’t eat too much candy” was not a fact but rather an opinion because it lacked specificity and detail and relied upon the subjective and not the objective.

Which brings us to JK Rowling’s alleged transphobia. What bothers me about these articles stating as fact that JK Rowling is transphobic is that opinions greatly differ in regards to Ms. Rowling’s transphobe status.

A journalist writing about Rowling may believe she is transphobic, but that doesn’t make it a fact. There are many people, myself included, who don’t think Rowling is transphobic at all. And just because trans activists label Rowling a transphobe doesn’t make her one.

Any journalist worth a damn should write of Rowling that “some claim she is transphobic” or “trans activists claim Rowling is transphobic” or that “Rowling has made statements some deem transphobic”. This really isn’t that hard.

Hell, when I was working for RT I wrote the term “dementia-addled” while joking about Joe Biden in an opinion piece and the editors very quickly informed me that I wasn’t a doctor and hadn’t examined Biden so I couldn’t diagnose him as having dementia. It was a valid point, so I took the phrase out of the piece despite my believing Joe Biden has dementia and, worst of all, that removing that statement ruined a good joke.

Anyway…I don’t care about the Harry Potter tv series, but I do care that our culture has completely gone off the rails and that journalists at the most prestigious of media outlets lack the critical thinking skills and basic journalistic integrity of a 7-year-old. I have no doubt that the Ivy League educated know-it-all, know-nothings at The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe would not hesitate for a moment to declare that “you shouldn’t eat too much candy” is a fact because “the science is settled”. Sigh.

It should also be obvious that the news media plays the same word games with other topics as well…and treats opinions as fact on a daily basis turning journalism into nothing more than insidious, subtle and not-so-subtle activism which only misinforms its audience and diminishes journalism’s credibility.

Alright, thus concludes both my rant about shitty journalism and JK Rowling as well as my not-so-brief TV Round Up.

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Last of Us: TV Review - Zombie Video Game as Prestige TV Zombie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An uneven show that feels like prestige tv fool’s gold.

HBO’s latest prestige tv series, The Last of Us, is a strange one.

The series, which premiered in mid-January and recently ended its first season, follows the trials and tribulations of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his teenage ward Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic, fascist America under siege by fungus-fueled zombies. Considering that description it should come as no surprise that the series is based on a 2013 video game of the same-name.

It seems a bit of an odd choice to make a prestige tv series based on a video game, but thanks to the hard work of HBOs savvy marketing department, the show was well-received by critics and generated a modicum of cultural chatter, no small feat in our scattered entertainment era.

Full disclosure, I’ve never played the video game The Last of Us and in fact had never even heard of it until the tv show came along. This lack of knowledge left me unencumbered by the source material and able to judge the series solely on its value as a tv show not as an extension of the video game.

My thoughts on the series are that…it is…despite some great moments, overall sort of underwhelming. The show is very uneven, as it’s at-times extremely compelling, but also often dull and aggravating. It’s also one of those rather annoyingly trite shows that poses as elevated but is really rather philosophically vacuous and politically vapid.

The first season runs nine episodes and the first episode is easily the best of the bunch. The drama of a civilization instantly crumbling due to a quickly expanding pandemic – a fungus spreading across the globe which turns its victims into zombie extensions of itself, is fantastic and eerily reminiscent of the real-world’s recent tumult. The flashbacks in episode two of how the pandemic started are equally captivating and may have been my favorite part of the series.

Another solid sequence is in episode four and five when Joel and Ellie meet up with a pair of brothers in Kansas City. The four of them must avoid not just zombies but blood thirsty locals. The conclusion of this particular adventure is phenomenal.

The problem though is that the show often feels like…well…a video game. The set ups for most of the adventures feel painfully contrived and uncomfortably like a sequence from a rather simple video game.

The series also has trouble with pacing and with generating and keeping dramatic momentum. For every episode like one, two, four and five where you’re fully invested, the show also has episodes, like three and seven where everything slows down to a crawl and we get stuck in the muck and mire of inconsequential characters and their flaccid non-drama.

It really is purely coincidental that the focus of the drama in episodes three and seven revolves around characters being gay. Even if these characters were as straight as arrows their stories simply wouldn’t be that interesting. Although it must be said that HBO injecting a heavy dose of cultural politics into a story that doesn’t need it is not the least bit surprising in our current hyper-political age. In addition, considering the paucity of people we get to know and spend time with in the series, that close to half of them are gay is sort of hysterical in an absurd way. To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”

The later episodes encapsulate the overall issues with the show as they seem both dramatically lethargic and narratively unfocused. In these last few episodes, a survivalist, charismatic Christian cult comes to the fore and considering the other cultural politics of the show it will not surprise you to learn that they are the most-evil people imaginable.

Despite the first season being much too slow at times, it also somehow manages to feel uncomfortably rushed at its conclusion. It also doesn’t help that the series and its violence become less based in reality in terms of its action as the season progresses, culminating in a rather bizarre 1980s action-movie climax.

The acting in The Last of Us is like the rest of the show, not particularly great. I genuinely like Pedro Pascal and find him to be a pleasing screen presence, and he does solid work as the tortured tough guy Joel, but he’s never really asked to do too much heavy lifting.

Bella Ramsey as Ellie is like nails on a chalkboard. Ramsey is a very unappealing screen presence and she feels completely phony as the struggling teen. Ramsey’s cadence and speech are so odd as to be grating and her entire performance rings very hollow to me.

Melanie Lynskey, an actress I very much like, is terribly miscast in a supporting role as a revolutionary leader fueled by bloodlust and revenge. Unfortunately, Lynskey is so unbelievable in the role as to be ridiculous and it scuttles what is one of the more intriguing storylines.

As for the special effects, the zombies do look pretty cool, and the actors portraying them do a terrific job of being creepy as hell.

On the whole though watching the first season of The Last of Us, despite its occasional high points, felt like a bit of a chore. Maybe I would feel differently if I was familiar with the video-game. Who knows?

In terms of just being a tv series, The Last of Us seems like one of those prestige shows that, like HBO’s Westworld, run out of creativity, lose the plot, lose their audience, and then are quickly tossed down the cultural memory hole never to be thought of again.

Considering The Last of Us seems to have already lost its creative steam (around episode six), I’d guess season two will see a precipitous decline in both audience engagement and critical adoration. It seems to me this prestige drama is a mindless zombie ultimately not long for this world.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Andor: TV Review - Andor shines as darkness descends on Darth Mouse and the Disney Empire

****THIS IS A SPOILERS FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a real spy drama that happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Well crafted, and very well acted.

Andor, the most recent Star Wars live action series, finished its twelve-episode first season on Disney + this past Wednesday November 23rd.

The series, which tells the story of Cassian Andor and his introduction into the early-stages of the rebellion against the Empire, is a prequel to the film Rogue One and is set prior to the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

To say I was reticent going into watching Andor would be a massive understatement. You can’t really blame me. The previous two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, were both utterly atrocious. These series, most specifically Obi Wan Kenobi, were so bad as to be embarrassing, so one can understand why any fan would expect the worst when it came to Andor.

But then I tentatively waded into the series and was at first relieved, and then surprised and finally excited. Andor may very well be the best Star Wars series thus far – at the very least it’s equal to The Mandalorian, and the reason for that is because an actual professional, Tony Gilroy, whose career includes writing the Bourne trilogy and writing/directing Michael Clayton, created the series…and it shows.

Andor is certainly the most sophisticated Star Wars series to date. It’s a real show about a growing, underground rebellion that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. You could set the story in modern-day Iran, China, US or Israel and you wouldn’t have to change all that much.

The acting in Andor is the best there’s ever been in any Star Wars story, be it movie or tv series. The cast across the board are truly phenomenal.

I’m not much of a Diego Luna fan, but he’s fantastic in Andor as the lead. His performance is contained yet kinetic. Luna reveals just enough, but never too much, of Andor, and it makes for compelling viewing.

Genevieve O’Reilly is spectacular as Mon Mothma, an Imperial Senator from Chandrila trying to thread the needle of her public image, personal politics and family life. O’Reilly is so good in the role, and Mon Mothma is such a fascinating character, that I was yearning for a series about her alone.

Stellan Skarsgard is also brilliant as Luthen Rael, a key figure in the rebellion who no one can seem to pin down. Skarsgard shines in the role because Rael, like the actor playing him, must constantly change the masks he wears and along with them his behavior. Skarsgard is a great actor, and having him bring his considerable talent and skill to a Star Wars series indicates how seriously the creators of the series took the story.

The rest of the cast, in big roles and small, are uniformly terrific, and it elevates Andor beyond the usual Star Wars fare and turns it into a legitimate spy drama.

For example, Rupert Vansittart plays Chief Hyne, a small supporting character, and in one small scene he is so good as to be astonishing. This is what happens when you cast skilled actors…everything gets elevated.

The overall aesthetic, most notably the set design, is also top notch. Each set feels real and not like some set on a studio backlot. Visually, everything has a visceral, tangible feel to it, and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of major science fiction like Blade Runner.

To be clear, not everything works perfectly. A few storylines felt forced and fell a bit flat, such as the odd relationship between Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious supervisor of the Empire’s Security Bureau, and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a-down-on-his-luck security inspector for a corporate entity working with the Empire.

Gough and Soller are both very good in their roles, but the arc of their characters and their relationship rang hollow and felt superfluous, and their climax is easily the weakest part of the otherwise well executed series, and it isn’t even close.

From what I understand, Andor is not generating big numbers for Disney +.  The situation is so dire that Disney is running the series on ABC in order to generate some interest in it. This is unfortunate but not surprising.

When you roll out second and third-rate garbage like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re not going to generate trust from fans, and so they don’t give a series like Andor the chance it deserves.

A great friend of mine, let’s call him Doug, is the biggest Star Wars fan I know. He’s truly a fanatic. But as Andor’s first season wore on I kept asking him if he’d watched it and he said “no”. He said he hadn’t given it a chance because he “didn’t want to be crushed with disappointment again.”

That Doug, who literally gets dressed up in costume and attends opening night of Star Wars movies, is reticent to watch a Star Wars show because he can’t take anymore soul crushing disappointment, is a sign of major problems for Disney.

I think Disney knows it too, which is why CEO Bob Chapek is out and guru Bob Iger is back in. Iger retired in 2020 and left Disney, the company he built up into a staggering entertainment powerhouse with acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, in the hands of his one-time protégé. But now he has some serious decisions to make if he wants to pull Disney out of its current tailspin - which includes a 40% drop in stock price over the last year.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Big Dick Bob Iger will wheel and deal his way out of trouble, maybe by buying Netflix, or maybe even by selling Disney to Apple.

Buying Netflix seems improbable to me because Netflix carries massive amounts of debt and brings nothing of note to Disney, which already has a robust streaming service.

Selling to Apple makes more sense, at least financially, as it would mean a boon for Iger personally as it would attach his vast Disney holdings to Apple, a Teflon tech company that isn’t going anywhere.

But these choices would simply be a distraction for Iger from the bigger decision he must make which is, he can either double down on the creative direction Disney is going now with its numerous properties like Star Wars and Marvel, or he can dramatically change course.

Doubling down means continuing with the cultural political stuff in Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, which is a big part of the reason Disney is in such trouble at the moment. It would basically mean Disney deciding to stay the course and do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In other words, it would be insane.

As insane as it would be, I could totally understand why it would happen. The Disney employees, like mindless cult members, truly believe in this woke stuff, and in their own righteousness. And the ruling class in the Disney executive suite live in the most isolated of bubbles that aggressively reinforces the importance of wokeness, and their own self-righteousness.

That said, Bob Iger is no moron. He has to know that his bottom line, and all of his personal stakes in Disney, are getting seriously damaged by the company’s embrace of wokeness, including denigrating and attacking fans as racist, sexist and homophobic who critique their product.

The other option is for Iger to reverse course and to go back to the middle of the road in terms of staying away from cultural politics. That’s no easy task, especially when his workforce and the social circles the executives run in, will put up serious resistance.

At this point the problem can’t be solved just by returning to making quality movies and tv shows, as evidenced by Andor being such a great series but no one tuning in. The disease of wokeness has taken deep hold and Disney is suffering from a stage four version of it, and it is killing the company by alienating customers.

Everything is trending down for Disney. The recent spate of dismal Star Wars series pre-Andor are seriously eroding fan interest. The same is true of Marvel, where the recent batch of movies aren’t just bad but underperforming at the box office…all while their budgets bloat beyond belief. Marvel tv shows are just as bad if not worse than the Star Wars shows, and they don’t pay any dividends anymore.

The reality is that the good ship Mickey Mouse was on its way to the utopia that is the Fantasy Island of Wokeness but it hit the Iceberg of Reality and is now quickly taking on water. It seems to me that bringing back Bob Iger to rearrange the deck chairs won’t solve any of the bigger problems.

Maybe I’m wrong and Iger will right the ship and Disney will be back to its robust self in no time. Or maybe Disney is doomed because it didn’t listen to Cassandras like me who were warning them early on that “get woke, go broke” was inevitable if they kept on the self-righteous path.

Regardless of all that, the truth is that building back trust from fans is a difficult thing to do and it takes years. There is no quick fix. But Andor, which is as good The Mandalorian, is a terrific first step.

Disney needs to put together a string of quality Star Wars series, and eventually Star Wars movies, in order to bring the bevy of Star Wars fans back safely into the fold. The same is also true of Marvel.

I hope they do it. I also hope you check out Andor, because it’s very well-made, and well-worth your time.

©2022

House of the Dragon - The Current Undisputed Fantasy TV Champion of the World

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made, well-acted series that gets better as it goes along. The best of the current fantasy tv bunch.

House of the Dragon, the prequel to HBO’s massive hit series Game of Thrones, concluded its ten-episode first season on Sunday night.

My first impression of House of the Dragon was tepid, as I found its first episode to be rather middling, but I’m happy to report that as its first season progressed the show got progressively better.

The series is not as good as its esteemed predecessor, but it did benefit by being in direct competition against another much-hyped prestige fantasy tv series, Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which debuted a week after House of the Dragon.

The Rings of Power was an embarrassing, amateurish, unmitigated disaster, and by comparison, House of Dragons is absolutely stellar. House of Dragons defeated The Rings of Power like Mike Tyson obliterated poor Michael Spinks back in the day - by brutal first round knockout, and now stands as the current undisputed, undefeated Fantasy TV Champion of the World.

In our current art/entertainment destroying age where cultural/political issues such as diversity and representation rule the day and talent and quality are rarely considered, it can be easy to confuse competency with mastery. House of the Dragon is not a masterful piece of work, at least not yet, but it stands out due to the mere fact of its baseline cinematic competency.

For example, in the season one finale the closing scene is a joy to behold because it is so deftly written, directed and acted, something which never occurred in The Rings of Power.

In the scene, where Daemon brings tragic news to Queen Rhaenyra, there is no dialogue. The story and the drama are conveyed to the audience through visuals. It is a rather simple scene, but it is very effective because of its simplicity. And that level of simplicity is a sign of the director and producer’s confidence in their storytelling and their filmmaking, something that was very evidently missing in The Rings of Power.

The confidence and competency of the producers and directors of House of the Dragon, who put together the cast, writers, costume and set departments, is in stark (no pun intended) contrast to the hapless and helpless bunch of buffoons who ran the good ship The Rings of Power into the rocks. The writing, acting and filmmaking that elevated House of the Dragon are what you get when people know what they’re doing are in charge, and the two-bit, throwaway soap opera of The Rings of Power is what you get when Bad Robot interns trying to fill diversity quotas are at the helm.

To be clear, House of the Dragon isn’t perfect. For instance, the time jumps were often jarring and scuttled some dramatic momentum, and some narrative choices, like when Rhaenys fails to torch the Hightowers on coronation day, beggar belief as it was not only the most emotionally satisfying thing to do but also the most rational thing to do. But House of the Dragon captivates because it boasts both superb aesthetics, most notably the costumes and sets, and most importantly, sublime acting across the board. Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Milly Alcock and Eve Best were all superb on the show.

Considine’s performance as the conflicted and often feckless King Viserys was a triumph and a testament to his abundant talent.

Matt Smith’s dark turn as rogue Prince Daemon revealed his impressive level of skill and craftsmanship.

The transition from young Rhaenyra and Alicent, played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey respectively, to adult Rhaenyra and Alicent, portrayed by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, could have been catastrophic, but went off without a hitch. Alcock’s growth into the role of young Rhaenyra was glorious to behold and when D’Arcy took over the role, she didn’t skip a beat. Carey struggled to captivate as young Alicent, so when Cooke took over the role it blossomed and became pivotal to the drama of the show.

Rhys Ifans and Eve Best as Ser Otto Hightower and Princess Rhaenys respectively, are two fine actors and their craftsmanship elevated their roles to glorious heights.

All of these actors and even all of the ones I haven’t mentioned, were vastly superior to the second-third-and fourth rate actors hamming it up on The Rings of Power. Which begs the question…why didn’t Amazon spend at least a little bit of their billions bagging big-time actors to fill their Tolkien fantasy world?

As for House of the Dragon, its first season ended on a dramatically potent note, and portends that the best is most definitely yet to come, which will no doubt generate excitement when season two comes around. By contrast, The Rings of Power stumbled and staggered through its flaccid first season and never generated any significant drama so it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most die-hard sycophants tuning in to its second season.

Game of Thrones, particularly its earlier seasons, was a truly masterful piece of television, and while House of the Dragon doesn’t measure up to that high standard, it is a faint enough of an echo of that glorious show to still be considered appointment viewing. There is definitely room for improvement, and hopefully season two can make that leap. Considering the arc of season one, I’m actually optimistic that House of the Dragon will grow to be even more worthwhile as it progresses.

©2022

The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1/2 star out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series should be thrown into the fiery depths of Mount Doom.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which just concluded its highly-anticipated first season, was the tech behemoth’s attempted fantasy foray into the land of prestige TV.

So, was Bilbo Bezos’ billion dollar bet on building his one ring to rule them all in the form of a J.R.R. Tolkien TV universe worth those beaucoup bucks?

Nope.

It’s not hyperbole to declare that The Rings of Power is an unmitigated disaster as it’s gone over about as well as an all Hobbit (or Harfoot) team competing in the NBA.

It’s difficult to know the exact ratings for the series as streamers are coy about specifics, but it’s not difficult to see that the show was a catastrophe creatively and gained zero cultural traction except in generating memes that mocked it.

The sprawling series, which chronicled various, rather flaccid dramas across Middle-Earth in the Second Age involving Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Harfoots and Humans, felt astonishingly small for something with such large ambitions and attempted scope.

The final two episodes of the series were touted as the episodes that would vault The Rings of Power out of the morass of the miserably sub-mediocre episodes that came before it and into the public consciousness. But boy-oh-boy that ‘twas not to be.

Episodes seven and eight were just as painfully amateurish as the rest of the series.

The big battle billed in episode seven was in practice a small skirmish that felt foolish and looked absurd, like something scrapped together from the cutting room floor of an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, rather than something in a billion-dollar tv show.

Then there were the big revelations in the season finale that weren’t very revealing at all. Sauron was unmasked – even though any idiot with half a brain in their head already knew who Sauron was all along, and then there was the pseudo-mystery of the Gandalfian wizard who the lawyers haven’t figured out yet if they can actually call him Gandalf. Not exactly earth-shattering or even drama-inducing.

Aesthetically, the series, despite its bulging budget, looked and felt like a show on the low-rent CW network. The costumes and sets probably weren’t cheap but sure as hell looked cheap. And the paucity of background actors made every well-populated scene seem like a high school drama class rehearsal.

The writing on the series, in both the dialogue and the narrative, was shockingly pedestrian to the point of literary malpractice. Considering the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, only previous experience was fetching coffee at J.J. Abrams’ Bad Reboot…oops, I mean Bad Robot production company, this is less than surprising. The only surprising thing is that Amazon invested a billion dollars to do business with these two simpletons.

Payne and McKay were considerably more committed to adhering to Amazon’s cultural political agenda of diversity uber alles and girl boss empowerment garbage than to staying true to Tolkien’s luxurious lore.

The other enormous issue with The Rings of Power is the abysmal cast. Much internet outrage and counter outrage ensued due to the series casting minority actors in what had been white roles in Tolkien’s written works and in Peter Jackson’s film versions. The question for me remains regardless of their race or ethnicity, why cast such bad actors? At their very best these are soap opera level actors…at worst they should be digging ditches in community theatre. Game of Thrones and its prequel The House of the Dragon, have some massive talent among its acting ranks – both well-known and newly discovered…so why couldn’t Amazon shell out some decent money for good, never-mind great actors?

What bothers me the most about the failure of The Rings of Power is that it could have, and should have, been great.

Tolkien’s writing is a rich and glorious garden from which many fruits can grow and prosper, but when the pesticides of cultural politics are introduced, they act not as growth agents but as poisons that destroy.

The evidence of this is plain to see in Peter Jackson’s highly-successful Lord of the Rings films, which while not perfect, are at least foundationally committed to Tolkien’s lore. In contrast, Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy takes a bite from the culturally/politically poisoned apple and is thus neutered of psychological power resulting in the films faltering. The same is true of The Rings of Power, which fails to understand the power of Tolkien’s myth and instead embraces the superficial (cultural/political), and ends up producing an insipid, if not insidious, piece of vapid non-entertainment that’s incapable of being satisfying on any level, most notably psychologically.

The best way to understand how universally shallow The Rings of Power is, and what a failure it is, is that even the people who claim to like it will never watch season one over again. Another damning piece of evidence is that even the sad sack sons of bitches who vociferously defended the series from the get-go, most notably establishment critics who fawned over the series due to its cultural politics, are now admitting the show is a “stinker”.

Regardless of what I, or the bevy of Bezos bought media shills, have to say about The Rings of Power, Amazon has committed five seasons and more than a billion dollars to the series. But considering how bad the show is, and trust me, it really is bad, the biggest billionaire flex of all would be for Bilbo Bezos to not give a shit what anyone else thinks and just keep setting his money on fire to produce a show no one but he likes or cares about.

Ultimately, all I can say about The Rings of Power and about a philistine like Bilbo Bezos having all that money to burn is…what a terrible waste.

©2022

She-Hulk Season One: Final Thoughts

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. DO. NOT. WATCH. This is easily the worst Marvel show (no small feat) and one of the worst shows I’ve seen in quite some time.

In Rob Reiner’s brilliant 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, Reiner’s Marty Di Bergi delicately brings up to the band Spinal Tap a critical review of their dismally received previous album, “Shark Sandwich”. The concise and precise review he references has only two words, “shit sandwich”.

After enduring the odious slog that was the nine-episode first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney Plus, the two words that kept popping into my head were, “shit-hulk”.

In keeping with the fecal theme, I would declare two things. First, that She-Hulk truly is one of the most abhorrent shit sandwiches of a show I’ve ever seen, and second, the finale was the diarrhea icing on the repellent poop cake.

The fourth-wall busting finale was a desperate attempt to salvage a flaming garbage barge floating on a sea of sewage and it failed miserably.

The show decided to get all meta in the finale in a brazen attempt to disguise the fact that it had literally lost the plot. The result is it’s too clever by half and not half as clever as it thinks it is.

Believe it or not, it turns out the true villain in She-Hulk is not Abomination or Titiana, but rather people on the internet who criticize the show. I’m not joking. The insecure and self-absorbed makers of She-Hulk decided to make their online critics out to be the ultimate villains, and labeled these alleged internet trolls as misogynist incels in the process. How clever. How brave.

I guess in some ways She-Hulk’s finale is meta-textually interesting since it takes the decidedly feminist route of discarding reason and accountability in favor of embracing mealy-mouthed victimhood, a common approach in this narcissistically addled, masculinity-deprived day and age.

In this vein, people being held accountable is something that is of the utmost import to She-Hulk, and she makes sure in the finale that all the dubious men she comes across are all held to account for their failings. But in true girl-boss, neo-feminist fashion She-Hulk is herself allergic to self-reflection and blames others instead of taking responsibility for her own misdeeds and missteps. Big green physician, heal thyself.

She-Hulk is one of the most terrible, awful, no-good shows of all time for a variety of reasons, bad writing, bad acting and bad CGI not the least among them, but what bothered me most about it was that it defecated upon poor Daredevil while it shat upon itself, and I don’t know if the character will be able to escape the stench.

Daredevil the series was a stellar Netflix production (2015-2018) that ran for three season and Disney has now gotten back control of it and is saying it will reboot or restart the series.

The Netflix Daredevil was the best Marvel series ever made and it isn’t even close. Netflix gave Daredevil a gritty, grounded, R-rated feel…which is exactly what the character and story demanded and needed.

Rumors are that Disney is going to give its Daredevil its patented G-rating treatment and totally neuter the character and the series in the process. Watching Daredevil’s impotent appearance on She-Hulk was like witnessing a castration, and forbodes the once great Daredevil being turned into just another flaccid Disney Plus piece of trash series. Mark Ruffalo’s eunuch of a Hulk was bad enough, but now Daredevil? Can’t Disney just leave these big, bad conflicted men alone and let them kick ass and crack skulls?

The bottom line in regards to She-Hulk is that it’s instantly forgettable and entirely atrocious. It’s a cornucopia of everything that is wrong with our current culture and popular entertainment. I hated this show. I truly hated it. The only thing that would’ve made me hate it more was if Lena Dunham was in it.

On the bright side, at least the makers of She-Hulk succeeded in proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that women are entirely, absolutely, unequivocally incapable of being funny. Good to know.

As for the bigger MCU picture, She-Hulk’s egregious failure is a warning sign for Disney that the Marvel machine is in dire straits. The last three Marvel TV series, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel and now She-Hulk, have been absolute disasters. The last three Disney/Marvel movies, Thor: Love and Thunder, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Eternals, have been equally abysmal.

Marvel is such a money maker that the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule does not apply, but it also doesn’t mean that Marvel is invincible. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out in November and a lot is riding on it. The original Black Panther made a billion dollars, but this is a different time and different movie with Chadwick Boseman’s unfortunate death. If the advertising is to be believed, the new Black Panther is a woman, and the movie has the familiar stench of Disney once again pushing a socio-political agenda on to viewers. Will audiences flock to Wakanda Forever? Maybe. Or will audiences be less inclined to go out and see it because they’re tired of the relentless cultural propaganda? A distinct possibility. My guess is the film will do well…but not too well, and not well enough to cast concerns over Marvel’s future into the abyss.

As for the tv side of things, the slate of upcoming Marvel TV series does not look very promising. And if the shitty She-Hulk is any indication, Marvel TV has gone deep into the toilet and it’s going to take a Herculean effort to remove it from its dark and dank depths. Consider me not optimistic.

©2022

Werewolf by Night: A TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It just is.

I love Halloween. Due to my being a rather weird, Irish-Catholic, existentially-obsessed, netherwordly-adjacent, ethereal Jungian shadow-magnet-at-heart, it has always been my favorite holiday. The problem with Halloween though is the same problem with many horror movies or Halloween-themed series or shows…they’re much better in theory than in practice.

As much as I love Halloween it was always a letdown as a kid because no matter how demonically cool MY costume, growing up in the Northeast, my parents always forced me to wear a coat over it because it was cold and parents always ruin everything fun. Such is life.

That said, every Halloween I still get fired up and filled with hope for some profoundly spooky connection…either in the real world or the less apparent one.

Which brings us to Werewolf by Night, which is the first “Marvel Studios Special Presentation” currently streaming on Disney Plus. The hour-long Halloween special stars Gael Garcia Bernal and is written by Heather Quinn and directed by Michael Giacchino.

The show is based upon the comic of the same name and tells the tale of a group of monster hunters who, in the wake of the death of master monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, compete to kill a monster and become possessor of the powerful talisman the Bloodstone.

There are elements of Werewolf by Night which I really liked. For example, it’s very clever that the special is filmed in black and white and consciously recreates the aesthetic of the Universal Monster Movies from the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Universal Monster Movies are classics and I love them even if they are not quite as horrifying to modern eyes as they were back in the day, so I appreciated the aesthetic choice.

I also thought the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal, a terrific actor and pleasing screen presence, as the lead Jack Russell, was a wise decision, as was casting the always excellent Harriet Samson Harris, who nearly steals the show as the supporting character, Verussa Bloodstone.

I saw Harris on-stage in Chicago nearly twenty-five years ago in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Her performance was sublime but the play was inferior…such is life in the theatre. Here as Verussa Bloodstone she is gloriously weird and unnerving as a grieving widow and conniving step-mother.

And finally, there’s some top-notch CGI on display in the special in the form of the monster Man-Thing, a pleasant change from Marvel’s recent run of dismal special effects in both tv and film projects.

That said, the special also has some issues.

For instance, the Universal Monster Movie aesthetic is great but it’s undermined by the curious decision to insert somewhat graphic violence and explicit language – two things which were anathema back in the Universal heyday. To be clear, I’m definitely not someone fucking asshole opposed to violence and bad language in a tv show or movie! But the insertion of both things into Werewolf by Night is at cross-purposes with the throw-back atmospherics and ultimately ends up being a distraction and mood breaker.

Another issue is, as much as I agreed with Gael Garcia Bernal as the lead, the problem with Werewolf by Night is that it under-uses him, and instead focuses more of its attention and effort upon Laura Donnelly as Elsa Bloodstone. Donnelly is a less-than-compelling actress and Elsa a less-than-compelling character (at least in this special). Donnelly is like an acting vampire as every second she is on-screen she drains the life out of the show.

Thirdly, as good as the Man-Thing CGI is, the werewolf make-up/CGI is dreadful. If you’re going to update the Universal Monster Movies for the modern age, it’s the make-up CGI that has to do it, not inserting gratuitous violence and salty language.

The werewolf metamorphosis scene (of which I’ll give no relevant information regarding the characters involved so as to avoid spoilers) is good…until it isn’t. It starts off with the human to beast transition taking place in shadow on a wall behind a character as they watch in horror as it occurs in front of them. This works because its old-fashioned movie making where through camera placement and lighting, we see the transformation in shadow and the reaction to it in light. But then the camera slowly moves in for a close up of the reacting character’s face, and in so doing obscures the werewolf shadow until it is completely diminished. This is such directorial malpractice as to be criminal. The shot , if it moves at all, should’ve moved slightly in and down, putting the reacting face at the bottom of the screen and the werewolf shadow looming over it at the top, so viewers can see both simultaneously until the scene’s conclusion.

After that botched metamorphosis sequence, the werewolf comes into clear view and the make-up/CGI is so bad as to be laughable. This isn’t Teen Wolf level bad, this is I Was a Teenage Werewolf level bad.

As much as I like the Universal Monster Movies and admire the attempt to pay homage to them, I found director Michael Giacchino and the makers of this special lacked the skill and craft of their monster movie forefathers. They also certainly never earned the Wizard of Oz nod they gave themselves at the end of the special, which felt less like homage than blatant disrespect fueled by mis-placed ego indulgence.

I’ve not read the Werewolf by Night comics, so I have nothing invested in the success or failure of this Marvel special, but I couldn’t help feeling that it could have and should have been considerably better.

Ultimately, Werewolf by Night isn’t great and it isn’t terrible, it just is. And what it is - is an atmospheric, visually limited, narratively stunted, dramatically benign, rather slight, somewhat disappointing production devoid of horror.

I guess I’ll have to make a pilgrimage back to the original Universal Monster Movies again this Halloween to get my horror fix.

©2022