TMINE’s about to take its traditional Christmas and New Year break. I’ll be back tomorrow but after that, normal business won’t resume until January 3rd or 4th with the Daily News et al. But a new tradition I started last year was to leave you with a specific question to keep you occupied: what were your favourite new shows of the year? As always, let everyone know your choices and the reasons below or on your own blog.
For the record, after the jump are my Top 1213 from all the countries around the world, as well as that new-fangled Internet thing, in no particular order, with the addition of one I mysteriously left off this morning. Merry Grafelnik, everyone!
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
It’s the final week before Christmas and TMINE’s usual end-of-year break, so this is going to be the final WHYBW of 2016, unless I do another one on Thursday and Friday to mop up a few concluding shows.
As usual, American TV has just about wound down in readiness for Crimbo but this year, Internet TV has started arming a flotilla of box sets for everyone to settle down with once the turkey has subsided and no one can move any more. I’ll be looking a couple of those in a mo, but there’s too many for me to deal with by myself, so if you’ve already watched season two of TheMan in the High Castle on Amazon or season one of Une Chance De Trop(No Second Chance) or Cannabis on Netflix, feel free to let everyone know what you thought of them in the comments section.
Elsewhere, I’ve (p)reviewed Swedish Dicks (Sweden) and passed a third-episode verdict on Shut Eye(US); after the jump, the regulars:
Canada Travelers
US Chance, Falling Water, The Great Indoors, Shooter, and Timeless.
But first, a couple of newbies:
Nobel (Norway: NRK1; UK: Netflix)
Aksel Hennie (The Martian) is a Norwegian special forces officer just back from Afghanistan who is ordered to investigate when a former Taliban target turns up in Oslo. Hennie ends up killing him, but begins to learn that maybe his orders weren’t as legitimate as he first thought. Who’s responsible, will he get found out, has it anything to do with the Nobel Peace Prize committee and what happened back in Afghanistan anyway involving the target’s wife?
Something of a leap up in quality from previous Norwegian efforts such as Okkupert (Occupied) and Mammon, Nobel is a geopolitical thriller that juxtaposes the individual with realpolitik, examining the decisions individual soldiers have to make on the ground, the effects of war and the little bit people who get caught up in big decisions, while looking at the alliances needed and compromises made to end war, where even a $60bn deal can be threatened by the wrong person turning up to a party at the wrong time. It all feels nicely realistic for a change, even if some of the nuances of the language and culture passed me by (eg a translator appears to be speaking Norwegian with everyone else and then someone says to her “six languages and you still can’t speak Norwegian”. What language is she speaking then?!), and Hennie makes for a very plausible special forces operative.
I’m only two episodes in but this looks like a keeper.
The OA (Netflix)
Netflix has started to develop a habit of covertly producing very odd but wonderful little series with no publicity that it puts out of a Friday as a boxset and surprises everyone. The OA is such a show, a genre-defying piece created by and written by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, directed by Batmanglij and starring Marling (as well as a certain Jason Isaacs) that’s almost impossible to categorise – the best comparison I can come up with is if Neil Gaiman and Hal Hartley sat down together and decided to mash up Stranger Things,Room and Anastasia.
It starts with Marling jumping off a bridge. But when her parents come rushing to her hospital, they reveal she’s been missing for seven years – however, before she disappeared, this fully sighted girl was blind. Returning to her home, she’s soon shaking up the town with some special powers she seems to have acquired. But she needs five “strong and flexible” people to help her rescue someone, perhaps from that mysterious other realm she once visited…
Full of strange authorial decisions from Marling’s insistence that everyone now call her ‘The OA’ through to only starting the title sequence 45 minutes into the episode once she begins to retell her story of actually being a reincarnated Russian oligarch’s daughter, it’s a properly auteured piece of work that needs to be watched if you’re to stand a chance of knowing what it’s like. Visually beautiful, it is by turns upsetting, bewildering and heart-warming, and most frequently like a fairy tale – but even that’s a classification it eludes.
I’ve seen one episode so far and it never once did any of the things I suspected it would do and did many things I’ve never imagined. I’m going to watch more just to see if it’ll blow my mind any further, but it requires a good deal of patience and I suspect it won’t be to everyone’s tastes.
I also watched a movie this week!
Rogue One (2016)
An almost immediate prequel to Star Wars, Rogue One reveals the full details of how those plucky spies mentioned in the first movie’s opening introduction were able to retrieve the plans for the Death Star and ultimately help to stop the Empire’s plans for galactic domination. Directed by Gareth Edwards and co-written by Tony Gilroy, the film is more like a proper war movie than any of the other Star Wars flicks, echoing The Dirty Dozen and The Seven Samurai, as plucky crim Felicity Jones puts together a band of warriors that includes Donnie Yen and Riz Ahmed to track down the man who designed the Death Star – her father, Mads Mikkelsen.
Operating resolutely in the vein of Edwards’s previous blockbuster, Godzilla, it’s a game of two halves. The first is a slow, character-builder that shows off the Star Wars universe with some spectacular location filming. The second is then a giddy, action-packed pay-off that surprises with an oddly large number of heroic deaths. On top of that, you have the return of a number of original Star Wars characters and actors who appear as their young and/or not-dead selves through the power of CGI, the movie effectively spelling out why the Empire was so fearsome, why everyone was properly worried of the Death Star and by the end, precisely why everyone was right to cack themselves as soon as Darth Vaderentered the room.
All in all, a movie that gets better in the memory and which finally does something new and worthwhile with the franchise. It’s also best to watch Star Wars afterwards to see how it almost exactly matches up with everything we see in that.
You’ll probably know Peter Stormare from somewhere. Maybe it’s from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo or The Big Lebowski. Maybe it’s from Terry Gilliam’s The BrothersGrimm orSteven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. If you’re a TV fan, you’ll probably remember him as John Abruzzi in the first two seasons of Prison Break. But he’s been in a lot, lot more than that.
Since he has an accent, naturally he’s usually cast as a foreigner to American soils, although such is US TV, he’s been able to use pretty much the same accent to play Germans, Russians and Italians, without anyone noticing he’s none of those – he’s actually Swedish.
And for his latest role, which he co-created with his fellow ‘Viking Brother’ Glenn Lund, he’s even able to play a Swede – or an ‘ex-Swede’ as his character prefers it, since the former stuntman is now living in LA and working as a private detective. Running his own agency, ‘Swedish Dick’, he’s asked by a new client, a DJ, to track down his laptop, as it’s been stolen by a rival DJ and it has all his sick new beats on it. Stormare quickly tracks down the thief, a young fellow Swede (Johans Glans), and retrieves the laptop. However, things aren’t quite as they seem and by the end of the episode, the technically literate but fragile Glans has joined the more robust Stormare as a PI in the new retitled agency ‘Swedish Dicks’.
The show aired on Swedish Internet channel Viaplay in September and has been picked up for global distribution by Lionsgate, with a US airing promised for early 2017 and maybe a UK Netflix/Amazon pick-up at some point soon after that. This isn’t all that surprising, since like TV4 Sweden’s Welcome to Sweden, it’s clearly been made with a global audience in mind, since half the dialogue is English, half Swedish.
Oh, yes – have I mentioned yet that Stormare’s arch-nemesis is his former partner, Keanu Reeves? Yes, Keanu Reeves.
Now that says global, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, the scripts still say ‘Swedish’, since the show is undoubtedly Swedish in tone: Stormare’s gun is actually a hairdryer, the bad guys generally only want to be doing right by their sons and most of the jokes are in that favoured Swedish comedic artform – slapstick. Few of the jokes work in English and I only ever found myself gaffawing at the Swedish jokes. I mean this is the sort of level we’re working at most of the time – even regular guest star Traci Lords can’t save this:
Swedish Dicks is pretty gentle comedy at best, but it’s not awful. Indeed, it’s pretty amiable stuff, and Stormare and Glans are a personable, if silly pairing. It’s not thrilling, though, and I certainly don’t want to watch any more of it after having watched the first episode, not even for Keanu, since you can watch all his appearances in this 12-minute YouTube video.
But if that’s whet your appetite, here’s a trailer for the whole series and maybe the whole thing will be on your TV screens soon:
We should probably be giving Shut Eye a medal, since it’s doing such a public service – revealing all the tricks of the trade used by psychics to fleece their customers. But good thoughts alone aren’t enough to make a good TV programme, so unfortunately for Shut Eye, we have to evaluate it on when it’s watchable or not.
The first episode set the scene pretty well, with star Jeffrey Donovan playing a former Las Vegas magician now working as a fake psychic in LA under the purview of a bunch of Gypsies, including Isabella Rossellini. Well versed in the arts of cold reading and setting people up, one day he gets a bump on the noggin from a client’s disgruntled boyfriend and winds up having proper psychic visions. Will he use his new powers for good or for evil, we wonder at the end of the episode?
Evil, it turns out. Didn’t see that coming, did you?
The casting of Donovan as the lead is a genius move, since he’s able to recycle two of his old routines for the role. In episode two, the show becomes full on psychic Burn Notice, with Donovan giving us (and his mark) the rundown on the mystic art of psychically stealing people’s money. By episode three, he’s mining Touching Evil for sympathetic, dazed, brain-damaged and odd, as he starts using his new found powers to tell people the hard truths they probably don’t want to hear.
As you might have deduced from that run-down, Shut Eye is as odd a show as its lead character, since it is by turns comedic and then deeply serious and violent. More problematically, it keeps piling more and more details onto to the plot, almost in an apparent attempt to confuse us while it steals our watches. As well as the Gypsies and their bizarre activities – including poetry recitals and love ceremonies – there’s Dexter‘s David Zayas as a gang boss customer of Donovan, who’s as quick to throw someone in a deep fat fryer as he is to fix Donovan’s floorboards. There’s Donovan’s hard-edged wife, KaDee Strickland, who wants him to regain his former manhood while she’s simultaneously sleeping with another woman. There’s Donovan’s son, his supposed ADHD and his school issues. There’s The Wire‘s Sonja Sohn as a police officer who’s chasing after Donovan. There’s thirtysomething‘s Mel Harris as Donovan’s main mark, who sometimes wakes up with a rooster and a tree branch in her bed. There’s even a kooky doctor – Susan Misner (Billions, The Americans) – trying to help unclog Donovan’s subconsciousness using Mozart and drugs.
And so on.
It makes for a show that says an awful lot without really taking the time to say anything worthwhile, not even about fake psychics because they might be real, it turns out.
I probably won’t be bothering with the rest of Shut Eye, despite its funnier and more psychedelic qualities. Donovan’s worth his enormous salary for this gig, but the gig itself could probably have done with a rethink about exactly what story it wanted to tell.
Barrometer rating: 4 TMINE’s prediction: Unlikely to get a second season
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
It’s been a slightly busier weekend than I was planning, thanks in part to the arrival of my new nephew, Charlie (welcome to the world, Charlie!). That means I didn’t quite manage to watch all the new shows I wanted, but I’m otherwise pretty much up to date. I’ve already reviewed the first episode of Shut Eye (US: Hulu), but that’s as far as I’ve got – third-episode verdict later this week, though. I’m five minutes into Netflix’s Medici: Masters of Florence and it’s got a worrying Borgia-quality to it, so I’m not in a rush to get any further with that, but I’ll try.
However, I’ll definitely be previewing Swedish Dicks (Sweden: Viaplay) this week and hopefully working my way through 3% (Netflix) and anything else that looms large, too.
That means that after the jump, thanks to last week’s minor purge and the December break, I’ll be looking at the slightly reduced list of current regulars:
Canada Travelers
US Chance, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Falling Water, The Flash, The Great Indoors, Lethal Weapon, Shooter, Son of Zorn and Timeless.
I’ll also be looking at the season finales of Ash vs Evil Dead and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
I did manage to watch a movie this week, too:
Jason Bourne (2016) Disappointing return of the now-venerable franchise, with both Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass returning after the brief Tony Gilroy/Jeremy Renner interlude of The Bourne Legacy. Trying to take in the developments in world espionage since the The Bourne Supremacy, Jason Bourne brings Damon out of retirement to help Julia Stiles with her Snowden-esque activities, only to discover that his own dad might have had a hand in the Treadstone programme that created ‘Jason Bourne’. Meanwhile, Alicia Vikander is helping CIA director Tommy Lee Jones hunt down Damon and Stiles, while covering up his guilty secret, which involves Mark Zuckerberg-alike Riz Ahmed; Vincent Cassel is their asset out in the field, trying to kill Damon and Stiles, but not just because he’s following orders.
The plot and pretty much everything else is a poor retread of the best and worst bits of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, offering nothing new, while sacrificing one of the things that made the first few movies so refreshing: a reasonable attempt at mimesis. Here, the technology is just nonsense – “I’ve embedded malware in the files. As soon as she accesses them, I’ll know where she is” – the fights and inevitable car chases are poor and implausible, and even locations are glossed over, with the Canary Islands standing in for Athens at one point.
Should have stayed off the grid, guys. Or asked Tony Gilroy to help out again.
