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.
This may – or may not – be the last WHYBW for a couple of weeks. TMINE will be taking a break from Thursday through to Monday next week. Will I have time to watch much TV? I don’t know. The fact that my watch list is now just a few shows should help, but we’ll know for sure next Tuesday.
Which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of American Gods, Doctor Who, The Handmaid’s Tale, Silicon Valley and Twin Peaks, as well as the season finale of The Americans. That’s not much, is it. Come on summer season. Where are you?
Because this is the only other show I watched this week:
I’m Dying Up Here (US: Showtime) 1970s-set drama about a bunch of up-and-coming comedians in LA, all hoping to hit the big time by appearing on the Johnny Carson Show. But first, they’ve got to prove themselves worthy of a main room gig at Goldie’s on the Sunset Strip and Goldie (Melissa Leo) is only going to let you have that once she decides you’re good and ready. Until then, you’re not going to get paid, so you’ll be bunking down with your mate in someone else’s closet or masturbating in front of dying priests to earn some money, just to get by.
Initially, the show, which is based on journalist William Knoedelseder’s non-fiction book of the same name, looks like it’s going to be about Sebastian Stan’s ‘Clay’, who is the first of the bunch to get on Tonight. However, as the name of the show suggests, all doesn’t work out well for Stan, so the focus quickly shifts to his ex-girlfriend and fellow comic Ari Graynor (Bad Teacher), some of Clay’s friends from Boston (The Knick‘s Michael Angarano and The Office (US)‘s Clark Duke), and African-American comic RJ Cyler, who’s badly represented by agent Alfred Molina.
Despite being exec produced by Jim Carrey, I’m Dying Up Here‘s biggest problem is it’s not funny. Indeed, it’s bloody miserable, being closer to How To Make It In America and the horrors of being completely utterly broke than it is about the joys of comedy. Even when it’s supposed to be funny, such as when Graynor finally produces a routine that will ‘define’ her and potentially take her to the big time, it’s singularly unfunny.
It looks beautifully 70s and it quickly kills any idea you might have that stand-up was glamorous back then. Watchable or enjoyable, though? Not at all.
I know what you’re thinking. “Thank Christ for that! At last! A sequel to Romeo and Juliet! I so wanted to know what happened to everyone else at the end of that. Not Romeo and Juliet, obviously, because they’re dead.”
Thankfully, after a few mere centuries of waiting, here we are, all braced to find out what happened to the supporting cast of one Shakespeare’s finest thanks to Still Star-Crossed, an adaptation of Melinda Taub’s book of the same name. Will it be war between the Montagues and the Capulets? Does Rosaline, Juliet’s serving girl, get married and live happily ever after, preferably not to a Capulet? Did Romeo really manage to kill Paris? And what will happen to Friar Laurence, the narrator of the play and the bloke who gave Juliet that pesky potion that caused this story of woe?
By the end of the first episode, though, if I’d ever wanted to know the answers to those questions – and I’m not sure I did – I’d definitely lost all interest in finding them out because Still Star-Crossed is desperately dull. Strangely, it’s a bit hard to work out where it’s going so horribly wrong, but it quite definitely is.
The script itself isn’t that awful. While expecting Shakespeare is an error, of course, it follows the original play for about half its runtime and when it tries to be original itself, it’s reasonably well plotted, if soapy, with intrigue, war, covert love affairs, sibling rivalry and mean step-mothers/aunts/employers aplenty. The dialogue’s a bit ropey and cod Jane Austen, but nothing too shocking – although, oddly, no one thought to half-inch much from Shakespeare himself, à la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I can’t help feeling that catholics living in Italy during the Middle Ages would be less likely to have mass sword-fights inside cathedrals than depicted, but history will almost certainly provide dozens examples to disprove me, I’m sure.
Production values are okay. The show’s gone to the effort of filming in Spain, rather than Sacramento, and in lots of lovely old towns at that, so at least it looks reasonably the part. If a bit autumnal. And Spanish, not Italian. Where it needs more help to look Veronese, there’s plenty of background CGI, albeit quite obvious, cheap background CGI. Everyone gets decent enough wardrobe and set dressing. It looks a bit too clean to be properly medieval and has a touch of The Musketeers about it at times, but it still looks 100 times more authentic than the average Renaissance Fair, say.
Direction is… average. There are the occasional nods to Baz Luhrmann’s visually exciting and innovative Romeo + Juliet, but for the most part, it’s competent and workmanlike, albeit more intent on showing off the nice interior decor than it is on thrilling us.
The cast of almost entirely English actors is pretty and not too hammy. Anthony Head (playing Lord Silvestro Capulet) is the obvious stand-out who knows what he’s doing and can do all this with his eyes shut. Everyone else is either concentrating a bit too hard on the dialogue, not hitting anyone else too hard with their swords or blinking in disbelief that they’ve been cast in this – to the show’s credit and taking its cue from modern theatre, at least half the main cast are black, with a few pasty white Brits making no effort whatsoever to sound Italian (if realism is your worry) making up the rest of the numbers.
They’re just nothing that wrong with any of its components. By rights, it should be a perfectly average piece of US TV that passes the time oddly, and certainly no worse than Outlander does, for example. Yet, it’s impressively uninvolving, with no character to really care about, action scenes that go through all the motions of period action scenes without evoking even the slightest thrill, and illicit romances and jealousies that have all the piquancy of an end-of-year profit and loss reconciliation meeting.
Who, what, where, why? I just didn’t care. And you won’t either.
Here’s a trailer. A plague on both the houses of whomever thought “where this tragedy ends… an even greater story begins” was a good idea.
I have to admit that despite expectations, I’m actually quite enjoying Downward Dog, ABC’s new comedy in which a dog comments on his and his owner (Fargo‘s Allison Tolman)’s lives together as though he’s speaking to his therapist. After all, it’s a mid-season, ABC show involving a talking dog.
But despite that unpromising scenario, it’s proving to be a lot smarter and a lot more grown-up than I’d expected. While the show obviously has a talking dog, it’s still a dog, not a pseudo-man, so its concerns and understanding of the world are pretty much a dog’s concerns and understanding of the world, rather than a Garfield-like commentary on life and obsession with lasagne.
In episode two, does he understand that the magnet tied to his collar operates some machinery that opens the dog flap? No, he thinks he has powerful mental powers and we follow his mental processes as he tries to understand that (“Maybe I made that old monkey friend of mine who kept saying ‘I love you’ say it with my mind, too”). Episode three sees him trying to deal with the staggering revelation that his beloved owner goes to work where she spends time with other people; feeling neglected, he contemplates an emotional affair with someone else who gets him, but when his new ‘owner’ turns out to be the kind of person who throws a ball for him to chase after but secretly keeps it in his hand, he realises the value of his existing relationship.
While that offers plenty of fun and actually some real pathos at times (that was just something in my eye, honest), the show is still more about Tolman than the dog and offers something more like a serial drama than a comedy. It’s about her struggles at work with her clueless boss, his struggles with his own cluelessness and her ongoing relationship with her ex-boyfriend. Or is he her ex – is it something more? Here, there are genuine adult issues and emotional nuances being explored, ranging from how to balance all the contributions in a working team through how to deal with workplace seniority struggles through to wondering if you and your partners’ goals are the same, whether you’re growing up at the same speed, whether what you have in common is really what you have in common and more. There’s nothing here that more powerful, straight dramas haven’t covered, of course, but compared to the eternal childhood of Imaginary Mary, Downward Dog is impressively emotionally literate.
Despite its name, Downward Dog is ultimately a very warm, very human show about human concerns. It’s rarely laugh-out loud funny, but its wry humour is never far away and its take on dog psychology is hugely fun. Not necessarily a show to deliberately seek out, but you’ll probably enjoy it if you ever catch it.
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.
WHYBW took a bit of a break last week, thanks to there being Twin Peaks to watch and not enough time to do that and write about other TV, too. But it’s back, just in time to catch some season finales as the US Fall season begins to wave its final goodbyes and the Summer season starts to kick in.
There have been a few new shows, too, in the past fortnight: the first episode of Downward Dog and those first two new episodes of Twin Peaks I’ve already reviewed elsewhere and I’ll be reviewing Still Star-Crossed (US: ABC) and previewing I’m Dying Up Here (US: Showtime) later in the week. But with a bank holiday weekend, I’ve had a chance to catch up with everything, watch a few movies and even try some of my backlog.
So, after the jump, I’ll be reviewing the latest episodes of American Gods, The Americans, Doctor Who, Downward Dog, The Handmaid’s Tale, Master of None, Silicon Valley and Twin Peaks, as well as the season finales of The Flash, Great News and Lucifer. Before then, a new TV show and not one but two movies!
You Are Wanted (Amazon) Amazon’s first German-language TV show is a Berlin-set ‘techno thriller’ starring (and written, directed, produced and composed by) one of Germany’s most successful actor-director-composer-writer-cameramen-producers Matthias Schweighöfer, who plays a moderately successful hotel manager and family man, whose life starts to fall apart when hacktivists start to take an interest in him for no obvious reason. Before you know it, they’re in every computer system he has from his laptop and smartphone through to his TV and child monitor, stealing his money, faking an affair and incriminating him in crimes, all while blacking out Berlin’s power system. What do they want and why him? Well, you’ll have to watch to find out.
The first episode was a touch more German in its production values than Amazonian (ie not as good and a bit silly at times), but while it’s not exactly Mr Robot when it comes to hacking, it’s not American Odyssey either, exhibiting a slight hint that it might know a bit about the subject at least. Schweighöfer is appealing, but there’s not much by way of thrills so far, just a lot of Schweighöfer playing with his family and reinstalling operating systems. But it’s promising enough I’ll probably be watching episode two this week at some point.
Word to the wise: despite promises to the contrary, Roku’s Amazon channel won’t display subtitles (I’ve fiddled with every setting it has and nada on anything I’ve watched). So, although half the dialogue’s in English, your German had better be up to knowing what “hydraulic fracking” and “epidemiology” are auf Deutsch if you’re to get by on that platform, so stick with iOS (which definitely does work) or something else. When I gave the subtitles a whirl, though, they turned out to be pretty bad translations that removed any nuance from the original (eg “Google is your friend” became “Use Google”), so I’m not sure that’s much better.
Passengers (2016) Mechanic Chris Pratt is in hypersleep on board a spaceship to a new colony, when a meteorite collision causes a malfunction on the ship. Pratt wakes up 90 years too early and he’s the only one on board apart from android barman Michael Sheen. Dare he wake up alluring writer Jennifer Lawrence to keep him company? And if he does, what will she do when he finds out he’s effectively killed her? And was his malfunctioning hypersleep pod the only thing damaged by the collision?
A lot has been written about the gender politics of Pratt’s actions in this and to be fair, the movie does go at great lengths not to dodge the ethical questions involved. It’s also far more of a piece of science-fiction than you might have assumed and everything looks very beautiful. But ultimately this is a two-hander between Pratt and Lawrence and how much you’ll want to watch this and their musings about the meaning of life and death very much depends on how much like both of them, whether you find their age gap a bit creepy and whether you think Pratt unconsensually violating sleeping Lawrence’s body (metaphorically) is too much of an obstacle to your enjoying the movie. There’s a brief appearance by (spoiler) Laurence Fishburne and a so-brief-you-probably-won’t-even-see-his-face cameo by (spoiler) Andy Garcia, too, which makes me think there’s a longer cut of the movie out there somewhere…
The Accountant (2016) An odd attempt to revive The Saint but without paying a licence fee, in which rather than Val Kilmer playing a swashbuckling and suave master criminal who adopts Catholic saints as his noms de plume, we have Ben Affleck playing a socially awkward savant and master criminal who adopts the names of famous mathematicians as his noms de plume, as he goes about… analysing the finances of whomever will pay him. Anna Kendrick is the Elisabeth Shue of the piece, a mid-level accountant who finds an irregularity in her employer (John Lithgow)’s books that Affleck can’t stop himself from investigating. Except Affleck has a very specific code of conduct and if any of his employers break it, he’ll use all the training his psych ops army dad gave him to kill them with extreme prejudice. Trouble is, Lithgow has hired Jon Bernthal (Marvel’s Daredevil‘s The Punisher) to protect him so Affleck might not find the going so easy and Treasury agent Cynthia Addai-Robinson is chasing after him in the exact same way she chases Ryan Phillippe in Shooter…
Written by Bill Dubuque (The Judge and Netflix’s forthcoming Ozark) and directed by Gavin O’Connor (Warrior), oddly enough the film is more about an accountant with autistic spectrum disorder than it is about a fighty master assassin, with Affleck redeploying the ‘tortured hero with a disability’ routine he used in Daredevil to evoke sympathy as he does a lot of A Beautiful Mind-like writing on vertical surfaces. But oddly, although its portrayal of ASD’s sensory issues as something that simply needs to be overcome through harsh regimens of fighting, flashing lights, loud noise and hitting yourself with a stick is probably a little contra-indicated, it’s surprisingly accurate, albeit more in a Bron/Broen (The Bridge) sort of way than Life, Animated, with Affleck’s character driven by, advantaged by and disadvantaged by his condition throughout.
The ending is surprising, the fight scenes are genuinely very good, and Affleck and Kendrick are frequently amusing together. And I promise you you’ll never see Martha from The Americans the same way by the end. It’s nonsense and there’s one scene in which JK Simmons sits down to explain the entire plot to the audience, but it’s nevertheless a jolly entertaining, surprisingly smart, surprisingly generous action movie that does for ASD what Daredevil does for blindness.
In the US: Sundays, 9pm ET/PT, Showtime In the UK: Mondays, 2am, Sky Atlantic
Like most of David Lynch’s work, it’s easy to recognise Twin Peaks‘ importance without really being able to explain why it’s important. Ostensibly a pastiche of US soap operas mashed up with a murder-mystery, it was still obvious from the get-go that Lynch was doing something TV really hadn’t done before. But it was really hard to say what it was doing.
I remember sitting in the TV room during my first week of university watching the show that all the papers had told us was must-see TV. I was already a Lynch fan, Channel 4 having introduced me to most of his movies over the years, so I was looking forward to it even more than most.
But for half an hour we sat there, wondering what the hell everyone was raving about, as the body of high school cheerleader Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was washed up ‘wrapped in plastic’ near the small town of Twin Peaks and the inhabitants underwent all the stages of grief you’d expect from seeing a golden girl struck down in the prime of life in a town that felt like it hadn’t quite escaped the 1950s.
Then enter Special Agent Dale Cooper (Dune and Blue Velvet‘s Kyle MacLachlan), a boy scout of an FBI agent sent to investigate the murder, and suddenly the tension of the room eased. At last, we understood what everyone was on about. This was magic. This was art.
Over the course of the next two seasons, the show proved elusive. Sometimes a murder-mystery, sometimes a comedy, sometimes a horror movie, Twin Peaks was indefinable oddness, with perfectly ordinary characters (James the biker boy) interspersed with oddball small town characters (Deputy Andy), oddball FBI agents (David Duchovny’s cross-dressing agent and Lynch’s own deaf agent), oddball characters from nowhere in the world (The Log Lady – so-called, because she carried a log with her) and oddball characters from nightmares (Bob, the ultimate killer of Laura Palmer, who came from ‘the Black Lodge’ and possessed people).
There have been books filled with theories about Twin Peaks and what it was. What’s often forgotten is that it wasn’t very David Lynch. Sure, the undertones from Blue Velvet, with its theme of “the darkness hiding behind the facade of white picket fences”, was obvious. But while Cooper got inspiration from dreams and the Black Lodge had dead people talking backwards and dwarves dancing…
…the nightmare surrealism of Eraserhead was a distant memory.
In fact, objectively speaking, Twin Peaks was mostly a very conventional ABC soap opera cum thriller that just happened to have some wonderful characters and some wonderful moments of surrealism.
Nevertheless, despite being cancelled after two seasons and its follow-up movie flopping, Twin Peaks has remained a worldwide cult classic, esteemed almost as much as its contemporary The X-Files was, but without having been dragged past the point of a natural death and ending on a worthy cliffhanger – Cooper seemingly possessed by Bob after a final encounter in the Black Lodge.
Somewhat perfectly, though, the show had a built-in promise that it would return in 25 years and Showtime in the US has delivered on that promise with a whole new limited series. The question was: what form would it take? Would it be a simple cash-in that brought back a few characters for a quick new murder to be solved? Would it simply riff all the original’s greatest hits without adding anything? Sure, David Lynch was on board, but when was the last time he’d done something exceptional? Mullholland Drive or Lost Highway maybe?
Well, the first two episodes are in and I have to say the new Twin Peaks is magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. And what’s more, it’s a return not just to Twin Peaks but to the David Lynch of pretty much all his movies, including Eraserhead. Although maybe not Dune (Hal yawm!).
