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Britannia: Woe to the Vanquished (2017)
Mud, sky and blood
With the arrival in Celtic Britain of the second Roman invasion, both onlookers and members of warring factions look for ways to survive, to avert catastrophe, or to seek a glorious destiny.
BRITANNIA's opening episode begins with an unnamed mystic character later dubbed The Outcast performing divining rituals in an unknown tongue. He emerges from his visions sprawled in a tree and says to the sky, "Oh $#1t". The show is promising to span both relatable realities and exotic otherworlds.
As the story expands into worlds of mud and sky and a cast caked in sweat and blood, this seems like an intensified version of revisionist retelling of legends, as seen in films like 2004's KING ARTHUR. This cinematically ambitious series serves up gorgeous cinematography of dramatic landscapes, and elaborately detailed designs for sets and for characters' distinct adornment. A particularly memorable example is the creepy witchiness of the Druids, with their uncannily over-dilated pupils.
The Druids also exemplify BRITTANNIA's distinctive take on pagan mysticism - riding the boundary between grounded folk religion and hints of the supernatural. A coming-of age-festival turns into what looks like Burning Man in Britain; The Outcast displays a mix of superstitious confabulation and seeming actual occult insights.
The recurrent intrusions of disorienting altered states for characters, which are coded visually by blurring at the borders of the frame,, did occasionally seem repetitive. However, that is a minor irritating qubble compared to the potential pay offs from a story written with a larger psychedelic vision in mind. It should be worth persisting to see if the filmmakers can tune the show's visual storytelling to match its themes.
Beyond prestige tv production values and visual spectacle, the cast of characters - already sprawling and due to expand yet more - are mostly sketched effectively by their actions and by conflicts illustrating their concerns. Some, however get just opaque hints that will either hook you with a mystery or leave you guessing.
One tribe's assassin gets her quest ( and thus her screentime ) sidelined by the Romans' arrival. However, she concisely demonstrates confidence and preparation that will presumably enable her to rise to the changing situation.
This show is making a solid stab at avoiding the pitfalls of historical dramatisations. They can settle for reducing events to commonplace inevitabilities which can obscure the represented experience of those denizens - people who lived through their own era as an unfolding unwritten present. As has been said, the past is a different country, and they do things differently there.
How might it have felt to live in a culture with distinctly different expectations of their future? What would the costs and struggle to preserve or destroy their changing world have been like? BRITANNIA sets out to insert the viewer into multiple adjacent interacting worlds at once, spanning the perspectives of major players - the Romans and vassal cultures present among the Roman legions; the warring tribes of Britons; and noncombatants.
The use of contrasting tones is a critical element here. Sweary history is fun, as when a Roman general boosts the morale of a traumatised rookie soldier by telling him to take a dump on the Britons' land. Touches like that profane wit make them seem more like real soldiers than ciphers from a history textbook.
Populating a story with colloquially articulate characters reacting to personally significant events that impinge on them is a great way to make vigourous drama out of a past that might otherwise seem just static. The Roman general receives an intimately targeted challenge from a Druid version of a Manchurian-candidate psy-ops assault. The general's loud defIance in response makes his determination and leadership seem more than that of a carelessly bold would-be conqueror.
Similarly, one Celtic tribal prince gets to show off his clear minded tactical skills, making him a common enough type in war stories. He also, however, shows befuddled reactions to the politics that oblige his voracious wife to share her sexual favours with a tribal ally. This plays out in a sex scene which is intense, exotic and titillating, but it is nonetheless built around humorously relatable character beats. ( Note also that besides sex, the show is peppered with other adult content including bloody violence. The violence is often presented impressionistically but also occasionally as brutal gore. )
The character of The Outcast takes the mixing of tones to a kind of breaking point. This is most apparent in an exposition scene where he seems to declare his own intended mythic-hero arc for the series. Coming from a character written and performed as a self-important areshole, that declaration seems pathetically deluded.
Knowing that the storylines of the show will surely demand that The Outcast discover a quite different path, facing his limitations and challenges in some quite different way- is by itself a big enough hook to keep me watching this series.
Paper Girls (2022)
A fresh take on a coming-of-age adventure story
In small town 1980s USA, a quartet of teen girls are thrown together on their pre-dawn paper-routes then transported by mysterious figures into their town's 2020s future. They struggle to understand what happened to them, and to their own future selves.
This show at least initially seems like a pretty charming and fresh take on a coming-of-age adventure story. Episode One is quite pacey. It hits the ground running, jumping into displaying characters through their actions as they are caught up in escalating events. Episode Two shifts gears to a slower pace, but still shows a deft hand at balancing the expanding cast. The writing shows a light touch with the usual tropes showing time travellers as "fish out of water."
Based on these episodes, the show has lots of promise, although it is yet to develop a really focused and driven plot: there is no clear antagonist yet, for example. The shift in visual palette from episode one to episode two also hints that the show is still taking form.
The real hook for episodes three and onwards is probably the prospect for more encounters of the eighties girls with their future selves. This is despite the fact that the first pairing ( ambitious immigrant kid Erin meeting her neurotic adult self ) may come across to viewers as somewhat of a disappointment. Discovering that you have become a person that your younger self would dislike is a potentially dramatic version of alienation, but as written here it seemed like a downer dead end of sorts for both versions of the character.
The incursions from "future folk" and their combating factions as seen so far are more opaque than mysterious, and some of them use anachronistic turns of phrase that tax suspension of disbelief even more.
The show could have been accused of mining audiences' 1980s nostalgia, but it focussed more on sincere presentation of the experiences of being a teen finding your way into a wider world outside your family, school and culture. That experience is probably qualitatively different for later digital-native generations, so it is good to get a version of that older story on screen.
There are hints of epic sci-fi drama in the works, but the first two episodes keep that mostly off-screen. The episodes instead work to establish the characters and their worlds, giving you a chance to see them flex their agency in struggles with both internal and external challenges. That provides a quartet of arcs to follow, any one of which should carry you through the more disbelief-inducing plot beats, both those up front and those that are sure to follow.
Glassboy (2020)
An occasionally inspired kidventure
A boy named Pino with a threatening chronic illness decides to break away from his wealthy family's housebound coddling. He makes friends with the neighbourhood gang of kids.
Around the midpoint of Pino's story, he stops in the rainy street to lower his umbrella and feel the raindrops on his face. By sharing a simple delight with the viewers, the film evokes freedom, authenticity, and a moment of intimacy. Such experiences have been unavailable to Pino because of his illness, and because of people's fears around it.
The filmmakers use several such evocative moments to connect the audience to concerns of the characters. These supply stakes for the story, which structurally is a combination of a preteens-on-bikes adventure comedy and a nuanced family-illness drama. That empathy, plus some impressionistic or otherwise cinematic flourishes, elevate the film a couple notches above what is otherwise a sweet, modest family film.
GLASSBOY is bookended with the protagonist's own streamlined comic-book renderings of his story, and that opening suggests a heightened fairy-tale structure for his story. He is a sort of prince trying to find a path out of being penned up in a castle, and out of a looming cursed fate. Heightened imagery appears sometimes, such when Pino suffers a collapse. He is shown as him sinking into murky ocean depths until being called back to the surface. More pleasantly, Pino gets to share a moment with the kid gang's leader Mavi in a fantastical animated imagined star-scape. That evoked a moment of friendship quite sweetly and elegantly.
Outside of such imaginative moments, the plot and characters are more mundane but still quite warm and entertaining. The film is padded out with a spread of plot and character beats that occasionally are somewhat uninspired. The blowhard tutor character gets set up to be clumsily scapegoated (for the sake of younger viewers, I suspect.) Three of the kid gang characters labour under simplistic characterisations, of the "my nickname is my personality" variety. Jokes about how the fat kid can't stop eating only go so far.
On the other hand, Pino's parents are caring and wise in ways I found refreshing. Pino and Mavi's arcs get some thoughtful writing, delivered through reasonably subtle child performances. There is a dramatic moment when a bullied Pino realises a sort of resilient power from accepting being powerless in practice. Such a moment could be an inspiration for viewers who have struggled with threats like illness or with aggression.
Such moments when the film greatly exceeded my expectations were balanced out by the more predictably pedestrian ones, thus my settling for a six-star rating.
What If...?: What If... Zombies?! (2021)
Combining the best of Marvel and of the zombie horror-comedy genre
Combining the best of Marvel and of the zombie horror-comedy genre.
Lost in Space: Impact (2018)
Much better than it needed to be
A family of colonists crash on a remote alien planet and have to struggle to survive and explore its mysteries.
This is a solid science-fiction adventure that entranced me much more than I expected that a reboot would. The first two episodes serve as an extended introduction and are the ones viewed for this review.
The show is built around well-written family drama and novel survival challenges. That probably makes it more like an adaptation of the 1812 'Swiss Family Robinson' novel - as opposed to being a riff on the 60s show which this production is rebooting, with its episodic fantasias. Note, however, that this series does include several elements to gratify fans of that TV predecessor.
The characters are consistently relatable and/or realistic. Maxwell Jenkins plays the youngest, Will, giving a non-precocious performance as a kid struggling to be courageous and constructive despite his fears. Parker Posey's restrained version of the previously campy "Dr Smith" character promises some insidious opportunistic villainy. My favourite so far is Mina Sundwall's middle-child Penny. She is scripted as responding to the motivating influences of her scientist mother Maureen and her driven sister Judy; and building herself up into coping and into action with some frequently funny self-talk.
The castaways are not a cosy nuclear unit from the start. The core of the story seems to be to demonstrate how their choosing to adopt family values like trust, empathy and communication will enable their teamwork and survival.
That theme presumably motivates the apparent shortfall from the character of father John Robinson. He is pretty opaque and unlikeable in the opening episodes. In this more contemporary version, he was a military careerist estranged from the family unit. He presumably has to work for reconciliation rather than just having a patriarch's entitlement by default.
The show labours under the typical burdens for science fiction films trying to represent something alien using mundane locations and relatable humans. The filmmakers subtly enhance the wilderness locations of the crash-site planet to include exotic flora and fauna. Unfortunately, it does still mostly look like the Canadian forests standing in for other worlds used in previous sci-fi franchises like Stargate.
There are several anachronisms. Oreos are somehow still a popular snack in the 2050s. One character cites their ambition to retire to Miami despite their living in the decade after a climate-changing catastrophe.
The production more than balances out those shortfalls with multiple high-budget sets and fantastical effects sequences. These include a character trapped in the ice of a flash-frozen pool; their all-terrain Chariot vehicle charging down a mountain; and a storm raining stones on the party.
This show reminds me of the 2003 reboot of the 1970s Battlestar Galactica series. Each reboot could have coasted on a known brand and some nostalgia. They could have settled for cosmetic refreshes with some added spectacle and better visual effects. However in both cases, the result was a lot better than it needed to be. They took care to build in thematic and dramatic meat, and deliver some fresh varieties of science-fictional wonder.
Ted Lasso: Biscuits (2020)
Is glossy authenticity a thing?
( Note I am reviewing eps one and two here as if they were a single pilot.)
A struggling London soccer team brings in a cheery coach from American college gridiron after his morale-raising style goes viral. Initially everything is against him: culture clashes, mocking reporters and players, and the expectations of the team owner. However, he works patiently to win over the team and apply his brand of positivity.
The premise of a novice professional coach, as high-concept but slight as that is, seems like a gamble for pitching a new series.. Apple TV has at least pulled together a mix of fresh younger players and some experienced character performers to grab your attention. Put them into a glossily shot version of modern London and their stories should go down easier, at least.
The way Ted Lassoo and his assistant Coach Beard recurrently drop into a friendly wordplay routine for no plot-critical reason suggests the writers want to make time for a slow build. The opening two episodes show some thoughtful writing and performance, and respect for the characters.
Lead Jason Sudekis created the Ted Lasso character for an advertising spot and got a series pitch off the back of that. The character has an understated line in fish-out-of-water humour and less-cringey faux pas, but he is not primarily a comedic character. He is hinted to have a conflicted backstory that justified him 'doing a geographical' and flying across the Atlantic leaving behind his family.
Ted Lasso looks like he treats his job as making people like him and like themselves, and he shows some skills at that. There are hints at least of his potential innovations, as in his interactions with kids kicking ball in a park. It is a truism in story-telling that we like to follow characters who are good at their jobs, so that might be what hooks viewers.
One of the virtues of the industry's shift to producing for streaming is they don't have to play it safe for immediate broad and commercial appeal. Given the mixed responses to several of Apple TV's recent productions, one should take several more episodes to evaluate this show, rather than just the initial two episodes viewed. The first two eps do not yet deliver a clear sense of why we should care about the show, or which of the many characters or points of view are going to be developed. The stakes are not laid out explicitly, but it is possible the show is not even really about sporting competition, but about relationships and communication.
Gypsy: The Rabbit Hole (2017)
How to crash sexily
A therapist (Naomi Watts) struggles with competing temptations and impulses that potentially threaten her controlled life of career and family.
The psychotherapist's couch is a fruitful setting for multiple kinds of drama, if only for the acting showcase it potentially gives to character actors embodying someone confronting their issues in treatment. Based on the viewed first episode at least, Gypsy nominally falls into a relatively recent variant more devoted to subverting the older image of therapists as saintly helpers and mentors, and instead mining the therapists' own abundant maladjustments and conflicts.
This series also adds a wider set of contexts, following Jean the therapist into her interactions with colleagues, friends, family, her daughter's school, and others. That licenses the creators to deploy some creative cinematography to frame her moving through multiple urban and suburban environments, and recurrently frame her in some interesting symbolic ways. For example, showing her alcohol-fuzzed glow by shooting her through a semi-translucent pane in a rail carriage. So we know this will be potentially more than a theatrical-mode performance piece.
Occasionally such symbolic elements are opaque to the point of being irritating, but they presumably will become more interpretable as the series progresses. The repeated holds on ticking clocks presumably is meant to evoke some sense of anxiety for Jean, but anxiety by itself with no object is too diffuse to be much more than irritating.
Similarly, there is a brief sex scene that is framed as if through a door crack implying a covert viewpoint that is not further explained, and may make you feel uncomfortably voyeuristic.
Such complicity may end up being the meat of the show. The idea of compulsion is introduced in the opening voiceover then again by one of Jean's substance abusing patients, who stares longingly and soulfully into the camera lens and thus at the viewers. Jean progressively begins acting out in impulsive ways, from white lies to professional misconduct, substance abuse, theft and emotional infidelity.
This is mostly presented in empathetic ways that make it seem like an authentic rebellion or a necessary compulsion rather than as immediate red flags with looming consequences. Many viewers probably want to feel things strongly like Jean apparently does, and will want her to seize the day rather than put up with her life of upper-middle-class compromises.
The episode was generally well written and performed. However, the supporting characters were largely overshadowed in favour of showcasing Naomi Watts' lead, and so the full company is hard to evaluate after this one episode. Bourgeois people gossiping at a dinner party does not immediately make for engaging characters. There probably are novel storylines pending around the daughter character, and some progressive themes around gender and sexuality, but there is not enough in this one episode to see how well that is going to be deployed.
The apparent betrayal Jean experiences in the closing moments of the episode will probably serve as a deciding threshold for most viewers. Do they register how Jean's own covert infidelity makes her potentially as much a target for judgement as the person who thwarted her? Or do they want to see Jean righteously confront them? That will probably decide your commitment to repeat viewing.
No Tomorrow: Pilot (2016)
Sunny side of the Apocalypse
Deciding to add a new tv series to my viewing routine, whether scheduled or binged, makes me anxious. What other media will it displace? Will it peter out for me, whether due to my own distractions or the show's own shortfalls?
'No Tomorrow' gives that burden a clever judo throw by encouraging people to experience life joyously and fearlessly.
The high concept premise uses a 'miracle question' : what would you do if there were no consequences ? What dreams would you chase, what fears and regrets would you slay?
The protagonist, a likeable woman in her 30s chafing at the limitations of her middle management existence, finds enough impetus to chase a hot stranger, who then challenges her to seize the day, or at least the part-year remaining until the asteroid apocalypse he predicts will arrive.
That sort of premise seems to set an expiry date on a first and presumably only season. Fortunately this show hits the ground running. Some dense and clever writing, a steady flow of entertaining visual humour and character based humour, and the license to follow the characters into joyous and/or empowering challenges, all add up to a sunny tone that could deliver you from pandemic-lockdown misery.
Only Murders in the Building: True Crime (2021)
A smart take on a whodunnit built around performers having fun
Three residents of a New York City apartment complex join forces to investigate the suspicious death of a neighbour.
This is an enjoyable and smart take on a whodunnit. It is built around performers having fun with their roles, and peppered with commentary about genre storytelling and about the media industry.
The first episode opens with the three leads introducing themselves via voiceovers showing their points of view on life in the city. Then we see their unknowingly shared ritual of consuming a particular podcast presenting true crime investigations. This was an efficient and entertaining way to set up their motivations, as well as foreshadowing their probable roles in the investigation to follow.
Martin Short gets the showiest role as an out-of-work producer. He seizes on the death in their building as an opportunity to get his name on something - namely their own home-studio true-crime podcast. His self-absorbed manner includes carelessly casting shade in the guise of directorial commentary.
Selena Gomez defaults to restraint in her performance. That contrasts effectively with the delight she shows in the moments when the trail heats up. When she shares such delighted moments with her fellow snoops, that makes the trio feel like insiders sharing a secret adventure. Note this effect is part of the appeal of true-crime stories, such as the podcast the trio are obsessed with, and is a hook for the audiences for this show.
The episode's production showed some cinematic flourishes throughout, but near the close of the episode it goes all out. Elegant special-effects fantasies are used to represent the characters' subjective reactions to breakthroughs. For example, free-falling joyously from the top of a stair, then bouncing weightlessly all the way back up. Such moments mean that the filmmakers have greater stylistic ambitions than your typical crime procedural potboiler assembled from static dialogue scenes.
The only real shortfall for me was Steve Martin's character. He is a semi-retired celebrity who has mixed feelings about losing both his A-list status and his anonymity. Such feelings are not too different to Steve Martin's reported ambivalence about his own career. Martin co-wrote this show, and I wonder if the joke is there for Martin more than for the audience. The bulk of the show is pending so there is plenty of time to reverse that impression.
The Middleman: The Pilot Episode Sanction (2008)
A Steed and Peel Avengers-alke?
A slacker is recruited to a secret super-science agency's troubleshooting team.
This is a silly, colourful show that is densely packed with laconic gags and references to sci-fi properties. The lead character Wendy ( a cute Natalie Morales) is written as a fun mixture of disengaged slacker, curious adventurer and dismissive badass. Based on the pilot episode, Wendy is the show's best asset.
The rest of the cast of characters - including Matt Keeslar as the straight-laced hero Middleman - have potential, but they were mostly placeholders to hang gags or plot threads on. That shallowness may be a choice by the filmmakers or something that will be remedied as the show goes on. It is consistent with the show's breathlessly overwritten exposition and casually included sci-fi weirdness.
If I was making a rash judgement I could call it a one-joke show, that joke being that the characters have seen all this before - and more so still for audience members who have consumed enough media to recognise, say, a specific supervillain scheme recurring in different properties.
Genre self-awareness is fun in the short term, but trickier as a show goes on. If literally everything is possible, and every past weird threat has been confidently defeated by a succession of past heroes, then the stakes seem pretty low. You would hope the filmmakers are aware of this and have a solution. There are clues as to what that might be.
When Wendy accepts the call to adventure, she imagines herself in a stylised montage as an agent, as if she was Emma Peel from the credits of the 60's British TV show "The Avengers". That image of glamour and cool is an aspiration that she and the show presumably will fall short of in funny ways.
However, I take it as a hint that The Avengers is the precedent for how to write this show. The Avengers was largely built on the playful chemistry between the leads Steed and Peel, which carried the show through variously realistic or silly episodic stories.
There are hints that Wendy is going to dump her current awful boyfriend and that Keeslar's Middleman wishes she liked him instead. If their relationship showed more spark than snark by episode three, I would have confidence that this show has legs.
Viking (2016)
A slickly produced and dramatically engaging historical epic of the Rus. Problematic in parts, but certainly not the stinker many other reviews proclaimed.
As a sympathetic but apostate former Christian, I am intrigued by a specific sub-genre: dramatizations of the historical adoption of monotheism by pagan cultures. My guard does go up if the film is of the solemn hagiograhy variety, presenting the change as a solemn inevitability (ala most"life of Muhammed" stories.)
To my mind, this film "Viking" smuggles a respectable monotheism epic into audiences' attention by disguising it as a visceral Game of Thrones style feud-fest. However, it nonetheless managed to retain my goodwill by packaging it with entertaining spectacles, mostly grounded in dramatically satisfying character motivations and arcs driving the conflict. In the process it averted hagiography
(At least until the end when an aftertaste of sanctity seems to hover over the film. SPOILER: the protagonist turns out to become a Russian Orthodox saint.)
However, that whiff may well be my own prejudice showing. To my less- encumbered cineaste's eye, the contrast between the smoky, muddy, bloody world of the Rus for most of the film, and the golden sunlit skies and mosaic-laden Christian universe that appears progressively more towards the climax, makes the religion appear impressively enticing, even to this apostate. It's an uplifting transition, one that ultimately reduces to a fake-out the cynical quote from Mao which appeared in the film's opening.
I did find the film had some shortfalls, mostly common to other historical epics.
It can be hard to distinguish one bearded or armoured character from another, both spear-carriers and variously expendable secondary characters, either in repose or in a rain- curtailed action scenes.
The film is overlong, and displays intermittent awkward compromises between historical veracity and dramatic necessities.
However, on balance, it still skillfully held my attention throughout; showcased some vivid cinematography and speed- ramped action; and generated moderate star-wattage from a couple charismatic performances.