Category Archives: Television

First Episode Review: MOBLAND

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Sunday saw the release on Paramount+ of Mobland, billed as ‘from the criminal world of Guy Ritchie.’

Paramount+

Set in the milieu of the present-day London world of criminal gangs and families of organized crime, Mobland seems to focus on the rivalry between competing families The Harrigans, led by Conrad (Pierce Brosnan) his wife Maeve (Helen Mirren) an assortment of their adult children along with the family’s chief fixer, Harry (Tom Hardy) and The Stevensons, led by Ritchie (Geoff Bell).

After an unexplained night out together between Eddie Harrigan and Tommy Stevenson leads to crisis the tensions between the family ramps up when Tommy Stevenson goes missing the open warfare is place in the table by his concerned father.

Amid the growing conflict Conrad Harrigan learns of a treason in his inner circle creating pressure on his organization in addition what is coming from the Stevensons.

The initial episode introduces a bewildering number of characters in the cast, some of which may turn out to be less consistent in their appearances than others but still requiring a sharp focus while watching. Mobland like much of Guy Ritchie’s crime movies, is not something one can take in casually while on a mobile device or performing household chores. To follow the intricate plotting and large cast demand attention.

In my opinion it is worth that attention. These are deeply crafted characters being performed by a very talented cast. Of course, an opening episode directed by a major director may not show the entire show’s true quality but so far this is something to look forward to each week.

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The Prisoner, A Conservative Psychiatrist, & Our Dark Times

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In 1967 star and producer Patrick McGoohan released into the world a surreal allegory of television series The Prisoner about an unnamed espionage agent kidnapped to a secret island called ‘The Village’ with the reason for his sudden resignation of great interest to his captors. A full decade before the brilliant surrealist filmmaker Daid Lynch would burst onto the scene with Eraserhead, The Prisoner would be most people’s introduction to film and television that would later be called Lynchian.

An important aspect to The Village and its totalitarian governance is that dissidents, malcontent, and people who attempted to resist were not labeled criminal but rather sick, mentally unbalanced. after all, no sane person could possibly resent to idyllic life present by the Village.

36 years after the debut of The Prisoner, conservative columnist and former psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer commenting on Democratic politician Howard Dean toying with conspiracy theories that President Bush had been forewarn of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 coined the term ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome,’ mirroring the Village’s policy of treatment dissent and disagreement as mental illness allowing easy dismissal of any and all criticism. Granted, Krauthammer probably meant the term as merely play on words and not at all a serious rebuttal, but the fast adoption of the term and its repeated deployment negates whatever intent the writer had.

A dozen years after Krauthammer introduced mental illness as a dismissal and pejorative for those is disagreement the term ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ entered the political terminology with current events expanding it to include ‘Musk Derangement Syndrome’ to include the wealthiest man alive and the administration hatchment man for regulatory governance.

As this administration proves itself criminal, callous, careless, and cruel the terms ‘TDS’ and “MDS’ are employed more and more. After all, no ‘right thinking’ person could possibly oppose such ‘common sense’ actions such as ignoring the courts, holding due process in contempt, and persecuting ‘enemies of the people’ for their speech.

At the end of the Prisoner’s only season when our unnamed protagonist finally discovers who is ‘Number One’ the person in charge of the Village and all its conformity demanding madness, it is a person who looks precisely like himself. The allegory clear, we all live in the Village. We have put ourselves there, caged by our own conventions and demands for tranquility.

And now in reality we are trapped in a ‘Village’ of our own making. Our wardens insisting that our rejection of an insane, idiotic, and cruel administration proof of our mental illness. I, for one, wear the ‘syndrome’ badge with honor. The truth remains, this is a cruel, criminal and deeply stupid administration and the truly deranged are those who profess that is normal and good.

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Key Star Trek (TOS) Character Episodes

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I recently watched a YouTube Reactor react to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The amusing elements in this reaction was that the young woman had zero context for the film, being utterly unaware of the characters and their history. One of her reactions when Spock comes aboard after the wormhole event is ‘Oh, they know Spock?’ with a tone of surprise.

In her wrap up, she of course mused about watching the series and that got me thinking about the most pertinent episodes for understanding the core characters of Star Trek. Not the best episodes mind you, just the ones that give you deep insight to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and the relationship to each other.

Season One:

The Naked Time

The Menagerie Pt I & II

The Galileo Seven

Arena

Space Seed

This Side of Paradise

The City on the Edge of Forever

Season Two:

Amok Time

Journey to Babel

The Ultimate Computer

Season Three:

The Enterprise Incident

The Tholian Web

The Paradise Syndrome

The list ended up heavy on season one episodes, but I think if someone new to the series who wasn’t going to watch all of it would get a pretty good understanding of the characters and what they mean to each other for the films that followed.

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Quick Review: The Gorge

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Dropped on Valentines Day this year was the action/horror/romance movie The Gorge. Two expert sniper/assassins are the latest people assigned to monitor a mysterious gorge with

Apple TV+

orders to prevent anything from leaving the site and maintaining strict no communication with each other. Since the pair stationed on opposing sides of the chasm are outstandingly attractive people (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) the no-contact rule is of course broken. By the third act of the film the pair find themselves at the bottom of the gorge, fighting for their lives and uncovering terrible secrets it has hidden for 80 years.

Directed by Scott Derrickson who gave us the first Dr. Strange film and the wonderful Black Phone I had hopes for The Gorge but while not bad the film in the end proved to be less than satisfying.

What works in the movie are the leads, Teller and Taylor-Joy works quite well together, have an excess of chemistry with each other and the camera, and are simply fun to watch. All of the movie’s troubles start at the bottom of the mysterious gash in the Earth. The secret they discover not only strains credibility but is actually lackluster. Their fight for survival is meant to the suspenseful but with a film boasting a cast this limited it can never leave your mind that both are going to survive. Additionally, once they reach the bottom of the gorge all character development grinds to a halt. They face no choices or challenges that impact on their character only on their physical survival.

I don’t regret watching The Gorge but it’s highly unlikely I will ever revisit it.

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Movie Review: Star Trek: Section 31

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Let me be upfront with the limitation of this review, I did not finish the film and abandoned it part way through its runtime of an hour and thirty-five minutes. That alone should tell you my opinion of this project.

Paramount +

Now, there are those who have been annoyed with ‘new Trek’ for political reasons; I am not counted among them. There are those that are annoyed with it for canon and continuity reasons, nor am I counted among those people. Star Trek: Discovery did not capture my attention, and I give up after a few episodes. However, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds I adore and cannot wait for the new season this year.

I went into Star Trek: Section 31 with limited knowledge, that ‘Section 31’ was effectively the ‘Black Ops’ division of Starfleet and with an open mind. Let the movie be the movie and see if I was entertained by it.

 

I despaired when it began with a ponderous and overly dramatic prolog. Prologs are tricky things, particularly when they ask the reader or viewer to accept things that are highly improbable, such as a ‘hunger games’ kind of deal to selected random persons who will become an Emperor. Despotic governments aren’t well-known for rigidly adhering to rules concerning the transfer of power.

Fine, we get through the prolog and go into another misused technique, the voice-over exposition, where Jamie Lee Curtis gives us the background for a central character. Minutes and minutes of screen time have been wasted that only served as exposition creating neither dramatic nor emotional tension. Now, with that past, the story itself can finally get going.

In a scene that was supposed to establish Phillipa’s (Michelle Yeoh) acute perceptions as she identifies the special ops team in her space bar the script comes to yet another screeching halt for more ham-handed exposition describing the team, which we get twice as the team leader goes over it again. It doesn’t not help that the team is comprised of stock, flat characters wholly devoid of any sense of any inner life.

Okay, we can get to the mission and at least start the story. Things go a little wonky and there’s a big special effects driven pseudo-martial arts fight scene that drags, is hideously edited and lacking in any dramatic or emotional weight because all we have been severed to this point is frying pan to the face exposition.

I mentioned that the film has a run time of 95 minutes, when this fight ended, we were about halfway through that. Mw sweetie-wife and I bored by the tedious affair stopped the stream and spent the rest of our evening playing the deck building game Dominion on-line.

As you can see Star Trek: Section 31 never engaged me on any level. There wasn’t enough story to be emotionally invested, the characters, what little time we had with them, were too bland and flat to care about and the plot never turned interesting. I could find nothing in this production that was worth any attention at all. We shall not finish it as life is too short to waste of such bland formless material.

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A lovely pairing

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This week my sweetie-wife and I started a rewatch of a beloved television series. It’s about a Federal detective who comes to investigate crime in an isolated logging town that harbors dark and supernatural secrets.

Oh, and last week we finished our re-watch of the groundbreaking American television series Twin Peaks what we started this week was Jordskot from Sweden.

It was December of 2020 when we watched the first season of this series and thoroughly enjoyed it. Even then without a fresh rewatch of Lynch/Frost’s bizarre and nightmare like Twin Peaks still echoing in my mind Jordskott provoked that comparison. Both shows start off as stories that present their fictional worlds as one that match ours, populated by varying kinds of people, good and bad, but rules by rational sane natural laws. Then things begin to twist, to turn, to become something darker with secrets older than the scientific method pushing the plot’s progression until what had been a police procedural has mutated almost imperceptibly into horror.

In 2020 when we watched for the first time both seasons were streaming on Shudder but before we could begin the next, the show vanished from the service. Over the next year or so I keep searching to see if it’d pop up on some other streaming site, but it did not and while it was never entirely forgotten it did fade from memory.

Late last year I wanted to look for it again, but the Swedish title had faded entirely from my mind, and it was a few weeks before I cracked locating the title and resuming my search.

Jordskott remained unlisted by all streaming services but for Christmas my sweetie-wife got me the DVDs imported from the UK. (I have never regretted purchasing a region free player) And so it is from disc that we have begun our rewatch and eventually our first watch of the second season.

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The Dreamer will not Awaken

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Filmmaker, Artist, and dreamer David Lynch as died. All artists are unique voices and visions, but few have the dreamlike quality that impacts generations such as was the films of David Lynch.

I first encountered Lynch’s visual language when along with a pack of friends I went to a local arthouse theater for a double feature of Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I still have clear memories of sitting in that darkened theater telling myself that eventually the movie Eraserhead would start making sense. It never did, but its images stayed parked powerfully in my mind.

I next ran into Lynch with his big budget studio production of Dune, the least David Lynch film that man ever released. It is so unlike his vision that extended television versions do not credit him at his insistence.

My next encounter however transformed me into a fan when I went to the theater to see Blue Velvet. I came out of that screen struck with the beauty and the horror of his mind. The glory of a good and simple life, the depravity of a bad one and just how closely interlocked the two truly were.

When Twin Peaks hit the air, my take was that Lynch had brought Blue Velvet to television, but of course the series was both far darker and for more normal than that movie had been.

I cannot say I have seen all of his work, but what I have watched has stayed with me and haunts my thoughts more than most financial blockbusters.

Every death is the loss of a voice and every one touches the world in ways that vast and complex. Lynch touched many of us and he lives on in our dreams and nightmares.

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Folk Horror Review: Robin Redbreast

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Produced and broadcast December 1970 as part of the BBC anthology program A Play for Today is a modern set piece of folk horror. Originally broadcast in color the only surviving elements are a 16mm B&W copy due to the BBC’s notorious penny-pinching habit of recording over their master tapes.

BBC

Norah (Anna Cropper) a thoroughly modern woman, having been dumped by her boyfriend of eight years, decides to abandon the city and live for a few months in a country cottage that she and her ex-had purchased just before the dissolution of their relationship.

The isolated village and its inhabitant are quaint and strange to Norah’s modern sensibilities with the woman she hired to help clean and maintain the cottage a busybody and gossip. When Norah discovers that there is an infestation of field mice in her cottage she’s directed to seek out Robin a local man who can perform the extermination. She finds Robin (Andrew Bradford) in the forest practicing martial arts nude.

Robin, though simple-minded, attracts the lonely Norah but slowly it begins to seem that the villagers have arranged everything to induced Norah and Robin into a relationship with some dark unspecified purpose at their goal.

I first heard of Robin Redbreast on the documentary about Folk Horror but at that time aside from one massive collection of films, it what not available anywhere to view. Recently it has become available to stream in the Ad-supported service Tubi and at a brisk one hour and twenty minutes it doesn’t require a deep commitment of time.

I think that the accident of only as B&W element surviving actually works in the film’s favor, giving it the village a feel of something not quite of modern times, very fitting for folk horror which is nearly always about the collision between tradition and modernity.

Limitations of both budget and technical capability do hamper some aspects of the production. A sequence that is supposed to be from a frightened bird’s perspective is achieved solely through crash zooms and whip pans of the camera that are quite off putting. There are a few conveniences of plot but overall while not approaching becoming a favorite for me of the folk horror genre Robin Redbreast was worth at least a watch.

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Series Review: The Penguin

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2022 saw the release of Matt Reeves’ interpretation of the classic DC Comics character Batman. Taking a more film noir approach the movie emphasized Batman as a detective over the character as a martial artist. The movie also introduced us the Colin Ferrell as Oswald Cobb, The Penguin. Reimagined as a lower class criminal hungry to make a name for himself and now HBO/Max has released a limited series focusing on the character.

HBO/Max

The series opens just weeks after the events of The Batman, the underworld is in chaos following the downfall of its leading mafia bosses, the poorest areas of Gotham are devastated by disaster, and corruption remains king in the city and its administration. Oz, (Colin Farrell) doesn’t so much seize the opportunity created by the chaos as his hand is forced due to his impulsive nature and fragile pride. Scrambling to stay ahead of vicious gangsters including Sofia Falcone (Cristin Miliot) recently released from Arkham Asylum, and the consequences of his own poorly thought-out actions Oz has only on his side a naive street kid, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), left homeless by disaster and Oz’s own mother slowly succumbing to a terrible wasting neurological disease.

Where The Batman lived with the constraints of an MPAA PG-13 rating, The Penguin thrives as a gritty R-rating equivalent, awash with language and violence that is only tolerated by the rarest of comic book movies. The series is part organized crime thriller with only a single shot to drive home that this is the home of Batman and deep character study of a people trapped and formed by their tragic histories.

The past weekend Colin Farrel took home a Golden Globe for his performance in The Penguin. Farrell is utterly transformed not only by the magical make-up effects that hold up even under insanely tight close-ups but by Farrell’s own fantastic performance. His voice, his accent, his physicality all belong to a man named Oswald Cobb (yest that changed it from Cobbelpot.) and it’s a powerful and moving depiction of a man that can charm and lie and always has his own best interests at heart.

Cristin Milioti, a performed I was unfamiliar with before this series, is another stand out talent in a cast packed with talent. With the subtlest facial expressions she informs the audience that this character’s mental health is always in question and the danger she presents is never far from the surface.

The Penguin is an outstanding series that twists and turns as it walks the viewer into the hell that is Gotham’s underworld where hope has long since died.

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Series Review: Dune Prophesy

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Set ten thousand years before the coming of the Kwisatz Haderach Paul Atreides the series Dune Prophesy concerns itself with the early Imperium following the Machine Wars when humanity freed itself from sentient computers and the founding of the Bene Gesserit.

HBO

Thirty years earlier the sisterhood, before becoming the Bene Gesserit, suffers a crisis with their found Mother Superior dies and power struggle erupts between factions, a struggle won by the fanatically dedicated and deeply emotionally scarred Vayla Harkkonnen and her sister Tula. With careful mechanizations over the following thirty years, they are now close to bring the emperor’s daughter into the sisterhood and through her placing one of their own onto the throne. Their plans are disrupted when a mysterious solider who apparently survived a sandworm attack appears in the court with a deep burning hatred of the sisterhood and strange inexplicable powers.

Dune Prophesy is the next cinematic adaptation of the novels and stories created by Frank Herbert and successfully brought to the movie screen by French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. With an ample production budget and a cast of veteran and new actors the series is a wonder of dramatic science-fiction television, a worthy follow-on to the pair of films from Villeneuve.

As has become typical of television of late the season is rather shot with just six episode none of which are bloated with any filler. Also, as it has become the practice in the industry the series doesn’t answer all the questions raised leaving some for further seasons.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dune Prophesy and anticipate further interesting and unsettling seasons.

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