Category Archives: Television

Novel Nordic Noirs

For some time my sweetie-wife and I have been enjoying murder shows from the far north of Europe. Recently we have added two more programs to our rotation of after dinner entertainment.

Arctic Circle is a show set in the Lapland region of Finland. This is the part of the world where you get reindeer and lots and lots of snow. It is also the area of Finland that seems to analogous to American’s relationship with Appalachia, rustic and suspicious of outsiders and with a dose of religious fundamentalism. The show follows Nina a local cop who usually is dealing with drunks and poachers now entangled in a case involving cross border human trafficking, the Russian Mafia, and a novel and deadly virus while dealing with the issues of a single mother  with a special needs daughter and a growing affair with a foreign scientist.

The show is well produced, well acted, and is thoroughly engaging.

The second program is Jordskott a police thriller with horror overtones. Produced and set in Sweden, though it features the lead from the Finnish serries Bordertown now playing a heavy, this show centers on Eva a police detective who has returned home after the death of her father and the unresolved disappearance of her young daughter seven years earlier. Atmospheric and moody Jordskott, which translates roughly in Soil Shot, unfolds at tits own pace with just enough mystery and strange reveals the keep the viewer engaged.

Arctic Circle is currently streaming on the Roku Channel Topic and Jordskott is a Shudder exclusive.

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Pandemic Programming: Staged

The Global COVID-19 pandemic in addition to killing more than a million people with over 210,00 of them here in the dysfunctional United States of America, has also wreaked havoc on the entertainment industry. Beyond the shuttering of exhibition houses and live theater around the globe production has foundered on the rocks of this disease. Film and television sets are cramped, crowded affairs with buffet style craft services to keep everyone fed and little ability to engage in social distancing with the results being that making new programing a risky enterprise.

However, a few creatives are finding ways to still give us the entertainment and joyful diversion we desperately need in the dark days and the one I am enjoying best is Staged.

Starring fan favorites David Tennant and Michael Sheen Staged centers on the two actors playing fictionalized and exaggerated versions of themselves as they are trapped in their homes by the pandemic and via Zoom calls attempt to salvage a theatrical production being helmed by a novice and weak first time director played by the program’s creator, director, and writer, Simon Evans.

In addition to Tennent and Sheen their real-life spouses, Georgia and Anna are supporting and engaging characters along with a few guest stars also contributing to the socially distanced project.

Selected scenes are available on YouTube and work quite well on their own but the full half-hour episodes laying on Hulu are the real joy. If you are in need of laughter fueled escape, I couldn’t recommend Staged any higher.

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Lovecraft Country Impressions After 7 Episodes

Lovecraft Country is an HBO limited series adapted from the novel of the same name written by Matt Ruff and centers on a group of Black characters dealing with magic, monsters, and racism during Jim Crow America. Mild spoilers ahead.

The story’s protagonist is Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman, a Korean War veteran, genre fiction enthusiast, and a descendant of the founding member of cult order.

I have now watched seven episode of Lovecraft Country and my feelings are hopeful but with a dash of apprehension.

The characters are well drawn with complex backstories and vibrant inner lives that all the actors of the series portray beautifully. The drama and dynamics are grounded in a realistic approach with the various character struggling with lingering abuse, trauma, and trust issues while still possessing aspirational motivations that speak to a high nature within them. In the face of a racist, unjust, and oppressive system that surrounds them they maintain, for the most part, their own dignity.

The fantastical elements, monsters and magic, are handled quite adeptly with fresh shocks and turns that has prevented the genre elements from becoming stale even seven hours into the story.

My apprehensions arise from concerns of the course of the narrative and the coming conclusion and break down into two major categories.

First; The lack of direct objectives for the protagonists. Tic, for most of the series now, has been searching for and attempting to decipher pages from a magical text with the goal of protecting his family. But it is not clear exactly what he is protecting them from. While there are evil supernatural forces, and one such force attempted to use Tic as part of a dangerous ritual, the surviving members of the cults do not appear to offer a direct and specific threat to Tic. It is not clear what will happen if Tic fails in obtaining ‘protection’ or what will happen if the surviving cultists are unopposed. This would be fine if we were only 1/3 of the way into the story but at 2/3 we need to have a clear appreciation of the stakes.

While the character drama is proceeding nicely, and the characters are being tested on their inner natures and being forced to change and grow that is sufficient for dramatic fiction but lacking for genre stories. Genre is more plot dependent; we need more than Luke Skywalker gaining maturity we need the defeat of the Death Star as well.

My Second apprehension centers on the thematic elements of the story and specifically with the racism of Jim Crow America. It is good to tell this story set in the Jim Crow period. It is a dark disgusting chapter of American History too often swept aside in popular entertainment. My issues do not arise from setting here and being direct in depicting the overt racism, but I fear the series is setting itself up for an unsatisfactory conclusion.

We know that Jim Crow will not end until the middle of the next decade and that systemic racism will persist after its legal abolition. making it a central thematic conflict in the show without a fictionalized character to stand in for it means that the characters no matter their eventually outcome with the cultists will lose in the greater cultural conflict. This is where having a character stand in for the wider culture is a useful device. A white racist character that comes to see the evil and ignorance of their racism can be used to suggest that cultural change and growth is possible and hinting that victory of those evil forces is possible even if your story ends within racist times but Lovecraft Country has no recurring major racist characters to suggest such a growth is possible. Because the racist characters come and go as part of the universal background the background becomes unchanging and unchangeable.

Perhaps that is the thematic intent of the show’s creators but it is very difficult to make failure and futility into satisfying ends for stories.

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Painful Television

No, I am not referring to the televised US Presidential Debate. I did not watch as I already have more than enough information to make an informed vote. Sadly, I am talking about a Scottish murder mystery limited series Deadwater Fell.

Currently available on the steaming service Acorn but also available as a single stand-alone purchase for the limited series Deadwater Fell is the story of a tragic fire that kills the wife and children of the village local doctor, Tom (David Tennant) and how the fallout from the events splinters the town and relationships.

My problem with the series is I truly disliked spending time with these characters. There is scarcely one that is pleasant, and most are actively abusive and manipulative. While all the characters have big dramatic issue, events, and troubles, the very nature of the characters make me immune to care.

The actors perform their tasks admirably, making these repulsive characters real and I do not hold them accountable for the writing. Though as I said to my sweetie-wife while we were watching the final episode, ‘If I want to watch Tennant being manipulative and evil, I’ll just watch Season One of Jessica Jones.’

In addition to the character abrasive natures the writing also seems to suffer from the author pushing the characters into scene for the audiences benefits rather than from a natural outgrowth of character motivation. For example, Tom, the Doctor, goes to Jess and tells her a sad story of his abuse as a child, as story Jess later learns is a lie. It reveals a bit of Tom’s character and his manipulative nature but Tom going to jess served no purpose for Tom. He wasn’t gaining anything. No cooperation, no item he needed, there was literally from Tom’s perspective, no purpose to do that. It advanced plot and revealed character but only by being out of character.

With less than ten minutes left to the final episode we abandoned the series and played Dominion.

I cannot recommend this series to anyone.

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Streaming Review: Get Duked!

Several weeks ago, my sweetie-wife discovered the trailer for the Amazon Original, meaning they purchased the exclusive rights, feature film Get Duked!and on August 28th it became available on Amazon’s Prime Video Streaming service.

Get Duked! (You ignore the exclamation mark) is the comedic, farcical story of 4 city boys dropped into the hinterlands of the Scottish highlands as part of a contest the Duke of Edinburgh Award but three of these young lads are delinquent youths with the final member of the quartet a naive youngster who actually cares about the prize, a laminated certificate.  However, once there are beyond the supervision of the sole adult in charge of the contest the ragtag assembly are hunted by mysterious and murderous landed gentry intent on ‘culling the herd’ of degenerate and unacceptable influences. Add into this mix of underachieving and limited intellect boys a collection of baked farmers and a local police station intent of glory beyond tracking the local and evasive bread thief and you have a movie that is pretty far from serious.

Written and directed by Ninian Doff in his feature film debut Get Duked! is a frivolous affair that is suitable for an hour and half of drama free entertainment. The young actors are capable and manage the difficult balance between being youths in trouble and characters you do not want to get injured or killed while several older actors get a chance to show off some comedic chops usually missing from the sort of parts that they play. I’m particularly thinking of Kate Dickie perhaps best known for her turn on Game of Thrones as the unbalance Lysa Arryn turning in a fine performance as the local chief constable desperate for glory and advancement.

The Scot accents in the film get a little heavy and with rapid overlapping dialog some viewers may wish to engage their television’s closed captioning systems to follow all of the voices but in general Get Duked! provides decent light-hearted escape from today’s terrible times.

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Quick Hits Aug 20, 2020

Just a few quick thoughts and observations for today.

Democratic Convention: Despite being a former poli-sci major and minor political junkie I have not been watching the convention. However, from analysis and coverage from both the right and the left it seems that they’ve found a way to do their messaging in these strange terrible times. They are keeping their aim fixed on the prize, defeating Trump, and are showing a level of unity quite unusual for this party. I understand the frustration from progressive that Republicans have highly placed speaking slots at the convention but this election is unlike any other in our nation’s history and the first problem, removing Trump from office, takes priority over everything else at the moment. More than ever, policy must come after victory.

Agents of SHIELD: The series, with all its ups and down, completed its seventh and final season swinging for the fences and engaging in some seriously epic storylines. Overall, I really enjoyed the series and I have started a re-watch from season one. The hints and rumors of a tie-in with the next phase of the MCU are intriguing and we’ll see where they go.

Writing my Next Novel: I’m almost ready for the prose outline of the new and still untitled novel. I’m currently working on a bullet point outline, just the most critical points for each of the five acts but as I go each act has more bullet points than the previous indicating that the story is taking off on its own. For this murder mystery aboard a generations starship I plan to incorporate some of the story structure ideas advocated my screenplays writer and Chernobylseries creator Craig Mazin.

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Series Review: Lovecraft Country

Sunday night saw HBO’s premier of the long anticipated series adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country.

I have not read the novel so my impressions of the series and the only ‘aired’ episode so far is driven entirely by the onscreen material.

Episode one centered on Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) an army veteran recently discharged following the Korean War’s armistice as he travels home to Chicago because his father has gone missing. Uniting with his Father’s brother George (Courtney B. Vance), who travels researching his guide to safe travels for Black people in Jim Crow America, and childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), he travels to ‘Lovecraft country’, rural Massachusetts, following clues to his father’s disappearance and hints of an ancestral legacy.

Aside from a vivid dream sequence at the episode’s opening Lovecraft Countytakes its time revealing its cosmic horror nature instead rightly focusing on character, mood, and critically environment creating a believable and frightening world with terrors drawn from history as well as the imagination. Jonathan Majors is well cast as ‘Tic,’ the bookish young man with a love of pulp adventures now grown into a handsome muscular man but with those same doubts and self-image issues waiting just under the surface. Jurnee Smollett’s Letitia while seemingly a woman who appears primarily as a sensualist also possesses depths and intellect that in the first episode promise greater things for her character and Vance’s Uncle George brings a sense of wisdom and hard-earned experience to the trio.

The cinematography fills a night encounter rich saturated colors from blood red flares while daylight excursions have a washed out colorless and joyless oppression to them, reflecting well the dual nature of the story and the show, fantastical weird apparitions existing alongside with banal historical evil. The show’s soundtrack is a mix of period and modern music and that I found a little jarring but other viewers are less likely to have their suspension of disbelief bumped by the choices.

It is nigh on impossible to adequately judge a story by just 10 percent of its content other than to say that the characters and encounters are all laid out in a pleasing, engaging manner and if the entire series maintains this quality, we are in for one frightening ride.

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Corona vs Chernobyl

For some strange and unknowable reason here in the depth of a global pandemic I have started re-watching HBOs Chernobyl mini-series. Brainchild of show runner and writer Craig Mazin the five-episode series follows the historical disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant following the explosion that ruptured the core and endangered million with its radioactive contamination. The series has won a number of awards around the globe and garnered praise for its acting, direction, and writing.

Mazin centers the themes of truth and lies at the heart of his scripts for Chernobyl opening the series with the question, ‘What is the cost of lies?’Given the lengthy time for writing, pre-production, and production Mazin’s work was not a direct comment on the Trump presidency but the applicability of those themes and questions are unavoidable.

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor number 4 exploded because of lies and because of the reliance of the system upon not only lies but that the lies of the authorities were never to be questioned. Lies hampered the recognition of the disaster and hampered attempts to mitigate its lethal consequences.

And yet dozens of scientists and engineers and bureaucrats managed to evade the lies and with the dangerous work of hundreds of thousands more and the sacrifice of millions more confront and contain the contamination. The Soviet system when confronted with the awful truth of the explosion and what it imperiled spent vast amounts of treasure and resources doing what was required. Mikhail Gorbachev the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has expressed the belief that the economic cost of the Chernobyl disaster was a critical factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Which brings me to the global COVID-19 Pandemic.

The government of the United States, the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation/state, under the presidency of Donald Trump, aided and abetted by support from his governing party the Republicans, has lacked the courage shown by the brutal communist government of the former USSR.

The Administration has failed to spend the treasure necessary, has failed to muster the resources required, has left its citizenry to face the crisis alone and instead has continually counseled with lies resulting in a count of 150,000 thousand dead, a count that continue to rise.

Trump and his GOP enablers have plugged their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and like children pretended that the mess simply doesn’t exist.

This is not to praise the Soviet System. It was a brutal, monstrous, and evil empire responsible for the murder of millions. It subjugated and enslaved its own citizenry and that of its neighbors the world is better off with its collapse.

It is shocking however that a system so utterly reliant upon lies and the denial of truth rose to a crisis while a party that prides itself on virtual signaling its patriotism leaves its country to burn.

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Leave Fiction in its Period

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched a portion of the BBC’s live presentation of The Quatermass Experiment. Written by Nigel Kneale and originally produced as live television in 1953 the shows centers on Bernard Quatermass and Britain’s first men into space with the disastrous and horrifying consequences of that first rocket flight. Kneale is one of my favorite television and film genre writers who produced material that was both thrilling and thoughtful. His ghost story The Stone Tape remains a beloved production to me.

In 2005 the BBC recreated the energy of live television with this new production of The Quatermass Experiment. Transposing the action to the modern-day United Kingdom. Instead of Quatermass’ Experimental Rocket Group being part of the British government it now stood as a private space launch concern. However, much of the dialog and drama revolves around the concept of a first flight into space and for 2005 that’s a concept that simply doesn’t carry a lot of sense of the unknown. The mystery of where the spacecraft flew to simply can’t be sustained in our current technological world. And while 500,000 miles is further than any manned flight actually flown it’s still in our own neighborhood and unlikely to yield up a story about aliens and monsters.

The Quatermass Experiment belong to its period just as numerous other stories that shouldn’t be ‘modernized’ such as The Manchurian Candidate or Fail-Safe, another experiment into revitalizing live television.

Works of art are products of their time, the social pressures and environments that both inspired and constrained the artists as they created and it is in their time they should remain.

 

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Comic Con Online

I won’t have a lot to say about this as I have never been a regular attendee of San Diego’s famous Comic-Con. My interest in the Comic industry has always been light, never a collector myself but during the 80s reading the issues purchased by my collector friends. That said I am not putting down the Comic-Con. It’s a tremendous event that now puts a global spotlight on things geeky and nerdy and I am thrilled that so many of my friends have such a good time most years.

The pandemic, just as it has with some many other fun events, canceled in person Comic-Con but the organizers have thrown together a virtual convention with panel discussions and presentations now available on YouTube. Yesterday my sweetie-wife and I watched a pair of these, first a cast discussion for What We Do in the Shadows, FX’s hit vampire comedy and this was quite enjoyable and then an interview discussion with Charlize Theron about her evolution in an action star and general all around badass on-screen.

The online presentation is a poor substitute for the crowded chaos that is Comic-Con and I dearly hope that my friends can soon return to in person geekery.

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