Category Archives: Television

Series Review: The Decameron

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It is 14th century Italy, and the black death is ravaging the cites. The scope and scale of the pestilence is breaking civil society, and many believe that divine judgement is upon humanity and the end days are close at hand.

In this setting a collection of nobles and their servants greedily accept an invitation to fortified country villa to be the guest of Visconte Leonardo to either wait out the pestilence or spend humanity’s final days in comfort and luxury.

Netflix

The Decameron, very loosey based on the 14th Century manuscript, is a black comedy satirizing class structure, religion, and the endless human need to gain the upper hand on one another even as everything falls apart.

All of the characters of the series are duplicitous, scheming, and concealing secrets from one another. The humor is dark with death ever present. The tone of the show is not for everyone, but I enjoyed taking the series to be sort of a dark twisted comedy version of Corman’s adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death.

While very few of the cast were known to me save one secondary character, the actors performed their parts well and brought in my emotional engagement. The only thing that marred the production value of the program was the CGI flames utilized in some scene in the final few episodes, but I will not begrudge any production that errs on the side of safety.

The Decameron is pleasant, funny, and not without a few points to make. It streams on Netflix.

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A Film I will Not Finish: Jackpot!

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Awkwafina and John Cena are both far too good for the material thrust upon with the sagging unfunny action-comedy Jackpot!

Amazon Studios

An aspiring actor returning to Los Angeles Awkwafina’s Katie becomes the subject of a lethal lottery when she wins the big prize in California’s monthly mega lottery. The wrinkle is that this new lottery will grant to prize to anyone who murders the person with the winning ticket if that murder happens before sundown and no guns are involved. Unaware of what has transpired with her winning because Katie has been living in Michigan dealing with her mother’s end of life care, she ends up with the services of John Cena’s Noel who is going to act as her bodyguard for 10 percent of the winning. There is a competing protect services offered by Simon Liu, but I did not get far enough into the film to see his character’s entrance.

Jackpot! fails on both of its critical levels. It is a comedy that provokes no laughter and an action movie with dull, uninspired, and poorly photographed stunt and fight work. Stunts, like dance, needs to be photographed so the audience can see the performers amazing physical prowess, not hidden behind fast choppy editing.

My sweetie-Wife and I gave the film 30 minutes of our time and we have no plan to return to see the remaining hour plus of the dull and uninteresting movie. Perhaps it gets better, perhaps it become more credible, but I harbor serious doubts based upon the movie’s uninspired start.

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Partial Review: The Decameron

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It is the 14th century, and the Black Death is ravaging Europe, a perfect setting for a sardonic satirical comedy The Decameron.

Netflix

With the pestilence turning cities into that scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail an eccentric collection of nobles accepts an invitation to wait out the plague at the at the expansive and luxurious Villa Santa as guests of Leonardo. Think Masque of the Red Death but funny.

However, Leonardo dies of the plague before they arrive and the servants, desperate to not lose their safe positions in the villa scheme to conceal the fact from their guests.

The guests also conceal secrets and each episode the absurdity grows with social classes thrown into disarray and sexual passions unleashed.

While the series is adapted from an 14th century text of the same name the casting and writing are thoroughly modern.

I have yet to complete this Netflix series and so it may not land this aircraft well but so far it has made for quite enjoyable viewing.

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Quick Thoughts on The Acolyte

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I am late to the party because I have not been overly enamored with the expanded Star Warsproducts of late. I adore Andor and thoroughly enjoyed season 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian but season 3 was aimless, The Book of Bobba Fett felt as though it had no point and Ashoka failed to entrance me and I dropped the show after two episodes.

Disney Studios/Lucas Film

The Acolyte falls squarely in the upper half of these offerings. It was decent enough and I was interested enough to watch the entire season. Set considerably earlier in the cannon’s history the series’ focus is twin girls, Mae and Osha, powerfully force sensitive and at the center of possible Jedi maleficence.

The cast is uniformly good with the most surprisingly performance in my opinion belonging top Mannie Jacinto. He manages a performance so distant to his previously best-known character, Jason Mendoza on The Good Place as to reside in an entirely different galaxy. (Yes, that analogy was intentional.) Lee Jung-jae as a troubled Jedi master was also exceptional.

Amanda Stenberg as the twin women held my attention and played the two characters quite well.

The Acolyte received some serious scorn from elements of fandom. I will not address if the root cause of that scorn is out of misogyny or from a desperate need to preserve an image of the Jedi as pure and wholly good. I must admit that I side with the fiction galactic senator that questions unchecked political power held by a religious order.

Overall, The Acolyte entertained and remained a pleasurable way to past a few evening hours but it is unlikely to stay with me in the manner that Andor has proven. It is not quite Star Wars for adult, but neither is it explicitly for children

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Columbo; Short Fuse

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Conceived and produced in the late 60s Columbo is the platonic ideal of the ‘inverted’ mystery where the killer is revealed early to the audience and the intrigue of the story is how the detective find the tiny flaw in an otherwise ‘perfect murder.’ It is unlikely that the movies and series had someone other than Peter Falk been cast as the disheveled but brilliant police detective. Falk often improvised lines on camera to throw off his costars in the same manner that his characters threw off balance the quarry he hunted.

In a bust of nostalgia, I decided to watch an episode from the early 1970s. Originally, I had planned on an episode where the guest star was the incomparable Ricardo Montalban but browsing through the available shows on Tubi I stumbled upon a season one episode with a stacked cast of Roddy McDowall, Ida Lupino, Anne Francis, James Gregory, and William Windom. Well, this one I had to watch.

McDowall, a brilliant chemist and photographer, plants a small explosive device in his Uncle’s cars which explodes killing the man on a dangerous mountain road where it might easily be mistaken as an accident.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the cast of Short Fuse this was actually a very substandard Columbo. There is actually very little for Columbo to detect and the character seemingly leaps to the correct solution without any evidentiary trail. The best part of any Columbo story, where the little detective reveals the flaw in the plan and the crucial elements that the brilliant upper-class murder missed is actually not present in this episode. Columbo plays a trick on McDowall’s character, causing him to panic and reveal knowledge he could have only if he had planted a bomb, but there is no ‘see, this is where you screwed up and I saw it,’ moment. In fact, it is highly unlikely that any grand jury would have returned with an indictment.

What a shame to see such a wonderful cast in such an inferior story.

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Reboots, Remakes, and Reimaginings

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Later this month Apple TV+ will begin streaming the television series Time Bandits from series creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. The series is a reimagining of the 1981 fantasy film by Terry Gilliam and against centers on a young boy’s adventures through time with a rag tag collection of misfits that have stolen a map indicating fractures in history/

There are voices raised in alarm and protest over the remake of what some hold as a dearly beloved classic. I watched the original film during its theatrical run and to this day quotes from the script still spring from these lips. (Most often, “Stay, Guard the Map,” whenever I leave anything on a table or such.)

That said I am no distraught over a remake. While it is often a cheap ploy to grab an already existing audience for more cash remakes are not always an evil thing. The admired classic film The Maltese Falcon which propelled Humphrey Bogart to stardom is not only a remake but the secondremake of that story. The earlier two adaptations failed to catch fire with audiences.

But remakes can also be horrid affairs that fail to understand the source material of the original. In 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix when the pilot is pointing out flaws in the plan to make a new airplane from the remains of the crashed one with the survivors strapped to the wings, he insists that the injured man cannot be expected to do that. The aircraft designer says that the man will die before the work is completed and therefore is not a factor. He is cold, it is calculating but he is not cruel or evil but simply dictated by reality. In the 2004 remake he shoots and kills the man, a dramatic and terrible interpretation of the text.

King Kong 1933 is an impressive achievement of technical filmmaking and transcends the simple adventure story envisioned by its creators. The 1976 film has none of the charm or heart of the original and the 2005 version while indulgent clearly has heart and a deep adoration for the source material.

Remakes like any artistic attempt are inherently neither good nor bad and only time will answer of the Time Bandits series meets expectations.

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Time and Familiarity Distorts Art

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By chance I am reexperiencing a couple of television series. To follow along with the podcast The Detective and The Log Lady my sweetie-wife and I are rewatching the surrealist mystery horror series Twin Peaks with an episode each Sunday evening. On YouTube I am enjoying watching millennial reactors experience the original series of Star Trek for the very first time.

Season one of Twin Peaks speeds along much faster than my faulty memory recalled. I had forgotten that the entire first series, as the Brit would say, totaled just 8 episodes. Not even half of a tradition American television season. My emotional memory of a slow, languid story that unfolded at a leisurely pace is entirely a construction that the mood of the series and the decay determine by the decades since its debut.

Star Trek has had a different course in my recent re-exposure to the program. I grew up watching reruns of the series in the 70s. (With very hazy memories as a child of the original broadcast.) I have seen every episode countless time, own the program on Blu-ray dice and have player the Roulette Episode game with myself where dice determine which story to watch.

This saturation of the series, with a judgment set by decades of rewatching that fixes the good and bad episodes into their hierarchy is quite shaken when a new viewer comes along.

Let That be Your Last Battlefield has long been on my list of some of Trek’s worst episodes. Aliens with superpowers that exist solely to put the plot of a deterministic course and a ‘message’ presented with all the subtly of a frying pan to the face made this episode painful to watch.

And yet people new to the series, without their opinions set my decades of judgment, can find the story engaging and relevant. My familiarity with the episode exaggerated it faults until I could no longer see its charms.

Oh, it remains a poor episode and the faults I have mentioned are glaring with my experience as a writer, but the bod doesn’t always overpower the good. It is important to try and keep that fresh new viewer experience alive.

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What?? A New Time Bandits?? No One Told Me

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Taika Waititi, the creative and executive behind some of cinema and televisions most entertaining shows, What We do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs, Our Flag Means Death and movies likes Jojo Rabbit, The Hunt for the Wilder People, Next Goal Wins and more has yet another television series coming in July of this year, 2024.

Time Bandits the series, is an adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy film that I quote to this very day “Stay! Guard the Map.”

I have no idea if this is a continuation or a fresh approach to the material, but I do know that July 24th I will be there for this show’s 10 episode Season One.

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Consider the Transporter in Star Trek

CBS Home Video

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Developed as a means of sidestepping the impossible production challenge of landing a ship every time the characters went ashore in Star Trek the transporter is a marvel of impossible science and utterly fantastic energies.

The show’s lore the transport converts the target’s, usually a person, matter into energy, beams it to a distant location, then reconverts that energy back into matter precisely recreating the person at the new location.

Let’s sidestep the ‘Ship of Theseus’ question if the reconstituted person is actually the same person or not for another essay and focus on the physics of this process.

Einstein revolutionized the world with his understanding that energy and matter were equivalents as set forth in the world’s most famous equation E=MC^2. The energy value of a mass is equal to that mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Let’s put a 50-kilogram (110 lbs.) person on the transporter and set them down.

50 kg converted entirely to energy becomes 4,500,000,000,000 megajoules. Such a number is simply beyond human comprehension. It is the equivalent 71 thousand Hiroshima bombs delivered instantaneously as a beam to a distant location. If the transporter chief held a grudge against the person on the planet that had sold him a crummy watch, he could deliver 71 thousand Hiroshimas.

There is a reason why in my Space Opera role playing games when I have introduced a transporter like device it has never ever been of the variety that directly converted matter to energy and back again. Star Trek would have been far better served if someone had decided early on that the transport simply created a gate between places and saved us from both bad technobabble solutions to problems (we’ll just put the doctor in and reconstitute her from an early pattern) and not introduce a weapon of such scale and destruction.

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The Doomsday Machine is not Dead

CBS Home Video

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Season two episode six of Star Trek (The Original Series) gave us The Doomsday Machine, where Kirk and company battle a automated weapon that destroys planets. Hampered by a traumatized Starfleet Commodore they eventually deactivate the mechanism leaving floating derelict in space.

With a hull of neutronium the machine had been impervious to the Enterprise’s weaponry the victory had hardly been assured.

You might be forgiven if you assumed neutronium was a fantastical substance invented by delirious writers much like ‘Vibranium’ or ‘Adamantium’, but you would wrong.  Neutronium is matter that has been so compressed by immense gravitational forces that the protons and electrons have merged with the neutron at the nucleus of the atom forming pure nuclear material with nearly unimaginable densities, Neutron stars have nearly enough mass to become Black Holes, but not quite.

It is unlikely that the ‘Doomsday Machine’, even though it was ‘miles long with a maw that could swallow a dozen starships’ possessed stellar masses of neutronium. (That would make for an interesting battle, fighting a machine with the gravitational effects of a star.) To maintain its shape and function the mechanism would need to counter the immense gravitational forces generated by the neutronium hull.

When the Enterprise departed the battle volume the machine still retained it shape. If it was truly and utterly dead, it should have collapsed into a sphere, but it did not. Something inside the doomsday machine still functioned, fighting the terrible crushing force of gravity.

It was not dead. Now, there’s a space for some fan-fiction or a tie-in novel.

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