framersqool Reviews

Civil War (2024)

Yet another post-apocalyptic pageant of cliches

[3/10 · 26 May 2024]

Before seeing this, I had read a fair number of reviewers who seemed to have fallen for the old art-film gimmick of leading an audience to assume that, somehow, the absence of any real story IS the story.

Sadly enough, that one rarely works on anyone other than those who assume that because a big splashy motion picture's advance promotions have caused them to expect a masterpiece, that the actual production will be as 'important' (whatever that has ever meant in the arts) as its trailers are self-important.

There is so much to ridicule about this silly overhyped cartoon that I wouldn't even know where to start.

Fortunately, other reviewers here have already contributed quite a bit of input on that score, and I agree with them as to the specific elements making this thing so silly and pointless. They are not worth repeating.

But the general absence of any story here really explains it all for my purposes: the American entertainment industries have rarely shown any real insight or knowledge into genuine American life, and instead present us with cliches of their own making, and then take us on guided tours through an America that has only ever existed in the insular imaginations of those who produce its movies.

Don't fall for the implicit tactic of making you look for some overall larger message or warning about the future of American civilization, because there isn't one.

How war correspondents having a tough job does things to the people doing it is about as close as it gets here, and I think we all kinda knew that. Not like that one hasn't been done before, umpteen-gazillion times and rarely any better than this.

I really did want to expect something more meaningful or timely about this era in American history, but all it took was a few minutes into the regular parade of clueless portrayals of an imaginary America that Hollywood never has shown any interest in outgrowing, for me to realize that not only was any story worth telling not going to be told at all here, but also that this should no longer surprise me.

Baptiste (2019–2021)

What a let-down after 'Missing'

[4/10 · 8 May 2024]

We first meet Julien Baptiste in 'Missing', where we encounter a brilliant, persistent and devoted French detective who specializes in cases of long-lost loved ones. The series shows him as also being flawed, complex, tormented and conflicted, as all good detective drama must do or it's mere dime novel filler. The combination of his intrepid courage and his personal investments as portrayed by Tcheky Karyo, a longtime personal favorite, is the absolute redemption to some otherwise pretty nauseatingly mediocre and excessively brutal French crime drama that seems to have become the norm of late.

'Baptiste', by contrast, squanders all the sympathy and boosterism I might have felt toward either the character or the actor playing him. Here we find a tired old man, still caught, while remaining maddeningly expressionless most of the time, in that predictable crime drama backdrop of 'why can't you think about your family first?' even at his advancing age. Whatever. Mostly I'm just thinking, 'the wife and daughter are right: go home, old-timer, and count your blessings: you're just getting in your own way out chasing bad guys at your age, and for what?'

What passes for a story in the first few episodes, before I got the point that this really isn't getting any better, is tedious, irritating, and implausible, as the overall tale slides once again down that slimy slope toward a crime series relying increasingly on gratuitous suffering and continual horrors, in place of a good story about the investigative process.

I doubt it was going to get any better. I didn't stick around to find out. You can, I suppose, but the best of Baptiste has already been presented, in a whole other series that actually works. This one didn't seem to show much promise of that.

Estonia (2023– )

Unendurable bureaucratic soap opera

[2/10 · 27 November 2023]

It's hard to imagine how this complete muddle could have been made less informative, revealing or even interesting to try and get through. Apparently the decision was made (probably by the same typically European means of committees around tables where no one ever says what they mean because no one is sure who's really in charge) to make most of the 'story' about an extremely dull and irritating process of follow-up enquiry among representatives of the various nations involved.

The Swedes want to blame the Estonian crew (or something), the Finns want to blame the Russians (or something), the Germans want to blame the Finns (or something), and no one is even interested in hearing from the Estonians other than to cross-examine the one surviving crew member in very bad English by insinuating that he must have sunk the ship by having a crush on a girl in the galley (or something.)

I managed to wait out four episodes and part of the fifth, giving as much benefit of the doubt as I could, to assume that at some point we might start being shown something to do with a ship and why it sank.

But I think it was when one (Finnish? Who cares, by that point?) bureaucrat was arguing with another, three years later, in some courtyard outside yet another ugly building about leaks to the Germans (or something), and couldn't make himself heard over the other man's repulsive coughing fit having nothing at all to do with anything, that I realized there is no there, there: this confusing and meandering mess is not going to arrive at any story worth telling, if it hasn't already, more than four episodes in.

It came as no revelation to me that European bureaucrats are primarily engaged in international blameshifting and denials of their own accountability, which is all that is on display as this fractured and badly-edited script proceeds. So aside from that, I could not even tell what story it was this overly long insult to the victims and survivors of the actual shipwreck (which this is barely even about) was meant to tell us.

If you really must throw away several hours of your time being bored and confused and irritated by a story that isn't one and which leaves you less informed than you started out being, go ahead and sit through this. I guess there must be somebody out there who finds this sort of passive-aggressive Eurocratic soap operas interesting, but I'm not one of them.

The Diplomat (II) (2023– )

Well-done propaganda is SO frustrating

[6/10 · 30 April 2023]

Yeah, yeah, this is beautifully done. Great cast, sharp and witty script with lots of intricate human drama and pretty plausible moral dilemmas facing each of the characters, etc, etc. Great political soap opera, kind of an updated 'West Wing', Ukraine-war-era version, and to top it off, the whole thing is about a lot of foul-mouthed and scandal-plagued top-tier American and British professionals in the arts of statecraft, debating endlessly about what 'The Russians' must mean and how so very crucial it is not to provoke them.

Sadly enough, though the writers did manage to drop enough Ukraine references in at non-essential moments to mark the calendar for when then was made, the vacuous oblivion assigned to those most difficult and world-changing events in modern geopolitical history basically set the tone for the entire production:

'...we know the Russians will watch this show, so we don't want them to get too worried that we might actually help Ukraine win this war instead of just fighting it for another two or three years, so we're gonna make up a story about how Russia may or may not be the villain in an unrelated matter, have exactly one Russian character appear to show that we still buy into the mystique of the Kremlin being some impossibly clever lockstep army of absolute masters in the arts of duplicity who are of course unflinchingly loyal to their Tsar and might launch nukes at us at any moment if they get their feathers a tad ruffled, so don't worry comrades, this little drama has actually nothing to do with this marathon orgy of war crimes you are currently undertaking, and we only bring it up now and then to show how up-to-date the script is, while we set the story in a world which does not and never has existed, the one where the Russians actually are to be feared every time they promise to retaliate over something...'

...even though, it ought to go without saying for anyone familiar with the REAL world, the best they've done lately every time they have one of their weekly shocked outbursts at how angry they are, is to send another missile into another Khrushchova in Dnipro or Kharkiv full of sleeping women and children.

Good reason not to help Ukraine actually win: so that innocent civilians can pay the costs of more of the same western hand-wringing and equivocating and spin-doctoring and optics control, which the Kremlin has been able to count on out of its most reliable enemies for generations already.

In the name of all that is holy, I am SO sick of all this Cuban-Missile-Crisis mythology about how dangerous and unstable the Russians are, and how very dangerous it might be to, one fine day, you know, actually just stand up to them and tell them to cut the crap or face the consequences.

Nobody's EVER gonna write that show. Nobody would watch it. These intricate spy-dramas amounting to eight-episode duck-and-cover drills to keep the 'we will bury you' mystique alive, which has been SO lucrative for the west's entertainment industry, are just so much more, you know, entertaining.

Untold Arctic Wars (2022– )

Excessive production gimmicks all but ruin a story worth telling

[5/10 · 17 April 2023]

Partway into the fifth episode of the English-language version, I find once again that all the annoying gimmicks in the production style make this almost unendurable. The content itself is deeply fascinating, a rarely-examined facet of the second world war which definitely does merit much more scrutiny by those interested in history.

But not like this.

Good grief, this looks as though National Geographic (which has long tended toward the self-important anyway, in its presentations) must have had it in mind to see how many annoying and needless distractions it could inject, into telling a story which would have been far better told by allowing the facts to tell it for themselves, rather than insulting the audience's intelligence with all these silly AV tricks.

I don't know if I can even list them all but I'll try:

An entirely unnecessary and melodramatic score, preceded by an excruciating theme song which is embarrassingly out of place with the contents; the constant presentations of archival photos with bad colorization, silly 3D tricks and a continual zoom which all make them less than useless in augmenting the narration and only mocks their authenticity; presenting the guest commentators with lame half-framed closeups and cued, stilted facial expressions, making them all look like reality-TV characters instead of knowledgeable academicians...

But probably the worst bit of very poor composition is the continual return to little packs of Scandinavian treasure-hunters from the present day, with scenes like where they find a bit of cloth in the tundra and sit around congratulating themselves on how this 'proves' a thousand troops were camped nearby, etc, etc. (What this could possibly be meant to add, to the story of a war fought eight decades ago, utterly escapes me...)

If the producers of this catastrophically flawed bit of pretentious show-offery had instead just stuck to the story and told it, rather than making the entire production about all their clever and silly production tricks, this could have been a masterpiece.

Indeed, with anything like genuine regard shown for the lives lost and the sufferings endured, nothing less than a masterpiece was what this story deserved, making this near-cartoon we're presented with instead something careening much closer to ignorant flippancy, a disrespectfully trivializing obscenity.

They managed to make such a mess of it, that it's almost too ridiculous to watch at all.

The actual historic contents are all that saves it, and these take a lot of effort and patience by the viewer to even find, hiding behind all the technical stunts, grave-robbing adventurism, and generally melodramatic oversell.

Where Is Private Dulaney? (2022)

This might have been me

[8/10 · 8 April 2023]

All my life I have been utterly mystified that anyone can be naive enough to actually believe that signing up for the USA's armed services has even the remotest connection to 'serving your country.'

As if the way veterans are discarded and abused as a policy isn't enough to convince anyone that these people are not on the same side of anything as the American people are, this story just drives a few more nails into the coffin where my former juvenile faith in this country's government and institutions have been long buried.

These young men were of the exact same age group as I am.

It still sticks in my craw to this day that early in 1978, a few weeks after I had declined to return to my senior year in 'high school', but was still months away from turning eighteen, the school had contacted the US Marine recruiter in the area with the information that I had resigned from their predatory gay-mafia-run counterfeit of an education, and resolved to get on with my life.

A Marine sergeant called me on my parents' home phone, a number he had no business even knowing, and tried to lure me into their death cult. I reminded him that I was nowhere near eighteen years of age yet and even if I was, the last thing I would throw my life away on was letting the likes of him teach me how to go kill innocent people for no good reason.

He just laughed at me on the phone, and tried to convince me that since Vietnam the Marines hadn't been actually killing a lot of people any more, and so I had nothing to worry about, yada-yada.

It was haunting to watch the story of these 'few good men' whom the USMC were ready to write off as deserters just one year later, just because their little gun-club was so chaotic and corrupt that they couldn't keep order and discipline and the rule of law intact on their own training base.

If I had fallen for that recruiter's line of crap, Camp Lejeune may well have been where my life would have come to an end too, not that the Marines could care less then, or do any more about their own people now.

These people are not on your side, Americans. Nothing to do with the federal establishment can be trusted to behave toward any of us in any other manner that that they regard us all as their enemies.

God help us all, if Americans don't, at long last, start to get the obvious fact through their thick skulls that this country is not governed at all by these lying bandits, but rather occupied.

And I thank God to this day that even at seventeen (in 1978), I had the good self-preserving self-respect and common sense to tell that jarhead exactly where he could stuff his illegal job offer to a minor.

Shadowland (2022)

Staged & scripted propaganda

[2/10 · 21 February 2023]

Yet another brazenly fake 'documentary' using actors and staged events (how do you get three different camera angles during the same phone call, by a lady in a pizza kitchen smaller than an RV?), to promote whatever is the latest trending pop-culture version of what everyone is supposed to think.

Advertisers and entertainers have been using audience data since long before the time of 'social media' to craft narratives, based in part on what audiences will respond to, and in part on what ideas might best manipulate their interest going forward.

It isn't any conspiracy, it's just a tried-and-true business model: find out what they want, use it against them to make them want other things too, and build in enough ideological cues to have them believe that by taking this maneuvering of their viewpoints at face value, they are somehow ending up on the correct side of things.

This kind of mind-candy isn't even about politics or ideology really, it's just about what entertainment and marketing have always been about: finding one way or another to part fools from their money. If it didn't work so well, nobody would produce this kind of transparent fiction and call it 'information.'

Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (2023)

If reality TV is your thing, keep watching

[2/10 · 11 February 2023]

As with a great many so-called 'documentaries' these days, this silly saga is so totally staged it makes you think they actually overdid it on purpose, to attract the most gullible audience possible. Somehow we're supposed to believe all these recorded phone calls and hidden cameras throughout this ridiculous story were just part of this 'cult's' way of going about its business, or that people years later trying to recover from the damage they've done to themselves and each other are more than happy to have camera crews following them around for the most personal and painful moments of their lives. All those convenient home-movies from years before about awards dinners and glowing tributes to the villain from his past.... give me a break already. Even the spots with individuals sitting in quiet rooms telling their tales have a totally scripted feel to them; not one bit of this is credible or convincing, it actually comes a lot closer to just being grotesque, as reality-TV is meant to be. This is actually so obscene as to have me wondering if the whole thing wasn't set up back on campus at Lawrence in the first place, just to make a very bad movie about it, once they found this cast of laughably stupid people to fall for it and play along. There's something very sick about this whole production, not for the story it tells but for the sense one gets that the production people were in on it all along..

Inventing Anna (2022)

This is new: I'm usually the one who pans the big hits

[8/10 · 10 October 2022]

Seriously, almost always when I write a review here it's because I have found some half-baked nonsense, of which there is plenty these days and especially coming from the USA, being nauseatingly over-rated, and I can't resist the urge to set some folks straight on what bad taste they have, or something...

But this time I looked over the reviews here and was actually astonished at what a bad rep this series has been given, when for once I was pretty much categorically impressed on several levels with this unique and highly watchable series.

It seems the mud being slung here is mostly about viewers' taking sides on the many questions of right and wrong being explored, more than their taking the production itself at face value and evaluating it on whether or not it is good television.

But I was totally captivated. What doesn't this series have? It somehow manages to be a first-rate newsroom drama, a glitterati hate-fest, a treatise on 'work-life balance' and the costs of success ambitious women must pay and still be spouses and parents, an exploration of post-Soviet fallout on the generation born into one world and made to adapt to an entirely different one during childhood, and ultimately a courtroom drama not quite like any other I have ever seen, not to mention just another great entry in the endless parade of I (Heart) New York stress-operas for the age of personal brand, and almost entirely shown through the eyes of a long list of driven and fascinating women from a whole range of backgrounds.

The series is intensely female, which I love, and we see each woman in the story at her fiercest best and her most vulnerable worst, and in a refreshingly human light that reminds us that every woman is both and this really is okay.

And for all that, I am male, can hardly stand actual New Yorkers in person and hope never to have to endure that miserable and vicious city ever again, have pretty much devoted the entirety of my adult life to never coming even close to the kinds of merciless competitiveness and love of excess that constitutes everyday life for this sort of people, and as a lifelong Flyoverian living most of sixty-one years west of the Mississippi and regarding all things to the eastward as uninhabitable, I practically have panic attacks being in any metropolis of more than five thousand souls.

But I love a good story. And I especially love a good, well-written, multi-layered, morally ambiguous, unexpected story that doesn't presume to pronounce value judgments on itself but instead shows the characters as being just as complicated and contradictory as real people are, and makes us variously laugh with them, cheer for them, want to slap them, and get all teary-eyed for them over just how irritatingly vexing it is to be a human being in the modern world and still hang onto one's soul.

And Inventing Anna gives me all of that.

Of course I found Anna grating and unendurable, because that was the actress's job. Probably the central mystery coming out of the original article that inspired this is when the writer points out that Anna isn't even a very nice person, but still she had whatever hold she had over people around her. After Ruth Langmore leaving me a whole lot more irritated in Ozark by just as expert a performance, I was able to enjoy the young lady who played both these seriously flawed but strangely magnetic women, delivering another powerful performance in a challenging role where the whole point is to dare us to hate them, but find we can't quite get there because, bless their feminine hearts, girls will be girls, and girls are not easy to live with all the time. But we love them anyway, and this conflict element alone for the male characters here gives a whole different set of performances to enjoy.

Nor did I find the script or the characterizations to be, as one reviewer puts it, elevating sociopaths or whatever. Was Anna really a sociopath? Or a victim? Or some bizarre selfie-snapping female re-invention of Robin Hood? Or a scared little girl dealt a bad hand she played the best she could? I was no more sold on any of these easy dismissals by the end than I was from the beginning, nor did I feel I needed to be. What I saw was all these things, and still was impressed by how little we'd really seen of her truest self, because that was what the whole thing was about.

I just enjoy a good story, and a well-presented one. And this series more than satisfies on those counts. I had not found any American series produced recently even worth watching for quite some time, but this one I couldn't leave alone and finished it in two days.

Suspicion (2022)

So, it turns out a PR firm created the Century of Stupid? Wait...

[3/10 · 19 March 2022]

Do yourselves a favor, and this is only for those dedicated few students of the arts of propaganda, and cut to the final episode to find out which PC cause-du-jour this farce was meant as an infomercial for.

Not that this convoluted and irritating attempt at a story ever actually touches on this cause, that would be too obvious. No, the rest of the time we are treated to some half-hearted attempt at a not very plausible Scooby Doo adventure, where the kids are left to solve the mystery for themselves. Only, this time they are being (sorta-not-really) chased by a G-Man and a British agent, who don't like each other and argue a lot, mostly just magnifying the utter dearth of chemistry from two actors who seem bored but resigned to getting through a paying job delivering comic-book cliches. There will be other jobs, they hope.

Uma Thurman, reliably, gives us yet another bland opus as Uma Thur-meh, so don't expect much there, but thankfully she is little more than a cameo through most of it until she gets her cue to make her big save-the-world speech, which kinda comes off like the very after-the-fact damage control her character has, we're told, made a fortune doing but is somehow responsible for how bad things are in the world now, or something.

Yikes. I might recommend this to someone I didn't like, as a sort of prank, but come to think of it, there isn't anyone I don't like that much.

Red Election (2021– )

Bad to worse to grotesque

[2/10 · 22 December 2021]

Here's a clue for all you wannabe spy writers: watching innocent people suffer horribly, because somebody on government payroll made yet another stupid mistake at trying to manipulate terrorism in the national interest, is not entertaining. It isn't even interesting, especially when the story is so stupid and the characters so utterly inept and dimensionless. Just the lead lady alone is excruciating both as an actress and a character, a daddy's girl who has been nepotized up the ranks until she gets to give the orders now and then, and just keeps that same idiotic smirking sneer of incongruent non-plused cynicism on her face each time her lame-brained plans lead straight to catastrophe.

This is not about anything other than brainless violence, it has nothing to say of any value, it relies entirely on worn-out cliches and pop-culture bigotries in place of a story, and unless you just enjoy watching bureaucrats who think they are spies screw up everything they lay their hands to episode after grueling episode, don't even bother. Maybe you can spare yourself the severed limbs and gruesome child murders and a whole lot of horrified screaming; I can't even imagine what sort of person would even find this tolerable to watch, even less so the kind of people it must have required to produce this pointless assault on the viewership.

Hollington Drive (2021)

Excruciatingly accurate portrait of suburbia

[6/10 · 30 November 2021]

Naturally, of course, nobody can really afford to live this way, certainly not an inconsequential restaurateur and a primary-school principal, the two sisters in the story, whose menfolk don't look to have any means of earning an income at all. Just add up the costs of the mortgages, the brand-new cars, the high-fashion household goods (that stove in Theresa's kitchen costs at least three grand in USD, more than I make in the best of months...) and of course the latest model of phones for each and every person, and there is no way these people could ever even dream of being financially solvent someday.

And of course, that is the whole point of the nightmarish social-engineering project that is suburbia: keep the artificial 'middle class' so permanently mired in debt that there is no way out but to keep on acting the part and paying the bills. Which of course makes for an appallingly fallacious character type which by and large is the 'middle class' itself is and always has consisted of. The demand for everything to appear perfect at all times is so overwhelmingly consuming of everyone's energies that they become just like these people: passive-aggressive, duplicitous, adulterous and thoroughly dishonest. These are the kind of people for whom normal life is to uphold their polyester delusions by lying continually to themselves, each other, the children and the authorities in pretty much every situation.

And of course this nightmarish and thoroughly fantasist way of life produces on a steady basis the kind of cynical cruelty we see in the two children who are at the heart of the story. Never does it even occur to either of them that they are first cousins who will be in each other's lives for decades to come; at the first sign of trouble each one turns against the other and tries to shift all the consequences onto their own kinfolk just to stay out of trouble or have to admit to any wrongdoing of their own. And the 'adults' are even worse.

I manage to enjoy this kind of drama because it so vividly portrays the reasons I knew I had to escape suburbia forever and repudiate for a lifetime the addictions to debt, duplicity and the spendy whims of fashion such a life breeds. I bought my house and paid it off for less than what it takes one household here to have a change of clothing for one week. Every time I see people wallowing in the inevitable swamp of chaos and lies and bottomless despair such as these people get caught in just by trying to live this way, I think to myself, thank God I got out while I still could.

And this is the life people pay a million dollars of some bank's money for in places like Palo Alto, to live a life of ongoing lies and secrets that one cannot possibly afford or ever hope to have paid off? You can have it, if you're that lacking in self-respect. No, thank you.

Devs (2020)

If Silicon Valley people are like this, it's worse than I thought

[1/10 · 30 April 2020]

My label for this sort of people is 'personality-impaired.' Young people who think what they believe in is this thing called 'science', but whose personal lives are so bland and featureless after endless years of being indoctrinated to believe that anything they think or feel is probably politically incorrect, that they have learned not to risk thinking or feeling anything other than a continual fascination with the potentialities of digital gimmicks. They are drawn like moths to a flame to anyone who exhibits any kind of outward emotion, so long as how those emotions are expressed contains enough hypnotic cues they are trained to respond to. Enter Forest, overweight aging bug-eyed lunatic with grief issues.

Forrest, an obvious chronic sufferer of trauma-induced psychosis, cannot get past the grief and guilt over the loss of his wife and daughter. So he erects a two-hundred-foot statue of the little girl, and builds a creepy high-tech sorta-secret lab to try and bring her back to life. The glassy-eyed young tech nerds he hires are smart, very smart, but seem not to notice that this whole company basically exists to realize one grieving man's morbid fantasy at any cost, so they dutifully sit staring at screens all day doing whatever it is tech nerds do, and dream of the day they might get invited to join the outfit's high-end 'devs' division.

One does get the nod to come on board at 'devs', then something goes terribly wrong. Then for seven more episodes, we get to watch all the other tech nerds in this one passive-aggressive cult guru's little circle sit around talking about the meaning of life and the nature of reality, and stuff like that. Now and then, two or three minutes per episode is invested in suggesting that there is a story line to all this, something vaguely reminiscent of a murder mystery the authorities have been warned off of, then we go back to groups of aspiring young personality-impaired tech yuppies discussing the nature of the universe and stuff like that.

Eventually, rather than solve the murder mystery or even make any progress on it, the all-but-nonexistent story devolves into even more circuitous discussions on the meaning of life, which one very young personality-impaired person of indecipherable gender decides can be discovered by taking a swan dive off of a dam, because the lady standing next to him/her/them says she already knows he/she/they will, but depending on which universe the dive takes place in, etc, etc.

Seriously. This thing really is that lame. But one thing, though, there is a Russian intelligence angle, for like three minutes, then it gets abandoned to make more time for discussions about the meaning of life, serenaded by overblown music.

The only really stimulating thing about it all is to ponder whether these really are the sort of people who make up the tech sector, and if they really are this vulnerable to being manipulated by psychotic pseudo-visionaries with ex-CIA heads of security doing their frequent homicidal dirty work for them. Might go a long way toward explaining what actually happened to Sheryl Sandberg's husband, anyway, and how it was so easy to sell SilCon on the ridiculous cover story that he 'fell off a treadmill.'

Rubicon (2010)

Way too full of itself to deliver so little

[4/10 · 28 April 2020]

Looking through the reviews here, I see a whole lot of high numbers and gushing praise, but having just finished the sole season of this overdone pageant of cliches I really don't get all the acclaim.

First off, this would have been fabulous as a feature film, but gets bogged down with too little momentum and hardly any story line at all for the first ten episodes. I kept thinking each time the opening credits rolled, maybe this time we will finally start to see what this is about. No such luck until nearly the end, and by then so many tells had been carelessly slipped through the script that the final three episodes really came off as predictable, anticlimactic and even a little silly.

Secondly, this is by no means the first time a film or series has been top-heavy with high-powered cast and dazzling production values but still failed to disguise how boring and underwhelming the whole production really is. JB Dale was certainly compelling even though his character was never really given any dimension to make Will Travers, Analyst much more than kind of tedious to endure; Jessica Collins as the hopelessly out-of-the-loop 'assistant' who kept barging in on classified meetings offering coffee and whatnot but never seemed to know what her job really was, much less did we ever see her actually doing one; and while I have always been a fan of Arliss Howard, this portrayal of a smirky, murky, passive-aggressive, tokenly gay spymaster was an implausible strain to endure at best, and through no lack of skill on his part trying to pull it off; Miranda Richardson is gorgeous, poignant and sadly endearing from the very first scene and throughout, but after a while one sees that this is pure artistry on her part as an actress because her character hardly has any dialogue and hardly adds anything to, you guessed it, a story that isn't one most of the way through.....

Third, there are a plethora of loose ends, undeveloped plot tangents, unresolved relationships and needless sideshows. Sadly, most of these are hung like so much dead weight around the character of Maggie, who even though valiantly and even passionately played by Jessica Collins, ends up being such a distraction (why is this nice pretty lady even in this thing, and as what? Alienated nervous single mommy, pretty face at the office, spy for the boss, erstwhile love interest that never materializes, yada-yada) while we wait for the story to finally arrive, that I wonder if she didn't get it that her role was mostly being used as a time-consuming but easy-on-the-eye filler to get this thing through thirteen episodes.

And fourth, as I mentioned, all the cinematic artistry in the world cannot hide the fact that we are asked to spend hours and hours taking an expensive high-end big-name production at its word that finally, at long last, the last three or four episodes might actually deliver us a story to follow. When it finally arrives, it kinda doesn't really work all that well, mostly because the most interesting thing from the preceding hours and hours of story-free spy-routine had been all the little tip-offs that made the actual story itself mostly look like a hasty copy-paste of some Tom Clancy wannabe novel, and neither surprising nor climactic in the least.

Fifth, as spy-story scriptwriting goes, this is as lazy and sloppy as it gets. Breakthrough clues saving the day out of thin air, rooms full of PhDs making the most reckless wild guesses on the thinnest of evidence, constant interagency-rivalry jabs at other intel outfits lacking substance or credibility or relevance, a honeytrapping perfect-woman planted neighbor of no significance whatsoever to the non-story who from her first lines is obviously not what she says she is....

I really did enjoy this for what it does have to offer: excellent casting, lush Big Apple cinematography, a sophisticated but not intrusive musical score, great sets, some very likeable and well-played background roles... but if you want a great spy thriller, keep looking. This shows all the signs of maybe, finally deciding to be one, and then never manages to. Not surprising at all that it didn't last past its first year.

Mafiosa (II) (2006–2014)

Train wreck in slo-mo

[4/10 · 22 March 2020]

First off, were all these people writing such glowing reviews of this mess watching some other show by the same name, or what? I have watched a lot of crime drama from all around the world, and this calamity has none of the qualities I have ever found enjoyable or compelling in the genre, none at all.

Usually, the mob-side version of the form shows us a group of people bound by loyalty, occasionally interrupted by violence and urgent necessity as they are driven into them by the harsh realities of an underworld life. I would even venture to say that the main element holding most such drama together is how the theme of interpersonal loyalty under continual challenge is used as a kind of symbol for the larger human experience. But here, the question of loyalties, you may as well know, is answered early on and all through the nine-and-a-quarter episodes I managed to endure, is answered simply: there is none, and none to be expected to emerge. And, as shown here, continual betrayal is frankly kind of boring.

All because of "Sandra", who I have to say is the least-convincing mob boss I have ever seen portrayed, not only as a character but by the ashen-faced drabness of the lady playing her. Sandra has a lethal combination of the worst possible traits for someone in her position: she is naive, weak, irresolute, impulsive, uninformed, a victim of her own chronic wishful thinking and worst of all, arrogant. All she brings to this organization she inherits in the first entry is chaos, betrayal and death. Everything she tries, fails. She falls into every trap set for her, as she is so busy setting them for herself and her loved ones that she usually is the last to hear about the other disasters she is directly responsible for.

I stuck with this even as long as I did, just assuming that this impossibly slow and increasingly convoluted story line just had to be headed for some kind of turnaround, that Sandra would at long last pull her head out and rise to the occasion of a position she had never asked for much less ever been prepared to assume. But when, early in S2, she is made to stand on a table and sing to humiliate her in front of her entire organization, and complies meekly, I began to realize that apparently this is about a loser who knows nothing but how to keep on losing. No, thanks.

The ONLY redeeming quality this has is the Corsican locations. Period. And even that is ruined by a pretentious cinematic style which has the camera shaking around all over the place and keeps reverting to these weird badly-framed closeups where half of someone's face is in one corner of the screen while the remainder of the frame is just blurred and meaningless.

I never was much of a fan of French cinema anyway, and its television crime dramas have been consistently the least watchable owing to their being the most self-important and unconvincing of them all.

I don't know what the Frogs' fascination is with female leads who are comically inept at their jobs while their personal lives are nothing but one long juvenile scandal of poor communication and untrustworthiness, but I find it repulsive, as I did this. Only the Swedish make worse crime dramas with more intolerable female lead characters, but add some snow and this would be every bit that bad.

ZeroZeroZero (2019–2020)

Style over substance, on steroids

[2/10 · 7 March 2020]

Yeah, so for style, we basically have an extended knockoff of the Brad Pitt picture "Babel", which relies on a convention of several seemingly unrelated narratives set in the far-flung reaches of Morocco, Japan, southern California and Mexico. Each segment of each setting is presented as though it were its own story made in the lushly cinematic style of each country. As each story line develops, they serve together to show us how the raw and imperfect humanity of each character has led to a convoluted chain of unintended consequences of a single decision, until a nice American lady with marital issues on a tourist bus in North Africa gets shot.

Thing is, though, even with all its embedded and barely concealed propaganda messaging about guns and border policies being the ultimate evil, "Babel" actually works. For the simple reason that the characters are shown as human beings, with real emotions and the capacity to commit both great wrongs and fine noble acts of magnanimity.

This (aptly-named) triple-zero fiasco, on the other hand, simply uses a similar device, with settings in Italy, Mexico, New Orleans and on the high seas, to fling us about from one cynical orgy of senseless violence fueled by merciless ambition to another. Nobody seems to have any real motive for anything, other than perhaps various forms of duplicity and betrayal for their own sake.

And as for substance, which Babel has in abundance, this ritualized soap opera of continuous vendetta has only some cocaine buried in the bottom of some cans of Mexican peppers, apparently substance enough to get all these personality-impaired narcissists to (for instance) feed one's grandfather to a notoriously carnivorous sow with a taste for man-flesh, or shoot one's fellow soldier and friend in the face in a crowded discotheque.

Apparently, if one can set aside all the gore and gunsmoke and try to follow what there is of a story (I only managed two episodes of this insulting parody of itself), we are expected to believe that these people must have some kind of reasons to be doing all these horrible things to one another.

Other than, you know, a cocaine deal.

Gabriel Byrne's early speech about loyalty and utility sets a kind of tone, or maybe lays out some ground rules: that people who can be useful to us deserve our "respect" (the most over-used term in all of organized crime), and that those who cannot should probably be snuffed, or something.

Whatever.

I can only endure so much of people with zero humanity, zero conscience, and zero personality (that IS what it means, right?)

Just the daughter-heiress of the New Orleans shipping magnate alone is enough to make a person want to throw something at the TV, with her continually bland though slightly self-righteous smirk, in bizarre contrast to the completely incongruous animation to her voice, as we realize early on that here is nothing but a spoiled rich girl with no backbone and some lazy Gordon-Gecko-ish cliches about running an empire. An illustrative sample of her magnificent mind and her breakthrough ideas comes when she tells her brother, an overgrown adolescent who goes around in his twenties on a child's bicycle when he is not lolllng around the mansion burning one in his bathrobe, that he should take over the family international shipping enterprise because (wait for it) "you know all about boats."

Then we have the Mexican sergeant, whose chief skill set is not as a soldier but as a traitor, cartel mole and ice-veined assassin, mostly conducted while he listens to some crackpot preacher on his ear-buds who never makes the least mention of the Bible.

Or there is the Italian grandson and erstwhile toy merchant, the one who wants to feed Grampa to the pigs, who at least has some interesting issues with women to give him some dimension, or maybe it's just that he doesn't care for smirking bourgeois-feminist heiresses with ridiculous haircuts?

Whatever.

By all indications of the first two installments, this will just get worse and worse, more and more violent, stupid and pointless, as all the while the story takes us nowhere at all other than on a boring journey with some Mexican yeyo headed for Italy.

Zero. Zero. Zero. At least the title was decent enough to warn us: there really is zero here worth enduring.

The Expanse (2015–2022)

One bad apple

[4/10 · 7 February 2020]

Not since "Winds of War" and Ali McGraw's excruciating mockery of the entire actors' craft have I seen such an egregious example of how one extremely unskilled player can basically ruin a whole show which otherwise is pretty well done. That UN lady, whatever her name is and I couldn't care less, is one of the worst actors I have ever seen. Adding insult to injury is how her character as well is yet another of those female leads we see all too many of lately, where it looks like somebody decided that promoting the idea of women being annoying, crass and disruptive as their primary means of substantiating their positions on a full-time basis is some kind of promotable theme all by itself.

I mean seriously, what were these people thinking? Other than that one suppurating pustule of a placeholder performance, this otherwise could have been some of the best sci-fi television ever made. It really has a lot going for it: great characters (but one, yeesh), awesome sets and special effects, lots of shipboard drama and inter-crew byplay, enough romance to add that element of humanity but not so much as to be distracting, compelling story lines and subplots, not to mention one of the more plausible visions of humanity in space in some near future that I have ever seen.

But after a few episodes I found myself just bracing for the next appearance of that one needless and needlessly grating character, and even more so the unendurably irritating sub-mediocrity of the person delivering it. I managed to get through three seasons, wishing all the while she would be one of those characters to meet with some untimely demise in a spaceship crash or whatever, but apparently whoever she has influence on that got her this job on zero qualifications is determined to keep her around. But I find season 4 is not even worth the attempt as a viewer. Enough is enough.

Goliath (2016–2021)

It's all about the women

[8/10 · 5 February 2020]

What an ingenious device, here in the age of fourth-wave feminism, when pretty much everything about maleness is accepted in entertainment as a soft target for continual ridicule and denunciation: pretend that an absolutely gonzo series which exhibits a grim determination to make hardly any sense, is supposed to be about a dysfunctional middle-aged male alcoholic of a lawyer, but hiding right there in plain sight all through it is the most hilarious and hard-hitting study of the many and various forms of continual female neuroses I have ever seen.

Yeah, ol' Billy McB is a train wreck, but if you're paying any attention at all to how these ridiculous only-in-LA comic-opera stories hold together, you'll notice that every single plot, subplot and digression is about a shifting pack of absolutely bonkers women, and how most of them are content to allow an old drunk who lives in a sleazy motel to be the stabilizing and loving masculine center of their barely-functioning post-feminist universes.

And it all works, for Billy's women, because in his boozy and erratic way he loves every one of them the way only a decent man can love any woman, and they each need that from him like they need the air they breathe. Luckily for them, he doesn't require that any of them show him the least respect or regard as the man who holds their shaky and vulnerable lives together, because I'm here to tell you, mostly not a one of them ever bothers to.

This is probably the best testimony, hidden masterfully behind a veneer of surrealistic satire on the timeless LA-noir crime-drama genre, in just how crucial manhood continues to be to the otherwise mostly disastrous social upheaval that has been a half-century of mentally unstable feminism.

And I must add that what really holds it all together as a slapstick roast of the crazy women we menfolk cannot help ourselves but adore, is the unlikely and aggressively unlikeable character of Patty, played by the incomparable Nina Arianda. She is such a total wreck, and works so very hard at being impossibly mean, that a guy can't help but fall in love with her, just out of spite if nothing else. I can't remember a more fascinating female character in any genre, nor a more compelling portrayal of her by any actress, or at least not since I Love Lucy anyway. This whole series, this preposterous continual saga of protracted female psychodrama, is worth watching just to see what Patty's latest hyperbolic meltdown will be about, especially since she also has this way of being the smartest person in the room and usually the only one who really knows what is going on.

Succession (2018–2023)

Not at all what I expected

[8/10 · 9 June 2019]

Usually I wait until I finish a title before writing a review, and writing reviews is indeed one of my innocent vices about the internet era I enjoy the most, maybe as much as ordering tools from Home Depot and having them brought to my door by Jay the UPS Man?

Yes, these people are contemptible. The beauty of it is, they know it. Unlike the excruciating "Billions" which was completely undone by the lofty self-righteousness of some of the most horrible people ever portrayed in television fiction, this family and their surrounding entourage of thoroughly despicable misanthropes cannot help but allow their dysfunctional affections for one another to govern how they go about expressing their petty jealousies and rivalries. A scene early on between the younger brother Roman and his sister Siobhan (or "Shiv", aptly enough) where first they find a private spot to confer then resort to juvenile insults and end up rolling around wrestling like a couple of eight-year-olds, seems to set the tone and the message I think I am seeing here: that love, in and of itself among one's most loved ones, is a hateful, bittersweet process which only manages to bring out people's best as a feeble attempt to counterbalance the very worst they have within themselves and show each other continually.

The setup here is as if the only way these people know to express love is through hateful behavior, and they seem never to wound each other nearly as much as each one ends up knowing they have mostly just embarrassed themselves. Another reviewer pointed out that this is not really a big-business drama nearly as much as it is a portrait of a deeply troubled but deeply devoted family. And so far among them all, Shiv is my undisputed favorite. True to the redhead heritage that seems a global constant, she manages to be the most childish of them all while at the same time being the only real adult in the room, and seems also to be the one least at war with herself over simply being what she is. Her adolescent physicality such as plopping into a chair over its back or sitting on the floor while everyone else takes chairs in the hospital corridors trying to act like proper adults suggests an actress who completely comprehends her character, a young woman at the height of her powers but somehow more restrained and introspective than one suspects at first glance. I get the feeling she will continue in her semi-mad way to be the anchorage of a kind of sanity as all around her everyone else is continually coming unglued.

This is one of those items I saved to a list then put off actually beginning to watch it, thinking basically that enough is enough when it comes to greedy self-obsessed business titans agonizing over their bloated self-serving lives. Something in the tone of the previews got me to give it a chance, of all things just after sitting through the superb but heartbreaking "Chernobyl". Which I suppose is the perfect kind of act to follow, to make a story of passive-aggressive Gen-Y trust-fund babies somehow as lighthearted and madcap as say, The Addams Family?

Show Me a Hero (2015)

Extremely well-done propaganda

[6/10 · 4 June 2019]

There are two basic problems with extremely well-done propaganda. One, is that it is extremely well-done. The other, is that it is propaganda. Owing to the former, it is all too easy to overlook the latter, in other words.

Here we have a thoughtful, compelling, well-acted human drama about some really nice people, and the whole thing could easily be taken just as entertainment rather than as the carefully crafted infomercial for paternalistic social engineering by an all-knowing federal regime that it is.

Public housing really is the human calamity its opponents in the story here said it was going to be. Making it more pretty on the outside or mixing it in among "nice" neighborhoods does nothing to mitigate the corruption, vice, crime and especially untenable family life that it breeds.

Only near the end of these six episodes does the script actually touch briefly on a valid point about the real effects of these socialist warehousing projects, when it is pointed out in passing that most of the residents of these comfortable prisons are single women with children, who would lose their eligibility for the programs if the authorities ever found out there was a man in their house. This alone is probably the single most catastrophic consequence of the laws and regulations and agencies which oversee this massive undertaking to keep the slaves on the plantation: that men, as husbands, fathers of children and legitimate heads of households, are basically just in the way. The conditions for securing and then keeping these units work the same way as any other welfare program, which is that one is essentially punished for one's life situation becoming better, and so anyone who has such a home at public expense has every incentive to sustain the illusion of their "underprivileged" status or else be kicked out.

I worked for a public housing agency myself for a short time, and the phenomenon of the Invisible Man in these households was one of the constants. Not only do all the benefits of such programs go primarily to women, so does the status as a real parent and adult and citizen, since the man of the house's very existence is at best an open secret and at worst an act of fraud that has the whole family thrown out in the street.

Whatever other illusory and entirely cosmetic benefit to society these rowhouses may have brought, their primary effect has been to erase the relevance of manhood and fatherhood as an unnecessary and even criminal nuisance. As is made clear from the interviews and comments in the episode reviews after each segment from the production people, this show was done within a certain ideological and sociopolitical framework by true believers in these "theories" about how best to box up poor people to keep them out of the way, and they present the idea of a federal judge threatening to jail city council members for not voting the way they are ordered to as right and good and moral.

Naturally none of the production people would want to raise their own families in such a setting, but as always, the supercilious moralism of middle-class armchair socialists such as the movie industry is made up of assumes that what they think is best for their inferiors really is best for them whether it is or not. But gosh, it sure is a well-made TV show. If I didn't know better I would not have even noticed what a piece of liberal-progressive standard-issue agitprop it is.

Crypto (I) (2019)

Auto-generated screenplays must be a thing now

[2/10 · 8 May 2019]

Seriously: I think there must be some software now being used by whoever it is that mass-produces this stuff, where they punch in a series of keywords (separated by commas), and whatever the combination, the machine whirs and clicks and lights flash and in a few minutes spits out a movie script. This is one looks like: Evil Banks, Cryptocurrency, Gay Black Business Owner, Small Town Burnout, Weirdo Gallery Owner, Family Farm, Traumatized Veteran, Russian Mafia.

Yeah. Seriously. Try and imagine how to staple all those together into a plausible story with believable characters, and it turns out it can't be done. Which is, of course, why they came up with this Magic Movie Script software, which can be used to write the thing anyway. This really is that incoherent and disjointed, but of course having the (mythical version of the) FBI on standby to portray The Cavalry is always one way to try and save a really stupid motion picture.

Usually, as a longtime student of propaganda, I watch films with a view to spotting the subtexts and premises in them which betray their ideological intent, which usually isn't that hard to do. This one, though, never even gets that far. It is so lame, and so further weakened throughout with that Canadian-miniseries-styled excess of earnestness in the acting styles, that if this had been somebody's idea of fulfilling a mission to produce propaganda, their handlers would probably send them to the gulag for failing at it so badly.

Basically just a really, really dumb movie.

Goodland (2017)

Weak, predictable social-realist propaganda

[3/10 · 5 May 2019]

Whatever. Hardly ever does the motion picture industry portray having any clue about rural and small-town America, and this was by no means any exception. Within the first few seconds the intent was already clear: rusty, squeaky oil rigs and grey old abandoned buildings accompanied by sinister music, and I'm already braced for what was sure to come and did. Small farm towns, according to movie people, are full of angry disaffected losers, drunken violent young white males and crumbling businesses and institutions, and not much else. The reference to the new motel "out by the interstate" pops up over and over as a sort of otherwise needless symbol of progress and the resistance to it. I guess it never occurred to the writers that such a place would be staffed with locals and that the interstate highway isn't some foreign country or alien invasion in their world.

Nor are farmers stupid, nor are custom harvesters some anonymous gang of dangerous drifters, nor does anybody ever cut corn in a 160-acre center-pivot field by themselves. That combine doesn't hold the grain any longer than it takes to chute it into the grain cart running alongside, driven by a second inevitable witness to the dead body but absent from this story, nor does the grain cart hold more than about a quarter of what it takes to load the semi-trailer parked at the end of the row, driven by a third witness who also never appears in the story nor do either of the two essential pieces of machinery. Center-pivot farming is a high-dollar operation backed by hefty finances and performed by intelligent, worldwise men and women who typically have been around this big old world outside their home towns more than you can possibly imagine, and who have spent lifetimes learning everything from crop expertise to heavy equipment mechanical skills, and how to hire reliable contract harvest people that for the most part they have worked with for many years and know very well.

Plus, the Angry White Male narrative is alive and well here: for good guys/gals we have a female sheriff with violent ex-husband issues, a sixteen-year-old pretty motel clerk with daddy-abandonment issues and a neanderthal boyfriend, and near the end a grim-faced female federal officer with a black male boss, etc, etc. Of course all the bad guys are white males, except for the other ones who are inept cops and fat business owners stuck in 1955 by the look of them. The waitress jokes about everything being as obsolete as the old film camera in the story, the sheriff drives a truck of a vintage I haven't seen in years as if nothing else is available, the boyfriend totes an old break-action goose gun no modern country boy would be seen outdoors with, and on and on and on.

If you're an urbanite looking to have your biases about where your food comes from confirmed, you're sure to be vindicated here. If on the other hand you have ever actually spent more than an hour beyond The Last Exit in your lifetime, this is so uninformed and unrealistic it should have been billed as comedy.