ReportWire

Tag: tv-review

  • All Her Fault Is a Misandrist Masterpiece

    The rich white mommy drama sets its sights on the patriarchy in Sarah Snook’s first live-action TV series since Succession.
    Photo: PEACOCK

    The men in All Her Fault never utter the titular three words. But you know they’re thinking them when a young boy goes missing from a playdate his mother set up (all her fault), when a husband has to rearrange his work schedule because his wife has a meeting (all her fault), and when a teen’s overspending sends her boyfriend into a life of crime (all her fault). These women exist to their partners primarily as an inconvenience, and the Peacock adaptation of Andrea Mara’s novel of the same name hammers home the inequity in their relationships, family dynamics, and workplace over and over again. And yet it doesn’t get monotonous. Rather, All Her Fault gathers fury as it goes, particularly for anyone who would dare dismiss women as the fairer sex. And that “anyone” — well, it’s mostly the guys, because beneath the motherthriller shenanigans, All Her Fault reveals itself to be a misandrist masterpiece.

    Created by Megan Gallagher and starring and executive-produced by Sarah Snook in her first live-action TV role since Succession, All Her Fault is compulsively watchable, worthy of the type of binge that carves a dent into your couch cushions. With sprinting momentum, it introduces and amplifies an overlapping series of mysteries that begins with the disappearance of the young son of a very wealthy couple, Marissa (Snook) and Peter Irvine (Jake Lacy). The inciting action is a bit convoluted: Marissa goes to pick up Milo (Duke McCloud) from a playdate, but the woman who answers the door has no idea who Milo is. She is not Jenny, mom of Jacob, who texted Marissa to set up the playdate, nor is she Jenny’s nanny. The phone number that texted Marissa claiming to be Jenny is now out of service, and the real Jenny (Dakota Fanning) says she never sent the text. She’s only hung out with Marissa once. Why would someone use her name to kidnap Milo?

    All Her Fault lays out this information at a rapid clip in the premiere, using detectives Alcaras (Michael Peña) and Greco (Johnny Carr) to sort through the details and bring other characters into the mix: Peter’s younger sister, Lia (Abby Elliott), a recovering drug addict with a persecution complex; Peter’s younger brother, Brian (Daniel Monks), who uses a cane and lives in Peter and Marissa’s guest house; and Marissa’s business partner, Colin (Jay Ellis), who steps up to run their wealth-management firm after Marissa’s family life explodes. Each has their own secrets, of course. But All Her Fault’s visceral entertainment value is driven less by the reveals of these characters’ hidden motivations than the unexpected friendship that grows between Marissa and Jenny, who are discouraged by their husbands from communicating after Milo disappears but find in each other not just confidantes but allies.

    Marissa and Jenny are very different women with very similar problems. Fanning is in the clipped-and-icy mode she recently perfected in Ripley and The Perfect Couple, all placid smiles and unbroken eye contact, while Snook keeps inventing new ways to manipulate her face into expressions of adrift, devastated distress. (Snook’s eyebrows are so raised at each new revelation they sometimes seem as if they’ll levitate off her face.) The two actresses’ contrasting energies gel when they find common ground in the increasingly curtailed nature of their lives. Even as they meet their professional goals and find joy in raising children, something’s missing. A husband who acts like an adult, perhaps? A scene in which Marissa and Jenny drink wine while hiding in the bathroom during a school fundraiser has that chummy feminine quality that makes their friendship so familiar and this genre such a comfort, even as its ultrarich, ultrawhite characters navigate unrelatable scenarios, like tending to an Olympic-size pool or realizing the nanny’s been lying to you for months. Although Marissa Irvine is a far more conventionally likable character than Succession’s Shiv Roy, it’s fun to see Snook allude to her work as Waystar Royco’s most complicit woman, peppering little “yeah”s and “hey”s at the end of her sentences that transform innocuous lines into conversational challenges. Snook’s talent is playing women who seem like the only thing preventing them from falling apart is their gritted teeth, and Marissa is another well-rounded entry in that canon.

    Zoom out on the past year’s mountain of TV, and All Her Fault is one pebble in a cairn of series positioning their female characters against abusive lovers or uniting them against a common enemy. (Bad Sisters, Sirens, The Better Sister, and The Hunting Wives qualify here.) All Her Fault puts its own twist on that formula by dissecting Marissa and Jenny’s comparably frustrating marriages: how both husbands call their wives “amazing” whenever the women make sacrifices the men would never consider making, or how their domestic labor never ends, despite the means to pay for assistance, thanks to their husbands’ talent for removing themselves from things like dinner planning and schedule coordination. All Her Fault allows the two women to lament this normalized condescension and consider whether they’ve shrunk themselves in order to please their small men, then renders their husbands so selfish and negligent viewers can’t help but root for their riotous downfalls. (Jenny’s husband sabotages her meeting with an important client because he can’t figure out how to put their son to bed. Jail.) Once Marissa and Jenny finally confront them, All Her Fault revels in the husbands’ evisceration and their wives’ lack of guilt. “All her fault,” then, takes on another meaning: Marissa and Jenny’s payback is their responsibility, but the surprise of the series is their complete lack of remorse, how brusquely they wash their hands and move on, eyes open and resolve set.

    Not all the men in All Her Fault are terrible. Peña does well playing against type as Alcaras, who intuits that Marissa and Jenny’s bond is based on more than just the shock of Milo’s disappearance. Of the men who are terrible, Lacy is exceptionally hatable as Peter, a less bro-y spin on his character from The White Lotus. An early scene when Peter asks Marissa why she didn’t double-check any of the details of Milo’s playdate, and Alcaras turns the question around on Peter as Milo’s other parent, has a delicious let-them-fight charge. But really, the men in All Her Fault are ancillary, little more than obstructions yelling for attention, figures whose fall from grace delivers operatic melodrama before the show settles into a story about the dignity women can find through determining their own identities as individuals, rather than through the magnanimous terms like team or partners used in modern marriage. All Her Fault’s short-term gratification is in those big tell-off scenes, the moments Marissa and Jenny get to rip apart men who refuse to take any ownership over their actions. Its larger contribution to this specific subgenre, though, is the way it elevates and celebrates women who choose to reject the expectations of house-baby-mommy heternormative society. Who could blame them?


    See All



    Roxana Hadadi

    Source link

  • I Love LA Is Young, Dumb, and Full of Fun

    I Love LA doesn’t do a particularly good job announcing itself with its pilot, so to give you a better sense, I’ll spoil a joke. (If you’d prefer not to know this spoiler, feel free to skip to the next paragraph, but I assure you: This is not the show’s best or most interesting punch line.) In the second episode, Rachel Sennott’s Maia and Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah meet with the latter’s rival from New York, a polished blonde influencer who claims Tallulah stole her Balenciaga bag. The visit is meant to mend fences; naturally, it devolves into a cocaine-fueled nightmare caught on video. The footage leaks online, and Maia’s gentle teacher boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson), learns his coke-snorting face has become a meme, “Coke Larry,” while chaperoning the school carnival. (“Because I’m doing coke and they say I look like my name would be Larry,” he tells Maia desperately.) As his dowdy principal approaches, Dylan braces for the inevitable: getting fired, fighting with his girlfriend — the classic spiral. “Are you Coke Larry?” the principal asks and Dylan sheepishly confirms. “I’ve got a … golf trip next weekend?” his boss stammers. “A couple of high-school buddies of mine. I don’t want to let them down …” The beat stretches, the principal is eventually pulled away (“Great job on those snickerdoodles!”), and Dylan realizes he has to procure coke for his boss. That shouldn’t be a problem, though; Maia’s buddy will hook him up. The show moves on, as if to say, This is L.A. after all.

    The heart of a series like I Love LA lies in its ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments. When you’re starting your career, you have not yet learned how to be properly cynical (another excellent half-hour debut from this year, FX’s Adults, vibrates at the same frequency), and Maia and Tallulah’s relationship gives the show a buoyant us-against-the-world energy, a sense of shared delusion and drive that powers both its comedy and its ache. This type of striving 20-something comedy draws the unavoidable comparisons — Insecure for the influencer age, Girls for zillennials, Broad City out west — but I Love LA ultimately adds up to far more than the sum of its lineage.

    As Maia, Sennott plays into and against the flopping-sexpot persona she honed in filmwork like Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and Bodies Bodies Bodies. Maia’s eager and ambitious in the way you have to be to break through in Los Angeles, and her boss at the creative agency Alyssa 180 doesn’t quite take her seriously. (The titular Alyssa is played by a scene-stealing Leighton Meester, on quite the run right after setting the house on fire in Nobody Wants This.) Maia is supported by an inner circle including stylist Charlie (Jordan Firstman), kind but clueless nepo baby Alani (True Whitaker), and Dylan, whose interests skew more toward board games and World War II than TikTok and brand deals. Their status quo shatters when Maia’s former bestie, buzzy “It” girl Tallulah, blows into town, and by the end of the pilot, an estrangement born of distance and perceived success gives way to a renewed connection: Maia sees an opportunity to work with Tallulah, reigniting both her career and their friendship. That first episode suffers from the need to do so much heavy lifting and feels both overstuffed and overly conventional, but once all the pieces are in place, the show relaxes into itself and its actual voice emerges.

    I Love LA is a showcase for Sennott, who also created and writes on it, and Maia’s funniest moments spring from cringe humor, including a standout jealous outburst taken to sublime extremes. What makes Maia so compelling is how the character seems to be a mystery to herself. She hustles without knowing why or what it’ll cost her, and that ambition leads to clashes with Alyssa. Whenever their conflict comes to a head, Sennott’s face betrays a fascinating tension: committed yet confused, a deer in the headlights gripping a knife. Her performance syncs with an ensemble teetering at the edge of cartoonishness but never tumbling over, a balance owed to a writing team attuned to the cast’s chemistry and aware of the lines it shouldn’t cross.

    It’s tough to pinpoint a standout in a group of killers this sharp, but Whitaker’s Alani, a kindhearted airhead, consistently delivers some of the show’s best asides and strangest beats. Hutcherson, meanwhile, is a straight-man revelation, his earnest, odd-man-out presence grounding the show’s otherwise manic energy. Jury’s still out on whether I Love LA effectively bottles the sensibility of its generation, but at the very least, its visual palette will stand as a time capsule for this peculiar moment in culture when Los Angeles teems with influencers chasing clout. The gang’s costuming is a running progression of world-building and sight gags: Tallulah’s loud, barely-there outfits mirror the hyperperformative ambition of the influencer world she inhabits, while Charlie’s elaborate, layered wardrobe underscores how each character plugs into a different version of the L.A. professional aspiration.

    These dynamics animate the show’s set pieces: the scramble for brand deals, encounters with the bizarre fauna of L.A. celebrity, flirtations with the next echelon of fame and wealth. The energy of each episode stems from these pursuits, but at its core, I Love LA believes the fantasy that ambition and friendship might be enough to build a life in a city and professional world designed to break you. The series has a deep bench of accomplished EPs, including Lorene Scafaria, Max Silvestri, Emma Barrie, and Aida Rodgers; Barrie and Rodgers are Barry alums, and their influence seeps into the show’s deadpan Hollywood surreality, though I Love LA swaps Barry’s existential darkness for something more sparkly and hopeful. The result is a comedy that’s both precise and unhinged, absurdly funny yet emotionally true — a portrait of youthful ambition and friendship that makes someone slightly older both grateful to not be that young anymore and just a little envious of those who are.


    See All



    Nicholas Quah

    Source link

  • Mr. Scorsese Could Be Twice as Long and It Still Wouldn’t Be Enough

    Rebecca Miller has a clear thesis in Mr. Scorsese: There will never be another Martin Scorsese. Over five episodes of the Apple TV+ docuseries, Miller augments this argument through interviews with Scorsese and people from his life — childhood friends, recurring collaborators like editor Thelma Schoonmaker and actor Robert De Niro, relatives including his three daughters — and select clips from his decades of work. Every time Miller whips out a split screen to trace common themes between Scorsese’s various films and influences (like a comparison between the fights in Raging Bull and the shower-stabbing scene in Psycho), she proves her own deep understanding of Scorsese as an artist. Mr. Scorsese is an eye-opening and deeply moving viewing experience, one that had me crying within the first three minutes of the premiere episode. It is also, at a run time of 287 minutes, not nearly enough. Not! Nearly! Enough!

    Mr. Scorsese is convincing in its suggestion that Scorsese is perhaps the defining American filmmaker of his time, someone whose persistent interest in masculinity and money and the corrupting influence of both on our morality is a mirror held up to our national identity. The docuseries is so successful in hitting these points that I wanted to see more of the connections Miller was making; Scorsese’s career is rich and varied enough that Mr. Scorsese could have been, I don’t know, five more episodes? Ten more episodes? An episode released weekly until the end of time? I am being conservative and reasonable, I think! Here are 12 elements of Mr. Scorsese just begging for more screen time.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese is chronological, so premiere “Stranger in a Strange Land” spends time with the guys he grew up with in the Bowery. Scorsese bickering with Joe Morale and Robert Uricola about how they met is lovely and warm, which counters the discussion about the prevalent violence in their neighborhood. These men provide real color to Scorsese’s biographical details, like how his asthma led his father to take him to movie theaters for the air-conditioning, helping spark the filmmaker’s early love of cinema. Two men are particularly engaging: childhood neighbor Dominick Ferraro, who talks about a fight they were in at the West Side Club, and Uricola’s cousin Sally, who inspired De Niro’s character in Mean Streets. Ferraro’s description of Scorsese’s reaction after the fight is gold (“Scorsese turns around and says, ‘I wish I had a camera.’ I said, ‘This fucking guy wants a camera, I want a gun’”), and Sally deserves a memoir of his own. When Miller asks if he really blew up a mailbox, as depicted in Mean Streets, his casual admission and shrugging, “Let them arrest me now,” is hilarious.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Real ones know that Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, is a major reason why his films look so good and move so well. Mr. Scorsese pieces together how Scorsese and Schoonmaker met, separated for nearly a decade after he was taken off the 1970 documentary Woodstock, then reunited for 1980’s Raging Bull and have stayed together since. Schoonmaker is an unparalleled figure in America’s cinematic history, and while I relished the behind-the-scenes information Miller got about how she cut Raging Bull and popularized the use of jump cuts with 1990’s GoodFellas, it would have been wonderful to see a joint interview with her and Scorsese sharing memories of prior projects.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s career has long been fixated on the different layers of the American myth and why they allure and trap us. Mr. Scorsese tackles this through-line from a couple different directions. First is the story of Louis Frezza, Scorsese’s friend who died at 18 from cancer and was buried in a Queens cemetery, above which loomed a gigantic sign for the Continental Can Company. The omnipresence of capitalism in what should have been a place of faith disgusted Scorsese: “I was thinking, What is life? Screw you. I’m not gonna work for the Continental Can Company. … I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it,” he says now. Criticism of capitalism and imperialism undermining individual dignity drives a ton of his work, from the 1967 anti–Vietnam War short film The Big Shave to his 2002 NYC origin story Gangs of New York, and Scorsese comparing that film’s Natives gang to the Proud Boys is thought provoking as hell. I wish Mr. Scorsese had let him cook a little longer about the political angles to his work.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese doesn’t feel especially compromised by the filmmaker’s involvement, but there are moments throughout the series when it feels like certain things are only being alluded to. Did Scorsese have an affair with Liza Minnelli in 1977’s New York, New York? Did he and Harvey Keitel fall out, and that’s why they didn’t work together for 30 years? What about Steven Prince, the subject of Scorsese’s 1978 documentary American Boy? Prince was an actor who served as Scorsese’s assistant during his cocaine era and partially inspired Eric Stoltz’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Five years ago, he was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile for which Scorsese declined to be interviewed; it would be fascinating to get his perspective on that time in Scorsese’s life. Mr. Scorsese didn’t have to be messy, necessarily, but this man has lived a life. May we please have some gossip?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    This is how you talk about an ex: with warm affection and a sly read.

    She’s right: Sometimes it is just easier to think about lunch! Please, more of Isabella lightly teasing Marty about his tendency to flagellate himself while considering the agony of the human condition.

    It is simply hilarious to watch Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks talk shit about Harvey Weinstein, who produced Gangs of New York and was constantly butting heads with Scorsese. I have many times watched this scene in which Scorsese in an exasperated tone and with pinched fingers complains about how Weinstein wanted to cut the movie’s wardrobe budget because he didn’t understand why so many characters were wearing hats. I would hear a million more of his complaints about Weinstein.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s films have been nominated for more than 100 Oscars, but he only has one personal win for directing 2006’s The Departed. A clip from The Aviator press tour in 2004 shows Scorsese’s gracious answer to an interviewer’s question about whether he wants an Oscar (“Me, personally? The time has gone, I think”), but I refuse to accept that one Oscar is enough for this man. Billie Eilish is 23 years old, and she has two! I don’t care that the categories are different; it’s the principle of the thing. Rebecca Miller, please call every person you know in the Oscars’ Directors Branch and grill them on why Scorsese has been so overlooked. I will happily wait for that companion docuseries in which every one of Scorsese’s peers is interrogated for their lack of respect.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Taxi Driver was a shot in the arm to American cinema: a wildly dark movie about a man lost in his own fantasies and obsessions with access to guns and a strict moral code that he’s willing to die to defend. The MPAA originally gave it an X rating, and the film’s studio told Scorsese to cut it to an R rating, or they would. A classic story of artist versus overlords — which took a turn, well, fitting of Taxi Driver when Scorsese threatened to kill the head of the studio. Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma describe Scorsese telling them that he was going to get a gun, and the contrast between their bemused recounting of this story and Scorsese’s aggressive eye roll and laughter about the threat is highly entertaining. He now seems to be underplaying the sincerity of his outsize reaction, but it’s illuminating when Scorsese says, “Violence is scary, in yourself,” because he admits he was willing to get wild to defend his art. Hearing more about whether Scorsese felt pushed into violence to defend his other movies would have been compelling, too.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s cocaine addiction in the 1970s was clearly not a good time — Rossellini talking about how he woke up once to find himself black and blue all over, then learned at the hospital that he was bleeding internally from his heavy drug use, is harrowing. More details about that would feel perhaps voyeuristic. There’s an interesting connection, though, between Scorsese’s near-death experience and his relationship with De Niro, who asked him in the hospital if he really wanted to “die like this” and urged him to get better and direct Raging Bull. I cried when Scorsese quietly said of De Niro’s offer, “I looked at him, and I said, ‘Okay,’” but how much did Scorsese then feel grateful (or indebted) to De Niro? When they worked on movies together that Scorsese says he didn’t particularly enjoy (The King of Comedy) or isn’t sure entirely worked (Cape Fear), did Scorsese agree to the gigs because De Niro was there for him in his worst moment? A little more discussion of how hitting rock bottom affected his working relationships could have helped round out this section.

    Scorsese’s been famous for a long time. He’s been protected by the FBI twice, after John Hinckley Jr.’s Taxi Driver–inspired attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and after the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. You’ve probably seen at least one of his daughter Francesca’s viral TikTok videos or Instagram photos of her dad. We probably think we know Scorsese, or at least the version of him that comedians like Kyle Mooney have played on Saturday Night Live — which makes his discomfort with fame worth hearing more about. His daughters talk most about this, with Francesca mentioning a time when he didn’t leave their apartment except to go to his office. But how does Scorsese feel about this? He doesn’t speak much about how the ebbs and flows of celebrity have affected him, but I would like to know how he deals with not being able to experience New York City as casually as he once did.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    You probably know that people were very angry about The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Willem Dafoe plays a Jesus Christ who fucks, and Mr. Scorsese traces how the outcry against the movie was led by the increasingly powerful religious right in the U.S. But what about Kundun? Scorsese’s film about the Dalai Lama is only briefly discussed in terms of its amateur cast and its reception as “beautiful but dull.” The missing context is that Disney severely curtailed the release of the film because of the Chinese government’s pushback. Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner publicly apologized for the movie, saying, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it.” Kundun has remained incredibly difficult to find — the physical-media release was limited, it’s not streaming in the U.S., and repertory screenings are rare. Why not dig into any of this?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    1991’s Cape Fear, 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, and 2011’s Hugo all get only a line or so of commentary and a brief little montage clip, so if one of those is your Scorsese favorite you’re not getting much. And if one of your favorites is Killers of the Flower Moon, as it is mine, well, we’re out of luck, too. Despite KOTFM also being an Apple TV production, Mr. Scorsese relegates it solely to a few minutes at the end of “Method Director.” There’s footage of Scorsese prepping a couple of gigantic cork boards and directing scenes, but no real discussion of his motivations for tackling the film. Perhaps Mr. Scorsese wrapped sometime before the film’s release, but the series could have done a way better job encouraging people who already pay for Apple TV+ to fire up KOTFM. Eliding Scorsese’s most recent film makes for a really abrupt ending, and leaves Mr. Scorsese feeling undeservedly incomplete. Where art thou, Lily Gladstone?


    See All



    Roxana Hadadi

    Source link

  • The Chair Company Is a Rich Text for Tim Robinson Sickos

    Much as it leads Tim Robinson’s Ron down endless rabbit holes, The Chair Company is evocative and weird and captivating enough to make you chase your own theories about the comedian.
    Photo: HBO

    Tim Robinson, who so often plays men consumed by petty fixations or compelled to take things too far, has his own fixations. On I Think You Should Leave, his breakout sketch show with creative partner Zach Kanin, it’s hard not to notice how certain motifs recur across its comedy of unease like intrusive thoughts: peculiar elderly individuals, bursts of yelling, the refusal to take blame, idiosyncratic clothing, denials of reality, and drab corporate workplaces — all of which, the last in particular, were prototyped in the sitcom Detroiters, the pair’s first TV collaboration (alongside co-creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s Friendship, a light riff on male loneliness that follows a man’s spiral into obsession with a cool-guy neighbor played by Paul Rudd, we glimpse the emergence of another Robinson motif: Where his Detroiters character was ambiently married, in the A24 film he plays a devoted family man pretending at normalcy as it slips away. That characterization returns in The Chair Company, Robinson and Kanin’s new HBO series premiering October 12, which once again finds Robinson in an anonymous-looking office, playing yet another man losing his grip. Some artists spend their lives working through the same questions that consume them; Spielberg, for instance, has been processing the dissolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company reveals Robinson as one such artist, picking ever more persistently at the knots he seems to keep untangling in his head.

    Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a newly promoted corporate drone at shopping-mall-development firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature With Centers of Commerce.) His misadventure begins, as so many of Robinson’s sketches do, with a humiliation. After delivering his version of a rousing speech at a companywide presentation for a new project in Canton, Ohio, Ron suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It’s the kind of incident a cooler, more well-adjusted person might laugh off and move on from. But Ron is obviously neither. He refuses to let it go, and in the grand tradition of all great Robinson characters, his fixation curdles into mania. Convinced the incident is part of a larger conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation … and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, sending him down a rabbit hole of sketchy scenarios and phantom leads all while he struggles to hold the rest of his life together.

    This description makes The Chair Company sound more conventional than it is. In practice, the show feels like an effort to carry the DNA of individual I Think You Should Leave sketches across a collection of scenes comprising Robinson and Kanin’s first serialized narrative. The connective tissue can be loose — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes bafflingly so. One thread follows Ron’s elderly co-worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live legend Jim Downey, making his second onscreen appearance this fall after One Battle After Another), who lost out on a promotion to Ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. It’s not clear how he’ll figure into the bigger picture, but you accept that it may not matter. Another thread has Ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (a possible Dan Flashes callback?) that leads to a surreal encounter with a clothing-store employee who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into a mysterious membership program. At one point, Ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It’s loud and the kitchen is overrun. One table is pelting fries at other customers. A man’s plate shatters on the floor. The scene plays like a fever dream. No explanations, no resolutions, and when Ron gets what he came for, the world spins on as if nothing happened.

    Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson’s sensibility than Friendship, which often felt like a single joke stretched too thin. The improvement comes down to shape: The Chair Company adopts the loose framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to corral its spiraling logic and surreal diversions. The series has a hazy, dreamlike quality in which narrative logic bends but emotional coherence holds. The effect is almost Lynchian. Each scene obeys its own strange rhythm, yet together they form a single, deeply felt reality.

    Also like Lynch, Robinson’s onscreen world hums with quiet dread, a sense that something sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. His humor has always been rooted in humiliation and helplessness, in the fragile border between male entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron says at one point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t scream at them.” But what The Chair Company really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that’s been hanging out within that humor since, at the very least, the Darmine Doggy Door sketch. You could feel it, too, in Friendship, during one of the film’s rare moments of genuine unease when the wife of Robinson’s character, played by Kate Mara, disappears in the tunnels beneath the city. In The Chair Company, that undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (the payoff is equally unsettling); another finds Ron breaking into someone’s house only to stumble on a tableau straight out of Seven.

    That unreality naturally raises questions about what Robinson and Kanin are really after with The Chair Company. Why, again, is Robinson cast as the improbably beloved family man? This time, his wife is played by Lake Bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) adore him, almost comically, despite his weirdness and social transgressions. These scenes of familial harmony feel off, like they belong to another reality entirely. They don’t square with how Ron behaves or even how Robinson looks in the role. It’s as if we’re watching a fever dream of a man hallucinating what normal adulthood is supposed to be. Which leads to a stranger question: When other people in the show look at Ron, do they see Tim Robinson? Are we seeing Ron as he sees himself — the gremlin-man weirdo whom the rest of us have come to associate with Robinson’s persona? How are any of these readings complicated when you learn that Robinson himself is a family man with two kids?

    That’s the thing about The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just asking questions. Much as it leads Ron down endless rabbit holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating enough to pull you into chasing your own theories about the work and the comedian himself. Whether that mystery will translate beyond the Tim Robinson sickos, though, is another question. The Chair Company’s rhythms are tuned to a very specific frequency of discomfort that not everyone will find funny or even watchable. But for card-carrying sloppy-steak aficionados, it’s a rich text. The series features Robinson and Kanin pushing their sensibility to the edge, testing whether the anxious, combustible energy of I Think You Should Leave can hold steady in a longer, more fragile form. It mostly does and when it doesn’t, the fissures feel purposeful, like they’re part of the experiment. Not all the gags land, but the gags often don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seems almost like Robinson isn’t mocking obsessive male anxiety so much as sincerely expressing how it feels to be trapped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every drab office, every incongruously adoring wife is another turn through the same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be turning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.

    Correction: This review originally misattributed Friendship to Kanin. It has been updated.


    See All



    Nicholas Quah

    Source link

  • The Lowdown Ambles Toward Glory

    A spiky character study of Ethan Hawke’s dirtbag “truthstorian” Lee Raybon reveals itself as a surprising showcase for Sterlin Harjo’s creative vision.
    Photo: Shane Brown/FX

    Ethan Hawke’s face, an angular, beautiful cinematic presence since Dead Poets Society, gets put through the wringer on The Lowdown. In the closing minutes of the pilot, we see him behind the wheel, bloodied and gashed, left eye swollen shut, teeth smeared with red. The image grips you, but its gnarliness is undercut by absurdity: He’s laughing maniacally, having cheated death through no effort of his own. Creator Sterlin Harjo’s follow-up to his pantheon-great Reservation Dogs for FX, debuting this week, riffs on mid-century noirs and hard-boiled detective fiction, in which snooping protagonists are routinely roughed up, shaken down, and driven to the brink of madness. So it goes in The Lowdown, but Harjo filters the genre through his distinct sensibility, equal parts comic, hopeful, fatalistic, and regional. Hawke’s character is not the smooth, trench-coated detective of yore but a mangy dirtbag, repulsive and charismatic. Imagine plucking one of Richard Linklater’s Slacker oddballs and dropping them into a Raymond Chandler novel: familiar yet skewed, in a noir world refracted through Harjo’s sly humor and lived-in specificity.

    Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a self-described “truthstorian” who runs a rare-books shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moonlights as a citizen journalist — or is it the other way around? — filing longform investigations for a scrappy local magazine, The Heartland Press. The series kicks off when Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), a member of a powerful Oklahoma family, pens a suicide note, hides it inside a book on his shelves, and then shoots himself in the head. His death comes just after Lee’s exposé into the Washbergs’ long, sordid history in the state, but Lee doesn’t buy the cause-and-effect implied by the suicide. “Everything is connected,” he says. “Darkness is always afoot.” Could there be a cover-up? To him, the bigger picture is suspicious. Dale’s brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), is running for governor, and he seems a little too intimate with Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). At the same time, Lee is digging into Akron Construction, a company buying out Black-owned businesses in the region. He suspects a coordinated effort to strangle competition, which would hurt the local economy. Akron’s owner, Frank Martin (Tracy Letts), a power broker with deep pockets, is unamused by Lee’s prodding, as is the quiet, menacing Allen Murphy (Scott Shepard), who works for Martin.

    So that’s the board as it’s set. But in true pulp-noir fashion, it’s not long before the pieces scatter to the point where the game becomes unrecognizable. Only five of the season’s eight episodes were provided to critics, and by the end of the batch, I still couldn’t quite tell what we’re supposed to be paying attention to. Not that it matters. The Lowdown isn’t powered by its central mystery so much as the shaggy-dog pleasures of watching Lee stumble through a Tulsa rendered with such vivid texture you can practically smell the Plains dust. It’s the kind of show that rewards kicking back and basking in its world. Lee’s shop sits in an unassuming row next to a tax lawyer with whom he lunches and stores his valuables; a record shop his daughter frequents; and a diner called Sweet Emily’s, where he does his thinking. His odyssey takes him to estate sales, livestock auctions, hidden islands, and a rowdy, violent, surreal kegger for law-enforcement officials. It also detours into his own history, when an old friend (Peter Dinklage) resurfaces midway through the season to check in, commiserate, and spar: “Do not quote David Foster Wallace to me, my brother.”

    At its core, The Lowdown is a loving, spiky character study. Harjo — who serves as showrunner, wrote the pilot, and directed the first two episodes — harbors real affection for Lee, and you feel it in the density of quirks, contradictions, and traits packed into the role, all of which Hawke carries with ease. Lee is a pest and a scoundrel, chronically broke and overconfident, maybe a talented writer or at least one who’s quick with literary references. He’s conspiratorially minded, the sort who keeps one of those murder boards in his ratty apartment above the bookshop. He drives a sketchy white van so conspicuous that another character naturally dubs him a “pedo,” the back doors scrawled with the words You’re doing it wrong. Seen through a contemporary lens, Lee feels like a guy who’s one or two degrees away from a QAnon crank, except there’s a pure, humanistic engine in him. He’s earnest rather than angry, lost but charming in his pursuit of his purpose. “Don’t be scared for me,” he tells his worried daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). “Be scared for the people sleeping away their lives. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I’m living.” You believe he believes what he’s saying, but you doubt the argument as Lee belongs to TV’s ever-expanding fraternity of sad dads (see also Task) and lonely deadbeats. (Francis’s mother, whom Lee’s no longer with, is played by Kaniehtiio Horn, memorable as the Deer Lady on Reservation Dogs and Tanis in the underrated Letterkenny.)

    On the surface, The Lowdown may seem like a curious project to succeed Reservation Dogs. After the latter’s sheer triumph of Native storytelling, Harjo’s choice to center his next project on a sad white guy, a prestige-television staple, may feel to some like an odd reversal. But Harjo circles a fascinating and mischievous idea with Lee. For all his idiocy, brilliance, and noble intent, it’s hard not to notice how easily Lee moves through spaces where anybody who isn’t a white dude likely wouldn’t survive. Over the course of the series, Lee impersonates a white supremacist to enter the home of another white supremacist’s mother and later poses as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer to break into a private space to jack some rare books. He’s often saved by his own gift of gab; at one point, he talks his way out of torture and possibly death at the hands of a criminal outfit he blunders into. The show doesn’t frame this as a critique so much as a matter of amusement. Lee is grating and unquestionably benefits from the privileges of his whiteness, but he also weaponizes those advantages for some notion of good — even if it’s self-serving, even if it ultimately leads to his own ruin. Hawke is splendid in the role, which makes deft use of his chatterbox charisma, the very same that can come off as annoying yet attractive in films like Reality Bites and the Before trilogy, or menacing in something like Black Phone. For all the things Lee gets called (“a narcissistic cowboy with a penchant for thinking they’re a good person”) and the things he calls himself (“I’m a good guy, that’s what we do, we call up bad guys and make them answer the phone”), perhaps the truest description comes from Cyrus Arnold (a scene-stealing Michael “Killer Mike” Render), the publisher of a local crime rag: “A fucking white man that cares. Sad as hell.”

    The Lowdown is also quite the showcase for Harjo’s creative vision. His world-building is lush enough to smooth over however you may feel about Lee’s rough edges, and his gift for seamlessly weaving together his expansive cultural appetites gives the show a kind of referential heft that feels inviting as opposed to alienating. It draws on and echoes the great noirs (The Long Goodbye comes to mind) but also the paranoid fictions of someone like Philip K. Dick. You feel the echoes even if you’re not familiar with the reference. Jim Thompson, the Oklahoma crime writer whose reputation flourished only after his death, surfaces as a touchpoint in the notes Dale leaves behind, and hearing the name makes you curious enough to pick up one of his novels. The show sparkles with wit, sharp dialogue (“a faint heart never fucked a bobcat”), and a gallery of memorable, organically diverse characters populating Harjo’s Tulsa. And it finds real magic in small moments. Midway through the pilot, Lee meets Marty (Keith David), a stranger with as much literary flair as Lee has himself. They parry verbally until Marty tilts the encounter toward reflection. “Something brings us to Sweet Emily’s at this hour,” he muses, regarding the other insomniacs in the diner. “Look around.” The camera lingers: a cup of coffee, a man reading his Bible, rain streaking the window — a portrait of nighthawks. Lee shrugs it off. “Just a bunch of night owls, that’s all I see.” Marty corrects him: “No. You see poetry.” In this beat, the show’s essence is crystallized.

    In more ways than one, The Lowdown deepens and extends Harjo’s sensibilities. If Reservation Dogs found beauty in the embrace of community in the margins, The Lowdown draws its spark from what happens when someone in the margins starts to poke back at entrenched power. Both shows wander and amble toward something more than the sum of their parts, and both find beauty and meaning lingering in the details. The heart of noir tends to be nihilism, its abyssal mood a veil that invites you to glimpse the darker machinery of a world ruled by insurmountable powers where resistance leads only to ruin. But Harjo complicates that. “The way you write about Tulsa — there’s bad things about it, but underneath, it’s really good,” Francis tells Lee. He may be a fool, but he’s also a lover who continues to believe in the truth. It may yet end badly for him, but for the moment, he makes you believe there’s still glory in the fight to fix a broken world.


    See All



    Nicholas Quah

    Source link

  • You’re Not Ready For Young Royals Season 3

    You’re Not Ready For Young Royals Season 3

    Spoiler alert: This contains spoilers for Young Royals Season 1 and Young Royals Season 2. If you haven’t watched those, I envy you. Your life is about to change. No spoilers for Young Royals Season 3.

    I’ve been obsessed with Young Royals since it crossed my Netflix recommendation list. Marathoning episode after episode of Young Royals Season 3, I couldn’t stop thinking: Teens today are so spoiled.

    Everybody says it, but it’s true. Teens have it so much easier. Sure, they must have unique problems. But queer teenagers have one thing I didn’t have: an abundance of queer cinema.

    In high school, I watched every contemporary queer film available to me. With Tumblr as my launch point, I started with actual queer films like Blue Is The Warmest Color and then moved on to films with achingly intense queer subtext like Black Swan.

    As for television, my life changed alongside everyone else’s when Ryan Murphy released Glee, the most unhinged and revelatory show I have seen to this day. Rewatching that show is more absurd each time — but no one was doing it like they were. A gay character that had an actual storyline including, but not limited to, his sexuality? It was the blueprint.

    I also watched every single other show that Tumblr gave the stamp of approval for having queer storylines, even if they were in the background. It’s the only reason I watched Shameless to the end — which you might know as the launchpad for Jeremy Allen White, but I know for its groundbreaking queer relationship.

    Between episodes of shows like Shameless and Eyewitness, I expanded to foreign films and TV. Not like a pretentious indie boy, but as someone starved for queer content, I’d take what I could get. I watched brooding Norwegian films like Jongens and North Sea Texas alongside soapy shows like SKAM because they were all I had.

    Now, queer teens have Heartstopper, Everything Now, Sex Education, and more — and those are just the gay shows on Netflix. But some things never change: International queer TV is still top tier. After watching Young Royals Season 3, I can confirm that this season has some of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever watched. Tense and tender, Young Royals works because it leans into the messiness of adolescence, the idealism of youth, and the beauty of queerness to paint a portrait that feels grounded in reality but also infinitely hopeful.

    When Will Young Royals Season 3 Come Out?

    After months of commenting on @NetflixNordic Instagram posts (guilty), fans finally got an answer to their most pressing question: “When does Young Royals Season 3 come out?”

    Alongside the Young Royals Season 3 trailer, we got not just one release date, but two.

    Young Royals Season 3 is out now on Netflix. The first five episodes of the third and final season dropped on Monday, March 11th. But the show isn’t over yet. The final episode of Young Royals Season 3 will be released on Monday, March 18th.

    Watch the Young Royals Season 3 trailer here:

    Young Royals: Season 3 | Official Trailer | Netflixwww.youtube.com

    Maybe teens today do have it hard — their dopamine-deprived brains have to wait a whole week for an episode of TV.

    Season 3 will be released alongside a documentary, Young Royals Forever, about the making of the show. The show will chronicle the journey of this certified queer classic from casting to the final line of Young Royals Season 3. After that, it will truly be over.

    Watch the Young Royals Forever trailer here:

    Young Royals Forever | Official Clip | Netflixwww.youtube.com

    What is Young Royals Season 3 about?

    In a 2023 Netflix Nordic interview with Edvin Ryding and co-creators Rojda Sekersöz and Lisa Ambjörn, Edvin said, “We never problematize sexuality. We never problematize what is outside the norm. But rather, we problematize the norm.”

    And it’s this problematic, normative world that Young Royals Season 3 explores. Wilhelm (Edvin Ryding) — Crown Prince of Sweden and king of grand gestures — ended Young Royals Season 2 by telling all of Sweden about his relationship with Simon (Omar Rudberg). But now that the world knows about their relationship, the world can intrude. Suddenly the two are battling Instagram comments as well as the centuries-old expectations of the Swedish monarchy. And unlike candied representations of boys-vs-monarchy we’ve recently seen (ahem, Red, White & Royal Blue), the powers that be put up a formidable fight.

    The Season 3 teaser trailer (which I watched an unspeakable number of times), saw Wilhem and Simon together for the first time in the Palace. Season 2 began in the palace too. The Wille we found there was battling grief and betrayal, dreaming of a relationship with Simon that seemed out of reach. He references these dreams to Simon in Episode 1 of this season, saying: “It’s not how I imagined it.”

    Indeed, the season that follows is not how Wille could have imagined it. Nor any of us. None of the fan theories and predictions have even scratched the surface of what ensues in Young Royals Season 3. And that’s to say nothing of the finale.

    How does Young Royals Season 3 end?

    For years, fans and critics alike have applauded Young Royals for representation. The cast is actually made of teenagers (though they’ve grown up in the four years since the show began), and small details like showing textured skin and normal outfits (as normal as the old-money Hillerska crowd gets) set it apart from teen shows like Riverdale, Euphoria, and even the Spanish hit Elité.

    Mental health is also a major theme of the show. Our troubled protagonist Wilhelm has been struggling with so much in just one term at Hillerska — thank goodness he goes to therapy. Over the last three seasons, Edvin Rydings has put on a masterclass in portraying characters with mental health issues. The progression of how Wilhelm externalizes his anxiety is also telling of how the plot develops. Every choice is intentional, from the subtle lip-biting to the gut-wrenching screams. In Season 2, he was finally starting to connect how the outdated traditions he is beholden to contribute to his mental state. In Young Royals Season 3, will he finally figure it out?

    For Simon, social class has always been an obvious barrier between him and the privileged Hillerska elite. But unlike his sister Sara, he doesn’t feel the need to change himself to fit in with his upper-class peers. Despite their taunts, he stands up for himself and speaks his mind. Season 3 asks: can he still do this under the watchful eye of the Royal Family?

    The only critique I might have had of the representation in Young Royals Season 1 and Young Royals Season 2 was its quiet examination of race. Was it too quiet? Too subtle? Small gestures were obvious to me, a keen-eyed viewer who was also one of very few non-white students at a tiny boarding school. Things like Felice changing her hair from pressed to curly — and experiencing microaggressions because of it. Or Simon and Sara being ostracized not just for their class, but for their race.

    In Young Royals Season 3, it becomes clear that the creators were building a foundation to thoroughly explore in this concluding act. From Felice’s racial disillusionment after being used as a token Black student to Simon’s thrust into the spotlight and being dubbed a “typical Latin lover,” race is foregrounded in a new way this season. All of these things create a world that becomes unteneable to navigate for our two protagonists. And how they stumble across it, experiencing friction at every turn and unable to communicate what they mean without who they are getting in the way, reflects so clearly the pitfalls of youth.

    Is Young Royals Season 3 good?

    The test of a good show is if you can stick by its characters even as they frustrate you. I, an adult woman, want to shake these Swedish boys all season. I want to force them into a room to really talk, to make them explain how they see things so that their differences stop surprising them. They have moments where they come to small revelations. “Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing,” Wille says of their differences in a Season 3 episode. “Aren’t we supposed to learn from each other?”

    But moments like these are obstructed by what Young Royals Season 3 portrays so well: the inherent selfishness of youth. Even as they try their best to be there for each other, all the characters are clearly motivated by their own urgent, teenage desires. They’re also blinded by their teenage insecurities, thinking every problem they face is somehow their fault. Cue the miscommunication trope. In the words of a now-bygone TikTok trend: It’s a canon event, I can’t interfere.

    And while we don’t know how it ends — we’ll have to wait for the finale for that — whatever happens, it will have been bold, brilliant, and beautiful. Young Royals Season 3, don’t break my heart!

    Langa

    Source link

  • All Of My Thoughts While Watching The Idol

    All Of My Thoughts While Watching The Idol

    As a writer, there are times when you almost feel morally obligated to complete a task that no one else wants to do. In this case, I fed the inexplicable, dark need within the depths of my soul to watch Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s show on Max,
    The Idol.

    The Idol has quickly become the internet’s most talked about television show for all the wrong reasons. It’s not the fan fervor that followed other Max shows like White Lotus or Succession. It’s morbid curiosity at best.

    Following its debut at
    Cannes Film Festival, no one has been able to stop talking about its insanity: unnecessary vulgar sex scenes, a plot that was filled with holes and questions, and a debate about whether it’s a product of bad acting or bad writing…or both.

    But are we really shocked that
    Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, known for his borderline concerning references to sex and violence in his shows — who argued with actress Barbie Ferreira over character Kat’s storyline and caused her eventually to leave the show, who had multiple actresses express discomfort in the amount of nudity, who had no writers room — created this disaster?

    The Drama Surrounding The Idol

    Originally, this catastrophe was directed by Amy Seimetz who left when most of the series was finished. With HBO citing a major creative overhaul, reports swirled elsewhere that The Weeknd was unhappy with the female direction the show was taking. Out with female directors, in with resident evil Sam Levinson.

    Not only did this cost the show around $70 million, it also caused delays. Levinson then peppered in his signature overseasoning of sex to really mess the whole thing up. It started with reports saying the show had more sex than even
    Euphoria, which broke boundaries being a show following hyper-sexual teenagers. In a tell-all expose, Rolling Stone reported:

    “Four sources say that Levinson ultimately scrapped Seimetz’s approach to the story, making it less about a troubled starlet falling victim to a predatory industry figure and fighting to reclaim her own agency, and more of a degrading love story with a hollow message that some crew members describe as being offensive.”

    Levinson was absent from the set early on, says
    Rolling Stone, devoting most of his time to the Emmy-award-winning Euphoria. Subsequently, this gave Tesfaye free reign. The show “drastically changed” from the original Seimetz version to something more…of a joke.

    So I Watched The Idol Myself

    Needless to say, the scathing reviews and meme-worthy clips I’d seen on my social media were not enough to keep me away. The show had an absurd premiere week, with over 900,000 viewers, surpassing Max’s biggest shows:
    Euphoria and White Lotus. My sick curiosity killed the cat.

    It’s every bit as terrible as expected, despite a star-studded cast of The Weeknd, BLACKPINK’s Jennie, Troye Sivan, and Lily-Rose Depp, who plays popstar Jocelyn. Jocelyn, who is known in public for her scandals and mental breakdowns, falls under the spell of The Weeknd’s Tedros. That’s about all I know for sure.

    Tedros is supposedly the leader of a cult, but you wouldn’t get that from episode one…which fails to reach many points other than Jocelyn wanting to expose herself on the cover of her album. Jocelyn attends a club (sans security because that would make too much sense) and meets Tedros (who unfortunately has a rat tail) and is instantly
    enamored.

    This is all the proof I need that Jocelyn has no real friends. If Tedros approached
    me at a club, my friends would already have tackled him linebacker-style before we could say hello. No shot.

    But the reviews don’t lie, there’s too much sex. It’s all about sex. There are constant lewd references, vulgar, NSFW dialogue, and full-frontal nudity. I can’t even take the show seriously because I spend half of it fast-forwarding through sex scenes.

    I understand that they are trying to convey that Lily-Rose Depp’s character is vulnerable and clearly lacking any sort of creative direction…but they spend 30 minutes on each scene. Surely there’s a better way to speed up the plot?

    I cringe every time The Weeknd comes on screen, partly because I know there is some sort of sexual act about to occur and also because I can’t imagine letting his creature of a character within 50 yards of me at any point in my life.

    Overall, it’s horrid. I can’t even tell you it’s worth the watch because I struggled to get through three episodes and my roommate got mad at me for making her watch with me. In short, if you watch
    The Idol, your friends will like you less.

    Jai Phillips

    Source link

  • Apple TV+’s Drops of God: A ‘hugely entertaining’ thriller about… French wine-tasting, based on a Japanese manga series

    Apple TV+’s Drops of God: A ‘hugely entertaining’ thriller about… French wine-tasting, based on a Japanese manga series

    The show, written by Quoc Dang Tran, a Vietnamese-French writer who has worked on such French smash hits as Call My Agent! and The Bureau, manages to imbue the wine-tasting scenes with the tension of a thriller. There’s a particularly fun sequence shot like a caper movie in which Camille has to pose as a restaurant sommelier in order to get just a sniff of a particularly rare wine that a wealthy diner has bought.

    But the family drama is just as gripping as we learn, for example, through flashbacks why Camille has such an aversion to alcohol, and why Issei’s mother seems so cold and distant.

    The depiction of the two principal characters almost leans into national stereotypes. Redheaded Camille is passionate, impulsive, sweary. Issei is reserved, formal and analytical. But as the series progresses, we discover they have much in common.

    The two actors playing them are not hugely well known beyond their native France and Japan but with Drops of God have done their international job prospects no harm at all. Geffrier, who looks as though she’s stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, is a magnetic lead. She has dialogue in three languages – French, English and Japanese – and pulls it off with elan. Yamashita, already idolised in Japan, where he is known as a singer, dancer and presenter as well as an actor, is a charismatic presence. They both have cheekbones sharp enough to peel a grape with.

    Drops of God looks beautiful too. Tokyo is presented in steely blues and greys. Provence is bathed in golden sunshine, except for the occasional dramatic storm. Provençal tourism chiefs don’t need any help selling their region but will surely be rubbing their hands in glee at this.

    So will winemakers. Listening to the characters discuss wine and the wine-making process with such enthusiasm, and hearing them describe incredible wines so vividly, may well make you want to drink them. The show has been distilled from a bestselling 44-volume Japanese manga series of the same name which began in 2004, created by a brother-and-sister team, Shin and Yuko Kibayashi. The series is famous for its impact on the East Asian wine market, significantly boosting the sale of wines mentioned in the story. 

    It more than doubled wine sales in Japan in the first year it was published. In July 2009, the British wine magazine Decanter placed the Kibayashis at Number 50 on its list of the wine world’s most influential people, remarking that Drops of God “is arguably the most influential wine publication for the past 20 years”. One French winemaker withdrew a wine of his from the market after it was mentioned in order to prevent its price from rocketing. The wines in the TV series, which has changed several aspects of the manga’s story, are a mixture of real and fictional but if you happen to have a few cases of, say, Château Cheval Blanc 2000 lying around in your cellar, you may want to hang on to them for a while.

    One of the many charms of the show is that even if, like me, your previous knowledge of wine essentially amounts to being able to visually distinguish between red and white, you feel as if you are being infused with expertise as you watch. I finished the series regretting the life choices that mean I’m not running a wine domaine in glorious southeastern France but consoling myself that should a head sommelier position become vacant at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I could have a reasonable shot at it.

    ★★★★☆

    The first two episodes of Drops of God are on Apple TV + from April 21; new episodes are released weekly.

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    Source link

  • Return of the Roys: Succession is Back and Better Than Ever

    Return of the Roys: Succession is Back and Better Than Ever

    They’re back: our favorite toxic, turbulent family. The Roys returned on March 26 in Succession Season 4, the HBO Max dramedy’s suspense-filled final season.

    SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SEASON 4, EPISODE 1 YET, TURN BACK NOW

    Like Season 1, the sunset season begins on Logan’s birthday. And like Season 1, Logan is not happy. “The Munsters,” he calls the crowd surrounding him — referencing the 1960s sitcom about a family of monsters. Not an auspicious start, but certainly a hilarious one.

    But since Season 1, tectonic plates have shifted. After the Season 3 finale — one of the most dramatic episodes of television I’ve ever seen, barring maybe the penultimate episode of White Lotus Season 2 — the family is ruptured. But this time, it’s not just the internal strife or Kendall being on the outs while all the others are on the inside. There’s a clear line. Logan vs the kids. And they say you can’t put a price on family, but the bidding war on this one starts at $10 billion dollars.

    Recap: What’s going on?

    The highlights of this episode are clear: the kids are trying to screw over their father by overbidding on the Pierce deal. Well, they certainly did that. As culture writer Hunter Harris put it in her Succession Power Rankings: “Ten billion dollars just to get a call from Daddy… pathetic.”

    But the emotions undergirding this conflict are what makes it intriguing — and different than past seasons. Yes, the Roy kids are always either sucking up to or attempting to spite their father. Too bad they lack — as Logan said — their own ideas. After insisting that they were going to strike out on their own and build something themselves, they do what they always do: go after their father’s scraps. Their euphoria at the Pierce deal is in contrast to Logan’s isolation during his birthday party. His lonely stroll through Central Park? Add a Lana Del Rey soundtrack and that’s me at 16 — having an existential crisis, wondering about the world and the meaning of it all.

    Logan’s reflectiveness is new for us, and for him. We see it in his conversations with Kerry, his sad diner dinner, and even in his drawing room pleas for everyone to “roast” him and “tell a joke.” Anything to feel something. For Logan, things are going well. Yet he can’t shake the feeling that something is missing.

    It’s Greg who comes out and says it: “Where’re all your kids, Uncle Logan?”

    And indeed, the first time we see Logan back to his usual self is when he’s yelling at his kids on the phone. And as we gear up for the rest of the season, it seems clear that this battle will bring the Roys together — even if it’s just in their usual, toxic ways.

    Who are the major players this season?

    The lines are clearly drawn this season. But it wouldn’t be HBO’s Succession without the cast’s internal strife in all camps.

    Though Shiv and Kendall pretty much bullied Roman into a $10 billion deal — younger siblings can relate — previews hint that Roman might be the one to flip-flop back to his father’s side. He sent him a birthday text, after all. Gasp.

    And on Logan’s side, everyone, as usual, has their own agenda. Tom posits what his life will look like if he and Shiv divorce, namely his current place in Logan’s proverbial lap. Kerry’s climbing up the ladder and feels comfortably perched at the top, on Logan’s right-hand side, but how long will that last? And Greg is having “a rummage” in the Roy house. Cue all the finance bros renaming their groupchats to: “the disgusting brothers.”

    But from what reports foretell, this season will conclude with a successor being named. So, one of the Roys will inherit the keys to the kingdom. At this point, I honestly can’t imagine who. All I know is the road there will be full of hidden agendas, witty one-liners, and buckets and buckets of wasted money.

    What’s coming up?

    • The Pierce Battle: Is this the end? Or will it blow up in the kids’ faces?
    • The GoJo Deal: The world’s convinced this is set in stone. In fact, it’s the source of all the money the kids are betting their futures on. So, it seems ripe for an implosion. And I can’t wait to see more of Alex Skarsgard as a typical tech mogul.
    • Logan’s Life: We saw the man experience emotions for the first time. Now what’s he going to do with them?
    • Speaking of Emotions – Shiv and Tom: Is this the end for TV’s most malignant couple? They were barely together when they were together. But we saw that hand-holding! And we’re intrigued!
    • There’s a Presidential Election: Connor certainly isn’t going to win. But the kids and Logan seem on the opposite end of this battle, too. Will it be a harbinger of how things turn out with the Roys?
    • Oh, Greggy — have we lost our clueless, bumbling boy for good?

    That’s all for week one of Succession’s final season. And it looks like it’s going to be a good one.

    LKC

    Source link

  • White Lotus review: The show that skewers the super-rich

    White Lotus review: The show that skewers the super-rich

    The three-generational Sicilian-American family, the Di Grassos, provides the most comedy. F Murray Abraham is the patriarch, Bert, a relentless flirt at 80. His son, Dom, is a Hollywood player whose affairs have earned his absent wife’s fury. Michael Imperioli plays this remorseful, weak-willed clod with down-to-earth naturalism in what may be his best work since Christopher on The Sopranos. Dom’s son, Albie (Adam DiMarco) is an earnest Stanford University grad. The series’ hilarious moments come when the three fumble through a discussion of sex, and when they visit the tourist-trap location where the Sicilian segments of The Godfather were shot. To his father’s and grandfather’s horror, Albie goes off on an explanation of why the overrated film plays into men’s nostalgia for “the salad days of the patriarchy”. The actors’ impeccable comic timing makes you believe they are a family.

    Coolidge and White once more brilliantly define Tanya, who is sad, lonely (despite being married) and pitiable, but thoughtlessly callous toward people she considers the help. Haley Lu Richardson makes Tanya’s assistant, Portia, the most realistic character, a young woman with an edge of desperation about her future. In tears, she tells a friend on the phone, “I feel like I’ve just been stuck at home, just doom-scrolling on my phone the last three years”. White includes another nod at a world shaped by Covid and other blights when Harper says she has trouble sleeping because of “everything that’s going on in the world”. Daphne blankly asks what she means, and the appalled Harper explains, “I don’t know, just, like the end of the world”.  Well put, but White leaves it at that. Real-life disasters never intrude on this engaging show.

    While the guests seemed hermetically sealed inside the Hawaiian resort in season one, here they roam around (partly due to fewer Covid restrictions during shooting.) There are trips to an extravagant villa in Noto, another extravagant villa in Palermo, and the grand opera house, where we get a snippet of Madame Butterfly, until the series begins to feel like a tourist video. It’s just a matter of time before someone sings That’s Amore, but White savvily uses the song with a sad irony, a hint of the darker underside of The White Lotus that has yet to emerge.

    ★★★★☆

    The White Lotus season 2 premieres on HBO on 30 October.

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday

    Source link