Apple in my eye

I keep an updated worksheet of films and shows I want to see, arranged by streaming channel.  When I build up enough titles to warrant it, I will sign up for a free trial and/or one-month-only subscription to catch up with a channel’s desirable offerings.  Over a period of time, I built up a number of programs to watch on Apple TV+, so here is a record of my choices.
 
At the top of the pops reigns Ted Lasso (MC-71), which overcame lukewarm early reviews to finish at #5 on Metacritic’s compilation of tv critic top ten lists, and tucks into my best of 2020 ranking right between Better Things and Pen15.  The show has gone on to achieve cult status, win awards, and be renewed for two more seasons.  The title character, played by SNL alum Jason Sudeikis, had an unprepossessing provenance in a series of ESPN commercials, back when they started broadcasting Premier League soccer games.  He plays an American football coach from Kansas, classically Midwestern-nice but apparently clueless about soccer, who is hired to coach a West London team on the verge of relegation to a lower league.  As in Major League, the owner is a woman (Hannah Waddington) who wants the team to tank.  With experienced showrunner Bill Lawrence, the series was written by Sudeikis and two of his co-stars, playing his assistant “Coach Beard” and the team’s gruff elder captain.  Initially Coach Ted’s optimism seems silly and insipid, but as the season unfolds, we begin to understand the method to his niceness.  There’s a fair amount of across-the-pond comedy, in language and behavior, but an underlying message emerges about cross-cultural understanding and acceptance, and an argument about approaching others with curiosity rather than judgment.  The show put me in mind of Parks & Recreation and Lesley Knope, as a workplace comedy where Amy Poehler started off as caricature and wound up as admirable.  Likewise with the lesser characters, here including Juno Temple as a seeming airhead model/groupie who turns out to be among the wisest and funniest of them all.  You don’t have to be a soccer fan to appreciate this show, which both exploits and subverts classic sports movie tropes.  And the way it meets our cultural moment may be suggested by Sudeikis having played Joe Biden repeatedly on SNL.  Believe the hype, and seek this one out.
 

Another Apple original series that has elbowed into the circle of my recent favorites is Dickinson (MC-66/81).  The reclusive poet is having her pop culture moment, with this half-hour comedy series pairing nicely with two recent estimable biopics, A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily.  Though the show takes a parodistic approach to literary-historical fact, and peppers the proceedings with current music, attitudes, and language, creator Alena Smith brings to the project truthfulness and respect for literature and history.  The always-appealing Hailee Steinfeld is fierce and funny as Emily, the twenty-something poet in the 1850s.   Ella Hunt is appealing in a different way as Sue, her best friend and lover, soon to be the wife of Emily’s brother.  Toby Huss and Jane Krakowski are Emily’s parents.  Despite the anachronistic flourishes, the texture and feel of Victorian era Amherst seems quite authentic, and the stories are largely true to life but embroidered entertainingly (it’s unlikely that Emily dispensed opium at a party, on a wild night when her parents were out of town).  The series wanders from fact into reasonable speculation, with cameos for H.D. Thoreau (in a “Pond Scum” portrayal mitigated by the likeable John Mulaney) and L.M. Alcott (Zosia Mamet accentuating her frankly mercenary approach to writing).  Each episode illuminates a different Dickinson poem.  I’ve just caught up with the ten episodes of the first season, and will comment further after seeing the recently-completed second season.  
 
[P.S. I felt the second season went fuzzy around the character of Samuel Bowles – publisher of the Springfield Republican, friend and editor of Emily – and in the transformation of Sue from sympathetic to unsympathetic, but brought everything back into focus by the final episode (not the series finale, already renewed for another season).  Sam Bowles was indeed a journalistic innovator, here a parody of a tech entrepreneur, but I’ve seen no support for the idea that he was womanizer flirting with both Emily and Sue, though he was indeed a long-time friend of both.  Contrariwise, the cameo for Frederick Law Olmstead was funny but seemed a genuine reflection of his character.  This season jumps ahead to 1859, and culminates with news of John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.  Alena Smith adds five short extras on the historical underpinning of the series, jauntily animated with period illustrations, which indicate how seriously she approaches the era, as well as its contemporary relevance.  With my own obsession with the antebellum years in the North, Dickinson hits a sweet spot, particularly to my taste.  It will certainly lead me to read more of Emily’s poetry than I have heretofore.]

One more Apple series to recommend:  Little America (MC-85) is an anthology of eight half-hour true-life tales of immigrants to America, from India, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. etc.  High-level writing, acting, and production are the norm for these diverse stories, each unfolding an aspect of the immigrant experience – what drives people from their homeland, what draws them to America, and what challenges they face here.  Some stories are inherently sad, but all have a modest buoyancy, from adversity overcome with some semblance of success.  On the whole more amusing than wrenching, the series details many concrete aspects of displacement, but cumulatively celebrates what all these different people from different places bring to, and get from, this country.  Pick any of eight originating spots on the globe to sample, and I bet you’ll be back for more.  Each episode ends with a photo of the real person whose story has just been told.  Many hands make something special.  As Hamilton raps, “Immigrants – we get the job done.” 

 
Among Apple’s film offerings, Boys State (MC-84) won the top documentary prize at Sundance 2020 for partners Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (The Overnighters).  A thousand teenage boys congregate in Austin TX to enact a simulacrum of democratic politics, divided arbitrarily into two parties, who each pick a chairman, develop a platform from scratch, and nominate candidates for governor and other state positions.  As in most of these school-age competition documentaries, by reverse-engineering we follow from the beginning those who will emerge as the most prominent characters.  The two party chairmen are a double-amputee Reagan fanboy, and a Black recent immigrant from Chicago who has “never seen so many white people in my life” but turns out to be fluently persuasive.  One candidate for governor is the son of Mexican immigrants, who beats out an opportunistic white boy for the nomination, and then runs against a pretty boy son of Italian immigrants.  That’s a surprisingly diverse slate for an overwhelmingly white convention that seems to settle on two issues, anti-abortion and “gun rights” (the previous year a proposition passed for Texas to secede).  This is less a youthful celebration of democratic governance than a cautionary tale about the inherent dynamics of party politics and performative polarization.  It definitely fits in with my top docs of 2020.
 
Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (MC-73) is so fixated on “rich people problems” that even the appeal of Rashida Jones and Bill Murray is not enough to make it palatable.  We eat caviar, dine at 21, motor around Manhattan in fancy cars, shop at Cartier, talk Hockneys and Twombleys, weekend in Mexico, all bemoaning our fate.  Rashida is supposedly an author, but we never find out what she’s supposed to be writing, in her home office that looks like a Prada showroom in SoHo.  She’s mainly just worrying about whether her husband is having an affair, and Bill as her father is helping her sleuth out the situation.  Who is supposed to care, in this low-key comedy-drama?
 
A much more satisfying Apple original was Hala (MC-75), the story of a Pakistani-American girl in suburban Chicago, a rebellious high-school senior with a penchant for poetry and skateboarding.  Derived from the life of writer-director Minhal Baig, the film offers a novel angle on a familiar story of teen life.  It’s rather like Lady Bird in a headscarf.  Muslim girls wanna have fun too.  The title character is beautifully and touchingly portrayed by Australian actress Geraldine Viswanathan, who carries the film, even when in later stages it falls short of early expectation.  The name may be hard to remember, but the face is unforgettable, and will be looked for – and at – in the future.
 
Wolfwalkers (MC-87) comes with some expectation, having earned the Kilkenny-based Cartoon Saloon a profile in The New Yorker, not to mention an Oscar nom for best animated feature.  And it’s certainly in the running to win, representing the culmination of the studio’s trilogy on Irish folklore (following The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, as well as the estimable Afghani story The Breadwinner, all previous nominees).  A canny combination of history and myth, the film is set in 1650, when Kilkenny was occupied by the “Lord Protector” (i.e. Oliver Cromwell), who was determined to wipe out not just the wolves and woods of Ireland, but any vestige of Catholic or pagan belief.  An English girl forms an alliance with a wolfwalker, a woodland spirit who becomes a wolf when she’s asleep, to save the essence of the land.  The story is highly resonant and the characters engaging, but it’s the continuously and sinuously inventive hand-drawn animation that makes this “cartoon” a distinctive and transformative experience.
 
At $5 per month, Apple TV+ definitely earns its keep, month to month if not year round.