Tasting the Apple

Back on AppleTV+ for another taste of their offerings, I follow up on my previous surveys here and here and here.  It’s definitely a channel worth sampling from time to time, though hardly capacious enough to maintain a year-round subscription.

Ted Lasso (MC-73) may have become a bit bloated by the third season, its half-hour episodes effectively doubling in duration, but retained many of its charms (see earlier reviews here and here).  By now the show was predictably unpredictable, and somewhat insufferable in its incessant would-be life-lessons, but still with a score of appealing characters, and a steady stream of witty pop cultural references.  The on-pitch action was certainly more impressive with a bigger budget.  But the show concluded with curtain call after curtain call, which outlasted my ovation and detracted from my retrospective enjoyment.  I won’t review plot developments or character resolutions, but just exemplify my equivocations in one scene.  In the penultimate episode, Ted’s mother shows up unexpectedly and she’s played by the mother from Freaks & Geeks, of blessed memory.  But she’s too much for Ted, and at dinner in the pub, he flees her presence to go pretend to take a turn at pinball; Mae the pub owner sees him frozen there and goes over to recite an entire Philip Larkin poem without acknowledging its source, which would have been all right if she had just quoted the famous first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” but as an appropriation just goes on too long (like a concluding bit filched from The Sound of Music).  High-spirited and good-spirited as it remained, I was not sorry to see it end.  Some spin-off series seems inevitable, but won’t be a much-watch for me, my English football enthusiasm having turned to Welcome to Wrexham.

I was looking forward to the second season of Swagger (MC-79), as I said after the first, and it did not disappoint.  Creator Reggie Rock Bythewood could easily have called this series Love & Basketball, if his talented wife Gina Prince-Bythewood hadn’t already made a great film of that name.  But maybe he’d reverse the terms, since Swagger’s most distinctive feature is the authentic and immersive quality of its on-court action, which is not at all to depreciate its Friday Night Lights model as a family and community drama.  Most of the characters return from the first season, having leapt from 8^th grade to senior year, winning several championships in the interval and now at a lily-white prep school vying for a national high school championship.  Again the show is resolutely topical, about issues involving young athletes such as college recruitment and endorsements (this my first encounter with NIL revenue for amateurs – “Name Image Likeness”), as well as tokenism, mass incarceration, social media, and various forms of abuse.  Earnest but not sappy, offering life lessons without hammering them home, continuously engaging, this show is a hidden treasure.  I urge you to discover it, if you’re any kind of hoops fan, or even if you’re not.  
 
As my approach to bookselling has narrowed, I no longer pay attention to bestseller lists, so when Brie Larson (whom I’ve looked for since Short Term 12, not to mention her Oscar-winning turn in Room) led me to the Apple adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry (MC-68), I had no idea of how popular the novel was till I saw its 240,000 ratings on Amazon.  I suspect people invested in the book may have had more quibbles with this 8-part series than I did.  My only negative observation is how alarmingly thin Brie Larson has become (how does she play a Marvel superheroine with those twig limbs?  I don’t know, being a dedicated avoider of the MCU).  Here she plays a brilliant, unnervingly candid chemist, derailed from a Ph.D. by her adviser’s sexual assault.  She winds up as a lab tech, who develops a close working and eventually romantic relationship with the research institute’s star chemist.  After several surprise developments, she finds a new career as the host of a television cooking show.  Larson’s committed authenticity surmounts any questions of plausibility in the twists and turns of the story, which delve into sexist and racial attitudes from the Fifties, nicely articulated in a manner reminiscent of Mad Men.  The series’ concluding episode removed any reservations I may have had about its diffuse approach, by resolving the various strands convincingly.  My rating would be substantially higher than Metacritic’s average.
 
Turning to films, Flora and Son (MC-76) is John Carney’s third attempt to recapture the magic of Once, and one more tale of Irish music (and relationship) making comes close.  This time the players are a divorced young mother and her delinquent teen son.  Eve Hewson makes her troublesome character appealing, and so does Joseph Gordon-Levitt as her online SoCal guitar teacher, who literally steps through her laptop screen for a romantic duet.  Meanwhile music provides an avenue of connection with her grumpy son.  Once more, melody brings people together in unexpected harmony.
 
Two canny conmen confront each other in The Pigeon Tunnel (MC-79), Errol Morris behind the camera and David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) in front, sparring around the elusive truth of the latter’s life, as a spy and bestselling novelist, but particularly as the son of another conman.  Derived from Cornwell’s memoir of the same title, and based on a recollection of his sketchy father, the metaphor is driven home by dramatization and repeated imagery, to complement the “interrotron” interviews with Cornwall in a library of mirrors, piecing together shards of truth and make-believe.  The beguiling web-weaving includes illustrative clips from film & tv adaptations of le Carré novels.
 
I was induced to give Fingernails (MC-63) a look by the presence of Jessie Buckley, along with Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed, but nothing could induce me to watch to the end of this inert treatment of a ridiculous premise.
 
Before letting Apple lapse, I’ll be starting the third season of Slow Horses in December (my rec for first two here) and hoping for an early streaming release date for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. 
 
HBO has been demoted to Max by media villain David Zaslav and is no longer a good streaming channel (let alone essential - you can always watch John Oliver on YouTube), so it’s only worth a postscript here.  It’s unlikely that HBO documentaries will sustain their former quality and range, most reduced to celebrations of celebrity.  Case in point: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (MC-72), which could have been another My Dinner with Andre, as Brooks and director Rob Reiner, friends for sixty years, talk over his career at an empty restaurant table.  There are many enjoyable tv & movie clips and the occasional personal revelation, but a surfeit of encomia from other comedians.  I’m a fan myself, and happy to revisit his success, but it would have been better to let the man – and the work – speak for himself.  And a roast would be more fun than repeated toasts.
 
Alexandra Pelosi may derive some celebrity from her mother, but she continues to carve out a good career with highly personal documentaries.  In The Insurrectionist Next Door (MC-tbd), she visits and directly confronts convicted J6-ers to find out what was on their minds when they stormed the Capitol and how they feel about Trump now.  The film is amusing and instructive, if ultimately dispiriting.
 
On the upside, HBO is now running a second season of Julia (MC-76), which pairs interestingly with Lessons in Chemistry in chronicling the development of cooking shows on early tv.  It also pairs with Happy Valley to demonstrate Sarah Lancashire’s range.  The first season took me by surprise, but the second seems more wobbly, unsure in its focus and purpose, but still engaging and amusing.  By the fourth episode, when the second season of The French Chef goes into production, the show seemed to regain its mojo and now I look forward to the rest.
 
One further postscript: PBS seems determined to correct my impression that their documentaries are losing some luster.  On POV, they just released Aurora’s Sunrise (MC-79), a multi-layered film about the Armenian genocide of a century ago, but with an upsetting contemporary relevance.  It’s the story of a teenager who remarkably survived the massacres to make her way to America, where she became a celebrity and starred in a lavish Hollywood film that spread word of the catastrophe.  The film recreates the story through beautiful, if horrific, animation, while intercutting surviving footage from the epic silent film and interviews with the refugee in old age.  It makes an edifying double feature with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (reviewed here).