Stray viewing III

My devotion to Astrid et Raphaëlle (and hope for January arrival of season five) led me to look for another “Walter Presents” program on PBS.  The general opinion seemed to be that the next best (aside from murder mysteries) was the Danish series Seaside Hotel (IMDB), so I gave that a try.  I liked it enough to finish one season of six episodes, but felt no urge to persist through all ten, in much the way that Downton Abbey or Call the Midwife held my interest only for a limited time, as opposed to something like Doc Martin that attracted me for the long haul.  Set in a remote inn on the wild shores of Jutland, the establishment is run by a mismatched couple, with four maids (one of whom is the endearing main character) waiting hand and foot on a half-dozen well-to-do guest families.  The only outside character of any importance is the hulking hunk of a young fisherman nearby.  The first season occurs in the summer of 1928, and subsequent series go through WWII, apparently with most of the same characters.  The setting is very nice and the acting is good, with a mix of comedy, drama, and romance, but as far as tv from Denmark goes, this is no Borgen, but rather an intelligent, well-made soap opera with a touch of French farce.  [P.S. That said, my partners’ appetite for this cheese Danish exceeded mine, so I remained willing to sample occasional evening episodes, watching most of five seasons, without wearying of the characters.  The sixth season follows a gap of years and a shuffling of characters, and my interest waned a bit.  This series found a successful formula and stuck with it; highly watchable but hardly essential viewing.  The story beats are very predictable, but the treatment is appealing.]
 
By itself, “Walter Presents” justifies a bargain annual subscription to PBS Passport, but given the obvious value yet precarious state of public television, I intend to double my contribution at renewal.  I’m currently immersed in the latest Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution (MC-80), learning stuff and loving the visuals, and will report when I’ve made it through all twelve hours.  [Follow up: this had the stately pace of the Ken Burns brand, but focused more on military campaigns and less on the making of the constitution than I expected.  It demonstrates that we’ve always been a divided country, but not how we managed to come together in the first place around a founding idea.  I’m much less familiar with the campaigns of the Revolutionary War than those of the Civil War, so I appreciated all the battle maps.  I also appreciated the concerted effort to include Blacks and Native peoples in the story, and much of the artwork was of particular interest, though many repeated shots padded the length.  My biggest takeaway was the realization that the War of Independence was really the first Civil War – are we on the brink of a third?]

 
HBO and Hulu are two once major streaming channels that have suffered quality-wise under their corporate overlords.  While they once deserved their own round-ups, at this point they get lumped in with stray viewing.
 
Sorry, I’m just not certain what I think about Sorry, Baby (MC-89, HBO), even after watching it twice.  Repeat viewing speaks to being intrigued, but I remain somewhat baffled and leave it up to your judgment (of course I always leave it up to your judgment, but you know what I mean).  Writer, director, and star Eva Victor is obviously a well-rounded talent and an interesting character.  And I could certainly relate to the New England college campus setting.  Victor plays a graduate student and literature teacher whose thesis is about the short story form, and the film itself takes the form of five short stories out of chronological sequence.  The second episode gives the backstory of elided trauma, and the others show the various sequelae.  There’s a lot of deadpan humor, but also depression and panic.  I’ll certainly pay attention to whatever Victor does next, but I don’t feel that she precisely hit the bullseye on this maiden effort.  I’d put her in a category with Miranda July – provocative, witty, but not entirely comprehensible, to me at least.
 
As Auden says of Austen, Materialists (MC-70) aims to “describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,” but fails to bring Jane’s sparkling wit to the task of revealing “frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society.”  Or at least, of dating in contemporary NYC.  Dakota Johnson intrigues me, having caught my eye in The Lost Daughter but earning my derision for Persuasion (as bad as KK in P&P).  Of course I’ve never seen any of the Fifty Shades movies nor her Marvel incarnation).  I recently learned that she’s the daughter of Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hendren, and I try to read that Hollywood genealogy in her face. Here she plays a high-end Manhattan matchmaker, who admits that she knows about dating but not about love, and it's all about perceived value.  She submits to wooing by rich guy Pedro Pascal as a confirmation of her own value, though deep down she values Chris Evans, the broke actor she dumped some time back, a far cry from his Captain America (or so I’m told).  Director Celine Song follows up Past Lives with a rather compromised effort to make a serious rom-com, sacrificing some of the authenticity of her first film while not really delivering the pleasures of genre.
 
One last film to check out on HBO.  I read that Weapons (MC-81) was a horror film for people who don’t like horror films, so I gave it a try.  I got maybe 15 minutes in before the first jump scare, then called it quits.
 
For what remains of once-exceptional HBO series, I’m not up to the task of watching Task (MC-77) right now, but since it stars Mark Ruffalo and has the imprimatur of my brother for its Philly-DelCo local credibility, I’ll probably get around to watching at some point.  If so, I’ll insert comment here.
 
I might have canceled my Hulu subscription to protest Disney muzzling Jimmy Kimmel, but I was in the middle of a 12-week pause and they wouldn’t accept a cancellation, so I was stuck for another month.  On the upside, I could then watch one new FX series I really wanted to see, The Lowdown (MC-86), starring Ethan Hawke and created by Sterlin Harjo (of Reservation Dogs!!), a throwback private-eye drama set in Tulsa OK.  Gotta love it because here the P.I. is a constantly-vaping bookstore owner and part-time muckraking journalist.  I once had a book buying gig in Tulsa, so I enjoyed clocking familiar sights.  Hawke is for me the premium American actor of his generation, with the most interesting career choices from his teen years on.  He sinks his teeth into this role with relish.  Ryan K. Armstrong is delightful as his 13-year-old daughter, and many familiar faces fill roles large and small, as Hawke dives into the misdeeds of a rich local dynasty.  There’s quite a bit of Chinatown here, Jim Thompson’s work is a major plot reference, and dashes of Chandler or Hammett and their cinematic progeny are everywhere.   The settings seem authentic, and the country music accompaniment is great, not that I recognized much of it.  This also reminded me of another FX series, Justified, which is among my all-time favorites.  The eighth (and final?) episode makes a perfect ending, with several climactic scenes shot at the Philbrook Museum (where I worked) and Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, but I would surely be eager for more.
 
A rave review in The New Yorker last year put Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point (MC-72) on my watch list, and this month it came round to Hulu.  I’d rank my own enthusiasm at about the level of the Metacritic rating.  This is the product of a collective of recent Emerson College grads (who also made Eephus), here directed by Tyler Taormina.  It follows a holiday gathering some twenty years ago of a large Italian family on Long Island, but it’s no competition for the Christmas dinner episode of The Bear.  There are authentic moments of memory amidst the hurly-burly, but no overarching story emerges, though the first half centers on the siblings’ argument over whether to move grandma to an old folks home, and the second on a teenage granddaughter’s wild and/or mild night out with friends.  Some of the humor is entirely too deadpan, nothing seems very consequential, and little is resolved, but I suspect many might enjoy this upside-down Xmas family festival.
 
My favorite active American director Richard Linklater has two new films just out, but as I wait for the opportunity to see them, I took a look at one I haven’t seen since its initial release, School of Rock (MC-82).  It just turned up on Hulu and was as crowd-pleasing as I remembered.  Jack Black is manic and over-the-top, but still appealing.  It’s the kids, however, who make the film, as well as constituting the eponymous musical group that vies for a band competition and rocks their way into your heart.  Linklater is almost unique in his ability to range between popular entertainment and serious filmmaking.
 
I’d been looking for The Apprentice (MC-64) for so long that I assumed Trump had somehow blocked its distribution, but then it turned up on Prime and some other free-with-ads channels.  I found Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn highly believable, and the portrayal of The Donald as a young-ish man on the make fit right in with my own observations and preconceptions.  The settings are credible as well.  And the main thesis – that Cohn was the source of the Trump playbook of attack, deny, and never admit defeat – is undeniable.  It underlines the right-wing progression of the Republican party from McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich and through Cheney’s Bush to the brink of Trump’s fascism.  Iranian director Ali Abbasi has enough distance to walk a fine line between humanizing and demonizing the monster who rules us these days.  Unless you’ve already had too much of the attention hog dominating our public discourse, you’re likely to find this film entertaining and edifying, if also horrifying, for its masterful performances and sleek surfaces.
 
After enjoying Sarah Solemani’s performance in Him & Her and looking up her other credits, I saw she had written and starred in a series with Steve Coogan, another favorite of mine.  So I put Chivalry (IMDB) on my look-for list, and it finally turned up on Kanopy, in a breezy six episodes that only added up to feature length.  It’s a post-#MeToo satire on Hollywood with some amusing cameos.  Coogan is a loutish producer who must bring in feminist indie director Solemani to salvage a French misogynist’s film.  I still like both of them, but this seems a misfire, needing some third writer to salvage the series.
 
All to Play For (IMDB) caught my eye on Kanopy by headlining Virginie Efira, as they have many of her films, which I have been following assiduously, starting here.  She is predictably virtuosic as the single mother of two boys, who loses custody of the younger son after he’s burned in a cooking accident while she was at work in a bar.  She seems to have a good if somewhat loose relationship with her children and with two similarly unmoored brothers, but as her behavior becomes increasingly extreme, you have to wonder whether some fundamental instability is coming through, or whether she’s being driven insane by the child welfare system.  Don’t expect the film to decide that for you, but Efira’s natural warmth and empathy tilt the question her way.  Writer-director Delphine Deloget’s debut feature, properly translated from French as “nothing to lose,” benefits from her documentary background and suggests she may be a name to look for in the future.
 
I’ve got a lot more viewing to look for in the future, so come back here for reports on what I’ve been watching, next covering Mubi and AppleTV, and then a long-deferred return to Netflix.