TV

Revisiting the Prequel Problem

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

A couple of years ago I wrote some about the inherent problem with prequels:

But there’s an inherent problem with prequels – they’re playing in a universe in which the future is already known to us. That can box writers in and sometimes make it difficult for the prequel to stand on its own as a piece of compelling drama, something we should care about for its own merits.

I was specifically talking about Obi-Wan, the Star Wars prequel series that covers the time leading up to the original Star Wars movie. It has a kidnapped Leia in danger and multiple show downs between the younger Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, but there was a lack of tension since we knew that all of them have to make it into Star Wars in one piece.

Ironically, I contrasted that with another Star Wars prequel:

Star Wars knows how to do this. Rogue One is regarded by a lot of people as the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, even though we knew precisely how it was going to end. What made it work was that existing characters were largely absent and we got to know and care about a whole new cast so that when they made the necessary sacrifices to complete their mission it landed with some heft.

I say “ironic” because having finished up the second (and final) season of Andor I realized how much of a prequel problem that show had in the end.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, of course, given that Andor is a prequel of a prequel – Rogue One. What was surprising is that the issue wasn’t so much knowing who was “safe” draining the tension. It was that the series was so set on getting to Rogue One that it dashed along from event to even without leaving a lot of time to breathe and develop characters more.

By modern streaming standards Andor had a long run – only two seasons, but 12 episodes each, which feels positively indulgent compared to some (looking at you The Last of Us). While the first season was basically a straight running chronology, the second seasons breaks the episodes into four three-episode hunks, with each hunk separated by a year or more.

As a result, what at first felt like a slow burn character study of Andor and the people in his orbit turned into a sprint through important events necessary to get him to the beginning of Rogue One.

Does this mean that the sprint wasn’t rewarding? In a lot of ways it was. Apparently Ghorman and its fate is something that’s come up in other Star Wars properties, but I knew nothing about it, so the whole development there I thought was really well done. When the final hammer comes down it does feel earned, even if you wanted to know more about some of the locals before we saw them cut down.

Not too long ago I wrote about how, sometimes, form dictates how fiction turns out. I didn’t think about it then but “prequel” is another kind of form that forces creators to do certain things in certain ways. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but just as I talked about with the formal restrictions in that piece, it makes a difference in the end product.

Would Disney have ever let Andor play out over four or five seasons to dive really deeply into who all these people were (between Andor and Rogue One I still have no solid idea of Saw Gerrera or what exactly he’s up to)? Probably not. For all its quality and praise, my understanding is that Andor is not one of the Mouse’s hottest streaming properties. Without that time would it have been better not to rocket through years of things happening just to make sure we get to where we need to get? Maybe, but that was always the assignment and it’s impossible to say that Andor failed in it. What I am fairly certain of is that if the same folks had been given the freedom to tell a Star Wars story that didn’t have to plug into an existing narrative at some point the end result probably would have been even more rewarding

Form, Function, and Fiction

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

All art is driven by form, to a certain extent. Deciding to tell a story by writing a novel means a different form, with different strengths and weaknesses, than telling the same story by making a movie (which is why it’s often fruitless to compare adaptations to the source material). But sometimes creators will intentionally confine themselves even more, prioritizing form over traditional storytelling techniques. There’s recently been a couple of really interesting examples of this on TV.

The first to debut (although we came to it late), is The Pitt, the Max medical drama that is absolutely not a reboot of/sequel to ER.

Set in a takes-all-comers trauma center ER in Pittsburgh, the show’s catchy gimmick is that the 15-episode first season follows a single shift in the ER in real time (if you’re thinking such a shift couldn’t really be 15 hours long – it’s not an average day!). Noah Wyle (yes, of ER fame) plays the head doc as he rides herd over a bunch of residents, med students, and other medical professionals through the day.

The second to premier, which it did with a blast, was Adolescence, a British Netflix limited series about the investigation of a teenager’s murder of a teenaged girl.

As with The Pitt, Adolescence has a structural gimmick, too – each of the four episodes is done in one shot, so that it not only plays out in real time (for the hour – the series actually covers months of time in the end) but pretty much in one location. The first episode starts when police raid the suspect’s home, then follows him and others to the police station and the eventual reveal that he did, in fact, kill the girl. Other episodes feel a little more contained, particularly the third, which is basically a pas de deux with the killer and the psychologist trying to understand him.

In both cases, the format of the shows put limitations on how those stories were told. With The Pitt that began early, as they had to build the labyrinthine ER set before they could actually write anything. Given the “real time” framing, they had to know how long it took for people to get from place to place and what would be visible in the background of shots to know how all the pieces fit together. Likewise, in Adolescence the one-shot conceit meant there were no quick cutaways to other locations and other characters. That led to a tight focus on the killer and his family, to the exclusion of the victim or her family. As a public defender I found that focus refreshing, as often not enough attention is paid to the toll that crime takes on the perpetrator’s family. Nonetheless, it did lead to some criticism of the show for that focus.

What does that mean for how the form of these shows impact the viewing experience? I think the one-shot conceit for Adolescence makes a bigger, and more powerful, impact. The first episode expertly hands off from character to character, setting the scene at the station leading up to the killer’s interrogation and eventually admission. There are times when he disappears as the camera follows other characters around, reinforcing his isolation. The final episode, which includes a drive to the UK version of Home Depot after kids vandalize the killer’s father’s van, uses the drive time to supreme effect, giving us genuine human moments that, in other formats, might not land as well. The third episode, which is just the killer and the psychologist, is the least flashy but is intense. Only the second episode, where cops go to the school where the killer and victim went, feels a little hard done by the format, mostly because it’s a pretty big campus and there’s a lot of walking to be done.

The conceit feels less present in The Pitt. The most notable thing about it is that it avoids the typical medical drama pattern of wrapping up particular patients at the end of the hour. Some patients linger (and linger) for several “hours,” giving a better sense of how long ER visits tend to be. That said, aside from the slowly ratcheting up of tension over the hours there wasn’t one point where I was like “and that’s why they did it this way!” And the “one shift” idea drags down the reality of it a bit as no such horrible ER shift has ever existed in the history of the world. I would have liked to have seen a down hour where nothing major happens, people get a chance to breathe, and such. In the end the format works, and it doesn’t get in the way, but I’m not sure how essentially it is to the end result.

Art isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s shaped by the times in which it’s made and by the people who make it (who, themselves, are products of the times in which they’re made). Sometimes, artists will add additional barriers that shape their work and it can produce something really cool.

Sometimes It Just Doesn’t Work

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the third season of The White Lotus, so if you care about that kind of thing come back later.

One of the things about oral argument is that appellate judges love hypotheticals. Even garden variety criminal appeals can present issues that will resound through multiple cases in lower courts, so judges like to use hypos to test the limits of potential holdings or outcomes in any given case. Judges hate it when they ask a hypothetical question and the answer from counsel starts with, “that isn’t this case, Your Honor.” No shit, counsel, now answer the damned question!

I got those kind of vibes reading some of the criticism of the season finale of The White Lotus and the reaction to it of the show’s writer/director/creator, Mike White.

So far, all three seasons of The White Lotus are setup the same way – we initially see a dead body at an outpost of the titular resort, then rewind to a week or so earlier as we see the events that lead up to that death. This season, the finale included a gun battle that ended in a higher-than-usual body count (five dead, by some reckonings).

Some folks (myself included) complained that the swift manner in which the episode and, therefore, season, ended felt rushed, as the main characters (who weren’t dead) departed on schedule and apparently unaffected by the carnage around them. It’s not unreasonable to think the Thai police would sweep down on the place and question these folks or that some of them might be so shattered by the experience that they needed some kind of assistance (a trio of main characters were right in the middle of the firefight!).

White’s response to that criticism doesn’t strike me as particularly compelling:

Mike White, the show’s creator, thought the armchair critics were being too literal, calling them the “logic police” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“This isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows?”

There’s a fine line in criticism between knocking something for failing at what it’s trying to do and for not being what you think it ought to be (see, e.g, this review of Warfare that seems to condemn it for not being something other than it is). I’ve seen authors say they have a hard time reading for fun anymore because they can’t turn their writer-brain off and will try and think of how they’d have told the same story in a better, different way (I’m not casting stones – I can lapse into that mode, too). That seems to be what White is accusing critics of doing, but it doesn’t wash.

Nobody wanted or expected the show to turn into Law & Order: Thailand for the last half hour of the season (although a season arranged so that we know who died from the jump, with cops pushing rich dipshits out of their comfort zone, might be interesting), but it feels off to present not just on screen death but straight up murder (with multiple fatalities) and have it vanish into the atmosphere. Moreover if the show is, as White puts it, a “rumination-type show,” what event can cause more intense ruminations than witnessing a mass shooting? Granted they’re very different shows, but you can bet there’s some “rumination” going on among the characters of The Pitt following their mass shooting event.

Look, endings are hard and I understand that White had a lot of stuff left on the editing room floor due to time restraints, even with an hour-and-a-half finale. Still, sometimes it just doesn’t work or at least leaves people scratching their heads (as Bruce says, “not everything everybody does works all the time, son”). That doesn’t ruin all that came before it (it’s more about the journey than the destination, right?), but that also doesn’t mean people don’t have a point.

Sometimes you just have to accept the thing didn’t work and move on.

Thoughts on Rewatching “Homicide: Life on the Street”

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Last fall one of the great injustices of the streaming world was remedied when the entire run of Homicide: Life on the Street (including the wrap up TV movie) was finally available to stream on Peacock.

Yes, some of the music cues had to be changed due to rights issues (miss my “No Self Control” drop!), but otherwise the show looks and sounds better than it has for years. Created by Paul Attanasio (with an assist from director and Balimore guru Barry Levinson) and based on a book by then-journalist David Simon called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the show broke a lot of ground for network TV and helped usher in the cable shows we now think of as peak TV, including Simon’s The Wire.

I wish I could say I was into Homicide from the jump, but the truth is I only remember being able to drop in here and there during the show’s original run. I liked what I saw, but it was harder to watch a specific show back in those days, kids (it was on Friday night for part of its run, for fuck’s sake!). Where I really picked up the show was on cable a few years later and, ultimately, by getting the entire series on DVD. In spite of having it right there, I hadn’t really watched it for years until it hit Peacock last year.

The relaunch on streaming led to a good deal of reportage on Homicide’s place in the TV pantheon, which caught my wife’s attention. She’d not seen much of the show, but decided it was worth diving in in light of the hype. How does the series hold up during a full-length rewatch after all these years?

Dramatically, Homicide holds up remarkably well. Part of that is due to the fact that it doesn’t look or feel like a product of 1990s network TV. If you listen to the (hopefully not gone for goode) podcast Homicide: Life on Repeat, Kyle Secor and Reed Diamond talk a lot about how differently the show was shot and other technical things that are, mostly, above my head. Still, it doesn’t feel like a TV show from thirty years ago, from an era with commercial breaks and network censors looking over everyone’s shoulders.

That extends to the storytelling itself, of course. The cops of Homicide are not (generally speaking) heroes out there braving the mean streets to make the world safe for democracy. They’re just men (mostly) and women trying to do a job and get through days filled with horror, pain, and uncooperative witnesses. Cases frequently remain unsolved (the “board” – a large dry-erase board that lurks to one side of the squadroom tracking open and closed cases – is practically a character itself). Unlike it’s NBC stablemate Law & Order things rarely go to court, so most often it’s the arrest, the clearance of the case, that matters, not ultimately whether justice is actually done. Homicide depicts police work as a grind, as a kind of assembly line, rather than a great, noble calling. It’s not unlike the practice of law, in my experience.

None of that would work without amazing work from the cast, both the series regulars and guests (again, like Law & Order, there are lots of “hey, they went on to . . .” moments). Secor, as Tim Bayliss, provides the perfect audience surrogate, the new guy to the squad who has to figure out the rhythms of the work and whether he should really be there are all. Andre Braugher rules as Frank Pembleton, master of “the box,” and the last person you want to sit down with for a chat. That the series doesn’t shy away from the fact that interrogations are often about tricking idiots into incriminating themselves adds a sleazy sheen to proceedings.

I’ve already mentioned Law & Order a couple of times and it’s impossible not to compare the two shows. I’m no Law & Order hater, in spite of my profession, but that show does seem to have a more upbeat attitude toward police work than Homicide does. A great example of that is two stories that dealt with suspects who really looked guilty, but the facts didn’t show it.

On Homicide, Bayliss’ first case as a primary is the sexual assault and death of a young girl, Adena Watson. Through most of the first season he and Pembleton try to build a case against a neighborhood fruit seller who really appears to be the best suspect, but they can never actually pin the murder on him. An entire episode is devoted to his interrogation, after which nothing has changed. The case remains unsolved (as did the real life inspiration in Simon’s book) and haunts Bayliss through the rest of the series. Viewers are left without any real closure, either.

Compare that to the Law & Order episode “Mad Dog” from 1997, in which a rapist prosecutor Jack McCoy had convicted years prior is released on parole, over McCoy’s furious objection. Shortly thereafter, there is a rape/murder in the neighborhood that bears the released guy’s modus operandi, but no real evidence to connect him. Detectives and prosecutors spend most of the episode deploying various tools of surveillance and coercion to trip the guy up, to no avail (McCoy is even chided by his boss for “dragging the law through the gutter to catch a rat”). It could have ended like that, with a sense of unknowing and asking serious questions about police conduct. Instead, a second assault is interrupted by the would-be victim taking a baseball bat to the skull of her attacker – who is, of course, the recently paroled rapist. In a flash we get closure and knowledge that not only had the cops and prosecutors been right all along, but that the bad guys’s dead, to boot.

All of this leads to an interesting question rewatching Homicide after all these years – is it copaganda? That is, do the stories it tells valorize police in a way that polishes their public image in a manner that can lead to the public letting police get away with stuff they never should get away with? Although it’s hardly a new phenomenon, I don’t remember “copaganda” being a term back during the show’s original run or it being discussed as such. There are certainly moments when the show leans that way – for all their faults, the cops are still fairly noble and have a sense of purpose as “murder police” (as Meldrick Lewis would put it), but overall it doesn’t really feel like it. These cops cut corners, unashamedly treat some murders as more worthy of solving than others, and worry about bulking up overtime. It’s not pure copaganda, at any rate, which makes sense given the issues many of the characters’ real-world analogues have had.

But I might be biased. For all the glory heaped upon The Wire, which is great, I always held Homicide in higher esteem. It seemed to get there first, but did it with constraints that would strangle a modern “prestige TV” series. After rewatching I still do. It’s an amazing achievement and, if you’ve not seen it, you owe yourself some binging.

On the Half-Life of Revenge

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Revenge is a dish best served cold. – Klingon proverb

Revenge is an evergreen character motivation. Everybody, regardless of their station in life or what they do for a living, has gotten pissed off enough by someone to at least contemplate getting revenge. But how far can revenge get you in a story? Does there come a point where even the most righteous revenge starts to curdle?

I thought about this a lot while the wife and I were watching The Glory.

A South Korean drama from Netflix, it sprawls out over 16 hourish-long episodes (apparently originally released in two parts). The further on we got the less invested I was in the main character’s revenge arc – not because it wasn’t well founded, but because I had so much time to think about it.

The main character is Moon Deun-eun, who while in high school is constantly bullied by a group of classmates led by Park Yeon-jin. “Bully” here is really too tame of a term – they tortured the poor girl, which we see in fairly graphic detail (burning with a curling iron, for instance). They get away with it because their parents are rich and connected and Deun-eun is basically fending for herself (her father is absent, her mother worthless). After she drops out, Deun-eun struggles for a while until she dedicates her life to getting back at Yeon-jin and crew.

And she plays a long game. Over the course of years Deun-eun trains to become a teacher, eventually worming her way back into the lives of her tormentors by becoming a teacher in the school of Yeon-jin’s young daughter. From there she unwinds a pretty clever plot in which she does little herself to hurt anyone, but turns the others against one another in a way that leads to a fairly satisfying payoff. But it takes an awful long time to get there and, along the way, you start to wonder if revenge is really that great a deal, even if fully warranted.

To be fair, The Glory doesn’t let Deun-eun go quietly into the sunset when it’s all over. She’s basically stripped of her reason for living and only gets back on track by deciding to help her boyfriend get revenge on the man who killed his father. Nonetheless, your sympathies lie with Deun-eun only so far as the hot coals of revenge keep burning and I didn’t feel it at the end of 16 episodes.

Maybe it’s just the law-talking-guy in me but, in the broad view, revenge is bad. Bad for the soul, probably, but certainly bad for society. The law, in all its manifestations, is largely designed to replace systems of private justice – a.k.a. revenge. If your neighbor steals from you, you don’t break into his house and get your stuff back – you call the police or sue him. If someone kills your loved one, you don’t get to track down the offender and kill them yourself – that’s a job for the police, prosecutors, and the courts.

Emotionally revenge can be very satisfying, at least in fiction.

I mean, who couldn’t get on board with something like this:

On the other hand, being the better person just doesn’t have the same zip to it:

But for that very reason I think revenge works best in movies or a shorter series. There’s enough time to get you fired up and fully behind the main character’s scheme without giving you time to really think if they should be doing it in the first place. Revenge fiction works best when it harnesses that initial “this is bullshit!” reaction to learning about someone being wronged. The more time you have for that to ebb away, the less interesting the ultimate revenge is.

The quote at the top, of course, comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Critically, part of why that works so well is that the revenge seeker is the bad guy.

2024 – My Year In TV

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I continue my look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but new to me). This week let’s watch some TV . . .

Mrs. Davis (2023)

I can only imagine that the brainstorming sessions for this show must have included some mind altering substances. A nun scours the globe, with the help of various other colorful characters, in order to fight an out of control AI that might be taking over the world. Should this work in any way shape or form? No. Does it? Amazingly, yes. It’s funny, thrilling, compelling, and hits you in the feels. In a world overrun with IP-driven reboots and rethinks we need more Mrs. Davises.

Shogun (2024)

Not an original thought, I know – this once-limited series has been praised to the hilt since it premiered. Pleasantly, it completely lived up to the hype. Having no familiarity with either the original novel or miniseries (I’m not that old) I can’t say how it compares to those sources, but as a stand-alone piece of work it was brilliant. Was the ending kind of a cop out? In a way, but isn’t that what life’s like sometimes? Besides, there’s a second season coming to stir things back up!

The Sympathizer (2024)

This is another show that probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. The titular character is a North Vietnamese spy who infiltrates the office of a South Vietnamese general so thoroughly that when the general flees to the United States the spy goes along. What follows is a twisting examination of being and identity, punctuated with a lot of black humor. There’s a movie within the show that sends up Hollywood and Robert Downey, Jr. shows up in multiple roles. It doesn’t all work all the time, but, as with Mrs. Davis, this is more of the odd kind of storytelling TV needs.

Say Nothing (2024)

Say Nothing is one of the best books I’ve ever read (as I’ve noted before). When I heard at TV adaptation was in the works I was skeptical that they’d be able to pull off the same trick of telling some very relatable, personal stories about people involved in The Troubles while also providing enough high-altitude context to explore the wider conflict. The show, of course, doesn’t quite do that quite as well, but by paring things down a bit the story told wound up very powerful. The series performs a neat sleight of hand by setting the first few episodes as kinetic pieces of lawlessness and violence done for the cause and then pivoting to explore the long-term consequences of participating in those things. Excellent on its own, even better if it makes you want to read the book afterwards.

We Are Ladyparts (2021, 2024)

It’s a great elevator pitch – a series about a group of young Muslim women in Brittain (of Pakistani background) who form a punk band. Could be a heavy, maudlin examination of the struggle of outsiders in the modern UK, right? Or, it could be a very funny show with deep-down laughs and fun songs that also manages to dig into themes of belonging and identity. I was completely captivated, in spite of a couple of music-related nitpicks (the music isn’t really punk, even if the attitude is, and their plan for success sounds more out of the 1980s than 2020s). Hoping for more!

The Life of Rock with Brian Pern (2014) – Brian Pern: A Life in Rock (2014) – Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll (2016) – A Tribute – At the BBC (2017)

While watching stuff I frequently hop over to IMDB to figure out why a familiar face looks so familiar. I don’t know what we were watching or who I was looking up, but one of their prior works was Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll – needless to say, it piqued my interest. Brian Pern is a parodic version of Peter Gabriel – lead vocalist of a prog-rock band called Thotch in the 1970s who went on to a genre-defining solo career (he frequently states that he invented world music). Across three short seasons (three episodes each, plus a couple of later specials), Pern first chronicles the history of rock and roll then navigates his own failing career, which ends in a botched Thotch reunion and death in an unfortunate Segway accident. There’s a lot of very funny stuff over the seasons (which includes appearances from the likes of Rick Wakeman and Gabriel himself), but the first is the best. If you’re a fan of prog at all, or much mockumentaries, you owe it to yourself to track it down online.

Let’s Twist Again

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

DISCLAIMER: Again, this post gets into very spoilery details of a couple of recent Apple+ shows, Sugar and Disclaimer. If you’ve not seen either and want to experience them cold, bookmark this and come back later. Otherwise, onward!

There are, at least, two kinds of twists that writers can employ. One simply pulls the rug out from underneath you and changes the game going forward, but doesn’t do much to recontextualized what you’ve already seen. A few weeks ago I talked about the big “Colin Farrell is a blue alien” twist on Sugar, which falls into that category. Whatever the reveal entails for the show’s second season, it doesn’t cause you to look back at what came before and nod knowingly about how things have changed.

Another kind of twist is just the opposite, one that really turns all that came before on its head and makes you seriously rethink all you’ve already seen. Another recent Apple+ endeavor, Disclaimer, does just that.

Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (adapted from a novel of the same name by Renee Knight), Disclaimer is about a celebrated journalist/documentarian and mother, Catherine, (played by Cate Blanchett) whose life is turned upside down by the appearance of a slim work of fiction (no way it’s long enough to be a “novel”) that appears to be based on a traumatic event from her past. The book is self-published by the father, Stephen, (Kevin Kline) of a 19-year-old son, Jonathan, who died in said traumatic event, although the book was written by his deceased wife.

This is all, it turns out, a plot of the Stephen’s to ruin the Catherine’s life, as well of that of her husband and adult son, Nicholas. The book tells the story of a younger Catherine seducing Jonathan who then, in his besotted horniness, drowns rescuing five-year-old Nicholas from dangerous seas. It paints Catherine as not just an adulterous but a bad mother, concerned only with her own hedonistic pleasures rather than taking care of her kid.

But that story is, of course, fiction. You can tell by the way it’s shot and the fade ins/outs used to transition in and out of those scenes. Fiction can get at big truths sometimes in a better way than nonfiction, but in terms of the details of reality it has issues, particularly given the fairly flimsy basis (some apparently-sexy photographs) upon which this fiction is based.

The twist, which finally arrives at in the seventh and final episode but isn’t much of a surprise,* is Catherine’s side of the story: it was not a fling, an affair, or a lost weekend, it was sexual assault. She tells Stephen about how she didn’t actually know Jonathan, but that he managed to get into her unlocked hotel room, threaten her and her son with a knife, and then repeatedly assault her over the course of hours. This, of course, makes all we’ve seen before feel very different as a lot of what Catherine does can be viewed through the lens of her being a survivor of sexual assault, not just a brittle hothead.

Does that mean the twist works? I think it depends on the audience. This review goes into good detail as to why it doesn’t, although it can be summed up fairly succinctly: it’s not really much of a twist. It’s not hidden where the book comes from or what it is (apparently there’s a little bit more mystery in the novel) and you quickly realize that what you’re seeing in the gauzy Italian flashbacks is the product of someone’s imagination. It’s only a matter of figuring out when the other shoe drops, which the show gives away easily. Seriously, there’s a trigger warning before every episode about (among other things) sexual violence, none of which shows up in the first six episodes – guess what happens in the seventh?

But that assumes that the only point of a twist is to shock and surprise, to leave an audience thinking “I did not see that coming!” What if you’re after something else? Interviews with Cuaron (like this one) suggest that he was more interested in luring viewers into the headspace of those who read the book cold – several of whom comment that the Cahterine stand in “got what was coming to her” and that was a good thing – to judge her as a mother and a human being. The twist, then, forces viewers to confront their own biases and assumptions. It should make them feel bad about themselves.

Still, the “this is not exactly a twist” does undercut that idea a bit. So does the fact that Disclaimer is so very much. Cuaron is on record as saying this couldn’t have been done as a movie, but lots of viewers and critics, including yours truly, think otherwise. It would have to choose which movie to be – the serious study of grief, untold truths, and the aftereffects of abuse or the very pulpy revenge story in which Kevin Kline in old man makeup turns into a would-be murderer (the whole time I kind of wanted him to slip it Mr. Fischoeder territory, maybe have a golf cart). Part of the issue with the series is that it whiplashes back and forth in tone.

And then there’s the endless voiceovers (in at least two, if not three, voices and POVs) that mostly exist to make sure anybody who’s never watched a moving picture before doesn’t miss important stuff. There’s one scene, a flashback when Stephen and his wife go to Italy to recover their son’s body, and he finds evidence the kid’s been smoking again in his hotel room. The wife snaps that it was probably due to the girlfriend, and the Kline in voiceover explains that the wife never really liked the girlfriend. No shit!

Which is frustrating, because there are several good stretches in Disclaimer, some good performances, and it looks great (in the sense that sometimes “great” means drab and dingy). And the whole idea of luring viewers into one state of mind about Catherine then pulling a switcheroo has promise, but the whole fails to come together as a whole. And the twist, while vital to what it’s trying to do, doesn’t land like it should given what came before it.

As I said in my other post, twists are hard to get right. They’re also risky. If the point is to change a viewer or reader’s focus on all that came before it risks ruing it. A “gotcha!” twist my land flat, but it doesn’t necessarily blow up the rest of the work. I’m not saying the twist in Disclaimer ruins it, but I think there were much more interesting ways to reach the point it was trying to make.

Some Thoughts on “The Northman”

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. They both ooze atmosphere and can get by on that alone, but they’re also seriously weird, to boot. The kind of movies you walk away from asking, “what did I just see?” So while Viking revenge fantasy isn’t necessarily high on my list of favs, I did take the chance to watch his latest, The Northman when it came along.

The Northman is the story of Amleth, a 10th-century Viking prince who sees his father killed by his uncle, who then promptly carries off his mother. Amleth vows revenge and if you think this sounds a little like Hamlet, you’re right – they both riff on the same legend. His journey involves Viking raids, mysterious seers (one of who is played by Bjork!), a witchy ally, and, eventually, a mano-a-mano battle on an active volcano (shades of Revenge of the Sith? You bet!). It’s worth a watch, even if not up to the same level as Eggers’ prior work.

I do have some thoughts . . .

Can something be too accurate?

Eggers has a reputation for exacting precision in world building, going all in an getting the details right of the world of each particular movie. Not for nothing have all three Eggers films been set in the past (in one interview he laughed at the idea of making a contemporary film). For The Northman he engaged several experts on Viking history, ritual, and the like to create a world that sure feels awfully “real,” even if does involve things like unshakable faith, sorcery, and Valkyries carrying souls to Valhalla (as detailed in this profile).

I dig the detail. The world of The Northman is so gritty and granular that it feels “real,” even if there’s a lot about it that doesn’t exactly jive with reality. But can it go to far? I found a couple of reviews (one here, for example) that suggested that Eggers and crew get so caught up in details and being “right” about all sorts of small things that maybe other important parts of movie making get lost in the shuffle.

There are parts of The Northman that seem to be there solely because Eggers (or Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Amleth and was a producer) found out some cool things about Viking lore and wanted to put them on screen. I have no objection to that, but your mileage may differ. In fact, I can’t think of anything that feels like it could have been done “better” by fudging the details of the setting (most of the dialogue is in English, to be fair), so I don’t think Eggers puts verisimilitude as the highest and only value, but it’s clearly important. The film’s flaws (Amleth is a pretty boring hero with no apparent inner life or ability to reconsider his fate) are more down to the kind of story Eggers wants to tell rather than a fault in how it’s told.

Destiny versus storytelling

As I mentioned above, the legend of Amleth was the basis for Hamlet long before The Northman, but it makes for an interesting point of comparison. As this New Yorker review explains, Eggers’ Amleth is really nothing like Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane:

In regressing to Shakespeare before Shakespeare, Eggers replaces intricate and complex poetry with thudding banalities. He voids Amleth—a muscular warrior raised in crude ways and trained in cruder ones—of any inwardness, as if in fear of rendering him effete or off-putting. Eggers’s action-film Hamlet is neither bookish nor inhibited nor speculative nor plotting with far-reaching imagination of complicated stratagems—nor witty nor, above all, endowed with a sense of humor.

In other words, Hamlet is a tragic figure you can at least sympathize with – Amleth, not so much. Again, I don’t think this is a fault in Eggers’ execution as much as it is the kind of story he’s telling and the kind of world he’s telling it in. In Amleth’s world the constraints of fate are as real and binding on him as the law of gravity. If his destiny is to take revenge on his uncle it matters not that his uncle’s already had his downfall (his kingdom was taken by another king and he was exiled) or that his mother comes clean about who Amleth’s father really was (and her role in his death). Even the promise of a normal life in Orkney with the witch and their children can’t keep him from his destiny.

That’s the problem with destiny or fate or prophecy as a storyteller. Generally, writers and readers/viewers want characters – heroes, at any rate – who have agency. Or if they don’t they at least recognize that fact and rail against it or unsuccessfully avoid their fate. Tragedy is when you can’t stop yourself from doing what you shouldn’t, not when you just shrug your shoulders and go along for the ride. That said, the idea of a life free from moral choice – if I’m fated to die on a volcano, why live a moral, upstanding life – is one worth exploring, but it’s not what Eggers was after, for better or worse.

And, yes, the actual film doesn’t match the tagline on the poster.

The berserker and the office drone

Through sheer serendipity I saw The Northman while one episode away from end (of the first season?) of Sweatpea, a British TV offering showing on Starz in the United States.

Sweatpea is about an outwardly mild and meek office drone, Rhiannon, who been bullied by various people all her life and starts working towards bloody vengeance. Her primary target is Julia, a school bully (leader of a clique, in fact) whose abuse was so bad Rhiannon was literally tearing her hair out. Julie is first and foremost on Rhiannon’s list of “people I’d like to kill,” so she kidnaps her with every intent of doing her in.

Except there’s a complication – Julia, it seems, is a victim of her own, as her fiancé is abusive to her. Rhiannon is thus confronted with a person she wants dead who is suffering through the same stuff she’s gone through – but does that make right all the abuse Julie perpetrated in the first place? I don’t know how it’s going to play out as I write this, but the contrast with Amleth is striking. If Rhiannon goes through with killing Julia it will no doubt be her choice and I doubt it will be portrayed as glorious. Certainly, she’s not going to be flown off into Valhalla. But, then again, she lives in a modern world where things like fate and destiny are only found in, well, in movies and the like.

This Vox review has an interesting take on The Northman:

I wouldn’t go so far as “great,” but Eggers’ refusal to try and tell a story that’s such a throwback at least makes for an interesting watch. Consume in a darkened room and you may wind up thinking you’re back in Iceland, with the spirits of the dead all about you.

Now THAT’S a Twist!

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

NOTE: I don’t normally warn about spoilers, but if you’re at all interested in the Apple TV+ series Sugar, I would bail out at this point. I do recommend the show, so go check it out and come back when you’ve had a chance to see it for yourself.

Twists are hard to get right. Leave too many breadcrumbs in the early parts of the story and people will see it coming. Don’t leave enough and the twist comes along and makes no sense, as if it was just thrown in for shock. There’s a happy medium, where the twist isn’t obvious but, upon reflection, makes perfect sense in light of what came before it.

In many ways, I wish I hadn’t read anything about Sugar, the Apple TV+ series, before we watched.

We were always going to watch it because Colin Farrell is in it and he’s one of my wife’s “guys,” which is fine with me since he usually does interesting stuff. Still, I read a review when the show first came out, just to get a feel for the series, and it said straight up there was a big twist coming near the end of the season that, essentially, turned it into an entirely different show. That review wasn’t wrong.

Farrell plays John Sugar, a high-end private eye who specializes in finding people who have gone missing. Naturally, he has a mysterious past and an affinity for old movies (primarily film noir). After a prologue that sees him rescue the missing child of a high-ranking member of the Yakuza, he returned to Los Angeles where he takes a case of another missing girl, the granddaughter of a famous film producer. Sugar’s handler or partner (it’s unclear which, at first) tries to keep him from taking the gig, apparently because it’s too close to home – Sugar’s sister went missing when he was younger and the missing girl reminds him of her.

So far, so neo-noir. For six of the show’s eight episodes the series hums along in that mode as Sugar pulls back the veil on a sleazy underworld into which the missing girl has disappeared. It’s not anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s well done and an enjoyable watch. Then at the end of the that episode, after a furious explosion of violence, Sugar, alone in a hotel bathroom, decides to just “go home” for a while. He injects something into his neck and we watch as Farrel turns into a bald, blue alien.

No, not one of those.

It’s a hell of a swing, creatively, to turn the show’s premise on its head three-quarters of the way through. Except it really doesn’t. Sugar is part of a group of aliens on Earth to “observe and report” and their existence is now in jeopardy, but that’s about it. He still needs to find the girl and solve the mystery, except “aliens” is kind of sprinkled over the top.

Does the twist work? I’m still not sure. As I said, the big reveal doesn’t actually shift things all that much. Part of me thinks the sci-fi/noir blend might have worked better if we’d known about the alien stuff from the jump. The conflict between the “observe/report” mission and Sugar’s inherent need to help people would have been a good source of tension, particularly given the end resolution to the mystery of the missing girl.

But even if the twist does work, it seems to me that such a shift in the narrative so deep in the show (or book or whatever) makes it a difficult sell for audiences. After all, there are people who love noir movies that will never go near sci-fi and vice versa (one of the interesting things about having a table at book festivals is people often have no hesitation in telling me they don’t read “that kind of thing”!). How do you reach both audiences without spoiling the entire setup?

It makes me think of story ideas I’ve had that have made me wonder just how to present them. For example, I have a long-standing idea (it was my first failed NaNoWriMo project) about a regular guy who finds a book that purports to be filled with magic spells, which he uses to try and make a better life for himself (it backfires, obviously). I’ve toyed with rewriting that idea as a kind of epistolary novel (letters to his lawyer), but I wonder if that would lead to questioning whether the “magic” stuff is just conman bullshit or if it’s real? Does it make a difference if I’m generally a fantasy writer? Do readers have expectations?

I can only imagine someone who had settled into a nice, twisty neo-noir watching Farrell go blue at the end of that episode. Would they feel betrayed? Or would they be so invested in what was going on that they would just roll with it? Maybe that’s the point – being up front about the sci-fi element would scare some people away in a way that dropping it near the end wouldn’t.

While I still can’t say whether the twist really worked, it appears we’re going to have another chance to find out. Sugar has been renewed for a second season and it’ll be impossible to move forward without addressing the elephant in the room now.

Or the alien.

2023 – My Year in Movies, TV, & Podcasts

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Let’s talk about the past year on screens – big, small, and phone.

MOVIES

As has become the norm, I didn’t see a lot of new movies this year, although my wife and I did venture out to theaters a couple of times. One of those was to see the movie that I thought was the best of the year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

I don’t have a lot more to say about that movie, as it’s been reviewed and discussed to death since it came out. I will not say it is my favorite of Nolan’s films (I have a soft spot for The Prestige and always will), but it may be the most impressive. I thought James Camerson did well wringing drama out of a shipwreck we all knew about going in, but the tension developed during the scene with the Trinity test was another level.

The other 2023 movie I wanted to highlight was very different, a documentary called The Mission.

You may remember in 2018 when a missionary named John Chau decided he should try and convert a remote, isolated tribe on an Indian Ocean island and wound up being killed for his troubles. The Mission tells that story, based largely on Chau’s own diaries, along with letters from his father to the filmmakers. It uses animation to fill in the visuals, along with some talking heads that cover broader issues of missionary work and whether it’s more of a plague than a blessing. What really got to me is how Chau’s father watched helplessly as his son became more and more devout, captured by an evangelistic spirit, and charged headlong to his death.

As for the “new to me” class, it turns out that I spent 2023 getting caught up on a lot of good stuff from 2022. The first two are a pair of very different horror(ish) flicks, The Menu and Men.

The Menu is another in the recently popular “eat the rich” genre, this time skewering the wealthy and aloof via a snooty, high-end restaurant with the world’s worst customer service (or best, depending on your point of view). It’s darkly funny and enjoyable in a sick, twisted way. As for Men . . . well, it’s bizarre. A woman who suffered a recent tragic loss departs to a small English village as a retreat, only to find that it’s entirely populated by men (and boys, even more creepily) who all look alike (all played by Rory Kinnear, who’s a good enough reason to watch just about anything). It goes from unsettling, past creepy, into confusingly disgusting by the end, but it really stuck with me. It was the high point of several folk-horror movies I saw last year.

For something completely different, the absolute funniest thing I saw last year was Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

It’s a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic’s life, only it really isn’t. Instead, it skewers biopic tropes and pokes fun at Al’s own image and history. I watched it on a plane on the way to the UK last year and there were a couple of times I drew stares for laughing so hard.

TELEVISION

The watchword for television in 2023 was “endings,” as several excellent series came to an end, most notably Succession. Don’t sleep on the final outings of the gang at Archer, though. That was a show that had no business running as long as it did and continuing to be that funny. I wanted to highlight another couple of excellent shows that wrapped things up last year, however.

The first is Reservation Dogs, the Native American-led dramedy from FX (or Hulu, whichever).

Set largely on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, the show was about four young adults trying to make sense of their world and culture in the wake of their best friend’s suicide. It was often funny (the recurring presence of one character’s spirit guide in particular), but also quite moving. And while I would have loved to have gotten more of it, the series wrapped up in a very satisfactory way.

The other ending I wanted to note was also a return, and of a show I knew nothing about before its return, Happy Valley.

The ironically named series is set in Yorkshire and follows the tribulations of a woman who is both a police officer and stand-in mother to her grandson, the product of a rape that led her daughter to kill herself. It’s pretty rough stuff and, plotting wise, I have some issues with how they keep the father/rapist around as the series bogeyman, but the whole thing is held together by an amazing performance by NAME as the officer/grandmother. Very glad I stumbled into it on BBC America.

A pair of new shows really caught my attention, too. Each could have additional seasons, I suppose, but they work well as standalone experiences, too.

One is Scavengers Reign, an impressive sci-fi series from HBO (or Max or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days).

The setup is really simple – the crew of a deep-space flight crash land on an alien planet and struggle to survive. That’s really it for plot, which is slight, but that’s not the point of this show. Rather, the creators use the flexibility of animation to conjure a world that is truly and utterly alien, both amazing and terrifying in equal measure. In a way it reminded me of 2001 in the way it takes complete advantage of its medium. A trip well worth taking.

By contrast I wouldn’t recommend the trip taken by most of the people involved in Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (another Max offering), much less the titular mother herself.

On the one hand, this documentary is part of the current boom in docs about cults. What sets this apart is that so much of it is populated with video taken by the members itself as their leader goes from somewhat inspirational spiritualist to complete crank wasting away from overdoses of colloidal silver. It’s three episodes and there’s a part in the second where people say things that are just so stereotypically culty that you have to laugh. Then it becomes more clear is what we’re watching is a woman who surrounded herself with true believers that, once she needed help, weren’t able to provide it because they had gone so deep down this particular rabbit hole. It winds up being very tragic.

PODCASTS

I am not what you’d call a devout podcast listening (in spite of hosting one), but I do have a couple of favorites from the last year that I really enjoyed.

The first has been around since the early days of the pandemic, but I hadn’t highlighted it before – The Album Years.

Hosted by musicians Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness (who’ve worked together as No-Man, in addition to a host of other projects), each episode takes a particular year and works through albums from that year that stood out to them. The idea is to leave the obvious choices to the side and feature some lesser known, or perhaps lesser loved, work. Wilson and Bowness are literate in the area and have enough overlap in tastes that they can talk about a lot, but have enough areas of disagreement to keep things interesting.

The other was new for 2023 – If Books Could Kill.

Hosted by journalist Michael Hobbes and lawyer Peter Shamshiri, the tagline says it all: “The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” For each episode one of them (only one, usually) reads the featured book and they walk through the clichés, spurious claims, and just plain weirdness that infests pop psychology, self-help, and popular political/economics books. It’s funny, and often deeply sarcastic, but the work is kind of serious – we lap up a lot of bullshit as a society, often packaged in innocuous ways, so it’s good to call it out every now and then.

With that said, on to 2024!