What I'm Watching April-May Edition: Black Mirror, Poker Face, Blood Line, etc.

 

America’s #1 Family (Amazon); Ramy Yousef’s first series was poignant and packed wollops of sentimental value but let’s be clear: It was NOT a comedy, no matter what lies the golden globes or Emmys will try to feed me. The show still exists to give the Muslim community

much needed visibility, but it’s max funny. Leaning on the animated equivalent of fourth wall breaks, it had kinds of nods to old-school silliness with dream sequences of a kid’s teacher crush responding to her or the president popping in as guest star of the week.

Twisted Metal (Peacock): A post apocalyptic dark comedy with a certain aesthetic that screaming for you to notice it in the same way as a darker Wes Anderson, the Seth Rogen show Preacher or Robert Rodriguez. Anthony Mackie (the MCU) and Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine Nine) are the leads, but the series seems to be hoping its scene stealer, Sweet Tooth, will be the draw. Voiced Will Arent, sporting a psychotic clown mask, and a roused body similar to Batman’s Bane, he’s painted as a poor man’s joker in his childish antics and his randomness over who he kills (which is the most fear-inducing quality of even a boring villain). In the first episode, he wants the protagonists to listen to his stand-up act which is supposedly its own form of hell. Sound menacing enough for you?

The dark quirk angle is there but not hard enough to make the show wholly can’t-miss. It’s watchable, not spectacular.

Black Mirror (Netflix)-This season had 3 spectacular episodes—Bete Noir, Hotel Reverie, and USS McCallister 2-which is enough to excuse the fact that Charlie Booker swings big and won’t always get it right. Even this analysis undersells Black Mirror's batting average: Each episode revolves around a deep question (the Peter Capaldi episode, for example, asks "Are there consequences to being billigerent to video game characters?") that the viewer might not be interested in answering (like myself). Thes Eulogy episode was also of strong and poignant, but Paul Giamatti's take was too dark for my mood that day. Personally I like my mopey Paul Giamatti to not get outright clinically depressed as this guy was.

Poker Face (Peacock) Charlie Cale’s penchant for being at the right place at the right time is handled organically enough that it doesn’t feel like half the gimmick it is on every other whodunnit show of this nature. But the Peter Falk imitation, oy vey, let’s not overdo it Natasha Lyonne. As I said in the first season, what makes Poker Face great is that justice isn't always served in some perfectly congruous way. Virtually the only constant is that Charlie will be left to pick up the pieces and start a new life. This isn't dissimilar from the Western hero who is forced to ride off into the sunset over the closing credits, because he would never fit into the civilized society he helped build.

Through four episodes of the second season, Riann Johnson's series whole-heartedly immerses us into different subcultures (funerary homes, abusive child acting, the Florida animal control that birthed Gator King, etc). One episode is a half send-up to the Departed with the comedic stylings of Lyonne, John Mulaney, Simon Helberg and Rhea Perlman inserted in the leads (and yet, it somehow works). Ano

Bloodline (Netflix)-Because I was just visiting the Florida Keys, I was reminded of this series that was one of Netflix’s first streamers in 2015. Interestingly enough, Despite not being up of the big murder plot, that’s the long arc of the season, I am actually finding that the show consisted me based on the scenery porn, The quality of the acting, the chemistry, And the dialogue. The basic family dynamics, and the sense of what is happening in the smaller sub pots are enough to keep me engaged. I think this makes sense though, Not all viewing is predicated on people following every element of the plot.

Srugim (Yes TV, now on Amazon)- After doing a film talk about Judaism on film, I was convinced to look at an Israeli show. Despite being half-Israeli, I've never been particularly attached to Israeli culture and didn't initially think this had much to do with my American Jewish experience. There's a lot to unpack in my detachment from Israel (an anomoly among the Tribe) and enjoying one show isn't going to repair such a gap, but the point of my exploration between Judaism and the media was to illustrate that the gaps in our understanding of religion start out from a pretty immense place (even between sects of Judaism), so the media has a surprisingly large amount of work to do in our religious messaging.

In this case, the show focuses on a specific class of Israeli Jews who are Sabbath-obervant but not secluded from secular society. This quintet is on the verge of 30 and preoccupied with settling down. That tends to happen across the board for religious devotees who can't get it on outside of marraige, and the show deals with that quite frankly. 

The show is labelled as a drama which is accurate, but it veers into a certain dramedy territory and finds the appropriate soft moments to balance out the emotional heaviness. The five leads (except maybe Reut) can be described as self-sabatoging or more charitably described as taking a while to find themselves. Either way, it's highly compelling TV.

 

Unpopular Opinion: The Filmic James Bond Doesn't Work

 I just read my first James Bond novel, “You Only Live Twice.”

Before going into detail over what the books or what some of the films do right, I would like to talk about my idiosyncratic reasons for having fallen out of love with the film version of the James Bond character. As always, please consider subscribing or paid subscribing.

1. James Bond is more or less immortal because the script demands it, and the film rarely acknowledges this. 

Sure, it gets parodied in Austin Powers, but the Bond series itself rarely acknowledges such implausible outcomes where if at least a dozen events were off by a few seconds, Bond would be toast. That the film series treats this all as a cosmic irony without so much as a wink makes the hero look cocky in a negative way. I see no reason to not have tweaked the scripts so luck would have been less of a factor.

In worst-case scenarios, it feels like a cheat, and in a cosmic way, as if Bond might be responsible for the deaths of those close to him since he has to survive and the script demands a sacrificial lamb. When secondary Bond girl Miranda Frost says to Bond, “sex for dinner, death for breakfast”, it’s not accurate in a literal sense: Bond does not kill or even fail to prevent the death of his sexual conquests through negligence.

However, take the example of You Only Live Twice when Bond has sex with Japanese agent Aki. As the two are sleeping after the act, an enemy ninja unfurls some poison that is meant to kill Bond but he sneezes and the poison is blown to Aki instead. Bond didn’t do it intentionally but if he were not a character in a movie and a news figure, why would he deserve to live over her?

2. Bond being the paragon of manliness but by all accounts being a “hit it and quit it” kind of guy.

Sure, it’s all between consenting adults (just kidding, there are at least two instances of rape that I remember off the top of my head), but why can’t he feel a sense of romantic love for anyone he encounters? Yes, there’s that one women he married, but that’s treated as a fluke. For the most part, Bond faces the convenience of the woman who doesn’t want strings, but that also means the character never has to face an actual point of possibly hurting someone and navigating a mature conversation about his partner’s feelings (except for the woman he raped in Thunderball, Patricia Fearing, who we see him dumping on screen; and sadly the Patricia Fearing rape/dumping is horrific but not fully out of character). What this implies is he’s likely dumping the Bond girls between movies, although who knows maybe a few of them might he mutual.

What does this all say about masculinity that this great hero of manhood conveniently gets to avoid any serious conversations.

There are a few exceptions before the Bond era: He shows genuine care about the secondary Bond girl (Paris Carver) in Tomorrow Never Dies, the main Bond girl in Living Daylights, and Sophia Marceanu in World is Not Enough. Bond also shows admirable restraint in View to a Kill; convincing enough that maybe he wasn’t thinking about bedding her the entire time.

3. Bond’s License to Kill- 

James Bond’s “License to Kill” has never made any sense. If it’s self-defense, then his right to kill is no different than anyone else’s. If it’s within the context of war or what a spy mission might entail, that would be governed by rules of engagement (i.e. the Geneva convention). But beyond that, you’re just a murderous a-hole. If the argument is that Bond can be trusted to make ethical decisions in the field over whether to pull the trigger, I see little evidence of this in practice.

Some might say “why does this matter? It’s just a movie?” Sure, but movies are carefully calibrated to lure audience sympathies to one side or another. The only reason to root for James Bond is that the other side is generally someone who will destroy the world if unchecked.

Sidenote: Proponents of intersectionality like to label James Bond as a prime example of all the isms: sexism, xenophobia, racism, etc. I will disagree there if we use the films as text that just because Bond is sexist, that he is also racist and xenophobic. I see no evidence that these traits of the literary character make their way onto the screen.