Taking "The Substance"

Spoilers ahead.  "The Substance" is one of those movies best enjoyed knowing as little as possible going in, and I highly recommend it to horror fans.  Its the best horror film in a year that's been great for horror.  However, it gets pretty gruesome, so be warned.  

I'm writing a spoiler review, because there's a lot to talk about, and I want to talk about all of it.  And I mean all of it.

Writer and director Coralie Fargeat has returned after far too long for her second film, "The Substance."  It's a body horror movie, about an aging actress named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who is fired from her role as a television fitness host, because a network executive, Harvey (Dennis Quaid) wants someone younger.  Elisabeth is given a chance to access "The Substance," a mysterious drug that promises to create a better version of herself.  This better version is Sue (Margaret Qualley), a beautiful young woman who emerges fully formed from Elisabeth's flesh to become the new "It" girl, but she can only be active when Elisabeth is comatose, and vice versa.  They share a life, governed by strict rules, time limits, and mutual dependence.  Balance and respect are vital to making their double-act work, and of course things go bad very quickly.

You could treat "The Substance" as an elevated horror  film.  It's a new take on the "All About Eve" story with a fading star being replaced by an ambitious ingenue, with plenty to say about fame, aging, self-hatred, and internalized misogyny.  Demi Moore uses her status as a former A-lister in her sixties to stand in for everyone bitter about being past their prime, and all the women who are subjected to impossible beauty standards.  The most impactful scene is surely the one where Elisabeth is getting ready for a date and gradually goes to pieces because she just can't stop comparing herself to Sue's physical perfection.  Moore has never been more vulnerable and sympathetic onscreen.  And of course "The Substance" is also about substance abuse in the most unsubtle terms, with the viciously entitled Sue demanding more and more time and resources, to Elisabeth's detriment.  

I, however, am here for the filmmaking.  As a visceral thrill ride, "The Substance" is fantastic fun.  Taking place in a more overtly sleazy, bygone version of Hollywood, everything is deliberately heightened and stylized.   The hypnotic slow motion, the smash-cut juxtapositions, the '80s aesthetics, and the symmetrical frames had me unable to take my eyes off the screen.  And everything from the heightened sound design to the typography of the title cards is designed to elicit a very physical reaction from the viewer.  I can't remember the last time I experienced so much sensory overload while watching a movie.  Everything from a man eating shrimp to crinkling plastic bags to smeared makeup leaves a tactile impression.  Several pivotal scenes play out with no dialogue because it's totally unnecessary.  When the shock of blood and gore appear at last, it's almost a relief to be seeing more traditional horror images.

There have been some complaints circulating recently that you can't have female nudity in movies anymore without causing offense.  "The Substance" provides a strong counterargument.  I appreciate Fargeat's approach - both Moore and Qualley spend quite a bit of time in the buff, but it's never nudity for its own sake.  Their bodies soon become canvasses for needle pricks, gaping wounds, weathered skin,  mysterious lumps, and so much more.  Sue is sexualized constantly, but usually for comedic effect or to spur on Elisabeth's discomfort and resentment.  The aerobics program, notably, is constantly showing us crotch and posterior shots, but in such a way that is totally dehumanizing, until the female body parts look positively alien.      

In the last twenty minutes the movie goes full gonzo splatterfest.  Monstro Elisasue at the New Year's show is a masterpiece of grotesquerie, right up there with the best visuals from "The Thing" and "The Fly."  I never thought I'd see a prosthetic monster like this onscreen again, and it was thrilling.  Even better was Fargeat's willingness to go so far over the top in the delightfully insane finale, pushing all the camp and monstrosity into the realm of glorious, gooey Grand Guignol.  There are references and homages to so many other horror classics from the likes of David Cronenberg, Peter Jackson, John Carpenter, Brian Yuzna, and Stanley Kubrick.  

And Coralie Fargeat is making a great case for herself as one of those horror greats.  May her next film make it to screens faster than this one did.

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"Batman: Caped Crusader," Year One"

I've been a fan of the animated DC universe, starting with "Batman: the Animated Series" from way back in the early '90s.  However, with the proliferation of different titles and projects that often don't exist in the same timelines, or have much to do with each other at all, I've been pretty selective of which animated Bat-projects I watch these days.  "Batman: Caped Crusader" is the newest animated Bat-series, based on the earliest "Batman" comics from the 1940s and 1950s.  It has an all-star cast, and "Batman: the Animated Series" creator Bruce Timm serving as showrunner.  The first season consists of ten serialized episodes, and is aimed at an older audience - not the "Harley Quinn" series audience, but viewers who will appreciate stories that are a little darker and little meaner.

The first thing you'll notice is that this is a very different Batman (Hamish Linklater) from the modern versions of the character.  He's still pretty early in his career as a crimefighter, and has a lot of unprocessed trauma, so he's harsher and colder.  He calls his devoted butler Pennyworth (Jason Watkins) instead of Alfred, and is treated as a dangerous criminal by the police, led by Commissioner Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart).  Gotham City looks like something out of the 40s, but Gordon and his public defender daughter Barbara (Krystal Joy Brown) are people of color.  There are also several crooked cops on the force, including Harvey Bullock (John DiMaggio) and Arnold Flass (Gary Anthony Williams).  The ambitious district attorney, Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader), has some shady dealings too.  Other characters include the rare trustworthy cop, Renee Montoya (Michelle C. Bonilla), an Asian Harleen Quinzel (Jamie Chung), who becomes Bruce Wayne's therapist, and a female Penguin (Minnie Driver), who is still a vicious criminal.

So, while "Caped Crusader" is designed to look like the oldest old school "Batman," it's taking elements from source material from every era, and creating some new variations specifically for this series.  Obscure villains like Firebug (Tom Kenny), Onomatopoeia (Reid Scott), and Gentleman Ghost (Toby Stephens) join perennial favorites like Catwoman (Christina Ricci) and Two Face (Bader).  This gives Timm and his crew the opportunity to play around with the Batman mythos, trying out more complex and interesting takes on the material while exploring some of the deepest deep cuts that only true Batman obsessives will know about.  I like that the series really gets back to its roots as a crime story, with Barbara Gordon and Renee Montoya serving as secondary protagonists trying to tackle corruption and injustice in many different forms.  I like that a lot of familiar faces show up, but often in different roles, or with different personalities.  Harley Quinn is a fascinating case, a character who didn't exist in the early comics, and has always been defined by her relationship to the Joker.  The "Caped Crusader" Harley is a formidable villain in her own right, a calculating manipulator with a downright scary modus operandi.      

The show's weak point is its animation.  The character designs often diverge from  expectations on purpose - less colorful and a bit more grotesque when it comes to characters like Two-Face - but the animation is noticeably lackluster compared to the older "Batman" shows.  An episode featuring Clayface (Dan Donohue), for example, looks noticeably stiff and clunky, without any of the transformation sequences usually associated with the character.  The tone of the series is harder edged, more pulp than noir, and in getting the visuals to match, the show often looks cruder and less polished than I expected.  If "Caped Crusader" were totally focused on street level crimefighting I'd find this more understandable, but there are a few episodes with supernatural and fantastical elements that could have benefitted from a little more visual flair.  I'm hopeful, however, that this will improve if the show gets additional seasons.       

And I'm very glad that "Caped Crusader" got made, and found a home with Amazon Prime away from David Zaslav's interference.  It's a unique, clearly very personal version of Batman from Timm, who has been away from animated superheroes for too long.  It's niche and not as viewer-friendly, and might have an uphill battle attracting fans, but I really want to see where this one goes.  

    

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"Alien: Romulus" Rebounds

Minor spoilers ahead.

We've seen the "Alien" franchise get all grand and epic in Ridley Scott's recent trilogy, and now it's dropping all the fancy philosophy and mythology in favor of getting back to basics. The newest "Alien" movie, "Alien: Romulus" is a haunted house in space movie, just like the original "Alien," where a group of unwary youngsters stumble across an old space station and accidentally unleash the most lethal killing machines in the universe.  And thanks to the efforts of director Fede Alvarez, and his talented cast, it's a pretty good time.

The first twenty minutes of "Romulus" are the most important, efficiently setting up all the characters and stakes that will get us to care about the other ninety-odd minutes that follow.  Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an exploited worker on one of the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation's miserable space colonies.  She and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson), a simpleminded salvaged android, are convinced by friends to take part in a foolhardy scheme - they plan to steal cryo-chambers from a derelict vessel that has entered their system, and use them to escape to Yvaga, the nearest planet with better conditions.  Along for the ride are Tyler (Archie Renuax), Rain's ex, his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), who is pregnant, their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), a hothead, and Navarro (Aileen Wu), who is their pilot friend.       

Rain and Andy are the only two characters you really need to care about, and Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson are perfectly cast.  Rain is our new Ripley, full of empathy and painfully vulnerable, but capable of keeping her nerve under pressure.  Andy continues the franchise's long tradition of fascinating android characters, and there are all sorts of implications to our first non-Caucasian model being presented the way Andy is in this movie, with the character arc that he gets, that I'm going to enjoy unpacking later.  The other actors are solid, especially Merced and Wu, who are featured in some of the most graphic and upsetting horror sequences - have we had enough traumatic births this year? - but aren't really full characters the way that our leads are.  As with most of the "Alien" movies, the survival rate is not high, and we don't need to get too attached.    

 

I wonder if the most recent round of reboots and legasequels are best suited for more casual franchise fans who actually don't remember all that much about the original films.  I spotted several of the most distracting callbacks and homages to the original "Alien" in "Alien: Romulus," but I know I missed a few others.  I'm not sure why they bothered with the old one-liners and cameos, since "Romulus" is essentially one giant homage to the first two "Alien" films already, full of chases and fights on metal catwalks, viscerally scary alien creatures, and highly destructive weaponry.  "Romulus" gets top marks for its production design and creature effects.  The facehuggers and xenomorphs are as alarming as ever onscreen, and Fede Alvarez understands how to use them for maximum impact.  This one really  feels like the "Alien" movies I watched as a kid, not just because it's using old computer displays or getting out the puppetry rigs again, but because "Romulus" is a very simple, straightforward story.  Once the facehuggers are loose, everyone just needs to get out alive.     

So for the most part, "Alien: Romulus" is everything I want out of an "Alien" movie.  It presents some new monsters to have nightmares about, introduces some new heroes to root for, and delivers some really excellent chills and thrills.  If you're here to get your questions answered about the space jockey or the "Prometheus" Engineers, this is not the movie for you.  If you're here to scream at the monsters and root for the girl with the big gun to make it to the end, I recommend it.  Like "Twisters" earlier this year, the movie may be part  of a franchise, but it works because it gets the fundamentals right.  "Alien: Romulus" is genuinely scary, gruesome, exciting, and a great time at the movies.  Sequels are being planned, of course, but I'm only interested if they keep the scope limited and the stories dead simple.  For "Alien," you really don't need anything else.  

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"Rings of Power," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.  

Back to Middle Earth we go, and I'm happy to report some improvements in the second season of "Rings of Power."  There's a lot less focus on the boring human storylines this year, for one thing.  Bronwyn was killed offscreen because her actress left the show, so Arondir goes on the road with Bronwyn's son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) and Isildur for a few adventures.  Numenor's war over the throne continues, and the Stranger's journey with the harfoots brings them into contact with Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear) and a Dark Wizard (Ciaran Hinds).

However, the bulk of the attention is given over to Sauron, who takes on a new form to help him manipulate the smith Celebrimbor and facilitate the forging of more magic rings.  Charlie Vickers emerges as an excellent lead, playing Sauron as an ambitious anti-hero.  Flashbacks fill in his history with Adar and Morgoth, and in the present, Sauron's actions in the elf city of Eregion become the major crux of all the elf and dwarf-related storylines.  Galadriel and Elrond clash over how to respond to Sauron's seizure of the Southlands.  Durin faces a crisis as his father (Peter Mullan) falls under the influence of one of the rings.  Things escalate to an impressive battle episode at the end of the season, and several major characters get an excuse to don armor and wield weapons. 

The show still suffers from having showrunners who have never done anything remotely on this scale before, and are still struggling mightily with the learning curve of creating episodic television.  There are still story turns that happen way too fast, characters who feel inconsistent, and muddled motivations everywhere you look.  Some of the editing choices are downright confusing.  The show is now much more engaging, but it's leaning as hard as ever on tropes and imagery established by the Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.  This year, multiple characters struggle against the influence of magic rings, and the show tries its hand at large-scale warfare spectacle with the conflict at Eregion.  It all looks great thanks to Amazon's deep pockets, but it also pings as awfully familiar.  

However, I appreciate that the people in charge are clearly Tolkein fans who are willing to get nerdy.  There are the elves and orcs with dialogue in their own languages, and a couple of scenes in English where everyone really commits to trilling all their R's.  There's the episode that features multiple characters and locations from "Fellowship of the Ring" that didn't make it into the film version, including Tom Bombadil and his wife.  An entirely different group of not-Hobbits called Stoors are introduced.  At the same time the creators are not afraid to depart from Tolkein's writing for dramatic purposes.  The condensing of thousands of years of Middle Earth history continues at breakneck speeds, with significant pruning to make it all fit together coherently.

The second season is an improvement on the first largely because it has figured out what's working and what's not, and is adjusting accordingly.  However, it's also going off of a five season plan that is going to involve a lot of the characters who didn't get much of the spotlight this year.  Frankly, it's going to take some effort to get me to care about Elendil or Isildur or anyone at Numenor the way I care about Elrond and Durin, who still have the most watchable and interesting relationship out of anybody in the whole show.  But now that the writers are on better footing, maybe they can do better with the humans than throwing random love interests at Isildur or cramming everything for Elendil into one episode.    

In any case, I have every reason to believe that the show will continue to entertain me.  "Rings of Power" isn't up to the level of the film trilogy, but it's doing a decent job of being a television show set in this universe. 

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Your 2025 Oscar Nominees

I'll be frank.  I've had a rough time with the awards race this season.  This is usually the halfway point of my viewing year, which means that I have about six months of 2024 movies still to watch before I make my own list of favorites - I don't have access to everything I want to see any sooner.  Of the Best Picture nominees for the 97th Academy Awards, I still need to see three.  That's normal for me.  However, I  find myself more frustrated than usual by the Academy's picks.  "Anora" and "The Substance" are among my favorite films of 2024 so far.  Great.  "Wicked" and "Dune: Part Two" are solid, maximalist, popular favorites.  No complaints there.  "Nickel Boys" and "I'm Still Here" are smaller films that were heavily championed by critics.  Fine.  No comment on "The Brutalist" or "A Complete Unknown" yet.  

However, that leaves us with "Conclave" and "Emilia Pérez," two films I find exasperating to have to keep thinking about.  Neither worked for me, and "Emilia Pérez" is especially mystifying considering the ongoing backlash from the Mexican and transgender communities.  It's not a bad movie, but I struggle to call it successful at anything it's trying to do.  I do not understand what Jacques Audiard is doing in Best Director instead of Denis Villeneuve, Edward Berger, or RaMell Ross.  "Conclave" was just too silly for me to take at face value, though it fits a certain mold of socially conscious Oscar bait that I guess I can follow the logic of.  The fact that these two are the likely frontrunners in the Oscar race right now makes me feel a little crazy.  "Emilia Pérez" has thirteen nominations, which makes me wonder if Netflix finally called in supernatural intervention in their quest for a Best Picture statuette.  

The most obvious snubs are "Challengers" and "Hard Truths," which were totally shut out.  "Sing, Sing" made a valiant effort, but didn't make the Best Picture list - if it had to be "Sing, Sing" or "Nickel Boys" though, I'm happy it was "Nickel Boys."  Also-rans like "Gladiator II," "All We Imagine as Light," "September 5," "Maria," "Babygirl," "The Last Showgirl," and "I Saw the TV Glow" never managed to gain enough traction to be real contenders.  I'm genuinely surprised that Denzel isn't in Supporting Actor for "Gladiator II" and Daniel Craig isn't in Best Actor for "Queer."  "The Apprentice" picking up nods for Sebatian Stan and Jeremy Strong is very gratifying though, after the difficulties that movie had to navigate all season.

In the less visible categories, "Flow" popped up in both Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film, which managed to get around the language rules by having no spoken dialogue.  "No Other Land," the Palestinian feature about resistance efforts in the West Bank, still has no U.S. distribution at the time of writing, but hopefully the increased attention will help.  Elton John getting a Best Song nomination for his recent documentary feels like a blatant ploy to get him to play the Oscar telecast, which I can't be too mad about as someone who actually watches the Oscar telecast - except they're skipping the song performances this year.  "Nosferatu" got a Cinematography nod and three craft awards, which suggests that it was a stronger contender than I had thought - "Dune: Part Two" essentially got the same thing when you take out the Best Picture nomination.  "Wicked" is noticeably missing from the Cinematography category, in case you were following that bit of controversy.

Between the Los Angeles area fires and the Trump administration antics, I'm already exhausted at the thought of watching this year's ceremony.  However, Conan O'Brien is hosting, and that's a minor miracle that I can't ignore.  I already know that my favorites aren't likely to win anything, and I don't really mind right now.  Maybe after I've seen more of the nominees that will change.  I feel about the Academy Awards nominations like I feel about the state of the world in general in 2025 - defeated, disengaged, but doing my best not to throw in the towel.  The entertainment industry is important to me, and whatever you think about the Oscars, cancelling them just means more financial hardship for the movie business.  

So, bring on the disaster relief appeals and the trans solidarity and the "Succession" jokes.  The show must go on.  

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About That Beetlejuice Sequel

I want to get two things about "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" across.  First, it follows the usual template of one of these completely unnecessary sequels that happen decades after the original.  When it's not retreading old bits and playing the greatest hits, it's juggling way too many half-finished ideas and subplots.  The story is a mess, the characters are creaky, and "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" doesn't hold a candle to the original.  However, the movie is still entertaining as hell, and the most its fun I've had with any Tim Burton project in a while.

Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) grew up to be the host of a spooky reality show about hauntings, much to the consternation of her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who doesn't believe in ghosts.  After Lydia's father dies, Lydia, her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara), and Astrid return to the old house to settle affairs and hold the funeral.  Lydia's scummy boyfriend and producer Rory (Justin Theroux) tags along, hoping to manipulate her into tying the knot.  The demon Betegeuse (Michael Keaton) is thinking the same thing, re-emerging from the Netherworld to pursue Lydia again.  This time there's a ticking clock in the form of Delores (Monica Belluci), Betegeuse's murderous, soul-sucking ex-wife, who wants him back.  Also in the mix are Willem Defoe as a Netherworld detective who used to be a actor, Arthur Conti as Astrid's local love interest with  nefarious intentions, Danny DeVito as an undead janitor, and Nick Kellington as Bob the zombie.   Jeffrey Jones does not appear in this movie to reprise his role as the deceased Charles Deetz, but Charles does play a part in the story. Er, part of him plays a part.

If you're watching "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" for some kind of coherent story, good luck.  Most of the plot revolves around Lydia, and as much as I love her, Winona Ryder is not the strongest actress and Lydia isn't a very interesting character this time out.  However, if you watch it for the vibes and the kitsch and Tim Burton proving he can still be funny, you won't be disappointed.  So much of the film boils down to Burton getting anarchic and letting his inner child run wild again.  We get animated sequences with good, old-fashioned stop motion animation.  We get an icky Netherworld populated by morbid walking visual gags, including all of Betegeuse's co-workers being those dudes with shrunken heads.  There's a minute or two of Mario Bava homage.  There's a climactic musical sequence, set to Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park," that goes on for way too long.  The Soul Train that ferries the dead to the Great Beyond is, of course, an extended "Soul Train" joke.   Many of the callbacks don't need to be there - the opening sequence is a direct lift from the original "Beetlejuice," and "Day-O" is shoehorned into the film in the most inelegant way possible - but there aren't that many to worry about.   

Even if the filmmakers don't quite know what to do with them, I love seeing Willem Dafoe get a chance to ham it up as a detective who needs cue cards for his hardboiled speeches, and Monica Bellucci stapling her scattered limbs back together.  Dependable Catherine O'Hara is still playing Delia as the artsy kook who will never compromise on her vision - but did learn to love her weird stepkid.  I don't feel like I got enough of Michael Keaton, but that was true of the original movie too, where Betelegeuse wasn't actually onscreen for very long.  We get some more backstory for him here, but wisely not too much.  Keaton's best scenes are where he's being the nasty funhouse freak, terrorizing the mortals and oozing used car salesman smarm.  

The art direction is epic stuff, and I love that it's so tactile and gooey. Does anyone else ever get nostalgic for good splatter?  I'm sure there's a lot of invisible CGI involved here, but there's also way more practical props and costumes and foam-rubber everywhere, to really make it feel like the '80s again.  Looking at the budget figures, none of this cost very much, but it doesn't feel like they cheaped out on the production at all.  To the contrary, watching Tim Burton get back to his roots playing with puppets and prosthetics is an absolute joy.  After years of Burton doing mediocre Disney films, it's such a relief to find out he's still got this kind of silly, sloppy Halloween hijink-fest in him.   

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"Disclaimer" Doesn't Work

Minor spoilers ahead.

I don't think there's another streaming project from 2024 with credentials like "Disclaimer," the Apple TV+ limited series.  It was entirely written and directed by celebrated filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, whose last film was 2018's "Roma."  Its cast includes Cate Blanchette, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Lesley Manville.  The cinematography was split between Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, who have fourteen Oscar nominations between them.  Upon learning about the show, I couldn't understand why Apple didn't give this, of all its projects, a bigger marketing push.  However, after finishing the whole seven-episode series, I'm sorry to report that  "Disclaimer," despite some very good specific scenes and performances, does not work as a series.

The first few episodes are very good, setting up the characters and the premise.  An accomplished writer, Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchette), is delivered a book one day titled The Perfect Stranger.  The story is clearly based on an event from her past, twenty years ago, when she and her son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) went on vacation in Italy, and young Catherine (Leila George) met a British tourist named Jonathan Brigstocke (Louis Partridge).  Jonathan died under mysterious circumstances on that trip, and his grieving father Stephen (Kline) holds Catherine responsible.  The book, which was written by Jonathan's recently deceased mother Nancy (Manville), is only the first salvo in Stephen's plan to destroy Catherine's life and avenge his son.   

After the first three episodes of "Disclaimer," I was fully onboard with what it was doing.  All the characters and their relationships seemed promising.  Several extended flashbacks were intercut with events in the present day, going into the motivations of the various players.  Lesley Manville was a standout for her portrayal of a mother destroyed by the death of her son.  Blanchette had a nail-biting confrontation scene with Sacha Baron Cohen, playing Catherine's husband Robert.  By the fifth episode, after watching the least plausible and most unpleasant part of the plot be dragged out for multiple episodes, I was ready for the series to be over.  After seven episodes, it was clear how shoddily constructed the whole enterprise had been, with one of those twisty endings that depended on several characters being completely ineffectual at communicating with each other.  

I understand the idea behind "Disclaimer."  It's trying to examine the impulse to assign blame and vilify people, to root out secrets and solve mysteries in the wake of something tragic happening.  Since "Disclaimer" is about a prominent woman being disgraced and canceled, I expected that it was going to be similar to "Tár" at the outset, with Cate Blanchette as a similar, complicated character.  Instead, the actual main character is Stephen Brigstocke, with Kevin Kline playing him like some evil, geriatric Count of Monte Cristo.  His ability to manipulate people and orchestrate all of these ridiculous schemes is far beyond my ability to suspend disbelief.  The implausibility was exacerbated by the fact that it took multiple episodes to finally drop the other shoe and point out that we had clearly only been getting one version of events up until the last episode.  As for Catherine, she's disappointingly flimsy - a plot device ore than a person. And even with the worst interpretation of her motives, her actions hardly come across as rage-worthy.

"Disclaimer" would have almost certainly worked better if it were half its length, or even if it were refashioned into a feature film, but I'm still not sure it would actually be good.  The production is very high quality, with the gorgeous, dreamlike seaside scenes in Italy being a particular highlight.  The character work, however, is very far from where it needs to be.  Major characters like Stephen and Robert are positively cartoonish, and I suspect that it's only due to great efforts from Blanchette and Manville that the women manage to come off better.  The whole story is this hopelessly contrived tangle of bad tropes and clumsy melodrama that is too self-serious to let loose and enjoy its own absurdity.  There's a campy genre version of this show that would have been much more fun.         

Instead, "Disclaimer" is one of the worst things I've seen from everyone involved, and an unfortunate disappointment after so many good shows on AppleTV+ this past year.  

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It's Nice in This Media Bubble

Warning - this entry will be about the 2024 election.  It's something I need to get out of my system in order to move on from the events of the last few months.  I've put off writing about my immediate reactions for a while, but now it's time to finally confront a few things.

So, I spent pretty much the entirety of the Kamala Harris campaign for President of the United States in the left wing media bubble.  I knew I was in a bubble from fairly early on, and that Harris had a fifty-fifty shot at winning pretty much the whole way through the campaign, no matter what the news was telling me from day to day.  I was surprised at the outcome of the election on November 5th - not because of who ultimately won, but because it happened so quickly.  After 2016 and 2020, I expected that we wouldn't know who would be President for a few days at least.  

I don't want to write about what I think the Democrats did wrong, because the odds were stacked against them pretty high from the start, and my position is that there's not much that really could have been done with the cards they were dealt.  The anti-incumbency mood of the country (and the globe really), coupled with the failures of the US Justice system, and the Republicans failing to primary any decent alternative to Trump all pointed to a Trump win months before Joe Biden dropped out of the race.  As someone who has studied the US political system and consistently has a hard time ignoring politics, I was already in a bad mental state since late 2023.  Just thinking about getting through another election year at the start of 2024 felt like an ordeal.  

And then Kamala Harris was the nominee, and Brat Summer began, and suddenly there was this big wave of optimism that hit us full force.  For this first time there was some hope about the Democratic candidate.  Suddenly there looked like a real path to victory, and so many high profile endorsements were coming in.  Conversely, Donald Trump was now a constant figure of derision, and nobody was too worried about voicing their disdain for him openly anymore.  For a little over a hundred days, a good portion of the media was suddenly reflecting the world as I thought it should be - people were seeing through Trump's lies, and everyone was getting behind an intelligent, progressive candidate who had all the right answers.  Of course it turns out that it wasn't true, and the support was illusory, but I don't blame anyone who bought into this narrative.  After years of bad news, it was a comfort to think that a return to sanity could be possible.  As the weeks went by, my anxieties lessened and my mood improved.  I was still apprehensive about November, but I wasn't avoiding news about US politics anymore.       

Now, as someone who is very familiar with narratives and the way they work, the one being pushed toward Democrats in the last month or so of the Harris campaign was hard to ignore.  If you were on any kind of social media and expressed any kind of preference for progressive politics, you were getting a lot of stories about crowd sizes at rallies, women planning to vote in secret, and record numbers of newly registered voters.  It was increasingly clear that  I was being sold a certain view of the election by the various social media algorithms.  For instance, Youtube started pushing a lot of Bulwark videos at me with very hyperbolic titles, usually about Trump doing something embarrassing.  Meanwhile, Pod Save America recommendations disappeared for a while.  When I checked on their channel, they were still releasing their videos at the same rate as usual, but their tone was far more cautious than what we were seeing in the bubble, and their coverage of Harris more even-handed, so the algorithm made them less visible.     

In the end, it was the "less visible" ones who decided the election.  I mostly stayed out of the right-wing media spheres, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have had a more accurate picture of how the election was actually going to turn out.  Fox News and their ilk are so divorced from reality as to be completely useless, and often operate based on some of the same faulty assumptions as the left-wing media anyway.  The one good thing I can say about the left wing media is that the bubbles collapse faster.  It's been weeks now, and there's still a lot of emotional self-examination going on from those who were convinced that a Harris landslide was coming.  There are a few who are convinced that the pro-Harris momentum was real and the other side cheated, but not many.  The Democrats are better at accepting bad news.  

I admit that I got swept up in the hype in the last few days, partly due to the Selzer poll, and partly due to the huge turnout numbers.  However, this was not my first rodeo and the shock wasn't nearly as bad as it had been after 2016.  I had one sleepless night, but my anxiety ebbed very quickly.  The worst had happened, but it was a possibility that I'd been facing down long before the Harris campaign began.  The snap back to reality was abrupt, but not unexpected.  The 2024 election was over, and that in itself was a relief.  I expect I'll get through the 2028 election better too.  

Looking back, I'm weirdly grateful for the bubble.  I had peace of mind for three months.  I was reminded that there are a lot of people who see the world the same way I do, and care about each other.  I have many reasons to hope for better in the years ahead.  I expect I'll end up in more media bubbles, and I'm still in a few - the Ukraine War is a big one - but it's getting easier to see them coming.  And despite the damage they cause, I have to admit that they do have their uses. 

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2016-2017

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2016-2017 television season, in no particular order.  And good grief, there was a lot of good television. 

The Good Place, "Jason Mendoza"  - The finale episode is definitely more popular because of the famous twist, but my favorite surprise of the first season of "The Good Place" comes very early on, when we learn that Jianyu the silent monk is actually a Jacksonville bum named Jason Mendoza in disguise.  Manny Jacinto's sweet, dopey performance is priceless, and Jason instantly became one of my favorite sitcom dumbbells of all time.   

Legion, "Chapter 1" - What does a superhero show made by Noah Hawley look like?  Absolutely nothing else on television.  It takes a while to figure out what's going on in "Legion," specifically how to decode all the wild images we see representing David Haller's complicated psyche.  It's the stuff of nightmares, and it's absolutely beautiful to take in.  I chose the premiere for this because it does a fantastic job of setting the tone for the rest of the season.

Black Mirror, "San Junipero" - I'm glad "Black Mirror" has changed over time, exploring not just the bleak and horrific parts of humanity's relationship with modern technology, but some of the good bits too.  "San Junipero" creates a chance for two women, played by Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, to have the kind of relationship that they never had the chance to in real life, only to discover that love is a complex thing in any era and any circumstance.

The Handmaid's Tale, "Late" - The ins and outs of life in Gilead are revealed gradually over the course of the season.  "Late" reveals how women's freedoms were eroded in the past, while June suffers a pregnancy scare in the present.  We also learn how resistance in the Handmaids is brutally curbed when June and Emily transgress.  The final moments of the episode, revealing the most extreme measures, are some of the most gutting of the entire series.   

Fleabag, "Episode 6" - It was tough picking a standout episode for "Fleabag," but I couldn't pass up Godmother's "Sex-hibition" and its fallout.  Fleabag has to confront everything she's been hiding from the audience for the past five episodes, revealing the pain that's been underneath her bad girl behavior the entire time.  Phoebe Waller-Bridge excels here as both a writer and an actress, while giving everyone else around her their moments to shine.

Halt and Catch Fire, "The Threshold" - This is really Mackenzie Davis's year.  The Mutiny storyline hits its climax after two years of buildup, and Davis is right at the center of it.  Cameron and Donna's relationship has always had its ups and downs, but this time their goals have diverged to the point that the partnership - and the company - are no longer sustainable.  And the speed at which things fall apart at Mutiny is heartbreaking to witness.     

Westworld, "The Original" - I had a tougher time with the first season of "Westworld" than most, but I did unreservedly love the pilot, which sets out the tantalizing premise for the show.  With only  a hint at the very end about robot sentience, we're already in a very dark and dangerous place.  The Westword park experience, even before things start to go wrong, reflects the darkest parts of human nature in such fascinating and prescient ways.

Better Call Saul, "Lantern" - I don't think that the show ever really recovered from the loss of Chuck, but he sure went out on a high.  The end of the third season sees a lot of Jimmy's various schemes wrap up in ways that he didn't anticipate and can't fix.  I also strongly considered "Chicanery" for the best episode of this season, since it has Chuck and Jimmy's big courtroom showdown, but "Lantern" feels more fitting for hammering home the tragedy.

Mr. Robot, "eps3.4_runtime-error.r00" - There were a string of excellent "Mr. Robot" episodes this year, the most ambitious being this one-take episode that watches a riot unfold at E Corp from the POVs of Elliot and Angela.  There's some breathtaking editing and cinematography that rivals just about anything you could find in a theatrical feature, and the original broadcast on the USA Network even let it run without commercial interruption.  

The Leftovers, "The Book of Nora" - If you want an explanation for the show's mysteries, one is provided.  If you want a satisfying ending for the show's most memorable character, that's here too.  And if you just want to spend more time in the inscrutable, unknowable world of "The Leftovers," where the point is that there will never be any concrete answers, somehow that's on the table too.  And I couldn't think of a better finale for this unlikely show.

Honorable Mentions: 

Stranger Things, "The Bathtub" - It didn't quite make the list, but the first season of "Stranger Things" was a whole lot of fun.  "The Bathtub" stood out for showing how resourceful kids in the 80s got things done long before there was an internet.

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My Favorite Marx Brothers Movie

When putting together my research for this post, I initially tried to sneak it into my "Great Directors" series, as "My Favorite Sam Wood Movie" - Sam Wood being the director of "A Night at the Opera" and "A Day at the Races."  I was also eyeing "Duck Soup" for director Leo McCarey.  Finally, I decided that the directors were clearly not the main creative force behind any of these projects.  In fact, no director ever made more than two Marx Brothers movies.  So, if I was going to write about a Marx Brothers movie, it was going to have to be as a Marx Brothers movie, and nothing else.  

Alas, this decision created a dilemma.  How the heck was I going to pick a favorite Marx Brothers movie?!  The best gags are in "Duck Soup."  The best wordplay is in "A Night at the Opera."  The best set piece is the football game in "Horse Feathers."  The best song is "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," sung by Groucho in "At the Circus."  To be honest, I often don't remember which scene or gag or performance is in which movie.  Like Chaplin and Keaton, I tend to remember the bits more than I remember the full feature presentations.  I wish I could cobble together the best pieces from everything into one movie, but I guess we'll just have to make do. The Marx Brothers feature I've watched the most often is "At the Circus," which was a childhood favorite, so that wins by default. 

"At the Circus" is one of the Marx Brothers' MGM pictures, which all had roughly the same story.  There would be sketches and zaniness, but also folks in trouble who needed some help, a romance, musical interludes, and a happy ending.  Zeppo had quit acting after "Duck Soup" to become an agent, so our stars are Groucho, Chico, and Harpo - or J. Cheever Loophole, Antonio Pirelli, and Punchy in this movie.  Whatever they're called, we know them already - the fast-talking lawyer, the streetwise con-artist, and the nonverbal goof.  Their mission is to save a failing circus by putting on a show for a bunch of high society snoots, led by the Brothers' most dependable straight man, Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Dukesbury.

Of course, we're not here for the plot.  Behind the scenes, Buster Keaton reportedly worked as a gag man on the circus sequences, resulting in some of the Marx Brothers' most elaborate, large scale comedy setpieces.  Margaret Dumont gets shot out of a cannon, Groucho walks on the ceiling, Harpo gets to hang out with a seal and ride an ostrich (borrowing an idea from a recent Mickey Mouse cartoon), and a whole orchestra floats out to sea.  There's a gorilla, a trapeze act, a dwarf, and a villainous strongman.  Then there are the musical numbers - Harpo on the harp, Chico on the piano, the lovers with their duet, and Groucho singing about the immortal Lydia in the train car - with a little help from the songwriting team from "The Wizard of Oz."  It just doesn't feel like a Marx Brothers movie if they don't stop every once in a while for a song or a harp solo.

The trouble with "At the Circus" if you're a Marx Brothers fan is that it doesn't have the best versions of what the Marx Brothers were best known for - Groucho piling on pun after pun in a stream of fast-talk, Chico outwitting everyone in sight with his faux-Italian flim-flammery, Harpo's silent clown kleptomania, and all three of them teaming up or targeting each other to escalate the comedy chaos.  "At the Circus" was their ninth film, released in 1939, and a lot of the anarchic energy had ebbed, while all of their personas were getting overly familiar and Flanderized.  The circus performers and animals help distract a bit, but the Marx brothers are supposed to be the ones doing the distracting.  

I suspect that either "A Night at the Opera" or "Duck Soup" is really the best Marx Brothers movie, and "Animal Crackers" is where any curious comedy fans should start with their work, since it established so much of their formula.  However, after watching all their features again, all of them are worth seeing.  Yes, even the weird, off-brand ones like "Room Service" with Lucille Ball.  Seeing these guys onscreen in any capacity is always a marvel, and I don't think you can really understand American comedy without getting to know them.    

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"Sugar" is On the Case

Initially I wasn't going to watch "Sugar," because I had a pretty significant chunk of the show spoiled for me, and I wasn't too keen on watching a moody detective noir starring Colin Farrell.  Farrell used to be one of the actors I had an irrational aversion to, which has slowly gone away over the years, but I didn't want to press my luck.  However, I learned that the main character, a private eye named John Sugar, was a film buff.  And the modern day Los Angeles detective noir he was inhabiting, created by Mark Protosevich, had a habit of splicing in clips from old films like "Sunset Boulevard," "The Night of the Hunter," and "The Thing."  As a cinephile, I decided that I had to see this.

John Sugar is a mystery man who speaks multiple languages, is indestructible in a fight, and leads a pretty lonely existence.  He gets his cases from a woman named Ruby (Kirby) and seems to have a lot of friends who are worried about him.  His latest assignment is to find the missing granddaughter of a film mogul, Jonathan Siegel (James Crowmwell), which means digging into the lives of the troubled Siegel family - father Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris), his ex-wife Melanie (Amy Ryan), current wife Margit (Anna Gunn), and unstable son David (Nate Corddry).  There's also a local gangster in the equation, Stallings (Eric Lange), who is involved with the drug trade and human trafficking.

Farrell makes a great film noir protagonist, and I'm glad that I watched "Sugar" for his performance at least.  I've seen a lot of older film noir in the past year for other projects, and John Sugar is a nice mix of classic brooding hero and eager fanboy in love with the persona, and still a mystery man underneath it all.  The show is told from his highly subjective POV, with narration of course, which is why the film clips keep showing up.  As Sugar works on the case, we see stream-of-consciousness flashes of whatever he's thinking about - memories and related associations mostly.  The implication is that Sugar is as preoccupied with the unreal as he is with the real.  Five of the episodes, including the pilot, were directed by Fernando Meirelles, whose style is a great fit.

As with all detective stories, the ensemble has a big impact and "Sugar" has a solid one.  The Siegels are an opportunity to paint a picture of the dark underbelly of Hollywood, and Protosevich and the other writers don't hold back.  The nasty arc of David Siegel in particular is very well done, with Corddry playing an immediately hateable twerp of a villain, and Lange a much more menacing one.  It's always nice to see Kirby and Amy Ryan in anything, and I was glad that Ryan snagged the love interest role.  Though the show takes place in the here and now, everyone in it feels like they're in a proper film noir, with all the old character types and tropes effortlessly.    

As I previously mentioned, I had one of the show's big reveals spoiled for me, which unfortunately did impact my watching experience.  I was able to appreciate how well the series was structured and all the little ambiguities and hints leading up to the reveal, but I felt I'd missed out on most of the fun.  If you're curious about "Sugar" and have gotten this far, I urge you to not read anything else about the show and go watch it.  As a film noir it's pretty good, but as a film noir wrapped in a more experimental kind of narrative, it's far more interesting.  And though I did enjoy "Sugar" as a character study, I know I would have liked it better as the genre mystery it was intended to be.    

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Name a Favorite Movie for Every Year Before You Were Born

Back in 2017, I filled out one of those lists where you pick a favorite movie for every year that you've been alive.  Now that I've finished off my Top Ten project goals and have watched a lot more older films, I'm ready to pick favorites for all those years, pre 1980, when I wasn't alive.  To keep the length reasonable, however, I'll be stopping at 1939, which gives me forty-one years of movies.  As with the last list, I stress that this is a list of favorite films.  Not top.  Not best.  Not most worthwhile.  Just favorite.  And I'm going to cheat.  So here we go.  

1979 - The Muppet Movie

1978 - Superman

1977 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1976 - Carrie

1975 - The Rocky Horror Picture Show

1974 - Young Frankenstein

1973 - Robin Hood

1972 - What's Up Doc?

1971 - Bedknobs and Broomsticks

1970 - Little Big Man

1969 - Last Summer

1968 - The Lion in Winter

1967 - Le Samourai

1966 - Daisies

1965 - The Sound of Music

1964 - Mary Poppins

1963 - The Big City

1962 - Lawrence of Arabia

1961 - One Hundred and One Dalmatians

1960 - Psycho

1959 - Some Like it Hot

1958 - Mon Oncle

1957 - Nights of Cabiria

1956 - The Mystery of Picasso

1955 - The Night of the Hunter

1954 - Hobson's Choice

1953 - Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

1952 - Ikiru

1951 - The African Queen

1950 - Born Yesterday

1949 - Adam's Rib

1948 - Bicycle Thieves

1947 - Record of a Tenement Gentleman

1946 - It's a Wonderful Life

1945 - Christmas in Connecticut

1944 - Arsenic and Old Lace

1943 - Jane Eyre

1942 - Bambi

1941 - Dumbo

1940 - Pinocchio

1939 - The Wizard of Oz

A few notes - I played fair and did this year by year, looking through my data on Letterboxd and Icheckmovies, and going with my gut instead of my pretentious film nerd head.  If I had to watch one of these films right now, what would I pick?  Most of the time it wasn't a masterpiece, but a piece of entertainment.  

As expected, the pickings were very slim in the earlier years, and I mostly stuck to nostalgic old favorites - lots of Disney animation, light comedies, and musicals.  I managed to get in a few foreign films and artsier titles in the 50s.  It wasn't really until 1967 that I had difficulty picking titles immediately, because suddenly the number of good films I'd seen exploded.  I think "Le Samourai" only won that year because we recently lost Alain Delon.  Ask me again next week, and it might be "The Graduate" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"  Some years were far more stacked than others - 1970 barely had any titles I was considering, while 1971 had at least ten, including "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," "A New Leaf," "The Boy Friend," "Harold and Maude," and "Fiddler on the Roof."

I thought I did pretty good job of keeping nostalgia at bay through most of the 50s and 60s - I mean, objectively "Mary Poppins" is the greatest film to have been made in 1964 by any measure, but it really caught up to me the closer and closer I got to the 80s, because these were all the films I grew up watching.  I literally watched the 1973 animated "Robin Hood" daily at one point, because it was one of the few movies I had on home video.  

I'm surprised that no Stanley Kubrick films made it, but in the end Robert Stevenson was more important to me as a kid.  And no matter how many movies I watch, I'm still a kid at heart.  

  

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"Presumed Innocent" (1990) and "Presumed Innocent" (2024)

I watched the Apple TV+ adaptation of Scott Turow's novel "Presumed Innocent," thinking that I'd already seen the 1990 feature film adaptation, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Alan J. Pakula.  The premise of the eight-episode miniseries seemed familiar - the chief prosecutor at a district attorney's office is put on trial for murdering a fellow attorney, who he was having an affair with.  There's a political subplot, a lot of fallout with the protagonist's wife, and a great deal of time spent in the courtroom.  We haven't had a really juicy courtroom drama in a while, and I was happy to find this one getting good reviews and a decent amount of buzz.  David E. Kelley is the showrunner, no surprise.

However, the twisty story felt very modern and immediate.  I figured that some parts of the story must have been updated and expanded for the miniseries version.  Our lead, Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), is married to Barbara (Ruth Negga), and has two teenage children, Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick) and Jaden (Chase Infiniti).  We gradually learn about Rusty's relationship with the victim, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), his boss and mentor Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp), friendly detective Alana Rodriguez (Nana Mensah), and his therapist Dr. Rush (Lily Rabe).  On the opposing side are Rusty and Raymond's rivals, Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle) and Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard).  Molto in particular has a bone to pick with Rusty.   

The drama that unfolds is everything you want a legal thriller to be - emotionally charged, full of surprises, and only minimally concerned with legal plausibility.  Jake Gyllenhaal comes off as untrustworthy enough that there's real doubt about whether he's actually innocent.  There are some excellent red herrings deployed, and in the process we get some compelling character work from actors like Ruth Negga and Bill Camp.  I'd happily give Peter Sarsgaard the Emmy right now, for going toe to toe with Gyllenhaal in the courtroom, never letting us forget for a moment how badly Rusty has transgressed.  If you enjoy big monologues like I do, the series has some excellent ones.  My only real bone to pick is with the ending reveal, which feels like a bit of a misstep. 

After I finished the series I decided to rewatch the 1990 film version, only to discover that I'd gotten it confused with a different legal thriller.  This was a film I'd never seen before, starring Harrison Ford as Rusty, Brian Dennehy as Raymond, Bonnie Bedelia as Barbara, and Raul Julia as defense lawyer Sandy Stern, a character completely excised from the new miniseries.  Pakula's "Presumed Innocent" is a much more faithful adaptation of the novel from what Wikipedia tells me, where the victim is an ambitious femme fatale, and Rusty Sabich is a much less ambiguous good guy.  The mood is more sedate, though the story is  just as engrossing.  A lot of the plot has to do with the corruption of the legal and political systems, with Rusty uncovering multiple instances of bribery and malfeasance as he tries to prove his innocence.

The miniseries is more interested in examining Rusty's relationships with Barbara and Carolyn, and the psychology behind his actions.  The film is far less interior, focused on unraveling a more traditional kind of mystery through an investigative narrative.  The film has just as many good performances as the miniseries, even though the emphasis is very different.  Raul Julia gets the big moment in the courtroom, Bonnie Bedelia gets the chilling last word in the final monologue, and it's always very gratifying to stumble across another Brian Dennehy performance I didn't realize existed.  I obviously wasn't going to get as invested in the characters over a two hour movie as I was with the ones in an eight hour miniseries, but "Presumed Innocent" is a solid entry in the pantheon of '90s courtroom movies.  

The two versions of the story are so different, it's honestly difficult to rate them against each other.  And it's not often that I've been able to go in cold like this with multiple takes on the same piece of IP.  I really enjoyed this experience, and I can only hope more creative types will take similar chances with other adaptations in the future.            

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"Time Bandits," Year Whatever

Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits" is an odd choice to turn into a television series.  It's a child's fantasy adventure story told with the humor and irreverence of the creators of "Monty Python," but with a darker subversive edge that you don't see in mainstream media much.   I guess if anybody was going to come close to capturing that same feeling, it would be Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who created the "Time Bandits" series with Iain Morris.  

So, a nerdy kid named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), who is obsessed with history, discovers that his bedroom is a portal to different time periods.  He meets the Time Bandits, including leader Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), Judy (Charlyne Yi), Bittelig (Rune Temte), Alto (Tadhg Murphy), and Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), who are former employees of the Supreme Being (Waititi).  They've stolen a map to all the portals that allow travel through space and time, in order to get rich.  However, they're idiots, and Kevin ends up being more knowledgeable than all of them.  He's accidentally pulled into the band's schemes, and helps them through all kinds of trouble as they travel from the Mayan Empire to the sacking of Troy to Prohibition era Chicago.  The Supreme Being is chasing them, because he wants his map back, and so is Pure Evil (Clement) and his henchwoman Fianna (Rachel House), who get Kevin's parents (James Dryden, Felicity Ward), and younger sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) into the adventure too.  

I've seen the movie a few times, and I'm honestly not much of a fan, so I feel I'm in a pretty good position to parse the series in nostalgia-free terms.  What the Waititi and company have elected to do is to retell the plot of the "Time Bandits" movie, with much more conventional plotting and character building over longer journeys to different parts of history, but still retain a lot of the original concepts and imagery.  The humor is still plenty eccentric, but has almost no edge.  For instance, the original band of time-traveling thieves was made up of dwarf actors.  These have been replaced with a group of oddball comedy actors of taller stature - the kind that show up in most Waititi projects these days.  There are still a couple of dwarf actors in the show, but they're very peripheral.  The various encounters with historical figures still lean into absurdity, but are generally much sillier and nobody ever seems to be in any danger that the bandits can't talk their way out of. 

It takes a couple of episodes for the humor to gel, and in the absence of a stronger lead like Rhys Ifans in the similar "Our Flag Means Death," the rest of the cast often feels adrift.  Lisa Kudrow is great, but has more supporting character energy than lead.  The kids are great, but don't quite have the necessary presence to keep the momentum going.  When the chemistry is just right, like when the bandits meet a pompous Earl of Sandwich played by Mark Gatiss, the show can be a lot of fun.  However, this doesn't happen as often as I was hoping.  Where I think the series has a leg up is that it's got a lot of heart to it, which the movie was totally lacking.  Over the course of the series, I got attached to Kevin and the Time Bandits.  His TV obsessed parents have no idea how to relate to him, but this doesn't mean they're irredeemable, or that Kevin doesn't love them.  

The scope of the production is impressive.  This was clearly a pretty big budget affair, with excellent effects work, a lot of it practical to match the feel of the movie.  I'm very fond of Mark Mothersbaugh's electronica theme music.  The time periods and historical figures visited by the bandits are much more diverse than what we got in the movie, and we get to spend more time in each new environment since there are ten episodes to fill.  Regretfully, the early installments are awfully repetitive, with everyone quickly falling into a formula of failed heists and Kevin incrementally becoming more confident.  It takes too long for the bigger stakes of the story to be established, resulting in the last few episodes feeling very rushed.  

And to top it all off, the ending of the season is a mess.  It's not just a cliffhanger, but leaves off at a point where I was pretty sure that an episode or two just got cut from the series order at the last moment.  A second season doesn't look likely at the moment, and I'd be far more willing to recommend the show if it were more self-contained.  On the other hand, an abrupt exit is in line with how the Gilliam movie ended, so I guess I can't really complain. 

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