Cancellation Watch 2018

The yearly Upfronts are in full swing, which means that the network television world has just gone through its latest wave of cancellations and renewals. I swear it's getting more dramatic every year as audiences continue to splinter and a cancelled show isn't really cancelled as long as there are web services and other networks that might be enticed to pick them up.

This year, for instance, the biggest story was Fox cancelling "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," the Mike Schur cop comedy that has been a low rated, but much beloved part of their lineup since 2013. After a Twitter storm of reaction, fans spent a tense day waiting to see if Amazon or Hulu might pick it up. The next morning, NBC picked it up, which makes sense since NBC is and has been the home of all of Schur's other network comedies. Alas, there has been no such rescue announced for Fox's other cancellations, "Last Man on Earth," which is going to end on a cliffhanger, and "Lucifer." However, they are resurrecting "Last Man Standing," the Tim Allen sitcom that ABC cancelled last year after six seasons.

I've largely stopped watching shows according to any sane schedule, and frankly haven't been paying as much attention to developments in the television world as much as I used to. It feels like many shows I had just heard about, like "Deception" and "Rise," are already on their way out. I'll be sad to see "Superior Donuts" and "Lucifer" go, as I liked what little I saw of them. Good riddance to "Scorpion" and "Inhumans." The only recently cancelled show that I'm actually still watching is Syfy's "The Expanse," via Amazon Prime. I watched and enjoyed "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" during its first year and liked it, but once it stopped being a priority for me, I gradually drifted away from it. And while I'm happy for everyone working on the show, it's already run five seasons and losing it wouldn't have been so bad.

Still, the drama around the cancellations and renewals each year is fascinating. Fan campaigns are now a regular part of each cycle. There are even ones for shows that weren't picked up, like the "Supernatural" spinoff "Wayward Sisters." Creatives actively encourage this - I suspect the "Tremors" pilot being leaked was to try and garner some attention for the cancelled project. I think part of this is due to the programming decisions being so much more visible now than they used to be, with reactions online able to be virtually instantaneous. In the old days, the networks felt much more remote, and most of the campaigns to save shows were treated as futile endeavors. Now, you have Mark Hamill and Lin-Manuel Miranda weighing in on the cancellation of "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" on Twitter within hours of the announcement.

It's also easier to save a show than it used to be. The rules have changed drastically over the past few years, with the television landscape still in flux, and cable and web series often setting the standard. Bringing a struggling show back for an abbreviated final season is now common. "Agents of SHIELD" is going to have thirteen episodes next year to wrap things up. The "Lethal Weapon" series is being retooled, with its misbehaving lead actor replaced with a more familiar face for its third year. Reportedly, Seann William Scott will not be playing Riggs, but his brother - who is also named Riggs, of course.

The way network television operates has felt antiquated for a while now. The pilot process looks increasingly wasteful and clunky. Attempts to revamp the ratings systems have come across as increasingly desperate. Nothing has stemmed the steady exodus of viewers, and the networks have finally decided to try reducing the amount of ads next season after years of increases. Even the concept of the Upfronts, with all of these programming decisions being made in a few frenzied days in May, seems very outdated in an era where Netflix premieres new content every month and rarely releases viewer data.

I guess I'd better enjoy all the drama while it lasts, because in a few more years we may not have what we currently recognize as network television at all.

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The Ups and Downs of "Downsizing"

It's a sad day when a dependable director makes a truly terrible film.  Alexander Payne, who has an absolutely sterling record of making darkly comedic smaller films like "Election," "Sideways," and "Nebraska," decided to take the plunge into his first genre picture, based on a shelved script Payne wrote with Jim Taylor roughly a decade ago.  And a first glance, "Downsizing" looks very promising.

It's a science-fiction story, heavy on the social commentary, about a near future version of our world where the technology exists to shrink human beings to under six inches tall.  The benefits of "downsizing" include much cheaper cost of living and, theoretically, less resource consumption in an ecologically deteriorating civilization. Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to go through with the procedure, and roughly the first third of the movie is seeing how they deal with the transition.  Later, we're introduced to the downsized refugee activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) and playboy opportunist Dušan (Christoph Waltz), and the film explores how the miniaturized society functions in more detail.

I really enjoyed the first half of the film, where lots of fantastic worldbuilding is done, and we learn about all the ins and outs of living life as one of the Small.  The impact on everything from living arrangements to travel to economic systems is a lot of fun to see in action. There are also many hints and allusions to the downsizing technology being used for more sinister purposes - Ngoc Lan was downsized against her will, for instance, by a repressive Vietnamese government.  However, when the film gets around to fully exploring the ugly down sides of downsizing, it ends up stumbling very badly. While I can buy the idea that downsizing society ends up upsizing social inequality, the allegorical representations of this are just too hamfisted to be effective at all.

Also, we have to talk about the character of Ngoc Lan Tran.  Hong Chau gives a winning performance in spite of putting on one of the most over-the-top, distracting, stereotypical South-Asian sing-song accents I've ever heard, and being given dialogue that is often just painful.  There are some bits of conversation that are so cringeworthy, I couldn't believe that they had made it to the screen without anyone pointing out how bad they were. As glad as I am to see an Asian actress in such a prominent and memorable role, it really galls that it had to be such a caricatured one.  Everyone else in the film is fine, with Matt Damon playing an everyman schlub, and Christoph Waltz turning in another charming European sleazeball, but it's hard to get past the Vietnamese elephant in the room.

Even at this point, with the dodgy social commentary and the obnoxious dialogue, I could have given the film a pass.  Its intentions were clearly good, even if the execution was tone deaf. I admired the production design, the restrained use of special effects, and some of the film's smaller touches.  I was happy to see Payne being ambitious, and trying something he never had before. He was trying to talk about social ills that nobody else was, and I find that very commendable. However, then we got to the last act of the movie, where the film abruptly shifts course and decides that it's been about Paul Safranek's search for personal meaning the whole time, and ditches about 90% of the material that it had set up in favor of an entirely different storyline.

And though I thought the new story was actually pretty good on its own, and would have been fine as part of a separate project, it completely derailed "Downsizing."  If the film had been structured differently, had a stronger character arc for Paul, or figured out how to thematically tie the disparate pieces together better, maybe it would have worked.  Instead, the result was a fatally disjointed film, full of wasted ideas and storylines that ultimately went nowhere. And there's no mistake that this is clearly the work of Alexander Payne, with his sense of humor and his filmmaking sensibilities.  I'm left wondering how such a talented, perceptive director could get this movie so wrong.

Better luck next time, I guess.

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My Top Ten '90s Shows I Can't Make Top Ten Lists For

I've hit a definite stopping point in my series of Top Ten lists for the '90s television shows that I watched in my youth.  Nearly every list I've tried writing over the past few months has come up has come out incomplete due to my muddled memory or the fact that I simply didn't watch as much of the shows as I thought I did.  So, because I've already sunk a lot of time into the various lists and I might as well retire this feature with a bang, here are the ten shows I most regret not being able to put together Top Ten episode lists for.

Xena: Warrior Princess - There was a time when I loved "Xena."  I watched it along with "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" every weekend for years.  It was a fantasy action series! With a strong female lead! It honestly didn't happen that much back then.  Alas, going through the episode lists, it became clear in a hurry that I only watched the first couple of seasons with much enthusiasm.  I also heavily, heavily favored the comedic, meta, and gimmick episodes. I'm all for the cheese and the schlock, but the more melodramatic ones really got tedious over time.

Frasier - There are episodes of this show I adore.  My favorite is the one where Niles duels Maris's German fencing instructor with Frasier and the maid serving as translators.  The truth is, however, that I never watched "Frasier" regularly and mostly just caught the occasional syndicated episode. When I tried to put together a list, I wound up listing pretty much every episode that I remember seeing from start to finish, and that still wasn't enough to fill out the whole list.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised since the exact same thing happened to my attempted "Cheers" list.

NewsRadio - There were a lot of wacky workplace sitcoms like "Just Shoot Me" and "Spin City" that I watched a lot of, and "NewsRadio" was definitely the best of them.  The writing was a little sharper than anything else on network TV at the time. I just can't seem to remember individual episodes. I remember gags and one-liners and occasional subplots, but full episodes and storylines elude me completely.  So, here's to the one with the horrible sandwiches, and the one with the Boba Fett action figure, and the time they finally got Dave Foley back in drag. Good times, good times.

That 70s Show - I was in denial for ages about this one, because I remember watching the reruns constantly in college.  Well, it turns out that I was mostly just rewatching the first two seasons. Also, when making my list of favorites, I kept topping out at seven or eight that I felt I could write anything coherent about.  Most episodes had extremely repetitive plots, and the show was heavily dependent on repeating gags and formulaic humor. I still love the characters and their dynamic though, especially Red and Hyde. And it makes me happy that Kelso and Jackie wound up together in real life.  

King of the Hill - I really wanted to do right by this show because I wasn't a fan of it at first, and it won me over after a couple of years of watching random episodes here and there.  It was a bit of a shock when the show ended, because it had been on for so long and had become something of a constant in the TV landscape. I never watched it regularly because it was never on at the right time, but I don't think there was a single episode that I saw that I didn't appreciate.  However, when I tried to make up a list of episodes, I only came up with six that I knew I'd seen the whole way through.

The Golden Girls - I have wonderful memories of watching this every Saturday with my mother throughout the late '80s and early '90s.  I even managed to watch episodes of all three spinoffs. Unfortunately, the series is way too far back in time for me, and I can't recall the specifics of more than three or four episodes now.  So while I remember Shady Pines, and the cheesecakes, and Rose's stories about St. Olaf, and Blanche's stories about Big Daddy, they all exist in a lovely sort of shapeless melange of multiple episodes.  For the record, Dorothy was my favorite but I loved them all.

Home Improvement - Lack of enthusiasm is what sank the list for this one.  I can perfectly remember plenty of episodes, but I only got up to about six or seven episodes that I could really say I enjoyed watching.  Even then, it was mostly for one good gag or sequence, like the crazy Tool Time stunts. I appreciate the show being a very solid relationship and family show at its core, and it's no wonder it was such a ratings juggernaut at its height.  I associate "Home Improvement" with the '90s more than any other show on this list, but I have to admit it was never really one of my favorites.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - How could I not write up a list for such an obvious cultural touchstone?  Well I tried more than once, and kept coming up short of episodes. Frankly, after the pool hall grift episode and the one with Ben Vereen, this is another show that exists in my mind as a lot of great clips and one-liners unattached to any actual plots.  I love Carlton dancing to Tom Jones, for instance, but couldn't say what else happened in any episode where he does it. And I feel bad about having such a spotty memory, because the show was so ubiquitous and remains so beloved to this day.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit -  "Law & Order" has gotten worse and worse over time.  I haven't watched the show in ages, roughly since Chris Meloni called it quits.  Still, I figured I could get a list out of the better episodes from those first couple of seasons I used to enjoy, right?  Well, it turns out that crime procedurals have a tendency to all run together in my mind. Unless there was a notable guest star or a particularly outlandish premise involved, I couldn't remember any of the individual episodes from seasons I know I'd seen and enjoyed.  And the outrageous episodes weren't usually the good ones.

Malcolm in the Middle - And finally, a bit of a cheat.  "Malcolm" isn't a '90s show, but I remember it fondly as the last real family sitcom I watched regularly in its early seasons.  Sadly, I only watched the majority of the episodes once, which wasn't enough for them to stick in my memory very well. My viewing patterns were already changing, you see, and I was no longer watching shows over and over again in syndication.  I managed to work up a list of six episodes I loved, including the one with Hal on roller-skates, but the rest is just a blur.

Honorable Mentions: Murphy Brown, Perfect Strangers, Out of This World, The Drew Carey Show, Dinosaurs, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and The Nanny.

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Remember "Coco"

I'm a little embarrassed that it's taken me this long to watch PIXAR's latest film, one that I admit that I wasn't particularly looking forward to.  A Dia de los Muertos themed movie featuring Mexican culture seemed all well and good, but the trailers featuring the kid with a big dream and a serious case of hero worship seemed like awfully well-tread ground.  Also, PIXAR's track record has been very hit-or-miss lately. The last film of theirs I really liked was "Inside Out."

Fortunately, "Coco" is a film well aware of its progenitors in more ways than one.  In a little town in Mexico, our story unfolds with the introduction of twelve year-old Miguel Rivera (Anthony Gonzalez), who comes from a family that has banned music, because his great-great-grandfather abandoned the family long ago to seek glory as a musician.  Miguel, however, has dreams of following in the footsteps of his hero, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), a legendary musician known for his songwriting skills. On Dia de los Muertos, some tomfoolery with curses and a stolen guitar lands Miguel in the Land of the Dead, where spirits remain in animated (ahem) skeletal form as long as someone in the land of the living remembers them.  Miguel decides to take the opportunity to meet De la Cruz, with the help of a con-artist spirit named Héctor (Gael García Bernal).

And who is Coco?  She's Miguel's great-grandmother, Mama Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguía).  Though very old and mostly senile, she's still a much beloved part of the Rivera family.  It turns out that she's the key to unravelling the complicated Rivera family history, in a story that turns out to be about appreciating your loved ones and remembering your past.  No heart string is left untugged, as Miguel learns that family bonds can transcend the gulf between life and death. This also ties in beautifully to the depiction of Dia de los Muertos, which offers some lively, colorful iconography that the PIXAR artists take full advantage of.  The Land of the Dead, which is only accessible via a shimmering bridge made of marigold petals, is a visual wonder. And I love the scenes of the dead returning on their holiday and interacting with their friends and families.

"Coco" is yet another example of the studio's dedication to getting things right.  What immediately struck me about the film was how thoroughly authentic everything feels, from Miguel's family dynamics to De la Cruz's old movies.  Sure, certain things like the spirit animals, the alebrije, are played up because they look very cool, but care is taken to correctly depict and explain the importance of Dia de los Muertos traditions, and nods to the wider Mexican culture are everywhere.  Apparently a Spanish language version of the film was prepared simultaneously with the English one. Quite few bits of Spanish dialogue are left untranslated in the English version, and the entire cast is Latino, with the exception, of course, of John Ratzenberger.     

A big part of the film's appeal is its soundtrack, full of vibrant guitars and several hummable songs.  Miguel is an aspiring musician, after all. The filmmakers took the opportunity to pay homage to Mexican culture here too, including a version of the traditional "La Llorona" and several mariachi numbers.  The music does a fantastic job of selling the big emotional moments. The ballad "Remember Me" is crucial to the plot, and gets better every time you hear another character sing it. This is the closest that PIXAR has ever gotten to a full scale musical, and considering the results, they may want to consider doing this more often.    

I had some minor gripes with "Coco," mostly to do with an overly busy action sequence near the end, and some of the humor.  Goofy skeleton jokes have been around since the early days of animation, but "Coco" leans on it pretty hard. Otherwise, this is PIXAR at their best.  "Coco" is made with sensitivity and consideration by passionate artists. Best of all, they tackle subjects that we don't see enough of in the mainstream.  I've only seen it once so far, so it's far too early to say where it ranks in the PIXAR pantheon with any certainty, but "Coco" is certainly up there with the greats.    

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"Altered Carbon" Year One

High concept science fiction series have been having a great run lately, and "Altered Carbon" is another fascinating new title to add to the list.  Based on a series of novels by Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" imagines a world where the human consciousness can be transferred from one body or "sleeve" to another, allowing people to live for multiple lifetimes and making space travel and colonization possible.  This has also lead to a massive social divide between the unimaginably rich "meths" who are essentially immortal and untouchable, and the poor who have been left to stagnate technologically and economically.

Our hero in this universe is Takeshi Kovacs, who is played in the present by Joel Kinnaman, but who we also seen in flashbacks in his prior sleeves played by Will Yun Lee and Byron Mann.  He's a world-weary mercenary with a past who is recruited into the service of a meth, Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who wants him to solve an impossible murder. Kovacs is haunted by memories of his old mentor Quell (Renee Elise Goldsberry) and his sister Rei (Dichen Lachman).  And as he works through the case, he's trailed by a suspicious police detective, Ortega (Martha Higareda), and has run-ins with a vengeful soldier (Ato Essandoh) and the AI of a macabre hotel (Chris Conner).

"Altered Carbon" is reportedly one of Netflix's most expensive projects to date, due to a staggering amount of CGI and other effects work.  And though the aesthetics are on the derivative side, echoing "Blade Runner" more than anything else, naturally, it all looks great. The worldbuilding is the best part of the show by far, exploring how the ability to "resleeve" has affected this future society from top to bottom.  Murder victims can be brought back to testify against their killers. The bodies of the incarcerated can be rented out or borrowed. One episode sees a character's dead grandmother come home for the holidays in someone else's body. We also see cloning, interstellar travel, virtual reality, sentient AI, cyborgs, synthetic bodies, and mass surveillance in the mix.

The show is also very R-rated, with lots of nudity, sex, and violence.  Things occasionally verge on gratuitous, especially where the fight scenes are concerned, but I found the lack of content restrictions helped to emphasize how cheap lives were in a world where death is no longer meaningful.  This also allowed for some interesting concepts like gladiatorial deathmatches and extreme interrogation tactics to land with more impact. "Altered Carbon" is similar to "The Expanse" in this regard, though it doesn't have that show's sweeping scope and rigorous scientific accuracy.  I prefer the characters on "Altered Carbon" though, who are more colorful and more fun to watch.

It's an unusually diverse cast that the show's creators have put together.  Closed captions are necessary to get the maximum effect of this, as characters have dialogue in multiple languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic.  I have to remark on the dissonance of Joel Kinnaman playing a character named Takashi Kovacs, but this is part of the show's premise, and there were clearly great pains taken to ensure diversity in the rest of the cast.  And in large part, everyone does an excellent job. I especially enjoyed Martha Higareda's Detective Ortiz, who seems like a stereotype at first, but becomes compelling in a hurry. Also, Chris Conner's AI character is a charmer.

Of course, when you get past all the fancy sci-fi trappings, this is a detective story.  And it's here that the show's weaknesses are the most apparent. The writing is fairly good throughout, but I found that it did start to slip in the last few episodes when it came time to execute all the big reveals.  The show is much better at introducing the world and concepts of "Altered Carbon," bit by bit, than it is at enlivening the murder mystery elements of its familiar plot or making up excuses for more action scenes. I'm actually relieved that any further seasons of will be leaving the majority of these characters behind, as the universe they inhabit is far more interesting than they are.    

All in all this is a very satisfying piece of genre television, and an unusually committed one to the quality and the cohesiveness of its vision.  I don't think it's quite one of the greats, being ultimately more interested in the fireworks over the ideas, but it's a great sign of the times for science-fiction fans that a show like "Altered Carbon" exists.

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"The Disaster Artist" Explains it All

The amount of attention that the cult movie, "The Room," has received for being unusually entertaining despite also being a total trainwreck, has always struck me as odd. I've seen the film and understand why people enjoy its bizarreness, but the enthusiastic fandom that has sprung up around it and its creator, Tommy Wiseau, is more puzzling. And now along comes "The Disaster Artist," a comedic dramatization of the behind the scenes madness during the making of "The Room," to help shed some light on the allure of this notorious auteur and his immortal contribution to cinema.

Aspiring thespian Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) meets the strange, ostentatious Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) in acting classes, and the pair become friends. After moving to Los Angeles together to try and break into Hollywood, Wiseau decides to finance and make his own film, "The Room." Having no experience but plenty of money, Wiseau embarks on a lengthy film shoot marked by his tyrannical behavior, disorganized working style, and total inability to act competently. Greg tries to be supportive, but the situation inevitably boils over as Tommy's demands start to affect Greg's relationships and career.

You don't need to be a fan of "The Room" in order to enjoy "The Disaster Artist," but I think you do need to have some sympathy for and interest in the conundrum that is Tommy Wiseau. "The Disaster Artist" makes the mistake of making him a little too sympathetic, painting him as a well-intentioned wannabe who can't reconcile his own image of himself with actual reality. James Franco does a good job of mimicking Wiseau's distinctive accent and mannerisms, but he's less successful and getting across the sheer strangeness of his subject. I think demystifying Wiseau hurts the film a bit, because part of what makes him so fascinating in "The Room" is his absolute incompatibility with everything we expect from a leading man. Franco's Wiseau is memorably eccentric, but not nearly weird enough.

Franco is also clearly a fan of "The Room," and spends a considerable amount of effort recreating scenes from the movie with actors like Josh Hutcherson and Jacki Weaver playing the very mediocre actors playing the parts. I think this was meant to help emphasize just how strange much of the dialogue and production choices were, but there's far too much time spent on this in "The Disaster Artist," including a very self-satisfied final sequence that directly compares the real scenes from "The Room" with the recreations. And while I'm all for giving Tommy Wiseau his due, the overly happy ending doesn't really sit right. Or the opening scenes with various celebrities praising "The Room" for that matter.

The best scenes end up being the ones that dramatize the miserable shoot for "The Room." Most of the crew is played by familiar comedians, including Seth Rogen, as the script supervisor who ends up actually running the set, and Paul Scheer as an increasingly frustrated DP. I wish there was more time spent here, instead of on the fairly humdrum Greg and Tommy friendship. While I understand that "The Disaster Artist" was based on a book by the same name by the real Greg Sestero, and his POV is vital, his storyline results in an unfortunate amount of manufactured melodrama and pedestrian feel-good smarm that gets in the way of the comedy.

I suppose I didn't enjoy "The Disaster Artist" very much because it offers too much of an explanation for "The Room" and Tommy Wiseau when I wasn't looking for one. And while it's nice that Wiseau did manage to become a famous filmmaker to some extent, trying to paint this as some kind of happy success story also feels disingenuous. There are parts of a good film here, a dark comedy about a first time director run amok. Unfortunately, it's surrounded on all sides by a mediocre one about the power of believing in yourself and supporting your friends.

For those die-hard fans of "The Room," this should be a fun watch because there are a lot of little in-jokes and James Franco's performance is impressive. For non-fans, however, I think there's significantly less appeal. The experience of watching "The Room" is enjoyably inexplicable, and I see no point in trying to explain it. I think people would get more out of simply viewing "The Room" and enjoying the mystery.
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"The Post" and "Phantom Thread"

Let's finish up the Oscar contenders.

I was looking forward to "The Post," Steven Spielberg's dramatization of the tumultuous decisionmaking behind the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971.  The film has an all-star cast, lead by Tom Hanks as newspaper editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham. All of Spielberg's usual sterling collaborators are listed in the credits.  "The Post" also has added bonus of being very timely, deliberately positioned as a rebuke to the age of fake news and outrage-based journalism.

Initially, everything seems to be on the right track as we watch the Post's newsroom rally to cover the unfolding story around the Pentagon Papers, while Graham struggles with the newspaper's IPO and her evolving leadership role.  Hanks is in a more acerbic part than usual, and Streep in a more understated one, and they're both great. I like the look of the picture, which has several obvious homages to "All the President's Men," and the smaller performances from Bob Odenkirk, Matthew Rhys, Tracy Letts, Carrie Coon, and others.  But as time goes on, more and more distracting little Spielberg-isms keep creeping into the frame. There's the running joke about Bradlee's daughter's lemonade business. And the literal quoting of the Supreme Court decision to underline the lesson of the day. In the end, pretty much every attempt to lionize the fourth estate comes across as hokey and outdated instead of inspiring.

"The Post," like much of Spielberg's other recent output, plays like a throwback to a much older breed of motion picture, or actually two at once.  Occasionally it felt like he was making a gritty '70s social drama with a script from a romanticized prestige pic from the '40s or '50s. The heroes are larger than life, and the dialogue can't help but make a few grand pronouncements full of shining idealism.  The cinematography, however, is moody and stark, full of unglamorous people in glumly utilitarian environments. These tonal clashes aren't too bad, but the film never stops feeling aesthetically odd and unbalanced. I found that most of the movie was still very watchable and enjoyable, showcasing the work of a lot of talented people.  And yet, I couldn't help comparing it negatively to the much simpler, more straightforward "Spotlight" in terms of effective championing of the free press. And it doesn't come close to "All the President's Men" as far as portraying the social and political tensions of post-Vietnam America.

I had no expectations for "The Phantom Thread" at all, and was lucky enough to see the film knowing almost nothing about it except that Paul Thomas Anderson was directing, and Daniel Day Lewis was playing a fashion designer.  Specifically, he plays Reynolds Woodcock, who runs a couture fashion house in 1950s London. He and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) run the business to exacting standards, driven by Reynolds' obsessive attention to detail and his uncompromising adherence to his own set preferences and schedules.  And it's into this strict little world that Reynolds brings Alma (Vicky Krieps), his latest paramour and muse. She agrees to model for him and live with him, but finds the relationship too imbalanced for her tastes. This leads to a nail-biting power struggle between the two of them that pushes both parties to uncomfortable extremes.

 

I'm not used to domestic dramas and romances being this tense, but I should have expected nothing less from Paul Thomas Anderson.  The film is full of gorgeous imagery, from the painstakingly recreated period gowns to steaming cups of tea to a riotous New Year's party full of colorful revelry.  However, it's the actors who are impossible to take your eyes off of, often playing out incredibly suspenseful scenes in the middle of deceptively elegant settings. One dress fitting doubles as a seduction scene, and another as an exercise in  humiliation and diminishment. The aforementioned party sequence is full of motion and sound, but the overwhelming emotion it conveys is that of loneliness, as we watch Reynolds traverse the cacophony in search of Alma. Daniel Day Lewis is at his very best, playing the prickly Reynolds as one of those infuriating artistic geniuses who has heard far too much praise and is too used to getting his own way.  And it's an absolute delight to find that Vicky Krieps, who is practically unknown in American films, matches him scene for scene, and beat for beat.

One might be tempted to call "Phantom Thread" Anderson's own attempt at a throwback to the moviemaking of a previous era.  However, this proves not to be the case at all. In spite of the period set designs, Jonny Greenwood's lavish instrumental score, and the echoes of many classical romances in the narrative, "Phantom Thread" is very modern in its attitudes toward love and life.  How the story ultimately resolves is anything but traditional. I had a wonderful time with it, because I had absolutely no idea where it was going, or even what genre we were ultimately dealing with. Anderson didn't tip his hand, all the way up to the end, and I'm so glad that he didn't.  This was one of the best surprises I've had at the movies in a while, and one of the best movies of the year, period.

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