"Kimi" and "Bigbug"

Let's catch up on some Netflix.

Steven Soderbergh's latest is a thriller about an agoraphobic tech worker living in Seattle during the pandemic.  It's mostly an updated "Rear Window," with some elements of "The Conversation," and "Run Lola Run," in the mix.  Our heroine, Angela, is played by Zoe Kravitz, and is the recovering victim of a sexual assualt.  She works from home, resolving errors from the Siri-like personal assistant devices, called Kimi.  One day she hears what appears to be a sexual assault recorded from one of the Kimi units, which forces Angela to dig into her shady employers, and eventually gather up her courage to leave her apartment to get help.  The last third of the film goes from techno thriller to out-and-out action thriller, with Kravitz as our capable heroine.  

While "Kimi" is a fun watch, I wasn't able to buy into it as much as I would have liked because it's so derivative.  Everything in this film is something that feels like a variation of something that I've already seen, from the montage sequences of Angela manipulating the recording with different equipment to get a clearer sound, to the chase scenes around Seattle with Angela sporting bright blue hair like a cyberpunk character.  The script by David Koepp is pretty good, with some smart observations about the current state of surveillance technology and privacy concerns.  The bad guys are downright casual in their infiltration of Angela's devices and data, and it almost feels like a subversion that the Kimi device turns out to be much more helpful to Angela than the scary corporation that controls it.  

I feel like part of the problem is that "Kimi" is designed to be very timely.  Soderbergh shot it on location in Seattle, the pandemic is clearly still in full swing, and Angela at one point chides an overseas colleague that #Metoo has happened, and he can't be hitting on her during work calls anymore.  The movie could become very dated very quickly.  On the other hand, Soderbergh isn't cutting any corners, making Kimi's apartment feel like a very dynamic space, and then using handheld cameras and over-bright lighting to shatter her equilibrium when she finally manages to leave it. Kravitz's performance is very good, highlighting Angela's resourcefulness, anxiety, and badass bona fides.  It's not a great Soderbergh film, but it's the best version of this movie that could probably exist in 2022.     

Now, on to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Bigbug."  This is Jeunet's first feature film in nearly a decade, and I honestly have to wonder if he forgot how to make movies during that gap.  I might just be completely misunderstanding the tone of what this movie is supposed to be, but I don't think that's the case.  "Bigbug" is a dark satire about our reliance on technology, taking place in a garish future full of flying cars, bad reality television, and robot helpers.  Because there's an evil A.I. uprising taking place, a suburban family and their guests are trapped in their home by their well-meaning household bots.  

  

This is a complete mess tonally.  The human characters, including frumpy Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), her boyfriend Max (Stéphane De Groodt), ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi), his girlfriend (Claire Chust), a neighbor (Isabelle Nanty) and teenagers (Marysole Fertard and Hélie Thonnat) are all unsympathetic caricatures.  The cartoonish robots and AI enhanced gadgets they clash with are half-baked and outdated, only menacing for how badly they straddle the line between human and inhuman behavior.  I imagine there has to be some French cultural subtleties that I'm missing here, some nuances in the humor or the satire that just isn't registering.  Otherwise, this is just clownish farce of the worst kind.

This would be easier to dismiss if it weren't for the resources that Jeunet had at his disposal.  Netflix's deep pockets allow him to make more of a spectacle of "Bigbug" than he's had the opportunity to do for some time.  So, it's not just that the movie is bad, but it's an obnoxiously bad eyesore that makes Jeunet's deficiencies so much more obvious.  All the charm of his handmade oddities and cluttered fantasy worlds has been supplanted by CGI horrors.  His characters have never been flatter or more disposable.  

And yes, Dominique Pinon does show up for a cameo.  

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W. Kamau Bell Talks About "Cosby"

I've put this off for too long.  I try not to write much about hot button topics on this blog, because I don't have the resources and I'm frankly not well informed enough to talk about them the way they should be talked about.  And when you don't have anything helpful or constructive to say, it's best just to stay out of the conversation and reduce the noise.  Frankly, the sum total of my thoughts toward the Bill Cosby controversy that I feel comfortable sharing can be summed up as, Cosby's crimes are clearly very serious, and I wish he could have been brought to justice earlier.

The more complicated part of it, the one that we've all been skirting around these past few years, is what to do about Bill Cosby's legacy and body of work.  As a non-white person who was a child in the U.S. in the 1980s, "The Cosby Show" had a major impact on my worldview.  I am not willing to set aside my positive feelings for that series, even knowing that Bill Cosby was the major driving force behind it.  However, I'm not African-American, I haven't been keeping up with the cases against Cosby, and I'm not remotely well versed enough in the discourse going on around him to articulate my position with any kind of confidence that I'm not treading on anyone's toes or being inconsiderate of anyone's feelings.  It is a messy, upsetting situation all around, and I'm so grateful that W. Kamau Bell has decided to create a documentary series for Showtime, laying out all of the facts, and interviewing many, many people for "We Need to Talk About Cosby."  It spans four hour-long episodes and it still doesn't feel like enough.

What Bell does so well is that he carefully lays out the context for why Bill Cosby is such a sensitive topic.  "We Need to Talk About Cosby" is as much about Bill Cosby's successes as it is about calling him out on his terrible crimes, much like Ezra Edelman's "The People vs. O.J. Simpson."  It charts Cosby's whole career from the beginning, and we don't get to "The Cosby Show" and the height of his popularity until the third episode.  At the same time, Bell lays out that Bill Cosby was committing sexual assaults and rapes from his earliest days of doing comedy in the '60s, and covering them up using his celebrity and sterling reputation.  There's a lot of time spent emphasizing his efforts at creating educational programs in the 1970s, like "Fat Albert," building up Cosby's image as a trustworthy figure of authority.  This helps to explain why people of different generations have had such different responses to the scandal.  Gen Xers and older millennials like me still can't help viewing Cosby as a paternal figure on the same level as someone like Fred Rogers.    

The interviews in the series are conducted with Cosby's victims, his peers, many people who knew him, and also with various academics, writers, and media figures - mostly African American.  And I so appreciate that Bell gives them a platform to really tackle the contradictions of Bill Cosby, and the impact that he's had on American popular culture.  As one journalist points out, you can't talk about the African-American experience in the last half of the 20th century without talking about Bill Cosby.  He broke a lot of barriers and changed the media landscape permanently, for the better.  At the same time, dozens of first-hand accounts make it clear that he is an irredeemable monster who preyed on women and girls for decades.  And those two sides of him, while he did his best to keep them separate, are linked.  Some of his old comedy routines and running jokes are awfully inappropriate in hindsight.  He only had the access to his victims that he did because of the stratospheric level of his success, and he was scrupulous about maintaining his wholesome image.    

"We Need to Talk About Cosby" told me a lot of things I didn't know about Bill Cosby, but it didn't change my position on the scandal.  I still love and value the man's work, and think the man himself should be in prison for the rest of his life.  But what it did help with was that feeling of doubt and insecurity about my position.  I'm not the only person who feels this way about Bill Cosby - not remotely, and there are many, many other people  - smart, insightful, and moral people - who are still struggling with how to reconcile the dichotomy.  And it's more than understandable that we'll all be struggling with it for a long time to come.

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Make Time for "Voir"

I was looking forward to "Voir," because it's the first new content in a while to come from Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos, who are best known as the creators of the "Every Frame a Painting" Youtube channel.  "Voir" is an interesting experiment, sort of an attempt to legitimize the "visual essay" format that has become popular in recent years on Youtube and other video platforms.  Zhou and Ramos contribute three of the six installments, with the other three written by prominent film critics/journalists Sasha Stone, Drew McWeeney, and Walter Chaw.  Having Netflix's resources means that the individual essays can contain a good deal of polished original content like interviews, reenactments, and framing devices, along with the usual montages of edited clips from familiar films - now all properly sourced and licensed.

I binged all six segments, and it felt almost exactly like watching a bunch of Youtube film essays with unusually high production values.  They run from 17-23 minutes apiece, and cover a nice assortment of topics from the creators' personal experiences with specific films to wider trends and issues in filmmaking.  "The Ethics of Revenge," the one installment narrated by Tony Zhou, feels almost exactly like an essay from "Every Frame a Painting," just with a few nice interviews spliced in.  One that felt a little out of place was Sasha Stone's "Summer of the Shark," which is an impressionistic, autobiographical piece about Stone's childhood that uses "Jaws" as a focal point, but spends as much time talking about her own life and memories, which are dramatized with actors.  Then again, I appreciate the different style and storytelling techniques that this employs.

Another episode, perhaps the most ambitious, is "The Duality of Appeal," where Zhou and Ramos discuss how animated characters are designed, and specifically how female characters have been shaped by marketing forces to all look too much the same.  One of their old essays intended for Youtube would have stopped there, but "Voir" commissions a group of artists to design and animate a short sequence for a more unique animated woman, dubbed Cleo.  Going through the process allows the creators to highlight and discuss different aspects of design, and the various pitfalls.  It's a really lovely look at a topic that doesn't get much discussion in the broader film world, and is a good example of how eclectic this series has the potential to be.  

"Film vs. Television" is probably the most straightforward, informational TED Talk style episode that charts the rise of the two mediums and shows how they've recently started to converge due to both technological and stylistic changes.  I really appreciated this one for laying out its arguments very efficiently and connecting some dots.  For instance, television is structured the way it is because the major networks had their roots in radio.  It was also nice to see the direct comparison of television and film approaches to storytelling with examples like Michael Mann's "L.A. Takedown" vs. "Heat," and Stephen Frears' "The Queen" vs. "The Crown."  And it ends with a very good "Game of Thrones" joke. 

The two installments I found the most gratifying to see - not just as a film nerd but as a film discourse nerd - were "But I Don't Like Him" and "Profane and Profound."   In the former, Drew McWeeney discusses his favorite film "Lawrence of Arabia," and goes on to talk about unlikeable heroes in film, with special emphasis on the work of Martin Scorsese.  In the latter, Walter Chaw makes a case for Walter Hill's "48 Hrs" being a classic due to the way it discusses race and race relations.  I've been reading McWeeney and Chaw's reviews and analysis for years now, and it's wonderful to see them able to translate their work into a visual medium. 

The collection of talent involved here is considerable.  Interview subjects include animator Glen Keane, and directors Brenda Chapman and Jennifer Yuh Nelson.  The series was executive produced by David Fincher and David Prior, and Prior directed two of the episodes.  I'd love to see bigger names get involved in the future, but then again "Voir" strikes me as distinctive because it has such a more academic, outsider's viewpoint.  There are plenty of documentary series about films made by the people who make films.  This is something a little different, a little more personal.  And I love to see it.

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Rank Em: "Love, Death, and Robots" Year Three

It's a new season of "Love, Death, and Robots," so it's a new "Rank 'Em" list.  Before we get into the rankings, I want to emphasize that this was a good set of shorts and I enjoyed all of them.  There weren't any obvious stinkers in the bunch, which made it difficult to sort them.  Still, I had my favorites that I want to give kudos to.

Here we go, from best to least best:

"Swarm" - All of the shorts show off impressive animation to varying degrees, but this is the only one I felt had a properly interesting science fiction premise.  We start out with two scientists visiting an alien collective, and the situation quickly turns horrific.  It turns out that as the humans have been studying the aliens, the aliens have been studying the humans.  So, along with some great nightmare imagery, there's a nice dose of existential horror to go with it.  

"Mason's Rats" - It's a goofy update of the old pests versus exterminators idea, but I just love the execution.  You've got Craig Ferguson voicing the cranky old farmer who finds himself up against a colony of intelligent, hostile rats, and gets killer robots involved.  This could have escalated into another doomsday scenario, but I like that the ending was actually rather sweet.  I got the most entertainment value out of this one, which endeared me to it enormously.

"Three Robots: Exit Strategies" - This is going to make some people very upset because it has a few jabs that can be read as overtly political.  However, the robots going on a tour of humanity's futile attempts to stave off the end of civilization is hilarious.  The droll commentary is so dark and so cutting, but also somehow an awful lot of fun.  The real target here is human hubris, and a reminder to the rich and the powerful that we'll all go together when we go.

"The Very Pulse of the Machine" - A survival story with a gorgeous aesthetic, and some alien landscapes I won't soon forget.  The hallucinogenic atmosphere and the trippy concepts kept me very invested, and I especially like the ending, which reminds me of a lot of the more psychedelic science-fiction short stories I was reading in high school.  I've seen this kind of story done a few times before, but never as well.  

"Jibaro" - An original short written and directed by Alberto Mielgo, who also made "The Witness."  This one is just pure style, with frenetic cinematography and no real story or dialogue.  There are, however, two characters, a pair of lovers/enemies who seem to embody primal forces more than anything else.  It's wonderful just to look at the thing, and it's the best piece of pure animation of all the shorts. 

"Night of the Mini Dead" - A quick seven minute zombie apocalypse in miniature.  The horrific collapse of society and a nuclear holocaust is hilarious from a distance, and with the events all sped up.  The sound design is especially important for this one, with the squeaky chipmunk voices and the high pitched carnage.  I'm only putting this so low because it is just the one gag, and this is the shortest short. 

"In Vaulted Halls Entombed" - A rescue mission goes from bad to worse in this action horror piece.  It goes by a little too quick and doesn't quite nail the ending, but I like the sense of tension that it maintains, and the eldritch abominations that it manages to invoke by the finale.  The almost photo-real animation is a little bland, but avoids the stiffness that you see with similar characters.  

"Bad Traveling" - This is the one that David Fincher directed, and the longest of this set.  The story and premise are good, but I hate the way that this one looks.  It's dark and murky and you can't see much.  The character designs don't try to be photorealistic, but they're also remarkably unappealing for animation.  I suppose that's appropriate for a horror short, but it made this a difficult watch.

"Kill Team Kill" -  There are an awful lot of shorts in this group that are about a set of soldiers who encounter the unknown, and then get into violent battles that end with most of them dead.  This is the one where a team of quippy Green Berets meet a monstrous cyborg bear created to be a deadly killing machine.  There's really not much else to it, but the animation is cool and the designs are fun.     

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Time to Drop This Show

I've been getting better about not being so much of a completionist and letting go of shows that aren't working for me anymore.  There is so much good media these days that it feels increasingly foolhardy to commit so much time to shows that I'm not enjoying.  So, since the start of the streaming television era, I've amassed a collection of shows that I've abandoned after a season or two or three.  The latest is the science-fiction series "Raised by Wolves," which started out great, but completely lost me by the end of its first season.  It's doubling down on the holy war storyline this time around, which I have no interest in whatsoever.

Still, sometimes it's difficult to get over the urge to hold out for improvement, especially if a show has delivered in the past.  Sometimes it's worth it, like with "Mr. Robot," and sometimes it's not, like with "Game of Thrones" - well, your mileage will vary depending on how much you enjoy the fandom schadenfreude.  Since it's been a while since I've done a real navel-gazer of a post, today I thought I'd talk about some of my decision process in deciding when to give up on a series, or at least to wait until it's finished and then consider bingeing the rest.  Why am I still watching "Disenchantment" and "Westworld," and not "Barry"?

First off, the shift to streaming led to me dropping a bunch of network shows, because frankly it's not convenient to keep up with them week to week.  "The Good Place" was really the last over-the-air program I watched regularly.  Others like "Brooklyn 99" and "The Conners" fell by the wayside quickly.  However, now that "Brooklyn 99" is finished, I'm more interested in eventually bingeing it, the way that I did with "Parks & Recreation."  I don't think I'm ever going to be a regular consumer of late night again either, as I've settled on watching the occasional "Daily Show" or Colbert clip on Youtube the day after the programs air on the networks or cable.

I'm more selective about the shows I watch in general, so I've been better about not getting wrapped up in the types of series I'm eventually going to drop.  Tuning in to the reviews and internet buzz has been helpful in leading me away from minefields like "Castle Rock," which had a great cast and IP, but only a tepid reception, and "Euphoria," which is frankly in a genre I'm not going to ever enjoy.  It's also been helpful in getting me to think of individual seasons as discrete entities.  I watched the first and third seasons of "True Detective," which have nothing to do with each other.  I got through two seasons of "The Handmaid's Tale" before realizing that the show worked best as a miniseries, like "Big Little Lies," and I didn't need to see more.  

As for the actual reasons I stop watching - they mostly involve drops in quality, changes I don't like, or a show revealing itself to be something  I don't have the patience for.  One of my biggest pet peeves is storylines getting dragged out.  When it became clear that "A Handmaid's Tale" was going to keep manipulating the story to avoid the heroine being able to achieve her end goal of escaping Gilead, I lost interest and peaced out.  However, I watched all five up-and-down seasons of "Orphan Black" because that show was very good at keeping itself flexible, and dropping the ideas and characters that had run their course.  My tolerance for straight soaps like "Revenge" and repetitive shows like "Merlin," has also decreased significantly. 

Most of the shows I stop watching now are ones that I initially enjoyed, but failed to keep my interest.  "American Gods" and "The Expanse," both started out great, but they became very different in subsequent seasons, and now that they're finished, it's clear that they never got back to the level of quality they started with.  Of course I occasionally do run across series that don't work for me from the outset, like "Locke & Key" or "The Umbrella Academy," but I usually bail out a few episodes now, like I did with "Wheel of Time," instead of wanting to finish the season.  

Picking shows back up again is also something I've been doing more often, like with "Better Call Saul" and "Daredevil," so I can mentally tell myself I'm benching something like "Orange is the New Black" instead of giving up on it completely.  That helps me to push away feelings that I'm leaving something unfinished.  However, what's been helping me the most in abandoning my old mindset is that the flexibility of streaming options has allayed so many of my old fears about missing out and losing access.  

It's like what I had to learn with movies - I have more options now, and I'll never have to settle for mediocrity again.      

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It's Time For "The Inside Outtakes"

Bo Burnham recently released "The Inside Outtakes," nearly an hour of material consisting of behind the scenes footage, early versions of songs and sketches, and unused segments from his Netflix special "Inside."  There's also an accompanying album with a few extra songs that never made it to the filming stage.  It's been a year since the release of "Inside," a piece of media that's been one of the few to really capture the pandemic zeitgeist.  I spent a good chunk of 2021 obsessed with it, and became hyperfixated on Bo Burnham for a few months as a result.

Part of what fueled my reaction is that Burnham did zero press for "Inside," and almost no media appearances, even as the special racked up widespread acclaim, a pile of critical kudos, three Emmy wins and a Grammy.  While his audience was busy analyzing every frame of "Inside," trying to decode the themes and figure out how he'd managed to DIY the whole thing by himself during lockdown, Burnham offered zero answers.  We got a few announcements related to merchandise and the brief "Inside" theatrical run last summer, but that was about it.  

"Outtakes" is fascinating because it offers some indirect answers.  How did Burnham make "Inside" so perfect?  Everything we see in "Outtakes" points to a monumental amount of work.  We see five different iterations of the opening number, "Content," for instance, using different lighting effects.  All five versions are put onscreen simultaneously and synced together, so we can appreciate the differences, and see how the initial idea progressed to the finished product.  Another screen shows us 35 different takes of "Welcome to the Internet," each one blinking out of existence when Burnham hits a snag, until only the final, familiar one remains.     

The highlights, however, are the sketches and songs that were cut from "Inside."  It's apparent why some of them didn't make the cut - "Joe Biden" invokes distracting politics, and "Five Years" breaks the illusion that Burnham's character is operating in isolation.  "Chicken," doesn't quite fit the apocalyptic mood.  I like "The Future," which had its melody repurposed for "Problematic," and its visuals reworked for "All Eyes on Me."   Other segments, however, were probably only excised for time.  My favorite things in "Outtakes" are the Zoom interview that Burnham conducts with multiple versions of himself, and a podcast spoof that skewers thin-skinned comedians complaining about cancel culture.  Only slightly less effective are a nihilistic peanut butter sandwich making tutorial, a MCU-style announcement of an "Inside Cinematic Universe," and an absurdist advertisement for jeans.       

I've heard some chatter that "Outtakes" is as good as "Inside," which I don't agree with.  "Outtakes" has a lot of good things in it, but it's made up of far more scattered pieces, and derives most of its poignancy from being a companion piece to "Inside."  The narrative of showing the ups and downs of the creative process is rudimentary at best.  However, "Outtakes" is very much its own piece of media, with its own, slightly different style and a more metatextual point of view.  Another interesting twist is that Burnham clearly intended for "Outtakes" to be a Youtube release, with fake midroll ads, fake "skip ads" buttons, and a bevy of humorous pop ups to take advantage of the format.  

This is also a piece of media that's clearly aimed at Burnham's most ardent fans, the viewers who will pause the video to try and read a whiteboard in the background of a shot, or will spot the hidden frame from one of Burnham's old Youtube videos in the fiery alternate ending.  If you haven't already seen "Inside," I don't see the point in sifting through Burnham's discarded ideas - though some segments work decently on their own.   This is all the extras you'd expect to find on an "Inside" home media release, edited together and tweaked to make fun of its own existence, but it's still just the extras.

I am happy to report a sense of relief at realizing that my hyperfixation on Bo Burnham has well and truly passed.  After finishing "Outtakes," I had no real urge to rewatch it, to read reviews, or to find out what other people thought of it.  I'm delighted that it exists, and that Burnham continues to find new ways to surprise and delight us, but I'm also more than ready for him to move on to the next project.

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The Ambiguity of "Landscapers"

I nearly stopped watching "Landscapers" after the first episode, because I found the main characters, Susan and Chris Edwards (Olivia Colman and David Thewlis) rather dull and uninteresting.  The pair are aging Brits, with a pile of annoying little neuroses, who have been hiding out in France for years due to some undisclosed crime in their pasts.  Their careful anonymity unravels when Chris makes a fatal mistake that reveals the awful truth - they were involved in the deaths of Susan's parents (Felicity Montagu and David Hayman) and a subsequent cover-up.  The first episode ends with the couple giving themselves up to the police.

However, I'm very glad I kept watching the miniseries, because once Susan and Chris are split up, and start being interrogated by a team led by DC Lancing (Kate O'Flynn), we start getting a better picture of who these two are, and how their crime is more complicated than it seems.  I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal that the Edwards were eventually convicted of murder, since the series is based on true events and the creators signal their guilt almost from the beginning.  The series spends the next three episodes humanizing Susan and Chris, and exploring the wide gulf that exists between the sensationalistic media narratives around the investigation and trial, and the more nuanced portrayal that this new dramatization offers.  

There's always some concern when a piece of media takes a more sympathetic view of people who have done something terrible, and in this case I don't know how you can get to the end of "Landscapers" without feeling some sympathy toward the Edwards.  The writers never make much of a case for their innocence, because the evidence against the Edwards is plain, but they do offer motives and background for their actions that show some of their actions in a different light.  And though the Edwards are shown to  lie and exaggerate constantly, the show argues that a major redeeming factor is that they love each other and manage to maintain that love through the whole, terrible judicial process.  

The creators are very self-aware that they're creating a narrative that subverts an existing one, and they constantly draw attention to what they're doing while criticizing the tactics of the previous storytellers - namely the law enforcement officials and lawyers responsible for building and prosecuting the case against the Edwards.  There are fourth wall breaking moments and fantasy conceits, such as Susan imagining that she's revisiting the crime scene, only inhabited by the idealized versions of her parents that the prosecution is pushing.  The last episode contains a framing device with Susan and Chris playing romantic outlaws in a Hollywood western.  Some episodes end with clips of a more typical true-crime program that paints the Edwards as monsters over the credits. 

   

This leaves us with some interesting questions about the nature of true crime stories.  Clearly, we feel more sympathetic toward the Edwards in "Landscapers" because they are being played by two of the best working British actors, and given well-written dialogue from talented writers.  The story highlights their devotion to each other and their more entertaining eccentricities, while ignoring the less savory parts of their personalities.  The portrait of the Edwards painted by the miniseries may be no more truthful than the sensationalized tabloid versions, but it's more compelling because it's more thoughtful and more well-rounded, and delivered with skill by very talented creators.

Then again, this is not a documentary, and has less of a duty to tell the truth.  Rather, it tells *a* truth, which is that despite everyone's good intentions, any attempt to impose a narrative on a set of events is going to get bungled up somewhere, and the Edwards, who got stuck in the roles of the villains, may not have deserved it.  As a piece of entertainment, I can find little to criticize about "Landscapers."  Thewlis and Colman give committed and sincere performances, particularly Colman, whose big monologue on the witness stand in the last episode might make you cry.  This is a very different take on the true crime genre, and fans should absolutely give it a watch - as a cautionary tale if nothing else.      

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