"The Adam Project" and "Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes"

Twelve year-old Adam (Walker Scobell) is not adjusting well after the death of his father Louis (Mark Ruffalo), and is acting out at school and at home, despite the efforts of his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner).  One day he stumbles across a time traveler from the year 2050.  It's an adult Adam (Ryan Reynolds), searching for his missing wife Laura (Zoe Saldana), and on the run from the evil Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), the mogul who controls time travel in 2050.  The two versions of Adam need to team up in order to survive, but they don't get along very well.  

"The Adam Project" reminds me a lot of a previous Shawn Levy film, "Real Steel."  That was a science fiction story featuring a young boy and his father who were constantly being assholes to each other.  I didn't like it much.  "The Adam Project" has a similar adult/child dynamic, but handles it considerably better.  While there's a lot of snarky quipping being thrown around, it's clear from the outset that the angry kid and his struggling parental figures all love each other dearly.  Also, we know exactly why there's so much kid/adult friction, because the kid and the adult are the same person - Ryan Reynolds.  And we're all familiar enough with Reynolds' screen persona by this point that we know not to take the insults too seriously.

This is pretty obviously a Reynolds vehicle, despite the family friendly packaging.  Both versions of Adam are completely built around him, and Scobell was clearly cast for his ability to exude the same kind of self-aware cockiness.  I wish that the time travel adventure was more interesting, but the film is more interested in the family and grief therapy angle, that's just fine.  As an action spectacle, it's pretty low key.  There are lightsabers-esque weapons and other gadgets to play with, a cool airship to fly, and lots of bad CGI all around.  Deaging technology is still a menace in the wrong hands, and these are the wrong hands.  Still, a wholly original science fiction film aimed at kids and parents is a relative rarity these days, this is a perfectly fine watch if you just want some action and banter.    

Now, for "Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes," a very low budget Japanese time travel comedy that's just bursting with inventiveness and exuberance.  It's designed to look like a single shot following a man named Kato (Kazunari Tosa), as he discovers that the video screen in his bedroom shows images recorded from the screen in the cafe downstairs - but two minutes in the future.  Soon his friends have gotten involved, there are mobsters and mysterious strangers lurking around, and things quickly get out of hand.  The feature only runs 70 minutes, but it's a very fun ride to see what's going to pop up on the video screens next, and how the situation keeps escalating.

The tone is very broad and lighthearted.  Characters act much younger than they are and tend to speak in gleeful exclamations.  It's nice to see one of these time-twister stories that doesn't end in horrible betrayals and murder, but the antics of Kato and friends are very, very silly stuff.  This sometimes undercuts how impressive the film is on a technical and narrative level.  Once you start thinking about how the filmmakers managed to actually make the film, it quickly becomes clear how much of the action had to be carefully timed and orchestrated to play out in two-minute chunks.  Actors react to themselves onscreen in the future, in segments that haven't been shot yet.  Actors react to themselves reacting to themselves in segments that haven't been shot yet.  It's pretty wild.

  

Directed by first timer Junta Yamaguchi and written by Makoto Ueda - familiar to anime fans for his work on "Tatami Galaxy" and other similarly mind-bendy shows - "Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes" is very much a gimmick film.  However, the execution is great, and the movie doesn't outstay its welcome.  This is destined to become a cult film and will inevitably be remade with a much larger budget and a fraction of the charm.  I suggest tracking this down and checking it out before that happens.    

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"Turning Red" is Turning Heads

I never thought I'd see the day when PIXAR would make a movie aimed so directly at thirteen year-old girls, and one committed to existing in that awkward, gawky space inhabited by thirteen year-old girls.  It's a world of boy band obsessions and inappropriate crushes and uncomfortable conversations about periods - yes, this PIXAR movie acknowledges menstruation - and taking those first steps toward independence.  This feels like the movie "Brave" wanted to be, but didn't have the guts or the supportive creative environment to be.  

However, it's a different world at PIXAR now, and Domee Shi, the director of "Bao," has been able to make a very personal, very specific coming-of-age story with "Turning Red." Mei (Rosalie Chang) is a thirteen year-old who lives in Toronto with her temple keeper parents, Ming (Sanda Oh) and Jin (Orion Lee).  She's a good student and dutiful daughter at home, but secretly loves the 4*Town boy band, and hanging out with her trio of friends, Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park).  One day, Mei wakes up to discover that she's temporarily turned into a giant red panda, and it'll keep happening every time she can't keep her emotions under control.

"Turning Red" doesn't feel like a PIXAR film in many respects, and I mean that as a compliment.  The visuals are much more stylized, with flatter, more simplified character designs, a pastel color scheme, and an altogether cuddlier aesthetic.  The animation benefits from this, allowing for more cartoony, exaggerated movements and expressions.  There's still plenty of PIXAR's vaunted attention to detail.  "Turning Red" takes place in 2002, and the filmmakers gleefully recreate the specific little pop culture trends and visual hallmarks of being a Canadian eighth grader in that era.  Tamagotchi!  Friendship bracelets!  The Toronto SkyDome!  As an Asian-American viewer, I also award high marks for getting many cultural details right, like Chinese soap opera broadcasts, the army of Mei's aunties (with accents of varying degrees), and all the beautiful food.

Mei - who I probably identify a little too much with - is a great lead character.  She's much closer to a real girl than you usually see in cartoons, allowed to be a little bit of a brat and allowed to have inappropriate thoughts about cute boys.  Ming is your classic tiger mom, of course.  She loves Mei, but is often overbearing to the point of absurdity.  Mei may be struggling with the onset of puberty, but her mother is arguably even more caught off guard, totally unprepared for her little girl to start acting out and pushing back against her expectations.  The film is as much about her as it's about her daughter.  Some of the material that works the best comes in early scenes, where Ming reacts badly to finding Mei's sexy doodles of her crush, or shows up at her school with sanitary pads - both awful humiliations that fuel Mei's rebelliousness.  The "Teen Wolf" transformation hijinks are fun, but the mother/daughter conflicts are where "Turning Red" really offers something worthwhile.    

When you look at the last couple of PIXAR films, the studio is starting to tackle more specific types of experiences - like middle age malaise in "Soul," and siblinghood and grief in "Onward."  "Turning Red" shares a lot of common ground with "Inside Out," but from a much more boisterous and funny angle.  I love "Inside Out," but Riley is so idealized that she doesn't feel like a real kid, and most of that film is really from Joy's point of view as a parental figure.  Mei, on the other hand, despite how exaggerated her behavior is, rings much truer to someone going through the agony of early adolescence.  So, it makes sense that "Turning Red" makes for a much wilder, weirder, and unusual kind of movie.

I've seen some pushback about the film's content, which is more explicit about girls' growing pains than anything I've ever seen out of Disney, and very rare to see in an animated film from a major studio.  However, there's nothing here I'd say was close to inappropriate, especially in the age of "Steven Universe" and "Big Mouth."  It might spark some uncomfortable and challenging conversations for squeamish parents, though, which honestly might be a good thing.  

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My Top Ten Episodes of "Daredevil"

Spoilers ahead for all three seasons.

I finished "Daredevil," which improved so greatly in the third season that I'm pretty comfortable calling this one of the best live-action superhero series ever made.  There are only 39 episodes, but that's still enough for me to feel comfortable about putting together a Top Ten.  The episodes below are unranked, and ordered by airdate.

"Cut Man" - The second episode of the series gives us the death of Jack Murdock, an introduction to Claire Temple, and the first of the show's many beloved one-shot hallway fight sequences.  It also shows off one of the best elements of the show, which is how bad Matt Murdock is at being a superhero sometimes.  He's constantly being beat up and having to lay low for multiple episodes to recover.  Rosario Dawson is great here, and I wish she appeared in the show more.

"Speak of the Devil" - After multiple episodes of building tensions, Daredevil and Fisk are finally put in direct confrontation.  The escalations within the episode are great - Fisk going public ruining Urich's investigation, Murdock visiting Vanessa's art gallery and immediately raising everyone's suspicions, and the death of Mrs. Cardenas, setting up the big brawl between Daredevil and Nobu.  And of course there's the ultimate ending that sets up the big revelation scene and the next episode.

"Nelson v. Murdock" - This is my favorite episode of the season because it does what so many superhero shows fail to do, which is to actually deal with the personal fallout of a secret identity being exposed.  Nothing is immediately resolved, and Matt being so injured means he can't just walk out of the conversation.  Elden Henson is great, and totally cements himself as one of my favorites in the cast.  We also get some fun flashbacks to Matt and Foggy's school days and "avocados at law."

"The Path of the Righteous" - And this is the entry where I gush about Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, who I'd argue is easily the second lead of the show right after Charlie Cox.  The development of the Karen character through these three seasons is so well done, and a big turning point is her confrontation with James Wesley, and an ending that I admit I did not see coming.  Meanwhile, there's also our first real encounter with Melvin, who also doesn't appear in "Daredevil" nearly enough.

"Semper Fidelis" - Murdock and Nelson being lawyers, it makes sense that a major court case should be a plot point.  I especially appreciate that Foggy having to shoulder the entire defense of Frank Castle is used to show how Matt's priorities are a mess, and that Foggy is a much better lawyer than the show has portrayed him to be so far.  Watching him try to put together a trial strategy on very short notice is legitimately interesting, and Elektra is used exactly as much as she should be.

"The Man in the Box" - I haven't said much yet about Vincent D'Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, but even in brief appearances he's fabulously menacing.  His meeting with Murdock in the prison is probably my favorite scene in the whole second season.  The rest of the episode with Castle being framed for a new round of killings, and the discovery of the creepy imprisoned kids is also excellent, building up the Hand as a threat.  And who else cheered when Reyes finally went down?

"Blindsided" - the most impressive action scene of the series is probably the ten minute long one-shot sequence where Matt infiltrates Fisk's prison and has to fight his way out.  This time around Matt isn't in costume, and has to try and maintain the fiction that he's blind in the middle of a prison riot.  And there's a dialogue scene in the middle.  And the ending is an infuriating cliffhanger, of course.  This is also the episode where Foggy decides to run for office, and nobody questions it at all.    

"The Devil You Know" - I've seen big season arc low points before, but few have been as emotionally devastating as the showdown at the Bulletin.  It's all orchestrated so beautifully, with Matt, Karen, and Foggy all working together again, a big plan in motion to take down Fisk, and at the exact wrong moment, enter Wilson Bethel's Dex in the Daredevil suit to wreak havoc.  It's not just that things go wrong, but that the rug is pulled out so fast, handing our heroes a total, utter defeat.

"Revelations" - Jay Ali's Agent Ray Nadeem is a big part of the third season, and this episode puts him front and center, even though at the outset it's all about Matt learning some hard truths about his past from Father Lantom.  Nadeem trying to do the right thing, and being completely blocked by the frightening extent of Fisk's corruption is so crushing to see.  Foggy's family being compromised and Karen on the run just turn the heat on the situation higher.  

"A New Napkin" - I decided to include the finale on the list, even though I have some issues with it, based on how much I admire many of the individual pieces.  The showdown with Daredevil, Dex, Fisk, and Vanessa is great.  Letting Agent Nadeem have the final twist was very satisfying.  However, there was a little too much tonal whiplash, and I felt everything wrapped up too fast.  Then again, considering the sudden cancellation, I'm glad we got the last scene.

Honorable mentions: "New York's Finest," "Resurrection," "Karen," and really most of the rest of the third season.     

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"Under the Banner of Heaven" and "Pistol"

 I decided to watch "Under the Banner of Heaven" because it was billed as a detective show starring Andrew Garfield.  I didn't give the Mormon content much thought, and wasn't anticipating how central to the seven-episode miniseries the exploration of LDS and FLDS culture would be.  The show's creator, however, is Dustin Lance Black, who grew up in a Mormon household, and clearly has taken pains to put a more authentic portrayal of Mormon communities onscreen.  "Under the Banner of Heaven" dramatizes the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her baby, which is being investigated by Salt Lake City police detectives Jeb Pyre (Garfield) and his partner Bill Taba (Gil Birmingham).  Pyre is LDS, and Bill is a Paiute Indian.  

The two detectives are fictional, but Brenda and the particulars of her murder and very real and very disturbing.  Her husband Allen (Billy Howle) is arrested first, and through him we learn about the Lafferty family, a set of brothers who became increasingly fundamentalist as their fortunes soured.  The two oldest, Ron (Sam Worthington) and Dan (Wyatt Russell) were obsessed with the history of the LDS church and their own self-importance, eventually becoming abusive to their wives, Matilda (Chloe Pirre) and Dianna (Denise Gough), and threatening to Brenda, who they viewed as a threat for her worldly behavior.  Pyre is forced to confront his own relationship to the church as the investigation goes on, and the role of the Laffertys' faith and the failures of the LDS hierarchy become clear.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" works better as a character drama than it does as a detective story.  The performances are all very good, and several of the individual storylines are very compelling. Watching Brenda try to retain her independence as her life gets swallowed up by the restrictive Mormon dogma is heartbreaking.  Pyre's struggle against doubt is given the appropriate gravity and sincerity.  I'll single out Wyatt Russell as the best performer of the cast here, as he makes Dan Lafferty absolutely terrifying. However, as a mystery the show is unwieldy and tends to leave a lot of unanswered questions.  There are characters who seem to become fanatics out of nowhere, or suddenly just drop out of the narrative.  There are multiple interludes where we follow LDS founder Joseph Smith (Andrew Burnap) and his wife Emma (Tyner Rushing), meant to show the church has been linked to violence and horror since the beginning.  However, these historical segments are too long and too many, stretching out a narrative that already feels too long.  By the time the feature-length finale rolls around, it all feels a bit anticlimactic. 

Let's move on to something completely different.  "Pistol" is a Danny Boyle's blank check project, a six-part dramatization of the history of the punk rock band, Sex Pistols. The band was well before my time, so I only knew parts of their story, mostly related to the sad tale of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.  "Pistol" is told from the POV of the band's founder, guitarist Steve Jones (Toby Wallace).   Initially Steve, guitarist Wally Nightingale (Dylan Llewellyn), drummer Paul Cook (Jacob Slater), and bassist Glen Matlock (Christian Lees) form a band called The Swankers.  However, they catch the attention of would-be impresario Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who becomes their manager, puts Steven on guitar, and fires Wally in favor of singer John Lydon (Anson Boon) - soon to be known as Johnny Rotten.  The most creative license involves Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), who is installed as Jones' girlfriend, and treated as a main character.  Other feminine influences on the band come in the form of McLaren's partner Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), and shopgirl/model Jordan (Maisie Williams).  Chrissie and Jordan work at McLaren and Westwood's boutique, SEX, which serves as a base of operations in the early episodes.

"Pistol" works well as a miniseries, allowing each episode to focus on different challenges faced by the band, and different periods in their development.  Simply getting the Sex Pistols together takes two episodes, and it's only in the third that they start coming up with memorable music.  The Sid (Louis Partridge) and Nancy (Emma Appleton) relationship is at the center of the fifth.  Boyle directed every installment, using archival footage and a well curated soundtrack to immerse the viewer in the UK of the 70s.  I think it's worth checking out the first episode for the playlist alone.  Knowing very little about the Sex Pistols, I find it fascinating that the band knew they were mediocre musicians from the start, but their power was in their counterculture image and their rebel nature, which McLaren gleefully cultivated.  There's some stretching of the truth and some burnishing of their legends, but Boyle is happy to portray the Pistols as a group of deeply troubled, constantly fighting, wildly irresponsible reprobates, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to embody the rage of their generation.  

And it's all very entertaining, more or less.  As a biopic, I had some mixed reactions to "Pistol," but came away mostly positive on the series.  The actors are good, especially newcomer Anson Boon as a very memorable Johnny Rotten.  There's the usual glorification of bad behavior, and shamelessly invented devices like a woman named Pauline (Bianca Stephens), the subject of the song "Bodies," but the execution is very good.  It helps that Boyle is really using the band's story to pay homage to the whole punk era, and pays a lot of attention to getting the right amount of cultural context and period detail onscreen to make the narrative accessible for newcomers.  And I suspect that for a certain crowd, the nostalgia will be off the charts.  

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"Dopesick" is Good Drama

Director Barry Levinson has largely transitioned from theatrical films to television projects, often biopics profiling figures of recent infamy.  After films about Jack Kevorkian, Bernie Madoff, and Joe Paterno, it's no surprise that he's one of the producers and directors on "Dopesick," an eight episode miniseries about the opioid crisis.  Created and largely written by the dependable Danny Strong, the series follows  Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg), through the development and marketing of the painkiller OxyContin, and the opioid epidemic that followed in its wake.  "Dopesick" presents an excellent look behind the scenes at Sackler's twisted motivations and reckless disregard for public safety.  

However, Sackler's story is only one of many being told in "Dopesick," covering multiple individuals at different points in time over a quarter century.  There are two different investigations into Purdue that we get to see unfold, one spearheaded by DEA Agent Bridget Meyer (Rosario Dawson) in 1999, and another by federal prosecutors Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and Randy Ramseyer (John Hoogenakker) a few years later, finally getting to court in 2005.  There's also Dr. Samuel Fennix (Michael Keaton) in 1996, the primary medical practitioner in a small Appalachian mining town.  After being mislead by a drug rep, Billy Cutler (Will Poulter), he starts prescribing OxyContin to his patients, including a closeted young lesbian miner, Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), who lives with her parents (Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham).

So, I count six major storylines here, giving us a macroscopic, "The Wire" -esque look into the creation of OxyContin, the progression of the prescription drug epidemic, and heroic efforts to bring the responsible parties to justice.  We have the POVs of addicts, doctors, investigators, prosecutors, and Perdue Pharmaceuticals employees and leadership.  You could probably lose an episode or two, but "Dopesick" never feels overlong, and never seems to run out of terrible things to tell us about the Sacklers and their handling of OxyContin.  The storytelling is often very on-the-nose about its big dramatic reveals and ironic twists, but that goes with the territory.  Frankly, it's been a long while since I've seen a legal drama or police procedural with this much ambition and the talent to match.  Everything about this production is top drawer, especially the all-star cast led by Keaton and Stuhlbarg.

On the other hand, we've rarely had a horrific public health disaster that could so clearly be traced back to the bad actions of a single company.  The most effective and infuriating parts of "Dopesick" come early, when Sackler and his employees are discussing how to skirt around pharmaceuticals regulations, and deploying their underhanded sales tactics.  It's a lot of little lies and manipulations at first that snowball into something very frightening very quickly.  It's obvious from the start that Betsy is going to become addicted to OxyContin, but then other characters who should know better fall victim too, or have close shaves, as a result of the avalanche of misinformation that Purdue unleashes.  I appreciate that "Dopesick" acts as a public service announcement of sorts, alerting viewers to the tactics of Purdue and its ilk, and showing the extent of the damage they caused.  And if the Sacklers seem too unrealistically villainous, they only have themselves to blame.

The major criticism I've heard about the series is that it's too unsubtle and too concerned with making sure that viewers understand all the little nuances of the bad medicine and corrupt players.  However, it's a result of there clearly being a lot of passion and a lot of emotional investment in this project from its creators.  You can feel the anger and the tension coming across in so much of the writing, and nobody is pulling their punches.  This is as tough a watch as something like "Chernobyl," and viewers can expect to be put through the emotional wringer.  

My only real criticism of the miniseries is that wrangling six stories all at once was probably too much.  It's impossible to keep the timelines of all the characters straight, and there's not enough material for some and too much for others.  You could have made an entire film about Richard Sackler alone, and I'm sure someone else will eventually.  However, the execution is good enough here to sustain the weaker stretches, and I had no trouble getting through all eight episodes.  

And in the end, I feel like Strong and Levinson and their collaborators did what they set out to do - to hold somebody accountable, even if it's only on the small screen.  

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My Favorite Errol Morris Film

A typical narrative film has to work very hard in order to pull off a twist, because it's pretty easy to see them coming these days.  Documentaries, however, have the advantage of taking their material from reality, which is often much stranger than fiction.  Sometimes the unexpected turns are truly unexpected, as they were in investigative docs like "Tickled" and "Icarus," which took their filmmakers down unplanned rabbit holes.  And then there are films like "Mr. Death," where the filmmaker knew from the outset exactly what he had to work with, and built the film's narrative accordingly.

Errol Morris's films are largely based around interviews, and his films are mostly profiles of eccentric and unusual individuals.  "Gates of Heaven" is about the people involved in the upkeep of a pet cemetery, "Vernon, Florida" looks into the lives of various oddball citizens, and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" takes on four profiles at once - a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robotics expert, and a mole-rat researcher.  "Mr. Death," which is about Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a self-styled expert in execution systems, seems to be no different.  Leuchter is a self-taught, strange little man who is obsessed with his work.  He rattles off carefully memorized facts and figures, clearly deeply insecure about his lack of education and claims of his ignorance.  We learn that he makes his living repairing and upgrading capital punishment equipment to various prisons.  

Initially, Leuchter seems perfectly benign, despite his morbid profession.  He frames his obsession as humanitarian, intended to prevent the suffering of the condemned due to faulty or improperly maintained equipment.  As he discusses his upbringing and his work, he's even sympathetic at times.  And if you didn't know anything else about Leuchter, you might even be inclined to find him admirable, even if he's clearly constructed his own little self-aggrandizing personal mythology.  And that's when Ernst Zundel and the Neo-Nazis show up in the movie.  Errol Morris completely pulls the rug out from under his unsuspecting audience when he reveals that Leuchter is one of the primary pseudo-scientific sources behind certain Holocaust denial claims involving execution methods.  Leuchter was happy to help in Zundel's efforts to undermine the historical record, even convinced to spend his honeymoon exploring Auschwitz and taking samples for analysis.  He considered his findings evidence that the gas chambers were never in operation there.

What's fascinating is that Leuchter honestly doesn't understand why people are so upset with him.  He thinks he's revealing the truth, having bought into his own hype to such an extent that he doesn't realize that his methodology for conducting his experiments is deeply flawed.  He doesn't seem to be an anti-Semite, but rather someone too susceptible to praise and positive attention.  When the Holocaust deniers come to call, they appeal to his purported expertise, offering him the legitimacy that he craves.  Errol Morris doesn't do anything to portray Leuchter as morally suspect or malicious.  Rather, it's the banality and ignorance of his evil that is so frightening.  

What Morris does do is to build a narrative around Leuchter that helps you to understand how his mind works first, before revealing what he's done and gradually adding other viewpoints into the film to counter his claims.  Morris is famous for - and even notorious for - using cinematic devices like reenactments in his documentaries.  Here, he refrains from anything too showy, with one exception.  He pairs audio of an actual Holocaust expert taking apart Leuchter's scientific methods with footage of Leuchter stealing samples in one of the Auschwitz gas chambers.  And at a particularly dissonant moment,  Morris freeze-frames, punctuating the absurdity of what Leuchter's self-aggrandizement has brought him to.

Some have mistaken "Mr. Death" for an anti-Semitic work because Morris doesn't outright condemn Leuchter in the film.  I think that makes "Mr. Death" all the more effective, because Leuchter really is so terribly ordinary, and Morris allows him to bloviate and spin his justifications on camera in such a way that he ends up revealing how small and sad he really is.  The misinformation that he authors and the ability of that information to cause harm are terrible, and Morris makes it clear they are, but the man himself is a far more curious and complex question.  And these days, a terribly timely one too.     

What I've Seen - Errol Morris

Gates of Heaven (1978)

Vernon, Florida (1981)

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

A Brief History of Time (1991)

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)

Mr. Death:The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)

The Fog of War (2003)

Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Tabloid (2010)

The Unknown Known (2013)

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"Better Call Saul," Year Five

All the spoilers ahead.

I decided that the fifth season of "Better Call Saul" needed its own post because this is Kim Wexler's season, and I haven't written nearly as much about Rhea Seehorn as I should have by this point.  At the end of the fourth season, Jimmy McGill had fully gone over to the dark side by becoming Saul, and from Kim's reaction I was sure that was the end of Jimmy and Kim's relationship.  The last thing I expected was for Kim to break bad herself.   

Watching Kim make that moral slide is fascinating because it happens in a very different way from the ones we've seen so far.  Like Jimmy, she realizes that she isn't happy operating within the big law system and decides to strike out on her own.  Unlike Jimmy, it's mostly for moral reasons.  There's still an emotional component, involving her contempt for bad actors like Hamlin and Wachtell (Rex Linn), but Kim still fundamentally believes in doing the right thing.  She just no longer equates the right thing with playing by the established rules.  Her relationship with Jimmy is more complex than it appears on the surface, and one of the best shockers of the season was "McGill v. Wexler," where Jimmy's willingness to pull a con on her has the opposite effect of what Jimmy assumes, because it achieves the correct result from Kim's POV.  Unfortunately, Jimmy doesn't really appreciate how much trouble being a friend of the cartel can bring on him, and his carelessness puts Kim in the crosshairs too.

Seehorn has been consistently great on the show, shouldering so much of the narrative by herself.  Kim is the only major female character in "Better Call Saul" with any real agency, and for a long time I was worried that she wasn't going to get much of the spotlight compared to other supporting players like Vic or Gus.  Holding back on Kim has actually helped in this season because her moves are more unexpected.  Compared to Skyler and Marie in "Breaking Bad," she's much more psychologically complex and therefore easier to root for.  As Kim gets more reckless, she's somehow all the more admirable and sympathetic.  I resisted becoming invested in Jimmy and Kim's relationship for most of the show, but now that they're this entangled in each other's lives, and Kim is the one actively tempting Jimmy to push their cons even further, I can't help rooting for them.  These two deserve each other, even though all signs point to their transgressions costing them big in the future.

Most of season five is spent setting up for the final stretch of episodes, getting Lalo Salamanca out of prison and building him up to be the biggest threat in this universe. Tony Dalton has really distinguished himself, establishing Lalo as one of the show's best villains.  He's smart enough to see through Saul and Mike's various schemes, and unscrupulous enough to harm innocent bystanders, all while maintaining a friendly, personable front.  He's the one character on the board who has his eye on every other character, and it's great.  While Jimmy and Kim are still mostly operating in lawful territory, we've already had a demonstration of how little that matters to Lalo and the other drug war participants.  Everyone's in the game now.  

The production values were noticeably good this year, especially for the episodes that take place in Mexico.  Mike on the ranch and Lalo's compound do a good job of opening up the universe a little more.  I'm also glad that "Better Call Saul" finally got a proper episode with the leads lost in the desert, when Jimmy makes his dubious debut as a cartel bagman.  I'll miss the Suzuki Esteem.  The action-heavy finale is also one of the most impressive hours of television I've ever seen, beautifully setting up Lalo for a revenge spree in season six.

Finally, a quick note of appreciation for Joey Dixon (Josh Fadem) and his film crew.  If we get another spinoff in this universe, I want to know more about him, Sound Guy (Julian Bonfiglio), and Drama Girl (Hayley Holmes).  Assuming they survive the series.  

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"Doctor Who Flux" and "Around the World in 80 Days"

Catching up on some BBC content.

The latest series of "Doctor Who" was handled a little differently than the norm.  "Doctor Who: Flux" is essentially a miniseries about a universe-wide crisis called "the Flux."  Showrunner Chris Chibnall wrote all six episodes, where the Doctor and Yasmin are joined by a new companion, Dan Lewis (John Bishop), as they search for the cause of a mysterious, destructive phenomenon.  They encounter Sontarans, Weeping Angels, a big dog-like alien named Karnavista (Craig Els), and the sinister Swarm (Sam Spruell), but the big story about the Flux carries through each episode.  This is probably the best season of the Chibnall/Jodie Whittaker era to date, coming after a few rougher ones. 

Frankly, I still don't think that Yasmin or the Doctor are written very well, but at least now with a reduced number of companions, they have more screen time to work with.  Dan is a good addition, a loveable Liverpool chap who is great for comic relief.  His mixup of "temporal" and "tempura" was the highlight of the season for me.  It was also nice to see some of the older "Doctor Who" villains again - Chibnall finally has the mix of campiness and sci-fi excitement just about right.  However, he really struggles when it comes to the minor characters.  I wish he'd cut down some of the roles, because I was constantly getting the one-off characters mixed up.  

The production looks great this year.  The designs of the new aliens are very well done, especially the Swarm, with his creepy, skull mask-like face.  We also get more alien worlds, more spaceships, and more jaunts into the past.  It turns out that Time is a planet, a web, and maybe a religion requiring priests and guardians and technicians to keep everything in order.  We're treated to some interesting sights we've never seen before.  I like that the Doctor also seems more vulnerable this year, frequently a few steps behind the villains, and more unsure of herself.  However, the ongoing subplot about her secret origins still strikes me as strangely uncompelling.  It's not that I don't like the change-up, but it's just not as interesting as Chibnall seems to think it is.         

Now on to "Around the World in 80 Days," to see what an ex-Doctor Who has been up to.  The first thing you'll notice about the eight-episode series is that it's a co-production of several different countries, as announced by a complicated pre-title card listing out all the production companies.  And it's a pretty splashy affair, following Phileas Fogg (David Tennant), his valet John Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), and intrepid reporter Abigail Fix (Leonie Benesch) as they try to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days to win a big wager.  Unlike all the other adaptations of this story that I've seen, the new version plays the story straight, not as a comedy or action-adventure picture.  In fact, pains are taken by showrunners Ashley Pharoah and Caleb Ranson to update the story, making Passepartout and Fix co-equals with Fogg.

This is all well and good, but the writing is frankly not as good as I'd hoped.  Every episode brings our intrepid trio to a new part of the globe, where they have some kind of time-wasting adventure with the locals, win the day, and move on.  To keep things interesting, we start out with Fogg, Passepartout, and Fix being fairly hostile to each other, and gradually becoming a chummy team by the end.  The best episode is the one that breaks from formula a bit, and just strands the three of them on a desert island for a while to sort out tensions.  The trouble is that it takes far too long to get there - the show drags us through repetitive episodes set in France, Italy, Syria, and Hong Kong, with a glum Fogg and a melancholy Passepartout forever voicing endless doubts about the journey.  Tennant and Koma are wonderfully charming performers, and the show makes far too little use of that.

At least "80 Days" looks suitably fantastic, passing off parts of South Africa and Romania for various spots around the globe.  There's the requisite balloon aeronautics, trips on trains and ships and stagecoaches, and a rousing score with a main theme reminiscent of ticking clocks.  And at one point, they let David Tennant play funny drunk, which is almost worth the entire misadventure in India.  I also appreciate that not a lot of time is taken up with guest stars, though our heroes do meet a few interesting figures like Jane Digby and Bass Reeves.  It's not a bad show at all - good enough to keep my interest - but not quite what I was hoping for.        

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"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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