Why Did I Bother With "Morbius" and "Uncharted"?

I knew that "Uncharted" and "Morbius" were both very poorly reviewed films that nobody liked, and yet I still went ahead and watched them.  They both typify the kind of formulaic, action-adventure blockbuster that gets past my defenses because they resemble movies I've liked in the past, and there are actors involved who I generally enjoy.  In the case of "Uncharted," I was onboard for Tom Holland, and in the case of "Morbius," for Matt Smith and Jared Harris.  And in both cases I came away from the films a little mad that I'd let myself be duped again.

I mean, look at "Uncharted."  I have no knowledge of the video game series this was based on, but I knew that everyone wanted Nathan Fillion to play its hero, Nathan Drake, for the past twenty years, but the filmmakers couldn't get their act together in time for that to happen.  Instead, they opted for a prequel with Holland playing a young Nathan Drake, being mentored by an older treasure hunter played by Mark Wahlberg.  And good grief, Wahlberg is at his most absolutely insufferable here, in full toxic swaggering asshole mode.  Wahlberg was originally supposed to play Drake, as I understand it, and I probably would have skipped "Uncharted" entirely if that had happened.  

In short, the buddy comedy never works because Wahlberg is being such a killjoy the entire time.  The generic female lead, played by newcomer Sophia Ali is constantly being sidelined and abandoned, and clearly the writers had no idea what to do with her.  Antonio Banderas and Tati Gabrielle pop up a few times as the villains, because you have to have colorful villains in an "Indiana Jones" ripoff.  And "Uncharted" is such an "Indiana Jones" ripoff, and a "Mummy" ripoff, and even a "National Treasure" ripoff.  It's got a few decent action sequences, but the rest of the time it's just half-heartedly playing out the beats of a treasure hunt movie, while throwing out self-aware quips about being in a treasure hunt movie.  The cynical attitude just kills it for me.  I think Holland would actually be fine as the lead if the movie would ever let him just be the wide-eyed kid we know he can play, instead of making him awkwardly snark off against Wahlberg. 

The "Uncharted" fans clearly aren't happy with the end result either.  I've seen more than a few frustrated reviews pointing out that the Sandra Bullock rom-com adventure throwback, "The Lost City" is a better "Uncharted" movie than the "Uncharted" movie, because that one at least bothered to commit to the treasure hunting storyline.  In short, the "Uncharted" movie fell victim to one of the classic perils of video game adaptations - they forgot why their intended audience liked this franchise in the first place.  There was no need to broaden the appeal of a premise that already had a very broad appeal to begin with, and mess around with the DNA of a character that everybody already liked.  

Now "Morbius" is a somewhat more forgivable misfire than "Uncharted," but it's still a misfire.    I know even less about the source material here, except that this is a comics character from the Marvel universe that has ties to Spider-man.  Jared Leto plays Michael Morbius, a genius with a rare blood disorder that keeps him sickly.  In the pursuit of a cure, he accidentally turns himself into a vampire-like creature with bat-based powers.  It feels a bit like his creator tried to out-Batman Batman, as Morbius has super strength, echolocation, feeds on blood, and can fly under certain circumstances.  The villain is Morbius's foster brother Milo, played by Matt Smith, who suffers the same condition, and is less worried about the consequences of a potential cure.

There are some interesting bits and pieces here, mostly very underdeveloped as the film speedruns through Morbius's angsty mad doctor routine.  I will give it due credit for being a horror movie first and a superhero movie second.  All the action takes place at night, and some of the frightful visuals will keep small children at bay.   Morbius looks absolutely ghastly in vampire mode, and he looks even worse when he's not.  The film has the same aesthetics as the "Venom" movies, which it shares a universe with.  There's a lot of blobby CGI flying around, lots of glowy colors, and comic-book flourishes.  And like "Venom," it doesn't bother about having much of a story except the most basic beats borrowed from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Frankenstein."  

  

In other circumstances, I could see "Morbius" working, but this film is too beholden to its franchise predecessors.  It rushes through its origin story to set up a Sinister Six film.  It trades in character moments for endless effects scenes of Morbius transforming into vampire or human form.  Humor is scarce and heart is even scarcer.  The movie even has the annoying habit of skipping ahead to payoffs and punchlines it never bothered to set up properly, and we have far too little time with some of the secondary characters like the mentor figure played by Jared Harris.  It rankles all the more that this is a good cast, and director Daniel Espinoza has delivered good movies before.  However, the film's problems run deep, and even a delay of nearly two years couldn't solve them.  

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About That Nicholas Cage Movie

I'm not much of a Nicholas Cage fan.  I mean, I respect his work as an actor and I've enjoyed a lot of his films, especially "Raising Arizona."  However, I'm not a Nicholas Cage in the modern sense, meaning the Nicholas Cage who has become a pop culture icon for his over-the-top, intense performances in ever-more-ludicrous action films.  I preferred "Pig" to "Prisoners of the Ghostland."  And "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" is really all about this version of Nicholas Cage, the larger-than-life persona who the filmmakers have decided to build a meta action film around.

There have been perfectly decent meta films like this before, such as the Jean-Claude Van Damme dark comedy "JCVD."  "Unbearable Weight" follows the same template, portraying Cage as an actor going through a rough patch professionally and personally.  He's given a fictional family, an ex-wife, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), and a teen daughter, Addy (Lily Sheen), he's trying to do right by.  We watch him lose a coveted role and make plans for his retirement from acting.  Then he accepts a $1 million offer from a Spanish businessman, Javi (Pedro Pascal), to make an appearance at his birthday party.  Then the CIA gets involved, and a pair of agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) recruit him into their investigation of Javi as an arms dealer and the likely kidnapper of a politician's daughter, Maria (Katrin Vankova).

Javi turns out to be an aspiring screenwriter, and he and Cage spend most of the movie bantering about movies and screenwriting.  There's a lot of Nicholas Cage hero worship and a lot of rather wholesome male bonding before the movie turns into the high-octane action movie that we know it's destined to be.  However, "Unbearable Weight" only had a budget of $30 million, not enough to pay for the amount of mayhem that Cage fans might expect.  Watching Pascal and Cage pal around in Majorca is fun, but I think the film is only really going to resonate with other Nicholas Cage fans who will get all the jokes and references to films like "Mandy," "The Rock," and "Face/Off."  I've heard some claims that every Nicholas Cage movie is referenced here somewhere, and I wouldn't doubt that.  However, references alone do not a movie make.

Frankly, there's a lot of the film's construction that doesn't really work.  The family troubles are trite and boring. The artistic crisis isn't remotely convincing.   The fictionalized Nicholas Cage is simply not as interesting as the real life version, as a cursory glance through his Wikipedia page reveals all sorts of fun fodder for a future biopic that I sincerely hope gets made someday.  There's a running gag with Cage arguing with a younger, more ideal version of himself from the "Con Air" era, that reminded me an awful lot of Cage's work as Charlie and Donald Kaufman from "Adaptation."  However, "Adaptation" did meta commentary on screenwriting so much better than "Unbearable Weight," it makes this movie's shortcomings all the more obvious.  I mean, the Cage double was probably one of the more expensive effects in the movie, and the movie doesn't even bother to pay off the gag.  

I feel like I'm being ungenerous towards a film that does mostly succeed in being entertaining.  It has some clever one-liners and good performances.  Pedro Pascal is at his genial best, and Nicholas Cage is clearly putting in some effort to give his fans what they want.  As a movie nerd, I can't help loving the invocations of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Paddington 2."  This is also an original script and premise, and there can never be too many of those around.  I guess I'm just frustrated that "Unbearable Weight" isn't a better version of the movie that it is, that it plays it safe and isn't remotely as funny as it could be.  I can't help wondering what the Lonely Island guys or David Gordon Green could have done with this premise - and David Gordon Green has a cameo in this movie! 

Nicholas Cage, wherever you are, I've loved your work for years.  Clearly, the filmmakers behind this film did too, which is the best thing I can say about it.  But it's not enough.

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How to Watch "Men"

Alex Garland's latest film "Men," is one of those trippy, allegorical thrillers like Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" or David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr."  Things start out as normal as can be, and by the end realism has gone bye-bye and fever dream surrealism has taken over.  A viewer has to actively interpret what is being presented on the screen, because if you approach it in a straightforward manner, nothing makes sense.  Some viewers love movies like this and others hate them.  I am usually in the former category because I love watching talented directorsgo a little nuts.  

With "Men," Garland is in the same groove as his recent "Annihilation," presenting some striking, often disturbing images of hallucinatory body horror.  His heroine, Harper (Jessie Buckley), is recently widowed and having a holiday in a rented manor house in a remote village.  Immediately, she's put on edge by the property's owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), and then there are several more unpleasant incidents involving a naked man who seems to follow her out of the woods, a judgmental local vicar, and a nasty young boy.  All of them appear to have Rory Kinner's face.  As Harper becomes more paranoid, it's clear that her state of mind is being affected by the recent death of her husband James (Paapa Essiedu), which may have been an accident, and may have been a suicide.

There's really not much to the story, just a slow buildup of tensions to a nightmarish finale.  Every review I've read for "Men" points to toxic masculinity as a major theme of the film, though this strikes me as reductive.  All the different male characters who harass and threaten Harper in various ways are part of the same problem, and all essentially facets of the same, oppressive force in her life.  However, this force is comprised of the lingering psychic trauma from her husband's death, her fears about men, and her own guilt and grief for the part she might have played in her own misfortune.  There's some supernatural spookiness involving the appearance of a figure who seems to be patterned off of the mythological Green Man, and a jarring home invasion as part of the climax, but this is not a horror film in the way something like Ari Aster's "Midsommar" is.  Harper is being persecuted by phantoms I was never sure were real, and there's always a strong likelihood that everything we're watching is only taking place in her head.

These wilder events are where the film is worth watching, even if you have no interest in trying to puzzle out the symbolism or the themes.  The visuals are truly gorgeous and weird, and executed with some real skill and auteurist vision.  There's a great jump scare about half an hour into the film, when the stalker first shows up.  It doesn't make any sense in the context of the story because Harper doesn't see him, but the way the scene plays out adds a great jolt of energy to the film, and signals that the crazy is ramping up.  The suspense and action sequences are all orchestrated wonderfully, and the ending confrontation - involving a series of nude men - is truly one of the most awesomely deranged things I've seen in a film in a while.  The fact that it's so beautifully done with seamless effects work really impressed me.  It's one thing to come up with an idea like this, and another thing entirely to commit considerable resources to realizing it.   

I'm not totally satisfied with "Men" as a whole, because its metaphors are too straightforward for my tastes.  The film's parts, however, are very entertaining.  Jessie Buckley has no trouble inhabiting this metaphysically dubious space and showing us how Harper unravels, while Rory Kinnear gets to be menacing in all sorts of different ways.  I wish Garland engaged a little more with his ideas, and dug a bit deeper into Harper's psyche to maybe try and illuminate what the more primal roots of her fears are.  Also, while toxic masculinity is a perfectly good subject, "Men" can't help feeling a little one-sided.  Can you imagine Garland making a companion piece called "Women" with all the genders flipped?  

But then again, as artsy allegorical thrillers go, this one is very good at being entertaining as well as being a hallucinatory mind trip.  And these days, I don't look a gift horse in the mouth. 

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It's a "Kids in the Hall" Hyperfixation

I've found my latest rabbit hole.  

I became a Kids in the Hall fan like so many other Americans of a certain age, by watching the reruns of their show on Comedy Central, which ran it constantly in the '90s and early 2000s.  Eventually, I rented their movie "Brain Candy" and their tour videos, but that was pretty much it for me for over a decade.  I know I watched the miniseries "Death Comes to Town" at some point, but don't recall much about it.  Now it's 2022, and after watching the revival season of "The Kids in the Hall" and their new "Comedy Punks" documentary, I'm nowhere near ready to be done with these guys.

Amazon Prime, AMC+, and various other streaming platforms have all the old episodes.  It turns out that there are a ton I haven't seen - or haven't really seen, because Comedy Central showed heavily edited versions of everything.  I've been slowly making my way through the entire series, while checking out what the Kids have been up to while I haven't been paying attention.  I've liked some of the projects that the individual troupe members have been involved in, like Scott Thompson and Paul Bellini's band "Mouth Congress," and Mark McKinney in the Guy Maddin film "The Saddest Music in the World."  However, I've been mostly fixated on their media appearances related to "The Kids in the Hall," especially interviews and press ephemera.  It turns out that a lot of it is remarkably ephemeral. 

Now, the Kids have been around so long that a lot of their material predates the internet.  Some media, such as a 1994 Conan O'Brien episode featuring both Isabella Rossellini and her double, Dave Foley in drag, is probably gone for good.  What interests me most is the content that was online a few years ago, but has disappeared.  It's stunning how fast things can go.  There's a 2008 "Funny or Die" sketch where Buddy Cole becomes a parent that is no longer anywhere on the site.  Clips of a 2010 episode of E! Online's "The Soup," where four Kids members appear garbed as former child beauty queens (and Mark McKinney is heard offstage), have been linked to from multiple places.  The clips, however, are no longer online.  There are no videos on the E! site from before 2016.   And who knows what happened to all the interviews on the Nerdist Youtube channel after Chris Hardwick got himself cancelled.

A few things are still accessible, like Scott Thompson's appearances on "The Colbert Report" in 2014 and clips of Dave Foley's Canadian sitcom "Spun Out," where the rest of the troupe show up in Goth wear to enforce an old suicide pact.  However, going through the old "Kids in the Hall" fansites and online groups just brings up a ton of dead links.  Social media accounts have been deleted.  Whole websites have died or stopped hosting older content, which means a ton of interviews, promotional material, and the occasional web exclusive are gone with them.  Because it's not physical media, there's no way of hunting any of this down the way I can with the old DVDs and their extras.

I'm not too hung up on the gaps, because of the sheer amount of "Kids in the Hall" material I'm still sifting through.  I mean, the number of Conan O'Brien interviews with Dave Foley that don't involve Isabella Rossellini is not insubstantial. There's literally thirty plus years of material out there, and I've been doing my best to pace myself.  So, I'm going to focus on the series rewatch first, via Amazon Prime because I want another season (please, please, please), and I'm saving Siskel and Ebert's notorious fight over "Brain Candy" for a rainy day.    

And by save, I mean I'm literally downloading the clip from Youtube and holding on to it until I'm ready to watch it.  You can't be too careful these days.

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Who Gets To Exist in Fantasy Media?

I loved reading science-fiction and fantasy novels when I was younger, and almost all the heroes of those books were Caucasian.  I myself am not Caucasian, and didn't mind at all.  I don't remember a time when I wasn't able to mentally put myself into the shoes of someone who didn't look like me for the sake of a good story.  As I got older, however, I learned that other people couldn't get their heads around it.  I read about Ursula LeGuin raging over the book covers of "A Wizard of Earthsea" consistently picturing a pale-skinned Ged instead of a brown-skinned one.  I couldn't find any copy of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" that showed Hiro Protagonist was a BIPOC lead character.  The problem seemed to be especially prevalent in the fantasy genre.

And now it's 2022, and the latest skirmish in the Culture Wars is over POC characters in fantasy media like "The Rings of Power," "The House of the Dragon," and Disney's live action "The Little Mermaid."  The "The Rings of Power" features POC actors playing elves, dwarves, and harfoots (proto-Hobbits).  "The House of the Dragon" has black actors playing characters from House Velaryon, who share ancestry with the Targaryens, a previously ultra-pale family of despots.  The "previously" is important here, because these new POC characters represent a change from how these franchises have operated with regard to POC representation up until now.  In Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" films, POC actors were limited to playing enemy orcs and barely glimpsed members of foreign armies.  The first "Game of Thrones" series had more prominent POC characters, including Khal Drogo, played by Jason Momoa.  However, they were mostly cordoned off on their own continent, and limited to a single storyline supporting a "white savior" heroine, Daenerys Targaryen.  As for Halle Bailey as the new Ariel, I don't think I need to explain how prevalent the image of the red-haired mermaid has been in pop culture since she made her debut in the 1989 cartoon.  

These complaints are nothing new.  I've been hearing them for at least a decade, since Hollywood realized that POC led media like "Black Panther," "Aquaman," and "Bridgerton" could mean bigger audiences and more lucrative successes.  Whitewashed characters in movies like "The Last Airbender" and "Ghost in the Shell" became a thing of the past.  For the first time, POC actors were being considered for roles they'd never been considered for before, even if the character had previously only been portrayed by white actors.  More POC representation behind the camera has also helped considerably.  As a result, movies like "Prey," with an indigenous lead actress kicking alien butt, are getting made, and Jordan Peele is one of the last auteurs standing, having almost single-handedly kickstarted the recent black horror wave.  Of course, this doesn't mean that the transition hasn't been bumpy, or has sometimes resulted in bad casting choices and bad end product.  You could argue that the pendulum has swung too far, and Hollywood has overcorrected, but the latest controversy says otherwise.

So back to recent fantasy media.  The POC characters in "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon" are clearly in the minority on these shows, mostly in supporting roles.  A grand total of one major POV character in "Rings of Power," the elf Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova, is noticeably darker skinned.  Ariel represents the first live action Disney princess who wasn't explicitly a POC character to begin with, to be played by a POC actress.  Disney has made a dozen of these live action remakes, and this is the first time they've taken this kind of risk.  I'd characterize these changes as hardly being risks at all, compared to the leaps and bounds in representation we've seen in other genres and franchises lately.  Except, of course, there's been the backlash.  The complaints are so rote by this point, all boiling down to taking umbrage with the "agenda" to force a diverse worldview into these fantasy worlds where one didn't exist before.  As if that initial, non-diverse worldview wasn't just as much of a construct - one we treated as a default because we had few options otherwise.

The trumped up outrage is being pushed by a clear minority of fans and the usual bad faith actors, who simply don't like seeing POC characters in contexts where we haven't seen them before. They've been getting a lot of attention, because their arguments are frequently ridiculous, and their vitriol is completely out of proportion.  And frankly, it's all too familiar.  These are the people that the fantasy book publishers were worried about when they kept POC characters off of their book covers.  These are my fellow nerds who never learned how to put themselves in somebody else's shoes for the sake of a good story.  I've tried to engage with some of them, and it's honestly so sad how they can take such small changes as a deeply personal affront.  Any attempts at wider inclusion are seen as exclusion, despite there being plenty of other non-POC characters to follow and root for.  And after having their narrow-mindedness enabled for so long, is that any surprise?      

My takeaway from all this is that we have to work harder at normalizing POC in fantasy stories to fight this kind of mindset.  We need more representation, not less.  I wish "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon" had been bolder and committed to more POC representation.  Other fantasy shows have been more gutsy.  I love that "The Sandman'' has half a dozen black actresses playing characters who weren't black women in the source material - including Death, the series' most popular character - and creator Neil Gaiman has been active on Twitter, dressing down any complainers.  There's a new "Interview With the Vampire" series on the horizon, with POC actors playing Louis and Claudia - and it makes perfect sense for the New Orleans setting.  

I write this as someone who is from an East-Asian background, and still doesn't really exist in any of the franchises I've talked about, except on the margins.  Sonoya Mizuno is in "The House of the Dragon," and that's about it.  I'm still putting myself in other people's shoes when I watch these shows, though a wider variety of shoes.  Frankly, I don't understand how you come to the fantasy genre, full of made-up lands and impossible creatures, and not expect to have to do that anyway.  

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"Jerry & Marge" and "Fire Island"

Streaming exclusives are making it a lot harder to keep us with certain films.  Here are some very belated reviews of some recent feel-good movies that I'm lumping together because they both feel like they're destined to be somebody's favorites.  They're both serving audiences that tend to be overlooked, and both very good versions of what they're trying to be.

"Jerry & Marge Go Large," for instance, is a very sweet dramedy starring a pair of actors in their sixties, and feels a lot like one of those working class UK village comedies that were popular in the '90s.  Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening play the Selbees, Jerry and Marge, who live in the fading town of Evart, Michigan.  Recently retired and bored, Jerry stumbles across a lottery game in Massachusetts that has a flaw - if you buy enough tickets at a certain time, the odds shift in the buyer's favor.  This snowballs into the whole town getting behind Jerry's new venture to beat the lottery, and the Selbees discovering a new lease on life.

"Jerry & Marge" has an old fashioned worldview.  It tells the story of wholesome, small town, Middle American ingenuity and perseverance winning out over the faceless system.  This is tremendously appealing wish fulfillment, and thanks to a solid script and a good cast, it never tips into being smarmy or inane.  It's genuinely fun to spend time with Jerry and Marge as they make their monthly trips to Massachusetts to buy ever increasing numbers of lotto tickets.  The supporting cast, including Larry Wilmore and Rainn Wilson, lend some gentle humor.  I appreciate that Jerry is given some depth and time for self-reflection, and while most of the story is a heavily fictionalized account of the real Selbees' lotto streak, it never pushes too far or becomes too flashy.  A villain is concocted - a math whiz from Harvard running a rival lotto group - but the stakes are kept small and reasonable.   

These midbudget films used to be much more common, and it's honestly refreshing to see one that's so content to be exactly what it is.  It wants to give its older audience members some uplift, and to spin a fun modern day fable about some colorful people.  There are no chase scenes, no fights, and barely even any raised voices.  So, for certain audiences, this is going to be a snooze, and for others a delight.  I'm getting older myself, and was happy to see Cranston and Bening playing a pair of very nice people growing closer in their twilight years, and being complete nerds over math.  Not all movies need to be about psychopaths and neurotics, and frankly this was a great palate cleanser for some of the more R-rated media I've been watching lately.

Now "Fire Island" seems at the outset to be very niche.  Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang play Noah and Howie, part of a group of gay New York friends who vacation every year on Fire Island,  known for its LGBT enclaves.  Noah is the more social one, and intent on helping the far less experienced Howie find somebody to hook up with.  This puts them in the path of a much more wealthy group of guys, including Charlie (James Scully), who Howie hits it off with.  However, there's also Will (Conrad Ricamora), a stern-faced lawyer who seems intent on keeping the two apart.  Noah is attracted to him, but can't stand his attitude.  And right about now some of you are realizing that "Fire Island" is "Pride and Prejudice" as a modern day, gay, Asian-American rom-com.  And it's a lot of fun.

I have no idea whether "Fire Island" is in any way a true or honest reflection of what the gay Asian-American experience is like, but it comes off as a pretty sincere attempt a better representation.  Directed by Andre Ahn of "Spa Night," and written by Joel Kim Booster, the movie does a good job of translating Austen's concerns over class and wealth to a modern context.  Noah and Howie have no interest in matrimony - Noah is near repulsed by the notion - but they are very self-aware and sensitive when it comes to social standing and privilege.  We watch them roll their eyes at insensitive comments about Asians from clueless white guys, and goggle at Will and Charlie's expensive real estate on the island.  There are a few instances where Noah provides explanations for certain Fire Island events and activities through narration, but not so many that it feels like the movie is aimed at the straights.  

It's also nice to see a LGBT film that has a lot of overt sexuality, though only modest glimpses of any actual coupling.  Casual sex is not demonized in this movie, but presented as a perfectly good option for some of the characters.  This is balanced out by a lot of the film being about friendships and found family.  The lone major female character is Erin (Margaret Cho), who acts as a sort of lesbian den mother to Noah's group.  However there's a wide variety of gay characters of all different colors and races, who express their queerness in different ways.  And the film ultimately hinges on Noah learning to acknowledge that he and Howie, despite having so many of the same cultural signifiers, ultimately have very different experiences being who they are.  And there's no realization more universal than that.   

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The Stars Are Bright in "Gaslit"

If there's any sign that there's no difference between movie and television stars anymore, it's that Julia Roberts and Sean Penn headlined a limited series about the Watergate scandal for Hulu, and it was not a big deal.  "Gaslit" stars Penn and Roberts as John N. Mitchell, former attorney general and the chair of Nixon's reelection campaign, and Mitchell's strong-willed wife Martha.  We also follow John Dean (Dan Stevens), a Nixon administration lawyer who becomes a witness against the president, his girlfriend Mo (Betty Gilpin), and Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Libby (Shea Whigham).  A very long list of interesting character actors are also in the mix as various reporters, law enforcement, and governmental figures.

As someone too young to have been around for the scandal, it was fun to get a play-by-play of the Watergate break-ins, the cover-up, and the subsequent hearings.  While I know the broad outlines of the events, it was good to learn some of the smaller stories about the people who have fallen through the cracks over the years.  We meet Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), the security guard who stumbled across the break-in and wound up revealing the whole plot.  I liked the occasional check-ins with FBI agents Magallanes (Carlos Valdes) and Lano (Chris Messina), who are a pair of wry working stiffs not sure that they're doing much good trying to investigate Nixon's allies.  However, Roberts is clearly the star as Martha, who was a minor celebrity in her day, both celebrated and reviled for telling the truth about what her husband and his colleagues got up to.    

This is a series best enjoyed for its performances.  While "Gaslit" does a good job of showing the seedy political culture that made the scandal possible, it's far more interested in studying the characters it's chosen to single out - the unreliable, unstable Martha, her reluctant husband, the weaselly John Dean, and finally the insane G. Gordon Liddy.  They're all reprehensible people to varying degrees, but in "Gaslit" they're allowed to be very human and occasionally sympathetic.  Roberts has no trouble selling Martha's buzzy socialite, or the troubled woman she is underneath.  Sean Penn, in a fat suit and layers of facial appliances, is unrecognizable but still very effective as Mitchell.  However, Shea Whigham handily steals every scene he is in as Liddy, who he plays as a self-aggrandizing lunatic barely maintaining a guise of sanity.  Whigham is one of those character actors who has been in everything, and with this role I hope he finally breaks out and achieves greater prominence.      

I liked the miniseries overall, but it felt too much like awards bait in a season that has been full of similar prestige projects.  I kept thinking about the last Watergate project I had seen, Spielberg's "The Post," about the news coverage of the scandal.  The two projects are very dissimilar in tone - "Gaslit" is more venal and earthy, with a touch of Southern Gothic.  However, both share a major flaw in that they are both operating in the absence of Richard Nixon, whose shadow may loom large over the events, but he isn't actually a character in either story.  This leaves a vacuum where a much stronger villain ought to be.  In "Gaslit," the Mitchells, John Dean, and Liddy all intersect but barely seem to affect one another.  Giving all of them a common enemy to tie the series together would have been a big help.

I can't help wondering what "Gaslit" would have looked like as a prestige picture with the same cast.  I imagine it would have probably jettisoned most of John Dean's storyline and some of the more minor characters, which would have been a shame.  However, keeping the focus on the Mitchells would have probably made for a tighter and more focused, more effective piece of media.  As with an awful lot of recent miniseries, more is not always better.  At eight episodes, "Gaslit" isn't too egregious about its extra screen time, but it is harder to track various characters' arcs and relationships as they're spread out over more episodes.  

With a topic as complicated and many-faceted as Watergate, there's necessarily a lot of time spent on covering many different angles.  However, I was disappointed to find that there's relatively little time spent on the actual gaslighting of Martha Mitchell, and the other storylines often served to distract from her plight. 

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