Late Sept: what are you watching?

CuriousG

CuriousG

Half-elven
I've been watching season 2 of The Boys on Amazon with less zest than I did the 1st season. The superheroes remain interesting, but The Boys who used to try to take them down in S1 are mostly having angst, which is pretty dull, and I'm losing patience with them.

But Antony Starr is gripping my attention as the slowly unraveling, psychotic "Homelander," a creepy take on Superman, and it was funny to read on Reddit that other people are having the same reaction as me. I know it's just a TV show, but I feel my body tense up whenever he appears in a scene, and even in scenes without him, I'm half-worried that he'll swoop in and cause mayhem. He's really a great actor to have that effect on so many people in the audience.

So it made sense to re-watch Man of Steel with Henry Cavill from 2013. I did watch it all the way through, and I wondered why I'd forgotten so much of it, then realized it's a mixed bag, where some things are quite good, and others are quite forgettable. Some of the fresh takes I appreciated were how Lois isn't a teenage fangirl who within seconds of meeting him wants to have his baby; instead she's attracted to him with room for things to grow. And Zod was a good villain as someone who thought he was doing the right thing, like Thanos in Avengers, rather than the cliche power-mad evil tyrant. The fights and visuals remain amazing.

But it was pretty odd that a good chunk of New York City was destroyed, complete with toppling skyscrapers, yet no lives were lost, or we didn't see anyone dying, and there were too many plot holes for me to count. Not bad, just not great, and while I don't consider myself a partisan in Marvel vs. DC, I think Marvel is better and keeping their plots tidied up.

This week, in tribute to Schitt's Creek sweeping the Emmys, I'm rewatching favorite scenes and episodes. I initially hated the mother, Moira Rose, but on my 2nd and 3rd viewings, she became my favorite character with her outlandish costumes, odd cadence, and frequent word-bending (I'll credit her with expanding my vocabulary a little too).

So, what have you been watching lately?
 
actually found myself fast-forwarding most of the scenes with the boys in the last episode I watched; not like they were advancing the plot or anything. But watching Homelander come apart is creepy-but-I-can't-look-away. Power without a moral container is a very scary thing.

Which is perhaps why I'm so hooked on "Lucifer" these days. Part way through Season 3 now (I didn't start watching when it started, catching up now). Gaiman's take on the devil and Hell is fascinating to this student of religion. I just saw the episode where Lucifer explains to Linda's ex-husband that he doesn't "send" people to Hell, their own sense of guilt sends them, and they design their own punishments--usually, reliving over and over the thing they feel guilty about. Lucifer himself has a moral code, which includes belief in the free will of others; he doesn't entrap people into sinning, and he leaves the innocent alone. Lucifer himself is being punished but he doesn't feel guilty over his actions, so his punishment offends his sense of rightness.

I'm also enjoying the human characters who have realized that Lucifer is who he says he is and are dealing with the repercussions to their own belief systems. This show is deep!

We've been watching a lot of baseball. We have a largely new, young set of players on our team who are showing a lot of promise. Hopefully we'll be back in the stadium cheering them on next year. I love how they filled the stadiums with life-size photos of people so the players feel "watched," and also play the crowd noises . . . and have people on Zoom cheering on the Jumbotron whenever a player makes a hit or a good play.

I had so much trouble getting started with "Schitt's Creek" -- the characters were too outlandish for me at first -- but the rewards for sticking with it are great. "My bebes! My bebes!" "Euuuw, David!" I fell over laughing at Moira as the Impressive Clergyman from "Princess Bride" in the wedding scene. Genius costuming. So glad Catherine O'Hara got her Emmy at last.

Cities being destroyed are such a staple of scifi. I was hooked on Japanese monster movies when I was younger and Tokyo got destroyed in every one. I blogged once about how I think these movies feed into some distrust/hatred of big cities that makes us want to see them taken down (without loss of life). Godzilla NEVER comes ashore in the country!
 
The very 1st Thor movie happened in a small town in New Mexico, and when Loki sent the robot to fight Thor in "Main Street" of that little town, I really didn't care if the diner or post office got blown up. So I think there's something about having high-rise cities trashed that is more emotionally appealing than seeing Farmer Smith's barn set on fire. Love or them or hate them, we know high-rise cities are rare, expensive, and represent more human loss because of the density of habitation involved. Or, maybe they just look cool being blown up for some other reason.

Lucifer is enjoyable on multiple levels. I primarily like the humor, but I like the philosophy too. The one thing to be careful about is that while the show in serious situations consistently sticks to the idea that each person's hell is a self-created guilt trip, for comedic reasons, Lucifer and Maze will get nostalgic about torturing Hitler or whoever on a rack or with hot pokers or cutting off their nose, etc, just for gags, and that directly contradicts the self-created time loop of reliving something bad you've done. It's a contradiction that rankles some people (including me), but because I like the show, I just forgive them for it. They even tried to reconcile that in the latest season with an explanation that didn't quite work for me.

Anyway, by now you've probably seen that the show provides multiple layers of character development to even secondary people like Linda Martin, which is something I appreciate.

And speaking of character arcs: yes, Schitt's Creek definitely takes work and time to get into it, and the title is off-putting and not even accurate, but once I was hooked, I started bingeing, and I went back and forgave things that bothered me, or many of them. I think Alexis' transformation from shallow, ditzy, selfish pretty girl to a grown up is the most fun to watch because it's executed by very careful degrees, and the changes in her facial expressions are subtle but quite significant. A couple of her "rise to the moment" scenes give me little chills of gratitude that yes, self-absorbed people can change for the better (and they don't need to be perfect). Boop!
 
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His breakout role in NZ was as Jethro and Van West, twin brothers in a westie crime family. Jethro was a lawyer and Van was slightly mentally deficient due to a childhood accident. In one episode in season one, Jethro pretended to be Van and Van had to try his best to be Jethro - and Starr *nailed* it. I'm stoked that he's doing so well in The Boys (not that I get Amazon - I'm waiting for the Middle-earth TV show then I'll binge everything I've missed).

Meanwhile, I've seen Savage and Bill and Ted 3 in the cinema. Entirely different movies! Savage tells the story of how a young boy in a violent home ends up in an NZ gang and how gangs, as a replacement for a missing home life, can never fill that need for family and love. Unfortunately the movie itself was a bit middling, but the acting was very good.

B&T3 was just boring. Not worth the time or the money.
 
From what I've read about him, he was almost too successful on NZ screens, and he said it was hard to get new roles because everyone thought of him in his old roles, hence he decamped to Hollywood to start over. I always read celebrity stories of "hardship" with several kilos of salt (I'll never buy that Henry Cavill was bullied as a kid; even his school photos make him look somewhere between cocky and confident, and he didn't look fat), and there's more money to be made on US screens, but it can be a mix of reasons why Starr came here.

Starr certainly started low, and most people including me hadn't heard of "Banshee" before "The Boys," but he nailed the role in "Banshee" too, and reading fan comments on "The Boys," everyone seems riveted by him this season far beyond any other actor, so I think he's one of those actors who's more than just a pretty face and really gets the job. And then it's funny to see him in interviews, where he seems so normal, relaxed, and guy-next door. If he has inner demons that he's channeling, he hides them well in interviews.

Too bad about Bill & Ted; I had been dangling that one as a possibility, but looks like I'll skip it now.
 
that was a HOOT! Excellent performances all around. Starring Millie Bobbie Brown from "Stranger Things," Henry Cavill as her older brother Sherlock, and Sam Claflin as a priggish Mycroft. So much fun. I hope they turn this into a series.
 
As soon as I saw they'd made it, I put it into my "must see" list. We've got the book series in the library here, and I loved them! So glad to know they did it well.
 
Wow. While I had snooze problems with parts of the first 5 episodes, the last 3 really delivered, including the finale. I wish there had been more episodes this season since some things felt rushed (when they weren't bogged down in people's angst), and there were many threads to the plot. Anyway, it was a satisfying finale.

I started watching "Evil," which is curiously a CBS series that wound up on Netflix instead of CBS All Access. It's basically the formula of X-files with a Catholic priest and a non-religious/scientist/psychologist person solving situations that seem supernatural but turn out to have scientific explanations, so there's that constant tension between viewpoints. For me it's just okay and nothing better than that as the actors seem to be phoning it in and a lot of scenes seem to be amateurish in how they're shot (look at that woman striding forcefully into a building--oh my! I bet she's going to have a dramatic confrontation with that stride! Oh, and that music!).

Apparently to check off the inclusivity box, they shoehorned in Asif Mandvi (if anyone remembers him from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show"), who's conveniently foreign-looking, is secular with a Muslim father, and has a sister wearing a hijab who's good at hacking things, so she's a smart STEM Muslim possibly-immigrant female--does that check off enough boxes? I have nothing against that, quite the contrary, but when it's done as blatant tokenism then there's not much virtue in the virtue signaling. It just reminds me of the same Hollywood environment where Harvey Weinstein would make women famous, then extract romantic favors: good publicity doesn't get rid of the rot.

Another show I tried was "Home Fires," mainly because Samantha Bond is in it. (Aunt Rosamund from "Downton Abbey".) It's a female-centric show about life on the homefront during WW2. I'm a couple episodes in, and I'm finding it OK but no rave reviews.
 
This show popped up on Netflix, and somehow they took a short ghost story, Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" (a favorite of mine), and turned it into 9 episodes and also set it in the modern day. I give it an "OK" rating overall since there were some things I liked, such as fleshing out characters and adding more people to the story plus inventing a twist or two, and things I didn't like which seemed like filler.

One of the worst episodes had a narrator say repeatedly the banal lines "She slept. She woke. She walked," as if they were somehow profound when they were quite literally about what the woman was doing. My new nightmare is being stuck on an airplane next to someone repeating those lines for hours, killing me with stupidity and boredom.

But there was some world-building involved, and while some characters were straightforward, others had hidden agendas, and figuring out the rules that people were following (or trying to break) was pretty fun. I think it veered a little too far off in the direction of soap opera romance (affairs, scandals, betrayal, true love!) for my taste, but I nevertheless found the storytelling plucky enough to forgive what didn't appeal to me.
 
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