Tiger King: Cat-astrophe!

I was on a Zoom happy hour videoconference call with some colleagues last week (because this is how we live now) and we were sharing what we were watching to while away our time in quarantine. Someone went, “Tiger King, it’s amazing!” Well, therein began my journey into the trippiest seven hours of television I have witnessed on Netflix. This is the first Netflix show to get a Covid-19 boost as we are all stuck at home, but it’s certainly worth it. 

Tiger King is ostensibly about Joe Exotic (his real name is Joseph Schreibvogel, but let’s forgo the formalities, shall we?), a flamboyant man who runs the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma where he owns more than two hundred tigers and other big cats and exotic animals. At the very beginning, we know Joe is currently in jail, for ordering a hit on some woman; and then we cut to five years earlier when the documentary crew first got interested in this weird insular world of exotic animal collectors and conservationists in the United States that eventually led them to this incredible story.

Frankly, you need to just watch this series to figure out what it’s about, because I binged my way through it in two days and am still not quite sure what I watched. Every single character is an utter lunatic, and while they are incredibly personable and interesting, they are deeply bizarre examples of humanity. There’s Carole Baskin, the woman who runs a big cat sanctuary and wants to abolish private zoos like the one Joe Exotic runs because the animals are ill-treated. But as we dive into her story, it becomes unclear if this woman is the heroine she claims to be - she still charges people to come see the cats in her sanctuary, and it feels like a zoo itself. And then there’s the small matter of her millionaire husband who mysteriously disappeared, with the rumor being that she murdered him and fed him to a tiger. Um WHAT?

There’s Bhagawan “Doc” Antle who runs an animal preserve in South Carolina and seems like an affable oddball until you discover he is essentially running a cult with the nubile interns he hires to help take care of all his lions ands tigers. There’s a ton of polyamory going on, with everyone seeming to have multiple husbands and wives and behaving like a ton of hippies except ones who also very firmly believe in their second amendment rights and tote a lot of guns around. There are Joe Exotic’s husbands, who all seem a bit drug-addled, there’s his many music videos (yeah I can’t even get into that right now), subsequently the tale of how he ran for President (maybe that’s who could have us protected us from the coronavirus), and then the escalating tension and money troubles and ongoing feud with Carole and PETA leading to the FBI getting involved once it all got a bit murderous.

Tiger King is fantastical and farcical: if it were a scripted series, you would dismiss it immediately for being way too over-the-top, but nope, this is all real life. These people live crazy lives, make crazy decisions, and quite frankly are living the American dream. Apparently there are more privately-owned tigers in the United States than are roaming free in the wild in the entire world today. We’re #1 baby, and as this documentary points out, yet again, this is something we really shouldn’t be #1 in. If you really need a selfie with a tiger cub to make yourself look good on Tinder, chances are, you weren’t that much of a catch to begin with. So delve into the wild world of exotic animals with Tiger King: this is the horror story David Attenborough never told you about.

McMillions, Sanditon, Hillary, and Avenue 5: TV in the Time of Corona

If you're like millions around the world, you might currently be reading this in your home where you're self-isolating, quarantined, or under house arrest. It's a scary time out there, but if you aren't actively sick, what you might currently be, is very actively bored. Let's face it, being cooped up at home all day is a slog. But thankfully, it's 2020, which means there is no shortage of entertainment available on all manner of streaming platforms. As such, below is an eclectic TV roundup of shows I have recently watched that may keep you somewhat entertained as we all #QuarantineAndChill in our best efforts to #FlattenTheCurve. Stay safe, and hit me up in the comments if you need any personalized recommendations to keep you going through the Coronapocalypse.

Hillary: If you've read the blog, you know that I did not react well to the 2016 election. So this recommendation is for people who like political documentaries, wanted Hillary to win, and are mad that Trump is currently killing us all due to his incompetence. Directed by Nanette Burnstein, it’s certainly a bit of a hagiography, but it’s a comprehensive overview of Hillary Clinton’s life, from birth and student government (obligatory Wellesley shoutout!) to her global role as a political powerhouse and feminist icon. Each of the four episodes tackles a particular phase of her life, while juxtaposing it against phases of the 2016 campaign, which is a very compelling narrative structure. For someone like me, who only really paid attention to Hillary in this decade, it was a fascinating look at her early life and her particular brand of feminism, and the political tribulations that have had such a lasting impact on her legacy. I never understood all the Hillary hatred in 2016, but this documentary finally put me in the shoes of the conspiracy theorists and weirdos who saw her as some sort of corrupt, emotionless harpy. It’s a valuable and unvarnished look at a complicated woman, and while she isn’t going to break down in tears on camera, she will explain herself to you with conviction. It also provides great insight at what goes on behind the scenes of a political campaign. Did I still tear up at the end when they showed a clip of her concession speech? Sure. But the documentary does end on a hopeful note, suggesting that despite everything she went through, she kick-started a revolution that will have reverberations for years to come.

McMillions: This six-part documentary is what you need to binge if you’re looking for a real-life mystery with a host of colorful characters, FBI shenanigans, and a story that feels so unbelievable that it just has to be true. Written and directed by James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte, this is the tale of the McDonald’s Monopoly game that ran from 1989 to 2001, and featured the chance to instantly win a million dollars if you found the winning game piece. However, it turns out that almost none of the million dollar prize winners were legitimate. The FBI got an anonymous tip that some of the winners were related to each other, even though they didn’t share the same last names, and as they started to dig into this, they uncovered a vast and sprawling web of deceit. The documentary is part mystery, part screwball comedy, thanks to Special Agent Doug Mathews, who is the most gung-ho FBI agent you’ll ever meet and seems in dire need of some Ritalin. It’s a wacky show and each episode ends on a cliffhanger that will leave you begging for more, so it’s the ideal binge watch. Get to it.

Sanditon: One would think this show would be right up my alley, given that my home is littered with Jane Austen paraphernalia that my friends have sent me over the ages (on successive Christmases, I have received Austen candles, band-aids, post-it notes, and an action figure wielding a quill). However, Sanditon was her unfinished novel, a work in progress before she died, and I thought watching it would amount to nothing more than watching a piece of fan fiction. However, then my friend Maggie told me to give it a shot, citing the fact that there might be some scenes involving wet male torsos. And for eight episodes, I returned week after week, weirdly addicted to some very campy fan fiction that would make Austen audibly groan in her grave. Written by Andrew Davies, you can see how he’s turning the flimsy framework of the first 12 chapters penned by Austen into a re-hash of Pride & Prejudice, complete with seemingly arrogant hero, penniless but witty heroine, and rakish supporting characters who are ready to ruin any naive girls that want to attend a ball. The plot twists are insane and more suited to a gothic romance than a Regency drama. And the ending is just...well, you’ll see. Overall, if you’re a fan of period dramas, this will scratch that itch, but don’t expect a quality plot. This is purely a Coronavirus binge - you would skip it if you had other things to do, but damnit, you’re stuck indoors, so you might as well.

Avenue 5: Armando Ianucci is one of the smartest British TV writers around, so I will watch anything he does. Thus, I was insanely excited for his new HBO show, Avenue 5, set on a spaceship in the future when space tourism is pretty common. We meet a group of people who are on an 8-week trip to Saturn, until something goes horribly wrong and changes the ship’s trajectory. Now, their voyage is going to take three years. Oops. It’s a solid premise, but the comedy can be a bit broad and run-of-the-mill. Where it excels, of course, is when the characters start to have total meltdowns. There’s nothing better in an Ianucci sitcom than when someone is panicking and the full force of their vituperative wrath comes out to play. Plus the show deploys Hugh Laurie (my favorite British comedy actor but known to most Americans as the dramatic actor from House) to his best possible effect. I can’t spoil it, but rest assured that each episode contains some new revelation about his character, which is always a treat. While I am less enamored of other aspects of this show, I’ll keep coming back for him. Like most comedies, this show is struggling to find its footing in the first season, but each episode contains a nugget of comic brilliance to make it worth your while. Just this morning I watched the eighth episode and burst out laughing as things went completely haywire for 30 minutes straight. It’s a great watch if you’re panicking and need to expand your vocabulary in terms of things to yell at your phone as you get the latest breaking alerts regarding global pandemics. Isn’t that what we all need right now?

Onward: A Magical Quest

Onward is a Pixar movie, so it should come as no surprise that it is an imaginative, charming, and emotional piece of movie magic. At this point, you don't need me to tell you that a Pixar movie is required viewing; that’s just an established fact. But if you’re curious to learn what this movie is about before you inevitably head to the theater to see it yourself, let us proceed.

The movie is set in a world where magical creatures discovered technology and therefore forgot how to do magic. It’s hard to properly explain, but it's a wonderfully clever conceit that is established within the first five minutes and already tells you that the script by Dan Scanlon (also the director), Keith Bunin, and Jason Headley is going to be an effervescent joy. Wizards needed their magic staffs to help light fires, but then the world got electricity so everyone forgot how to cast spells because they could just hit a light switch. Centaurs used to run across the plains but then they got cars and that was all the horsepower they needed.

Enter our hero, Ian (delightfully voiced by Tom Holland). He is an elf, whose father died before he was born, so he grew up with his big brother, Barley (voiced by the equally delightful Chris Pratt), and mother, Laurel (voiced by comedy icon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Ian is a shy and awkward kid, but on his sixteenth birthday, his mother presents him and Barley with a present from their father. It’s a wizard's staff, with a spell designed to bring their father back to Earth for one day so he can see how his boys turned out. Barley is obsessed with magic and historical lore, but it turns out Ian is the one with wizarding powers, and he manages to semi-successfully cast the spell. It’s semi-successful because only his father’s lower half manifests itself - oops.

What follows is a quest to find a Phoenix Gem, which will help the boys restore the upper half of their dad and reconnect with him before their 24 hours are up. It’s such a bizarre concept but this movie is so impeccably well-scripted that you are along for the ride and everything makes perfect sense until you sit down a day later and try to explain the story to the readers of your blog. Suffice to say, the rest of this movie is a story about two boys and a pair of legs making their way to a mountain and learning a lot about themselves along the way.

Onward is a wonderful movie, and underneath all the magic and silliness, there is that beating emotional heart that is the hallmark of any Pixar movie. This is a story about the relationship between these two brothers, their grief for missing out on having a father, the fierce love of the mother who raised them, and facing your fears and growing up. It is a gem of a film, funny, clever, and heartwarming, with dazzling visuals and pitch perfect voice talent. So go forth on your quest and watch Onward. It will help you reclaim some of the magic we’ve lost in the world. 

Reply All #158: The Best Podcast Episode Ever

This post is to tell you to listen to one episode of a podcast. Just one hour-long episode, that’s it. I had heard about this episode yesterday on Twitter via NPR's Linda Holmes (who subsequently recommended it on today's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter) and then it showed up in today's New York Times Morning Briefing email. So I downloaded it at 8 am. I started listening to it while walking to work, and by the time I was halfway through, I had texted several friends to tell them to start listening immediately. I got to work and couldn’t finish since I had a bunch of meetings, but the second I was free, I gobbled up the rest, giggling like a loon at my desk. And when I finished, I stood up and told my colleague sitting in front of me to seek this episode out. I was utterly besotted.

The episode is called The Case of the Missing Hit and it is the 158th episode of the popular Reply All podcast from Gimlet Media. I have never listened to Reply All before and I don’t know if I will again, because this episode has set such an impossibly high bar for the world of podcasting that I feel like I might just have to call it quits after this. OK fine, that's a lie, and I will probably now listen to Reply All's entire back catalog. But it is really not hyperbolic to say this podcast episode completely turned my day/week/month/life around.

So what is The Case of the Missing Hit about? It is the tale of a man in Los Angeles who suddenly remembers this pop song he heard a lot on the radio in the 90s when he was living in Flagstaff, Arizona. He remembers the flute solo at the beginning, he remembers numerous lyrics that bear a resemblance to One Week by the Barenaked Ladies, but accompanied by a rousing chorus more reminiscent of U2. But try as he might, he simply cannot find this song on the Internet. He keeps Googling lyrics as he remembers them but Google stubbornly refuses to return a single sensible hit. This song doesn’t seem to exist and so this man turns to PJ Vogt from the Reply All podcast to help him solve the mystery.

Listen to this episode. Follow the journey as these two men go down an ever-deepening rabbit hole and consult an increasingly ridiculous roster of people to see if anyone has heard of this song. There are so many incredible twists and turns and it genuinely turns into the most compelling mystery you’ve ever encountered. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done it better. It is a wonderfully silly but miraculous story with an astonishing payoff. And it is a feat of remarkable storytelling that should be stored in posterity for future generations.

Technology is responsible for a lot of strife in our world but in The Case of the Missing Hit, we have the clearest distillation of what the Internet can help us achieve. Did you think the oral tradition died with Homer? Well, it's back baby. And I will be saving this episode on my phone and listening to it every time I need to restore my faith in humanity. My God, it was so good. 

Hangmen: A Perplexing Comedy

I didn't decide that I liked Hangmen until the final ten minutes of watching the play. Written by Martin McDonagh, a man whose work I generally admire (I saw his play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, on Broadway six years ago, and reading that review now, I see this review will be very similar), it tells the tale of the UK's second-best executioner in 1965 when hanging has just been abolished. It's a comedy - are you laughing yet?

Mark Addy (perfect casting) plays Harry Wade, a bluff hangman who has no compunctions about his profession. The play opens in 1963 where we witness a hanging that goes a bit wrong, but then forwards to two years later when news has just got out about the abolition. Harry owns a pub with his wife Alice (Tracie Bennett), so the rest of the play takes place in this pub with his friends/customers, and the arrival of a mysterious and mildly "menacing" man named Mooney (played by Dan Stevens, in a role unlike anything I've seen him in before and doing it very well). What follows is a supremely dark and twisty play about justice, capital punishment, and also whether it should count if you went off to Nuremberg to hang Nazis after the war.

I won't give anything away about the plot because it's something you need to experience for yourself. I might not have been in the best frame of mind to appreciate this play at the outset, but I was glad to eventually change my mind at the end. The trouble is that I like to predict things - I started to sense where the plot was going and got very uncomfortable about the imagined horrors. But what I forgot was that I was in the hands of Martin McDonagh, a playwright who is never predictable. He is fully in control of his narrative, and he will lead you merrily along the garden path only to pull the rug out from under you. Which is not to say there aren't any horrors in this play - it's just that they might not necessarily be the ones you imagined.

And as always, my favorite thing about Broadway continues to be set design: this time around, Anna Fleischle is responsible for sets and costumes and I was mesmerized throughout. At one point, a character goes out in the rain, and I'm not quite sure how they pulled off the rain effects as another character watches him through the window. The pub was the most cozy, quintessentially English pub ever, with working taps, so you could hear the beer splashing into mugs as Alice and Harry constantly poured pints (I'm assuming the beer wasn't real beer but it certainly made me long for a Guinness).

The audience I watched Hangmen with seemed to be keen to laugh at every little line, while I was far more resistant to giving in. But this play is an excellent exercise in living in the present. Just take each moment as it comes and revel in it, because you honestly cannot predict what the next scene will bring. Every single character is a mass of contradictions, so sit back and enjoy the ride. You will chuckle uncomfortably, but by the end, you might enjoy an uncontrollable guffaw.

Emma: Pastel Perfection

Watching Emma is the visual equivalent of eating a French macaron. Delicate and delicious, it is a pastel-tinted, gorgeous little confection of a movie. Based on Jane Austen's novel from 1815, with a screenplay by Eleanor Catton (her first screenplay!) and directed by Autumn de Wilde (her feature film debut!), this is obviously a movie that is right up my alley. I love Jane Austen, I love movies about women, I love movies written and directed by women, and this film delivers in every possible way. Let's get into it.

The lovely Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma Woodhouse, Austen's only heroine who is "handsome, clever, and rich," so this movie feels very different from all other Austen adaptations. Here we have a heroine who isn't striving for a husband or wealth; she is far more interested in being a matchmaker for her friends. In fact, given her hypochondriac father (played by the always delightful Bill Nighy), who is perpetually wary of sitting in a draught and wants Emma by his side at all times, it doesn't seem like she will ever leave her house. Instead, she befriends Harriet Smith (Mia Goth, who is perfectly cast as the cheerful but dim Harriet), and begins to mess with that poor woman's head with well-intentioned but utterly ruinous notions of romance and her station in life.

And then there's Emma's brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley, played by Johnny Flynn, who like most Austen heroes, takes a bit of getting used to, and then by the end is utterly swoon-worthy. It also helps that since this is a movie directed by a woman, we get the chance to see him naked (from behind, I hasten to add; we wouldn't want Austen to roll in her grave too much). He is the only character who cuts Emma down to size and isn't constantly telling her what a beautiful and intelligent woman she is. So naturally, you can see where that's going. But that journey takes place against a backdrop of magnificent green English scenery, with acres of rolling hills and gorgeous gardens, conservatories bursting with flowers, parlors laden with delicate teapots and mouthwatering pastries (I got spectacularly hungry halfway through this movie as I happened to be watching during tea time), grand English estates, bustling English villages, and sumptuous carriages that would put Porsche to shame. And if the production design and cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt wasn't gorgeous enough, oh the costumes. Costume designer Alexandra Byrne has outdone herself - I wanted to wear every dress, bonnet, and shawl on display. There are also a lot of scenes in which we watch characters being dressed by their servants, offering a glimpse at all the effort that goes into these period costumes. It was particularly intriguing to watch Knightley get dressed by his valet as we are used to seeing the women of this period getting corseted and gussied up, but pay nary a thought to the men.

One of my favorite scenes in the novel is when Knightley has to yell at Emma for something she did that was "badly done." This movie does not disappoint in capturing the emotion of both the thing she did and its aftermath (the thing she did involves Miss Bates, played by Miranda Hart, who is a casting coup and an actress I can never get enough of). And that's what I enjoyed most about this movie. While Emma cries buckets, we're also allowed to see Knightley give in to a tear or two. There's a wonderful scene where he is so overwhelmed by his feelings that he charges home and collapses on the floor. Hitherto, that is a move I've only seen teenage girls indulge in on film, but I think more men would benefit if they just dropped to the floor and had a tantrum. Even towards the end, when he finally makes it to the altar (spoiler alert?), he has to wipe away a happy tear on his cheek. Perhaps that is the greatest gift of women making films. They no longer hold men to some stoic, masculine standard. Men can now be allowed to be emotional too. Austen heroes are usually strong and silent, and then after a brief display of romantic passion, they win the girl and go on to happily ever after. But in this movie, we're allowed to indulge in the emotionality of all that romance and the toll it takes before the happy ending.

Emma is a fantastic movie. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen the entire time. Every set was dripping with stunning detail, every character was bedecked with finery that spoke to their social status and individuality, every frame was astonishing. The music is also arresting, with a score composed by David Schweitzer and Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister of Phoebe!) and the inclusion of some wonderful English folk songs that are anachronistic but fitting. The cast is an absolute joy and every single actor seems born to play their role (Josh O'Connor as the creepy Mr. Elton is a particular delight given that he was just playing Prince Charles in The Crown last year). Autumn de Wilde is a renowned music video director and photographer, so it makes sense that she knows how to stage the perfect shot and convey everything you need to know about a scene purely from the visuals before anyone has even spoken a word. So watch Emma. It's a bright and shining beacon of beauty and we need much more of that in the world.