TV Bonanza Part 1: Reboot, The Patient, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

An inordinate number of new shows popped up in August or September so I have been making my way through all of them for the past few months and am now ready with a grab bag of reviews. Settle in this week for a recap - there’s gonna be something for everyone!

Reboot: This is a sublime comedy from the mind of Steven Levitan, who previously created Modern Family and Just Shoot Me. Here, we get a show about rebooting a show, a behind-the-scenes satire of Hollywood and show runners and writers and the studio executives at Hulu. It’s a delicious meta commentary on the state of the television sitcom, and is an absolute delight for all eight episodes of its first season. It also boasts a stellar cast of folks like Rachel Bloom, Paul Reiser, Keegan Michael-Key, Johnny Knoxville, and Judy Greer, and because it’s not on network television, it can be liberal in terms of content and language. So don't watch with young kids.

The first episode has a big twist at the end, so I’ll just give you the basic set-up. There was a beloved network sitcom called Step Right Up and now a hip young showrunner (Bloom) wants to reboot it as an edgier dramatic show. However, the old showrunner (Reiser) is brought in by the studio, so we’re going to get a clash of the generations. There are fun moments in the writing room where the young diverse woke writers have to face off with the elderly Jewish writers who have a very different comic sensibility. And there's tension among the old cast members; they were off building very different lives for themselves in the past decades and now have different ambitions and hopes for this next step in their career. 

Reboot itself is very funny, occasionally filthy, and full of heart. The show within a show suffers from the usual TV problem where people are pretending it’s funnier that it really is, but since it’s a traditional sitcom, the mediocrity is kind of the point. This show is a gem, seek it out. With this cast and this caliber of writing, it has legs and will be well worth your time for many more seasons.

The Patient: This is a taut and brilliant ten-episode limited series from the minds of Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg who gave us The Americans. Here, they give us the story of a serial killer, Sam (the wonderful Domnhall Gleeson) who wants to try and stop killing, so he kidnaps Dr. Alan Strauss (the even more wonderful Steve Carell) to be chained in his basement and give him daily therapy to work through his issues. Needless to say, these aren’t ideal conditions, but needs must and Alan uses all his years of therapy training to apply all the empathy he can muster for this incredibly dangerous patient, whilst also reckoning with his own fears and fractured relationship with his son, who he may now never see again.

The scripts are impeccable, clearly indicating that the writers are very familiar with therapy speak and how these sessions ordinarily go even in extraordinary circumstances. The actors are brilliant, deftly navigating their way through this tense two-hander where they are able to demonstrate the full range of human emotion with a simple expression or change in tone. I recommended this show to my therapist and he quite enjoyed it, which does speak to what a good job it does in portraying the patient-doctor relationship, even in the most heightened of circumstances. Every episode has some fantastic cliffhanger that will keep you jonesing for the next installment, and it was always a highlight of my week. Now you can just binge it all in one satisfying gulp and join me in hoping that maybe Steve Carell will finally win his Emmy for this performance.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Oh what sheer fun. This show might be the most meta thing I have ever witnessed on television and it has fully dug its heels into the Marvel wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy sensibility. The glorious Tatiana Maslany stars as Jennifer Walters, cousin to Bruce Banner aka the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo has many cameos through the season). After the two of them get into a car accident, Jen discovers that now she too turns into a Hulk when she gets angry. Which sucks because she has a promising career as an attorney and cannot afford to keep Hulking out in court. 

Bruce gives her some Hulk lessons and she turns out to be a quick study, because as a woman, she has had lifelong training in keeping her anger in check. This show is a feminist delight, always making jokes about the shit women put up with on a daily basis, and Jen is the female superhero I didn’t know I needed but am very pleased to have. Each episode of the season is charming, self-referential with Jen frequently breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience and comment on how it’s all going, and is an irreverent and fun time. There’s an overarching plot that keeps you engaged from week to week, the special effects and action are always on point like with any Marvel property, and the finale is a whimsical ode to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This show is a great treat for people who have stuck with Marvel on this never-ending journey - I have mostly slogged through their more dramatic shows, but She-Hulk is a light, frothy comedy that strikes exactly the tone that I love most about Marvel.  So dive right in for eight episodes of surprising and silly superhero shenanigans.

October Olio: Amsterdam, Rosaline, Ticket to Paradise

There have been a lot of great movies to watch in October. But there have also been some middling ones. If you’re looking for something that’s “fair” but not excellent, an excuse to just distract yourself for a few hours, then this blog post is what you seek.

Amsterdam: This is a great movie to spot celebrities. It’s an all-star cast, a wall-to-wall who’s who ensemble, starting with the central trio of Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, and John David Washington, and ending with the likes of Taylor Swift. Yes, Swift is in the movie for a glorious cameo that sets everyone off on an adventure. I won’t get into details about the plot (mostly because I seem to have forgotten all of it) but this is a period piece set in 1930s New York. Our protagonists are all Americans who first met each other in France during World War 1, and now they are reunited and faced with a murder mystery that they must solve with a complicated series of characters and motivations that appear to be loosely based on a true story, with “loosely” being the operative word. 

This film is meant to be a screwball comedy but it’s not particularly funny, and mostly just frantic. Writer-director David O. Russell had some kind of vision here, but despite all the ingredients being right, the final result falls flat. Watch it if you like lovely production design and great actors, but don’t expect a coherent or engaging story. If you're anything like my boyfriend, you will get a lovely nap out of it.

Ticket to Paradise: This is a movie where George Clooney and Julia Roberts play David and Georgia, a couple who got divorced 14 years ago and can’t stand each other but are united in their love for their daughter, Lily (the lovely Kaitlyn Dever). Lily went on a trip to Bali, fell in love with a man after two months, and now, instead of returning to America to start her law career, she is getting married and staying in Bali. I like to think of this as Eat Pray Love: The Sequel.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve pretty much seen the entire movie. Directed by Ol Parker (who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Pipski), this is a very standard romcom, with megastar wattage because Clooney and Roberts are, of course, utterly charming goofballs with great chemistry. But the plot is predictable, the dialogue is lazy, and you’ll get what you expected. Bali truly is a paradise and you’ll be jonesing for a vacation after you watch this film. So head on to the theater for some charm and good vibes, but don’t expect any surprises.

Rosaline: In this movie, we yet again find our girl Kaitlyn Dever in a romcom! Here she plays Rosaline, the girlfriend who was jilted by Romeo when he found Juliet instead. So what follows is a Romeo and Juliet behind-the-scenes spoof, where half the movie is just scenes from the play, but now with Rosaline rolling her eyes in the background or attempting to break this couple up so she can get back with Romeo.

It a a fun premise, directed by Karen Maine and adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber from the young adult novel, When You Were Mine, by Rebecca Serle. Dever is a charismatic presence who does well with what she’s given, and there’s a lot of entertaining supporting character work, including Minnie Driver as the Registered Nurse and Bradley Whitford as Rosaline’s supportive but hapless dad. Enjoy the cameos and Shakespearean production design, and the comic take on what is ordinarily a timeless tragedy. There's also a great soundtrack, very reminiscent of the Bridgerton method of injecting contemporary pop into period pieces. It's a good way to spend some hours on the couch - you could do a lot worse. Like Juliet did.

Triangle of Sadness: Wealthy Woes

Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I saw a trailer and it looked a bit bizarre, but I thought I’d give it a try. My assumption was that it would be fine but too artsy, because this is what I expect from a Palme d’Or winner that the critics are raving about. So imagine my surprise when I found myself bursting out laughing during an extended sequence in this movie, to the point where I started crying tears of laughter while my fellow moviegoers were similarly convulsing around me. My God. What a movie.

The film is told in three parts, and the trailer I saw did not hint at the third part, which I am very grateful for. I would recommend going into this movie knowing as little as possible, though honestly, you’ll probably love it either way. In fact, the trailer I saw did give away a large part of the sequence that had me cry-laughing in my seat, and while I didn’t think it was that funny in the trailer, it was spectacularly silly in the final film. 

Part One opens with a couple called Carl and Yaya (the incredibly beautiful Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean), who are fashion models and influencers. They have a rich lifestyle whilst not actually being rich themselves and the first act of the film involves an incredibly heated argument about money that sets the stage for the rest of this searing satire.

In Part Two, we get to the yacht. A bunch of rich people are enjoying a vacation on a luxury yacht and here we get an interesting stratification of class. There are the guests who are uber-wealthy Europeans, who have made their money through all manner of enterprises (many of them slightly unsavory), and who often behave like spoiled brats or clueless morons. There are the staff who have been taught to be obsequious and make sure their wealthy clientele are always having a fantastic time so that they get a massive tip at the end. Even among the staff, there’s a further class delineation between the upper deck, client-facing folk, who are mostly white, and the below-deck cleaning staff and mechanics who are mostly Filipino. No spoilers, but that delineation is going to bear delicious fruit in Part Three of this film. 

Carl and Yaya oddly straddle these classes. For all intents and purposes, they are viewed as the wealthy clientele. They are two beautiful people on board this yacht, they probably don’t have a care in the world, right? But they were just gifted this trip as part of their social media hustle - they are somewhat bewildered by the other rich guests they meet in the dining room every night, but are also weird and prickly around the staff, never quite knowing how to fit into either world as they have such an ambiguous sense of their current status and a tenuous grasp of their finances. Again, the amorphous nature of their existence will become important in Part Three. And lest I forget, we also have Woody Harrelson as the yacht’s very alcoholic captain, a man who is a raving socialist, hates to deal with the rich people on board, and who will ultimately preside over the utmost chaos that plagues this yacht on a rocky night.

Writer-director Ruben Ostlund takes his time establishing his main characters before he lets the farce run free and this movie is an impeccable takedown of wealth and privilege. The editing is deliberate, and while I initially worried it might be too slow-paced, I quickly discovered that Ostlund allowed for all these pauses in conversations and an unsettling vibe at the beginning in order to set you up for the frenetic satire that is about to follow. You're in the hands of a master, just give yourself up to the ride.

That’s all I’m giving you. You must seek this movie out, ideally in a movie theater where you can enjoy it with a raucous audience who experiences a frisson of schadenfreude when the rich start to suffer and the yacht trip goes awry. This movie is such a blistering indictment of our society and how we talk about money and how we treat those who have it and those who don’t. And despite that serious theme, it is the funniest thing I have watched in a long while, a sizzling example of the power of satire to both educate and entertain. It is an absolute marvel and if I could make one wish, it would be for Dolly de Leon to get a nod for Best Supporting Actress at Oscar time because her performance absolutely thrilled me to my bones. My God. What a movie.

Mid-October Highlights: Bros & Tar

One is a prestige Oscar drama about a dangerously powerful woman. The other is a joke-dense, gay romantic comedy. They are insanely different, but oh they have both entertained me so much at the movies this month and deserve your eyeballs. Let's get into it.

Tar: Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tar, an erudite and fiercely intelligent American woman who is currently the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. By all accounts, the woman is a paragon, and in the opening moments of this movie, we will be treated to scenes where we watch her talk to people and hold her own, with a passion for music and a very precise vocabulary. However, writer-director Todd Field is not interested in a hagiography. And what follows is two and a half hours of watching the absolute collapse of our protagonist. 

I cannot give away more details, but my God, give Cate Blanchett her Oscar now. She is in every scene of this film and you simply cannot look away; watching her confidence start to turn against her and crumble in epic fashion is remarkable. Her hand gestures when she is conducting music are utterly mesmerizing, and the way she talk to her musicians, switching effortlessly between English and unsubtitled German is a wonder to behold. She has transformed into this character in an astonishing way, and I was captivated.

I went into this movie expecting to be bored out of my mind. Why did it have to be so long? Why did the trailer make it look like a plot-less nightmare? I was convinced this was a prestige film with no substance, and I have never been more glad to be proven wrong. It is impeccable in every way, not just that Blanchett performance. There's an attention to detail in every frame, including the sublime costume design from Bina Daigeler that captures Tar's strength and severity and relentless pursuit of perfection. The production design of her apartments is jaw-dropping. And the soundscape she inhabits always has something going on, some relentless beat in the background, something that is niggling at her and reminding us that all is not well. It's not just the majesty of the symphony she conducts. Even when she is at the gym, she is punching a bag to the rhythm of classical music. 

The supporting performances from Noemi Merlant as Tar's long-suffering assistant, and Nina Hoss as Tar's even-more-suffering wife, are incredible, and they serve as the perfect emotional counterpoint to Tar's almost demonic self-possession. But oh when that mask starts to slip, things go downhill real fast. The long running time of this film is truly worth it because you need to marinate in these characters and watch the trajectory of Tar's fall. And I still cannot get over the final shot of this movie. It was the coup de grace that convinced me that I had just watched a masterpiece. 

Bros: Starring Billy Eichner (who also co-wrote the screenplay with director, Nicholas Stoller), this movie is a joy from start to finish. It is the story of Bobby (Eichner), a single gay man in his forties in New York City, who is pseudo-famous as the host of a popular podcast and has just been appointed as the curator of a new LGBTQ+ History Museum in Manhattan. He thinks he is content with hookups and no commitment, but then he meets Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a club, and the two of them embark on a romantic journey that will keep you riveted with all its twists and turns. 

This movie is absolutely brimming with jokes. You almost can't dare to laugh at them because you are bound to miss the next one that follows immediately after. It is a laugh-out-loud script that captures the essence of Eichner's angry Billy on the Street persona, but also imbues him with so much warmth and humanity. Bobby and Aaron both have a lot of demons they are battling, which is why they are still single and afraid of commitment, and this is a movie about how two mature adults reconcile their baggage and decide whether or not they can in fact manage to stick it out in a relationship. It's wise and loving, but also funny and sexy as hell.

It is also an ode to the LGBTQ+ community and a celebration of their history and diversity and the many ways in which they can disagree with one another but also rally around each other. This movie has everything: heart, humor, and heaps of filthy jokes. It is sweet and spectacular, a raucous night out at the movies, and you should definitely treat yourself.