TV Thrills: Andor & Slow Horses

Welp, the Covid finally came for me so I had plenty of time to lay prostrate on my couch last week and catch up on all the TV I missed in 2022. If you've also missed these shows, I'm afraid to say you really do need to add them to your list, because they are excellent.

Andor: As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I'm not a Star Wars person, yet I have seen all the movies because my best friend is a fan and always takes me to see them. Well this time around, my best friend, my boyfriend, and finally, my boss, all jumped on the Andor bandwagon and kept telling me how good it was. And now, with no excuse to not watch, I found myself bingeing twelve episodes in three days and going huh, that was pretty great.

The show serves as a prequel to Rogue One. Let me assure you, I had no memory of that movie and didn't need to in order to follow this story. This show tells the tale of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) who is a bit of a wastrel and a rogue, taking on odd jobs and finding quick ways to make a buck. All he wants is to make a pile of cash so that he and his elderly mother can go live a life of luxury rather than living their current hardscrabble existence on one of the poorer industrial outposts of the Empire. But of course, when one of his jobs goes pear-shaped, Andor gets roped into a hell of a lot more than he bargained for. And eventually, our seemingly aimless rogue realizes that he may have a moral center after all and might be ready to join the Rebel Alliance. 

Created by Tony Gilroy, this is a splendidly cinematic show. There are a lot of characters and political machinations about the formation of the Rebel Alliance (this is who Luke, Leia, and Han will ultimately fight for, the Resistance against the evil Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy), but I paid no heed to any of that. Instead, I was simply captivated by all the wonderful action set pieces set across different worlds in this universe. There is an episode that features an insane heist sequence that will blow your mind. And as though this wasn't enough for the first season, they proceed to top that with an epic prison break sequence a few episodes later that is just as elaborate and ingenious. The show is firing on all cylinders in terms of spectacle and storytelling and whether you're a Star Wars fanatic or a complete newbie, you should find something to love. It's a damn good yarn.

Slow Horses: This show feels like The Thick of It but with spies. Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, this is the story of Slough House, a division of MI5 that is where incompetent spies are sent when they are deemed too much of a liability on regular operations but don't need to be fired outright. They are meant to be glorified paper-pushers. But of course, composed of a bunch of people who did start out as intelligent and ambitious, they end up inadvertently taking on high-profile cases and having to see them through, albeit, rather disastrously.

The head of this unit is Jackson Lamb, who is played by Gary Oldman in quite the casting coup. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Oldman famously played George Smiley, one of John LeCarre's most celebrated fictional spies, so it's hilarious to now see him as Lamb, a rude, downtrodden, slovenly man who seems to hate everyone in his department. He is a nightmare of a boss, but as the series progresses, you'll start to see that this is actually a man who cares a great deal about his fellow spies and doing the job well. Now, he is often dealing with incompetent people who can't do a good job, but a man can't have everything right?

This is also a show with fantastic action set pieces (the opening sequence in the pilot episode instantly hooked me, and suddenly I had watched all two seasons available - only six episodes each, so this is not a rigorous time commitment!) It's very British, very unsophisticated James Bond, and can also be very gory and shocking at times. There are some nasty deaths in that first season, and if you're squeamish, this may not be the show for you. But if you enjoy some tradecraft and bumbling spy narratives, this might be exactly what you need to settle down with this weekend.

Family Friendly Fare: Matilda the Musical & Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

2023 is upon us but if you do not want to watch anything too heavy and dour, here are two cheery options to throw on your movie watchlist.

Matilda the Musical: I got to see the musical on Broadway several years ago, and it was a rather delightful piece of set design and choreography. Which is what this movie also has to offer, with plenty of whirling dance numbers, and gorgeous production design. And of course, there are those lyrics by Tim Minchin, with rude and hilarious songs that the children sing with much gusto. If you like puns and wordplay, this is the musical for you.

Alisha Weir plays the wunderkind Matilda, an enormously smart little girl who is afflicted with enormously negligent and stupid parents. When she gets sent to Crunchem Hall, an enormously cruel school, she is fortunate enough to land in the first-grade classroom of Miss Honey, a compassionate and loving teacher who immediately spots what a bright girl Matilda is. Unfortunately, Miss Honey is no match for Agatha Trunchbull, the despotic headmistress who absolutely despises children, and what follows is a twisty tale where the children must fight back against the adults and intelligence and kindness have to battle against foolishness and evil. 

Fans of the original 1988 novel by Roald Dahl, or the 1996 movie starring Mara Wilson, may have their quibbles about various changes made to the original source material. But this is a musical and it's meant to be a bit more heightened and wild. The inclusion of Lashana Lynch as Miss Honey is wonderful, while Emma Thompson is having a great deal of fun swanning around the school and being perfectly hideous as the evil Miss Trunchbull. I will confess, I am still too partial to the 1996 movie, and no chocolate cake is ever going to beat the one that Brucie has to eat in that iteration. But if all you want is to sink into the couch and watch some children sing silly songs and wreak a plot of vengeance against a truly odious woman, you cannot go wrong with this film.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: This movie is truly excellent, no matter what age you are. My cousins and boyfriend were discussing it and trying not to spoil it for me (as I hadn't seen it at the time) and all they could vaguely say was "it has so many themes!" And now that I have watched it, I can concur. So many themes!

This is the story of Puss in Boots (still voiced with swagger by Antonio Banderas), who is now down to his ninth and final life. He is on the run from Death (yes, Death is literally a character in this film, so think carefully about what conversations you want to have with any young kids you to take to see it) and finds himself in a home for rescue cats, where a scrawny dog (disguised as a cat), Perrito (voiced delightfully by Harvey Guillen), takes a liking to him. When he then discovers that Goldilocks and the Three Bears, who here are a crime family straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie, are seeking a map to the Wishing Star, Puss realizes this could be his chance to get more lives. So he decides to head out on this adventure to find this star, only to encounter fellow thief and one-time (and perhaps once-again?) love interest Kitty Softpaws (charmingly voiced by Salma Hayek). 

This is a movie about the importance of friendship, living in the present, asking for help, not running away from your problems, loving your family, having a good conscience...I could go on and on. The fairytale characters that pop in and out are hilarious, always slightly subverting what you expect from them in some ways and then completely living up to the stereotype in other ways. The animation is beautiful, and of course you will get to see Puss and Kitty (and Perrito, to some extent) do their best cute, pleading, big eyes to warm the stone-cold embers of your heart. It's a sweet movie that is bound to impart a lesson that immediately speaks to some aspect of your life that you've been neglecting. I don't know how much kids are expected to get out of this film, but adults are in for an emotional and fulfilling ride.

Women Talking: Peeling Apart the Patriarchy

6 days into January, I may have already watched the best movie of the year. I'll try my best to explain further in this review why this movie is so sublime, but if you'd rather just take my word for it, I recommend you go watch it immediately. And try and take a friend - I was fortunate enough to watch with another woman, and when we were done, we spent a long half hour discussing this movie. We were women talking about Women Talking and it was magnificent.

Written and directed by Sarah Polley from a novel by Miriam Towles (that was horrifyingly inspired by real-life events in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia), Women Talking teases out its story in a beguiling fashion. We know that a group of women in a religious colony have discovered that the men and boys of the colony have been raping them at night. It is a horrific revelation and the police are called. The men are currently all in town, some having been arrested, others trying to post bail, and the women have gathered to take a vote - will they stay and forgive the men, stay and fight the men, or leave? When the vote shows a tie for the latter two options, a select group of women are appointed to sit together and talk through the final decision. And for the ensuing hour and a half we watch these women talk and deliberate about the horrors they have experienced, the dreams they still miraculously harbor, and their hopes and fears for the future. In flashbacks we start to piece together what happened to each of these women, what has been happening in this colony, and we start to get a sense of time and place, with increasingly startling and horrifying revelations.

Every actor is a marvel and each character is offering up such a unique and nuanced perspective on what has transpired. There's Salome (Claire Foy) who is roiling with rage and wants to stay and fight these men who have abused her and her children for so long. There's her pregnant sister, Ona (Rooney Mara), who is radiantly calm and intelligent and soft-spoken, and senses that leaving is the only true option that will give them their freedom. There's Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who cannot fathom leaving her life behind and thinks everyone needs to lean into their faith in God and forgive these men so the colony can move past this reckoning. And there are the older women, Agata and Greta (Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy), who are realizing they may have stood by while horrible things happened to them, their daughters, and their granddaughters but now is the time they must take a stand. 

The way that these women talk is absolutely wondrous. The conversations ebb and flow, they have bitter disputes but always come back to resolving their differences with words. They persuade, cajole, yell, cry, and startlingly, laugh. The laughter is the most wondrous piece of it all - how these women can find things to laugh about despite all this horror. There is one man in their midst, August (Ben Whishaw) who is the schoolmaster that the women have recruited to take minutes of their meetings and write up lists of Pros and Cons as none of them have been educated and know how to read and write. He and his questioning mother were excommunicated from the colony but he returned to be of service as a schoolteacher and now finds himself in this position or service to these defiant and brilliant women. It's a poignant reminder of how feminism is always in need of male allies and here August demonstrates what a difference it makes when you are a man who simply listens while women talk.

The film is also a work of art. I was enraptured by the dialogue but may need to watch it again to fully appreciate Luc Montpellier's cinematography as the camera keeps narrowing and widening its focus at different beats and how the scenes can be so bleak and gray when depicting certain horrors but then get saturated with more color as these women start to take a hold of their destiny. The score by Hildur Guonadottir is magnificent, perfectly capturing the somber and serious mood but bringing in the right amount of uplift and optimism to indicate the path forward. Guonadottir won an Oscar for her score for Joker, a film that I hated for its intensely male filmmaking, so I am pleased that perhaps now she will be recognized for her contribution to such a deeply feminist and female movie. I also got the novel from the library and devoured it in one afternoon, and Polley's script is a masterful adaptation - while the book is fantastic, Polley has played with the narrative structure in fantastic ways to make it a truly compelling cinematic experience. This is the exactly the kind of script a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar should be rewarding, hint, hint.

Women Talking feels like a long therapy session about the patriarchy. It's a reminder that one of the most effective ways to process trauma, whether individual or collective, is to actually talk about it. These women have spent their lives in silence, never talking about their bodies, never discussing the fact that they would wake up in the morning battered and bruised and suddenly pregnant. But now, they are talking. And there is a beautiful power in that.

Deft Dramas: Mood & Welcome to Chippendales

Over the holidays, I had the pleasure of watching two very different but equally compelling shows. Both are engaging, character-driven dramas that find a novel way to tell a tale about what happens when men and women get into the business of the oldest profession in the world.

Welcome to Chippendales: I was vaguely aware that Chippendales exists - I knew it as a successful chain of clubs where male strippers perform elaborate shows to titillate a screaming female audience. But this miniseries gives us the incredible history of Chippendales and how it was created in Los Angeles in 1979 by an Indian immigrant named Somen "Steve" Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani, delivering an extraordinary performance). I was listening to Kumail on a podcast and he said, "don't read the Wikipedia article about Chippendales, just watch the show." And I exhort you to do the same. I had no idea about the wild and sordid history behind the meteoric rise and ultimately deadly fall of the franchise, but over the course of this eight-episode miniseries, you're in for quite the rollercoaster.

Alongside Nanjiani, we have the impeccable Murray Bartlett as his business partner, Nick De Noia, who comes on as a consultant to help choreograph a few routines and then becomes integral to the business, leading to a very testy partnership. There's the marvelous Annaleigh Ashford as Irene, a customer who is not very enthused by the strippers but wows Steve with her accountancy skills and ability to quickly find ways to keep costs down. She wows Steve in other ways too, but we won't get into that. And finally, Juliette Lewis rounds out the "four geniuses" as Denise, the costume designer who becomes Nick's right-hand woman and offers up even more creative inspiration for the shows that they are devising. 

And oh what shows they are. We get to watch the evolution of these dancers, initially stumbling like newborn baby giraffes and eventually morphing into gorgeous and coordinated Magic Mikes. The music budget for this show must have been insane but the soundtrack boasts just about every song you could imagine from this era. Frankly, when the pilot featured a dance set to ABBA's Gimme Gimme Gimme, I knew I was all in.

Created by Robert Siegel, he and his team of writers have crafted eight fantastic episodes that tell a story of greed, wealth, sex, privilege, racism, paranoia, and ultimately death. Steve is a fascinating character, one that you root for at the beginning and then are horrified by at the end. He faces discrimination but then manages to be a bigot himself; he wants to be rich, and can then never be rich enough; and it's wonderful to see the complex arc of this character and the others in his orbit as they get more famous and yet can't stand to be around each other. Such is the human condition, and Welcome to Chippendales tells this story with verve and a thumping disco beat.

Mood: This is a six-episode series created and written by Nicole Lecky, based on her one-woman play, Superhoe. That is a similar origin story to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag, and let me tell you, Nicole Lecky had better have a similarly meteoric rise in fame. Because Mood is one of the most riveting, fascinating, and empathetic pieces of television I have seen in a while.

Lecky plays Sasha, a young mixed-race woman who is the only Black person in her household. She is still living at home with her mother, stepdad, and sister, and harbors ambitions of becoming a famous singer, but she can't quite seem to get her life together. Following a bad breakup with her boyfriend Anton, she makes some poor decisions that lead to her family kicking her out of the house. When she finally ends up becoming the roommate of a young white woman named Carly Visionz (Lara Peake), Sasha is slowly sucked into the glamorous world of being a social media influencer. Only to then find herself being pulled into the more shadowy, sordid world of cam girls and sex work.

It's hard to say more. This show opens up with the delicacy of a blooming bud, gradually unfurling its petals to give you a rich story of this woman's reckoning with her past in order to find her way again. The way in which Sasha is so gradually tempted into doing things she never thought she would do is breathtaking and by the time you get to Episode 5, your heart will be in your mouth as you realize just how slippery this slope is. And I haven't even mentioned the most surreal part of this entire program - it will occasionally turn into a musical, with Sasha belting out amazing songs and orchestrating elaborate music videos out of her surroundings as she tries to process her trauma through music and lyrics, making something beautiful out of the absolute chaos.

You must watch this show. It's a feat of acting, music, and brazenly audacious storytelling. It feels fresh and unique, but it is likely the story of far too many women on the fringes of society who have slipped through various safety nets and found themselves in this position. This is not a show that is judgy about sex work - in fact it portrays many women in the profession who are clear-eyed and know their boundaries and counsel Sasha because they can sense that she is in far too vulnerable a position. It's a magnificent portrayal of one woman and her journey into her own. It really is a mood.