Mystery Binges: Presumed Innocent & True Detective: Night Country

Are you ready to sink your teeth into a murder mystery? Then I’ve got two different flavors of murderous mayhem to share with you!

True Detective: Night Country: I was never a big fan of True Detective and was only able to watch 1.5 seasons because it felt a bit too male and self-aggrandizing under the aegis of creator Nic Pizzolatto. Well now, Issa Lopez has taken over as showrunner, and cast Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, two Alaskan cops who must investigate a VERY creepy incident involving some scientists from a local research station who disappear and are then found outside in the snow, frozen to death. Also, all of this is taking place in December as their town of Ennis, Alaska experiences its last sunset and plunges into endless polar night for a few weeks. Eek.

Our diligent duo have to deal with a whole mess of wild characters, as well as navigate their own fractious relationship and past secrets. This incident seems related to an old unresolved murder investigation of a local Inupiaq woman named Annie Kowtok, but as they delve deeper into the case, they keep throwing up more questions than answers. And also, there are a lot of spirits and supernatural jump scares that will ensure you always get freaked out at least once per episode.

Only six episodes long, this series is dark, scary, and riveting. I was worried that the mystery would not have a proper resolution, but the final episode wrapped everything up beautifully. Yes, the hour-long episodes can feel a little slow and bloated at times, but then something super scary will happen and you will jump from your seat and wish you could go back to just calmly staring at a snowdrift for some time. Foster and Reis are incredible, and the show does a good job of slowly doling out backstory until it all comes to a head in the finale. It’s an atmospheric thriller packed with literal and figurative chills and while I could only manage to watch an episode a day, so I didn’t get too scared, it was worth the sacrifice.

Presumed Innocent: All eight episodes are now available for one big binge, but I personally enjoyed watching this show from week-to-week. Based on the novel by Scott Turow (I never saw the 1990 movie adaptation starring Harrison Ford), the series was adapted for TV by David E. Kelley, the master of the legal drama. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who must stand trial when his colleague (who he was secretly having an affair with) is found murdered and he is the key suspect. What follows is an intense drama both inside and outside the courtroom that ultimately culminates in a rather pleasing finale where all is finally revealed.

I love a courtroom drama, so the second half of this show, that takes place almost entirely during the trial, was very enjoyable for me. It’s also fun to see Peter Sarsgaard play Tommy Molto, the prosecuting attorney who hates Rusty’s guts. Sarsgaard and Gyllenhaal are brothers-in-law in real life, so I like to imagine they had a lot of fun playing these warring characters who can’t stand each other. Ruth Negga is also phenomenal as Rusty’s wife Barbara, a quiet, long-suffering woman who thought his affair was over and now must deal with his betrayal while still supporting him in public for the sake of their children.

The finale doesn’t disappoint, and you will get a satisfying answer to the mystery, though I was more engaged in all the preceding legal battles and grandstanding before the judge and jury. I will admit to being a little distracted by the purported American accents deployed by O-T Fagbenle and Renate Reinsve in the supporting cast who in real-life are English and Norwegian respectively, but you know what, you can’t have everything. Overall, this is a great, well-acted, tense show that has a lot of cliffhangers that will leave you clamoring for more. 

July Movies Part 2: Kinds of Kindness, Twisters, Deadpool & Wolverine

It must be summer because I watched a movie about chasing tornadoes, a Marvel movie with two superheroes, and...a weird little Oscar contender from Yorgos Lanthimos. Let's get into it!

Kinds of Kindness: I think that I like director Yorgos Lanthimos's movies when he doesn't write the screenplay himself. But he definitely wrote this movie, and I don't know what to make of any of it. This film is an anthology of three different stories that star the same cast of actors, and each tale is weirder and gorier than the last. You've got Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Willem Defoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Joe Alwyn, rotating through a series of increasingly weird and outlandish characters, and if you came here looking for answers, I'm afraid I have none to give you.

There's a lot of body horror in all three stories, and a lot of heightened comedy that plunges into abject tragedy. You have a lot of characters who think they have their lives all figured out only to face crippling doubts and then face heinous consequences as they try to forge a new path for themselves. Everyone's flying too close to the sun, and everyone comes crashing down to earth, and at the end of the day, you'll walk out of the theater going, "Well, that was certainly an experience!" Your mileage may vary, but if you're looking for an absolutely bonkers night at the movies, this movie should be your top pick.

Twisters: If you're looking for an absolutely predictable and entertaining night at the movies, then this is the movie you go for. Written by Mark L. Smith and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, this film follows two teams of tornado chasers in Oklahoma who have different agendas but will ultimately have to team up if they want to save some desperate townsfolk from the ravages of climate change. There's riveting action, there's great visual effects, and there's Glen Powell walking through the rain in a white T-shirt. Check, check, and CHECK.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell play Kate, Javi, and Tyler, three separate storm chasers who are all operating under slightly different motivations. Kate and Javi go way back, and Kate has agreed to help him out for a week for a special project that she thinks could help people and Javi thinks will help him make money. Tyler is a YouTube star known as the "Tornado Wrangler," who likes to make theatrical videos of his storm chases, so obviously Kate thinks he's a moron. But if you've ever watched a movie or read a book before, you can imagine that their relationship is gonna take some...twists (sorry, I couldn't resist). This movie is a great popcorn flick, and it presumably has important things to say about the climate and taking care of our planet, but I don't live in tornado country, so I didn't really pay attention to that. I was more mesmerized by the white T-shirt in the rain.

Deadpool & Wolverine: Well, it's another Marvel movie. Directed by Shawn Levy, this film teams up the irreverent Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) with the grumpy Wolverine (Hugh Jackson), who are up against an evil stooge from the Time Variance Authority (you may remember the TVA if you watched Loki, but otherwise...just go with it), played by Matthew Macfadyen, who is certainly delighting in being a Marvel villain. If one British villain wasn't enough, we also get Emma Corrin as a secondary baddie, and there is lots of action and adventure and R-rated hijinks.

At this point, I definitely have Marvel fatigue, so I'm not going to pretend this movie was a rollicking delight. It has an absolutely banging soundtrack, and it featured some incredible cameos that truly perked me up, including a shoutout to Wrexham that was very cheering. But I could not keep up any level of enthusiasm for the 2-hour runtime of this movie. The whole snarky Deadpool shtick was novel the first time but has worn out its welcome at this point. It's less funny than just very silly, and while it was clear to me that this movie is probably going to be an absolute riot and joy to the die-hard comic book fans, if you're a casual Marvel movie fan like me, you're probably not going to care that much. The music and cameos were my personal highlight, but that seems like a bit of a waste for a movie that was supposed to make me excited about Deadpool and Wolverine instead.

International Binges: Panchayat & Queenie

Are you looking to diversify your TV viewing by watching something a little less American? I recently binged my way through one British show and one Indian show and can highly recommend both depending on whether you're looking for drama, comedy, or a little bit of both.

Queenie: Created by Candice Carty-Williams, based on her novel of the same name, this is a glorious series about Queenie Jenkins (played by the incredible Dionne Brown), a young British-Jamaican woman in London who is currently going through the most hellacious few months of her life. There is no confirmation that the show will be back for a second season, so instead, sit back and let this series of eight perfect episodes wash over you. 

Queenie is a Black woman in London and she doesn't want to see her mother even though she does spend time with her aunt and grandmother. She has a white boyfriend (though that relationship is on the rocks as the series starts), and an incredible group of girlfriends that she enlists for support, mostly via a group chat, when she makes terrible decisions and needs some advice. Which is something that happens ALL THE TIME over the course of these eight episodes.

This is a classic story of a twentysomething grappling with some intense personal trauma whilst also suffering from a quarter-life crisis. She is trying to establish her identity, figure out how many microaggressions she is willing to put up with, and what are the boundaries she needs, without making the mistake of shutting out absolutely everyone in her life. Like all great characters, Queenie is such a unique individual, but her story is universally relatable - we all have those difficult relationships or moments when we just snowball from one terrible choice to another, and it's wondrous to watch this brave woman bare her soul and try to clamber out from underneath the weight of the world. The supporting cast are all incredible, but mostly, you'll just be mesmerized by this central performance from Dionne Brown and root for Queenie to find a way forward with every fiber of your being.

Panchayat: This show is like watching Parks & Recreation but set in a rural Indian village in Uttar Pradesh named Phulera, where a hapless young man named Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) has joined to be the secretary of the panchayat (the village council that serves as the local self-government). He has had to take this job because he didn't do well in his engineering exams, but now he is hoping to leverage this experience to get into a more prestigious master's program and get the hell out of this village.

The first season of this show is definitely the best. We are introduced to the motley cast of characters that make up the panchayat, led by the Pradhan (aka leader), Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav), who is technically acting on behalf of his wife, Manju Devi (the glorious Neena Gupta), who was elected to the position so that they could say a woman was in charge to meet diversity quotas. The show is a pitch-perfect expose of the pettiness and silliness of local government, but while the characters initially seem extremely incompetent, you gradually learn to fall in love with their foibles and idiosyncrasies.

While I binged the first season in a day or two, I found the second and third seasons to be a bit slower going as things got a little too Bollywood. The genre slipped from pure comedy to a fair amount of drama, but I must say that they absolutely won me over with the final few episodes of Season 3. Writer Chandan Kumar, and director Deepak Kumar Mishra are finding that right tonal balance for a dramedy, and while I do wish they would lean more towards the hilarity of local village shenanigans (with a little romance to boot!) rather than the broader and more brutal world of Indian politics outside the village, they have a deft and wonderful touch that will certainly keep me coming back for future seasons. And special shoutouts to music composer Anurag Saikia, whose soundtrack and score for this show does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of setting the tone, while the lush cinematography by Amitabha Singh and Amit Kulkarni makes this show a true feast for your eyeballs.

July Movies Part 1: Fly Me to the Moon & A Quiet Place: Day One

Yes, my varied cinematic interests know no bounds. Today, I bring you two excellent movies, one a sci-fi horror, and the other a 60's romcom. Both feature charismatic actors giving dazzling performances, but if you're more into animals, both also feature prominent performances of the feline variety. Intrigued? I should hope so.

A Quiet Place: Day One: I have greatly enjoyed the Quiet Place franchise, movies about what happens to Earth after it has been taken over by an alien race with a superior sense of hearing. The aliens instantly kill any humans that make a sound, but otherwise cannot see them, so the first two movies followed the fortunes of a family with a Deaf daughter who could converse in sign language and were more prepared than most to handle this particular catastrophe. Well now Lupita Nyong'o stars in this prequel that takes us back to the very first day the aliens landed and the carnage they unleashed on the unsuspecting populace. More particularly, we see what they did to the island of Manhattan, which, as you can imagine, I ate up with a big ol' spoon.

Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski (John Krasinski does get a story credit), this movie does a wonderful job of imagining how the attack took place and how quickly humans realized the need for silence. It is an ingenious look at human adaptability and resilience (turns out thunderstorms and fountains make for excellent auditory camouflage), but also their innate decency and desire to help others. Yes, there's a lot of killing and jump scares, but this movie is also imbued with so much optimism and faith in the human race that it served as quite a balm to my jaded soul. Unsurprisingly, Nyong'o delivers a mesmerizing performance as a terminally ill woman with a service cat, who just wants a slice of pizza before the aliens destroy everything. She is ably assisted by Eric (Joseph Quinn), a British man who is in New York for law school and is absolutely friendless and alone as this apocalypse unfolds. 

This is a sad but somehow still weirdly hopeful movie and I was never bored for a se
cond. And there are some moving moments towards the end that genuinely made me shed a tear. The aliens get a lot more screentime than they did in the previous films, but they are deployed to good effect. The action sequences are tense and innovative, and as always, I greatly enjoyed how quiet the theater got as the entire audience felt afraid to breathe lest we disturb an alien around the corner. I love, love, love how these movies play with sound and silence, and this was a worthy prequel to show us how all of that began.

Fly Me to the Moon: If horror's not your thing, then surely a charming romantic comedy is precisely what you seek? Set in the 1960s, Scarlett Johansson stars as Kelly Jones, a brilliant advertising saleswoman, who is hired by the Nixon administration to improve NASA's public image and ensure they get enough public and congressional support to continue the Space Race and put a man on the moon. Channing Tatum plays Cole Davis, the NASA launch director, who is devoted to the Apollo program and is not too happy about this marketing woman with an elastic definition of the truth trying to sell his work to America. The two butt heads over Kelly's marketing tactics, but they are also two extremely attractive people who are definitely attracted to each other, so get ready for some real enemies-to-lovers intrigue.

The first half of the movie is all about the marketing shenanigans and motivations of our main characters. There's also a black cat that keeps running around the NASA buildings, which greatly worries the superstitious Cole. Then, Kelly gets told to prepare a Plan B, a fake moon landing set that can be broadcast if the actual moon landing fails. So, in the second half, we get to see how all of that pans out, with plenty of jokes that are sure to delight (or maybe anger?) conspiracy theorists. All along, costume designer Mary Zophres is doing phenomenal work, especially with Johansson's absolutely delicious dresses, while production designer Shane Valentino is knocking it out of the park with having to capture a 1960's aesthetic as well as bring the entire Space Program to life.

This movie is funny, moving, and honestly compelling if you're a space nerd who can't get enough about the Apollo missions. It captures the global collective awe at one of man's greatest achievements, but also manages to be super swoony and romantic. There are so many genres at play here, but director Greg Berlanti corrals everything together seamlessly, thanks to Rose Gilroy's script. Sure, it feels like there are some superfluous characters and some plot points that could be judiciously pruned, but I was too swept away by it all to notice. What can I say? I'm a real sucker for a romcom.