Rockets, Trains, and Automobiles: Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

 A mixed bag this week - though I'm realizing that this turned into another Netflix week of samples. I apologize for that inadvertent parochialism, and will try to diversify in coming weeks.

  Once I start in on watching something, the majority of the time I see it through to the end, often hoping it will redeem itself, but probably too often as more of a minor obsessive compulsive pattern. While I'm continuing to pile up things I'm hoping I'll really enjoy, much of the new and new-to-me material lately has had its problems.

Arriving this time last week was the nearly contemporary sci-fi drama Away (Netflix, 2020). I want to tread lightly on the sci-fi label, because I think they sincerely tried to keep it all as grounded as they could. There are no aliens, no futuristic weapons or even combat, overt technical leaps, nor Imminent Threat To Earth, this is done as something that could be planned for and executed now, with it all just being a case of mustering the necessary international will. It's in many ways a soap operatic drama where the characters are all simply brought together by their personal ambitions and a shared mission.

  A 10-part first season (so far no guarantee of a second) starring Hillary Swank as Emma Green, the commander of an international quintet tasked with being the first humans to land on Mars. An eminently human drama with a spiritual emphasis that I at first was generally fine with - spirituality is good - but which in later episodes became increasingly preachy and manipulative religious propaganda. I would have preferred they spent a little more time on the technical details, because as the "there are no atheists in foxholes" twaddle ramps up the technical details slip, sometimes feeling as if whatever technical advisors/proofreaders the production had were let go before they got to final scripts. There's at least one challenge the crew faces where, like me, you may be dumbstruck both by their lack of what should be a fairly easy solution - definitely something they'd be prepared for - and the almost casual lack of concern about the loss of a substantial chunk of the ship's air supply. Months from home and surrounded by hard vacuum, you ain't just getting that back.
  The overall pacing worked for me, conveying that this type of undertaking is going to be a long and methodical endeavor which will severely task the resolve of those involved. A slow grind of technical and personal challenges. While there are multiple life-or-death challenges, it would be a gross misrepresentation to describe it as a thrill ride. It would be very easy to take the key events of these ten episodes - especially if one's focused on the Mars mission - and say that this could have been handled in a fifth of the time, maybe even a tenth. (Admittedly, a similar complaint can easily be made for my prolix pieces.) Again, though, this is an episodic drama, one meant to emphasize the human costs of conflicting long-term commitments. It's not a action movie.
  At the risk of delivering a major spoiler, these ten episodes deal just with the trip from Earth -- well, the Moon, really -- to Mars. We learn, both from the main interactions during the mission and via flashbacks to key moments in the characters' lives, what we need to know about each of the people on the mission. Who they are, why they're there, what it's costing them in their personal lives. The Mars mission can fairly be seen simply as the scenario that reveals these characters to us, those characters and their relationships being the true focus of the series.

   If they do wrangle a second season, I'll probably be back to see what happens. How much of this is to be attributed to that obsessive compulsive impulse isn't immediately clear to me. If they do, I do hope they spend more time with knowledgeable technical consultants (really, an informed and interested 12 year-old would likely do most of the trick) and less in prayer circles or whatever it is they've been doing instead.
   In the general category of "What Did I Just Watch?" for the week, we have Charlie Kaufman's (writer and director) I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix, 2020, 2 hr 14 min)

  Starring Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley as a couple who've only known each other less than seven weeks, with the young woman (Buckley) having a running inner monologue about ending the relationship soon. (The title also has a general, punning meaning before the film's through.) They head out in winter on a fairly long trip to visit his parents on their farm. His parents are played with delightful mania by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. The majority of the visit with them at the farmhouse is probably all by itself worth the time to watch the film.
   It's very much a psychological drama with many, many absurdist touches that invite the notion that most or even all of this is happening inside one character's mind. It may be even perhaps someone's personal Hell. From the earliest scenes, during the trip out, thoughts don't seem safely and quietly contained in the young woman's head. Details seem to be retroactively added or omitted, including names and occupations. Characters seem to slip up and down their own timelines, from relative youth to doddering dementia and back again, and by late in the film we have several clues that this is all a scenario that's been rerun countless times.
   The film is based on Iain Reid's 2016 debut novel of the same name, which by the end clarifies some elements while still, intentionally, leaving many things open to interpretation by the reader.

   While I have many regrets in life, this is very much the sort of film that keeps "Not going to film school" off of that list. The fear that I would have succumbed to the insular micro-minutiae, and self-absorbed douchebaggery is greater than the one that I would have ended up murdering various classmates in an attempt to spare the world their works.
  Purely petty note: The e.e. cummings-esqe, all lowercase titles, delivered in microprint, were a minor entrance and exit point bit of preciousness I definitely could have lived without. That's a small item (no pun intended) in a film running well over two hours, but my eyesight's not what it was and it seemed such an unnecessary touch.
    Bending my usual rule of just not mentioning things I don't recommend, a couple quick notes on shallow, derivative, recently-arrived, "who thought this necessary?" genre items, especially as Netflix is touting each as top-watched items:
    Freaks: You're One Of Us (Netflix, 2020, 92 minutes) A German film directed by Felix Binder. Person in a lower-rung, working class life whose family is slowly sinking financially, is told by a stranger that she has a secret ability that's being kept from her. The key's to stop taking the daily medication she's been prescribed since she was a child. A flashback to her childhood has shown us that something violent happened at her school, but the details come to us later. She follows the advice, and before long the mouse has begun to turn. She also finds out that a co-worker has been similarly muzzled, and tips him off. Things start to go off the rails before long.

   I've certainly seen worse, but I'm hard-pressed to think of anything novel this brings to us. Fifteen or twenty years ago it would have been with or even ahead of the curve, but now..?
    Meanwhile, South Korea is offering another infection-mode, fast zombie movie, with #Alive. It settles on a Gen Z gamer, still living with his parents, who finds himself alone in the family's apartment when the world falls apart.

  I had some early hopes that we might get something novel, but those didn't last long. That the movie occasionally goes stupid doesn't help, with the threat going from massively, overwhelmingly coordinated to quickly stepped around at the plot's whim. Kudos to some of the eccentric, spastic conniption moves by various zombies, which may be the most entertaining points in the film.
   While the trailer doesn't reflect this, it's dubbed into English with captions provided to translate texts and other items in print.
  If you want a good South Korean film for this genre, I'll continue to suggest Train To Busan (Also on Netflix, 2016, 1 hr 58 min) which follows multiple people thrown together by circumstance on the day the world starts to violently come apart.

  

As for me, I have a few things picked out to look at in the coming week, once I've gotten clear of the work week, starting with episode four of season two of The Boys (over on Amazon Prime) now that the show is coming out in weekly installments.
  I do want to mention that while we can see the number of hits each of these pieces get, I and my fellow C7 bloggers really have next to no idea who (sometimes if anyone) is reading any of our weekly entries in the absence of any comments.
  How are we nearly in the middle of September already?
  Take care, and I'll be back next week.  - Mike