Still Out There -- Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

    Before this week's notes and recommendations: This past Tuesday was the 55th anniversary of the debut of Lost In Space. One of those you had to be there and be young enough nostalgia touchstones. That prompted me to put together a post over on a blog I've been wanting to revive, especially as I wanted the piece to appear on the anniversary, and my spot here in the C7 is Friday. That link, should you decide to click on it, will open a new window.

  While continuing to enjoy some things as they roll out (another good week for The Boys on Amazon Prime, where they're dropping new episodes very early each Friday) too much of my fishing around of late has brought back poor, or lackluster items, while some things (like HBO's Lovecraft Country) have me wary of saying much until the full season's revealed.
  So, instead, I'm going to mention a few complete items I don't believe I've gotten around to recommending before. (I should have kept maintaining a list, complete with links. Something else for me to fix in coming weeks.)
  Many series never get a proper resolution -- the show runners try for one more season than the backers will cough up the money for, and the audience ends up left in the lurch. Happily, I believe more are getting a chance to wrap up these days, as streaming services (which is where everything, really, is headed) would much rather lay claim to a complete something than something that just dead-ends in the middle of a sentence. I want to point out a couple that not only got a reasonably full story arc - there are almost always going to be unresolved points - but were good.
   An Australian series that started in 2015, then got two more seasons via a partnership with Netflix, finally wrapping in 2019, Glitch starts with a series of resurrections at a remote graveyard near the small town of Yoorana, Victoria. Seven people, reborn and climbing from shallow graves.

  It loops back on itself a little, bouncing between supernatural and science fiction, but is a fairly tight, dense narrative in eighteen episodes -- 6 episodes per economical season. As I think back over it I do need to point out that various questions are never answered, but I recall that as I was watching it it struck me that it was likely better that way. Some mysteries are likely to be more palatable remaining that way.
   Another 3-season series involving rebirths of a sort (but with 34 episodes) was the Canadian-US time travel adventure Travelers.
  A nicely done series, it takes elements of some other time travel stories (most notably a general scenario in the style of 12 Monkeys, and a key mechanic from X-Men comics' "Days of Future Past" story) and puts together the pieces that work.
  It involved some very cool mechanics that I recently realized I've internalized, and while it definitely folds on itself a few times as conspiracy-driven uncertainties pile up, by the end of the series we have a solid resolution. Oh, there's storytelling room at the end -- someone could take this off on another run, but it's not at all necessary. The main characters get a non-lethal ending to their mission.

    Over on Amazon Prime, somewhere in the past few months I got around to the 2013 film Coherence. A surreal science fiction piece involving a dinner party that's a reunion for a group of old friends that happens to be on a night when a comet passes. Strangeness, confusion, and duplicity soon follow.

  Writer/Director James Ward Byrkit took a very unusual approach to making this film. He assembled a group of improvisational actors, all strangers to each other, brought them to his home (it's primarily shot there), giving each a page of notes with their character's backstory and motivation coming into this dinner party. They weren't given a script. The only social commonality they had was Byrkit, who knew each of them well enough to get them to come. Once there, having read their notes, they had to try to fall into the rhythms of being old friends, lovers, etc. as their notes indicated. Who would play best against who in each dynamic was part of Byrkit's consideration as he pulled it together.
   He'd spent roughly a year working through the specifics of it, literally mapping the flow of planned events in diagrams, so that when it came time to shoot he could orchestrate the key moments and guide the players through it, all while allowing for their spontaneity. Over the course of five days the pieces of what would represent one evening's events were shot. At 88 minutes it's a tight product, with enough layers to make it something to revisit so as to better appreciate the transitions few if any would have noticed in earlier viewings.
   Most of the other things I've seen or been reminded of recently would best be handled as themed parts of other pieces, and I think the above is enough for this week.
   Summer's nearly over - this next Tuesday, I believe - though so little feels real. Disappearing into someone else's imaginings has only gotten easier this year.   Take care. -   Mike.