Endings and a Beginning - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

   

  Another busy week, sufficiently so that this is likely to be a shorter (for me) post.
     Arriving in theaters and on HBO Max (even though the trailer says "only in theaters") today is Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros., R for violence and language, 126 minutes)

     I haven't yet seen this biographical drama - based on the targeting and betrayal of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton in the late '60s. I decided I wanted to see the film first, and let it work or

not as a drama, before I started to do any historical searches for the almost inevitable variations from the historical record. It's not a bit of history I'm knowledgeable about, and had someone name-dropped Hampton not long ago I'd not have caught it.
     Chances are my Friday will be too busy for me to watch this early, and probably too draining for me to roll right into something like this.
     As the pandemic has led to such major changes in 2021 of having a studio commit to these simultaneous theatrical and online streaming service (not even a pay per view/video on demand release, but a month-long dump to a subscription streaming platform) I've been feeling a little more pressure to watch these, though.

     A new CBS series, just debuting last night, is a psychological crime procedural is Clarice (CBS, Thursdays 10 pm Eastern).
     Based on Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs, the show follow Special Agent Clarice Starling a year after the events of that novel. A committed professional, having suffered a year of unwanted, lurid celebrity, and deep, bitter, professional jealousy from others in various strata of both law enforcement and criminal psychology, those latter two groups intensified by age and gender bias. The collective weight of it has driven Clarice into the bowels of academia, toiling peacefully in obscurity until an ascending politician - whose rise to prominence was also tied into that last abduction by "Buffalo Bill," - reaches in to drop Clarice into the spotlight once more.

    It was largely a matter of timing - it came along when I wanted something new to step into the ground floor of. Beyond that, I recall that I initially ignored for vague reasons the NBC series Hannibal during its first season, jumping in with the second only to become a big fan.
     So far I'm not detecting any of the often brilliant notes that Bryan Fuller and that show's cast gave us, but it's just the first episode. I've no reason to expect great things from it, but they managed to maintain my interest in Clarice Starling. I'm a little apprehensive about likely pathways for a couple of the relationships, and what sort of cases will come out of this, but I'm otherwise interested enough to give it a few episodes.

     Any of those who were waiting for all nine of the episodes of the new adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand to drop on CBS All Access, the time's come. The new coda to the series, written by King himself, landed Thursday. On the whole it was a good effort, but I say that as someone who was always much more a fan of the scenario than most of the characters or even the underlying religious elements. I read the early '90s release of the expanded/less edited version, I just did that once, back then. Aside

from King's novella, The Mist, and a few of his short stories, I don't believe I've ever gone back to reread his work. One and done, without diligent study. Any of the adaptations to the screen I've mostly taken on their own merits.
     While this adaptation of The Stand evened out in the back half, I still felt that despite the time given over to it it was rushed. The first several episodes involved the curious choice of deciding to skip between the early days of the pandemic to a point four months in, when the communities in Boulder and Las Vegas were each firming up. That rushed several, key character and relationship arcs in my view, and involved making Harold Lauder less sympathetic from the start.

     While they abandoned the time jumps by the fifth episode, matters were rushed once again near the end. It may be that they made some good choices in what they decided to cut or otherwise gloss over, but as the series came to a close I was feeling the loss of some scenes that appear to have disappeared between the point when it was targeted to be a ten hour miniseries and instead became a 9-part one as the whittling in the writer's room finished.
     I continue to be interested in how this was received, be it by people who had strong opinions of the source novel, just the 1994 miniseries, or who only knew of it by reputation. All of those views are valid; in the case of the last group, I'd like to know how well they believe it told them the story, and what impressions they were left of each of the characters. When viewing an adaptation of familiar material it too easily becomes a problem to be aware of what baggage and/or story spackle one's bringing.

     Other viewing of late has mainly been moving through my rewatch of Babylon 5 on HBO Max, and the weekly installments of WandaVision on Disney+, the latter of which reached the two thirds mark with this week's episode, the series sixth. That's proven to be an eminently rewatchable series, as each week makes going back over the details of earlier episodes a little more rewarding. The past two episodes in particular have raised the game each time.

     That's it for this week. I'm wrung out. Take care. - Mike