Victorian Magic with a Touch of Steampunk, plus other warnings and possibilities - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

    Quite the wearing, rollercoaster week for me, with the calendar the same as 11 years ago when the pre-dawn of Easter Monday found me waking up to a death, literally beside me, and staggering through dealing with that. This week didn't include anything of that magnitude, save for the memories of it, and the milestone, would-be 60th birthday of the departed, which would have been yesterday, but it did include some ups and downs and a general weariness. Distractions of the sometimes less-than-welcome sort. Still, it also included getting my first vaccine dose, and successfully navigating a much-delayed annual review at work, so I'll take the victories and as deep, best and cleansing a breath as I can.
     Little time for viewing since last time, I'll mainly be noting some things I'm planning to be take a look at.
   This Sunday HBO will begin showing a new series, created and initially showrun by Joss Whedon. A Victorian supernatural adventure centered on a group of women with diverse, paranormal abilities. This is The Nevers.

     Owing to the waves of derisive charges against Whedon that have emerged during our plague year -

general bullying as a director, and a still surprising level of misogynistic behavior going back to his Buffy and particularly Angel days - it's little surprise that HBO's marketing department has all but scrubbed his name from the project. They certainly aren't leaning hard on his name and brand, something that would have been a natural marketing asset two years ago when filming began on this series.
    Whedon built his brand initially largely on female empowerment with Buffy, and was also the director behind Marvel's The Avengers in 2012, the highly-successful superteam movie that so many people seem to have forgotten the majority in the film and comics industry had previously considered to be an unfilmable, doomed project. So it was that there had been a spirited bidding war in 2018, with HBO coming out the seeming winner, and production launched on what was a project with Whedon as writer, director, executive producer and showrunner. How the times have changed.
     While this first season of the series will ultimately be 10 episodes, the pandemic-interrupted filming and critical damage to the Whedon brand - aligned with what the creative team is presenting as a "natural narrative break" in the storyline just after episode six - have decided to give us the first six episodes now, then the other four (under new showrunner, the British screenwriter Philippa Goslett) a little later. Whedon stepped down around Thanksgiving last year, citing a "year of unprecedented challenges," at the time citing the exhaustion from having completed filming under the restrictions of the pandemic.

     I'm going to take it all as its own thing, and try to enjoy the story and what seems to be an interesting cast, though most of the leads are ones I've seen little to nothing from. It would be criminal if the rising tide against Whedon were to damn the efforts of everyone else in this production.
  Hell, I'd probably have taken a look even just to see how the traditionally benign, affable Nick Frost fares as the "charismatic and brutal", Declan Orrun, a low-level Victorian crime lord known as The Beggar King. I'm also interested to see Pip Torrens, though there's little chance Lord Massen will prove as juicy and eccentric a role as Herr Starr was in AMC's Preacher.
   One of the things that arrived on Netflix this past weekend is the late-2020 sci-fi horror film What Lies Beneath. Teen returning from summer camp to find that her mom has had a whirlwind romance with someone who seems too good to be true, and gradually becomes creepy.

     Light (very) interest here, I'm initially approaching this as something that might be a fun failure - the reviews were generally terrible - though it's likely it'll end up being something I'll either abandon or leave on as peripheral entertainment, curious to at least trace the arc of it. Based on one of the reviews there's a scene that may just get me to turn it off. Anyway, this is an at least initially notable "maybe."
     Last week I mentioned I'd try to make brief note of some of the wastes of time I'd come across, most of which I'd quickly swept from memory and rushed along to find something to rinse the taste from my mind. One of the reviews for the previous film reminded me of one of those: an almost complete waste of time called Deadly Illusions (R  1hr 54 min.)

     I stuck with it all the way through, hoping they would manage to string the various scenes together by the end via defining revelations about which scenes we saw were real and which may have been fantasies, but in the end it seems to have been trying to turn a derivative hot, crazy, predatory nanny film into something more interesting through sheer smoke and mirrors. Hint: It didn't work. I stuck with it because I couldn't believe they were going to go with something so obvious... but they did, while just hoping people who'd grown dependent on articles and YouTube pieces to "explain" the endings of things to them would be tricked into thinking they'd gotten something more.
     Clocked in at nearly two hours, I would suggest a good nap as a more intellectually stimulating use of the time. Learn from my bad example. Save yourselves.
     From the I'll Probably End Up Trying This Eventually file, this week on Netflix also brings the Melissa McCarthy/Octavia Spencer superhero comedy Thunder Force. It's pretty much all out there, so we know most of what we're going to get, leaving it to you to decide if it's at all something you want.

    My broadcast tv viewing continues to be sparse. I'll continue to recommend the sci-fi thriller series Debris (NBC, Mondays at 10 pm Eastern), and the psychological thriller series Clarice (CBS, Thursdays, 10 Eastern). I've not yet seen this week's episode of the latter, but was pleased to see it reappear last (?) week after having been temporarily banished by the scourge that was "March Madness." Having shows I'm interested in pre-empted by sports coverage was what moved me over the line from utter indifference to near hatred of them as a child -- back in the dark ages when we had a handful of channels and could only watch anything when it was being broadcast. In a more civilized age, with limitless channels, sports should always be off on their own, special channels, where they can't harm anyone.
    I'll close out this week with an 11th hour heads-up from fellow C7 blogger Joseph Finn (congratulations and good luck on having landed a new job this week!) -- who on Thursdays takes readers through his weekly thrift store finds which often include DVDs and novels that have also been made into films. He pointed out a 1993 Finnish adaptation of Lord of the Rings that's lurking on YouTube. It's not subtitled, but just the sampling I've done of it so far has been hilarious. Running nearly 3.5 hours, I've subsequently read that this was whittled down from a locally-acclaimed Finnish stage play version from the late '80s that ran nearly six.

     Unintentionally (?) hilarious, I remind myself how ambitious an undertaking this was. It definitely helps to try to take it in as if it's a filmed version of a stage play, where the actors humbly request your willing suspension of disbelief from beneath their wigs and makeup. Much like watching many of the original Dr. Who (1963-89) series. It may be worth it just to watch the eccentric performance of Gollum, who comes well into the story at the 2hr 22 minutes mark, and seemingly has not found that his long time living in the wilderness has caused him to miss any meals.
     Now... who else hasn't done their taxes yet? I turn 60 next week -- on Tax Day, no less -- but have I truly learned about priorities yet?
     Take care, and let's try to get back here (safely) next Friday. -- Mike