A Few Visits and Revisits - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

    Thursday I celebrated my fifth birthday for the twelfth time. At least that occurred to me as what I should have done. My fifth birthday was the one where I'd had the epiphany that growing up was a trap - a raw deal - and told my mom this was just the right age. I wanted to stop there, where it was good.

     Oh, if only.
     Anyway, instead I was dragged through it for another fifty five years, and ended up spending too much of my 60th birthday in work. Still, not a bad day, and I had a few, good conversations... almost none of which had anything to do with this week's titles.
     Some follow-up notes from last week:

     Watched the first episode of the horror series Them (on Amazon Prime), enjoying it but finding the themes too intense and off-putting for me to want to binge, despite the full first season being there. As expected, the borderline psychotic cruelty of the white community reacting to the black family moving into 1950s, suburban Compton is the real horror. The supernatural elements have most of their impact as they manifest through the lens of the family's youngest child. I'll likely be taking this slow, spaced out, with a great deal of other material between the episodes. I can't take cruelty in anything but small doses.
     I very much enjoyed the debut episode of the new HBO series The Nevers. By the end of the first episode I was reminded of the underpinnings of the mosaic sci-fi fantasy series of Wild Cards novels. If that reference is meaningful to you, and you've watched this first episode, let's talk. If it isn't, don't worry; I don't want to burden this series by bringing in all that outside material if it's not casually at hand. I'll be very interested in seeing how the show plays out, including the (eventual?) revelations of Why.
     I continue to hope that the plummeting status of Joss Whedon as a human being doesn't take this show, and all of the fine work involved in it, down as part of a pre-emptive, blanket dismissal.
     Also noteworthy with The Nevers is the music. There's a string-heavy orchestral arrangement that rolled with the closing credits of that first episode that I was so taken with I immediately rolled it back and replayed it.
     Speaking of replays, recent viewings included the start of a rewatch of the first of the Netflix Marvel shows, upon realizing that we'd just hit the sixth anniversary of the release of that first season of Daredevil.

     I enjoyed the series when it first arrived, burning through it quickly. It was the announcement of the Marvel series that got me interested in accessing Netflix in the first place.
     It's been a very pleasant surprise to find that this revisit has me appreciating the series even more than I did six years ago. Casting, performances, parallel origin arcs, it's all so nicely put together. Charlie Cox does a fine job of bringing us Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with fantastically-elevated remaining senses, who operates well and vigorously outside the law as a vigilante. Vincent D'Onofrio is outstanding as Wilson Fisk, who is every bit as brutally dedicated to his own, Nero-like dream of burning down and rebuilding the city. Along with introducing all of the characters, this first season is to a great and primary extent a pair of origin stories for hero and villain, each of whom is haunted by the actions of childhood and the imprints of their fathers.
     One of the things I realized while rewatching this is how much I was wrestling with it the first time through.

     I'm decades steeped in the source material, having taken nearly all of it in in real time as it was being published, so the first time through this adaptation there was constant resistance going on just below the surface with each choice in how they decided to interpret elements of it as part of a cohesive, modern whole. In the comics, the character had been on the scene for over fifteen years before new writers started to retroactively define and layer the character - adding specifics of his origin, from special training, to a grounding emphasis on an Irish Catholic upbringing, to a stronger parallel between the natures of father and son - that subsequently became central to the character. In these modern interpretations it's generally homogenized -- smoothed out. While watching it the first time, in 2015, I kept fighting with elements of it because I kept comparing it to the radically uneven, but familiar and comforting, patchwork of the original comics. Some part of me was reacting to each choice as a rejection of fondly-remembered elements. Some part of me wanted the finesse of a skilled acrobat, and was put off by brutal, heavily-patched, human punching bag who gives as good as he gets.
     In general I've been finding elements of this with the rewatch of all of the Marvel Studios movies, many of which I had only seen when they first arrived. With the long-delayed rewatches all of that undercurrent of resistance with the source material is gone, and I'm left alone with the enjoyment of a fluid and comfortably familiar whole. Good, if in the case of Daredevil, violent, times.

     (Please note, this series is wholly and distinctly separate from the 2003 big screen debacle of the same name, which still elicits a groan as I think back to stepping out of the theater into the late afternoon sun back during its opening weekend. I'm told the director's cut of it is a notable improvement, and I remind myself that I was really grinding against the choices made back then in what seemed so obviously to be a movie by committee, so it's likely I'd have a much better time looking at that again than I did eighteen years ago. So far I haven't summoned the will nor stomach to do it. Currently my only positive associations with it were that I thought Affleck did a nice job portraying the titular character's alter ego, Matt Murdock, and Jon Favreau, playing his buddy and legal partner, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, had great chemistry with Affleck. Little did we know at the time how far Favreau would go, both in front of and behind the camera.)
     Landing on Netflix today is the trippy science fiction horror film Synchronic (2019, R  111 minutes). It involves a pair of paramedics, ladies man Steve (Anthony Mackie), and married father of two, Dennis (Jamie Dornan) who are summoned to a rash of emergency situations involving a new designer drug, Synchronic. Deaths, seeming dementia, disappearances, and strange circumstances all lie in its wake. Subsequently, each man is faced with life-changing situations, and one decides to make the time he has left count to help the other.

     This film's release arc has spread it out over three years. Film festival fare in 2019, delayed theatrical release in October 2020 - with the global pandemic severely limiting all film venues - then hitting video on demand early this year before, finally, landing on Netflix this month.
     It looks interesting, with a trailer that suggests games with subjective reality. I read a line or two more about the plot than I wish I had -- I'd have preferred to take it in over the course of the film instead -- so I'll do you the courtesy of not spelling out more here. Haven't watched it yet, but I'm aiming to sometime this weekend.

   Skipping back to HBO briefly, this Sunday also sees the debut of a new limited series, as Kate Winslet plays a small-town Pennsylvania detective investigating a local murder while her own life falls apart, in Mare of Easttown. 

     Certainly, there's always so much more, but that's going to have to be enough for this week's piece.
       While I haven't completely let myself off the hook from work - I'll spend a little time running some

calcs and getting a report where it needs to go, working remotely via my home work station - I'm mostly taking Friday off as part of a 3-day weekend. The hope is to either lose or find myself sufficiently to genuinely enjoy some of the time before blinking and finding myself forcing a Sunday night bedtime so as to be able to feign competency come Monday morning.
     Five more years to retirement...
     Take care, and I'll see you back here next Friday.  - Mike