Backwards Glances, A Comedic Bridge-Burning(?), Being Alone, a Return of the Storm, and more - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

     A wide swath of themes this time.
     This past week saw me alternately too busy for much viewing, or in a sleepy state where I was revisiting familiar items rather than watching something new to me. This included:
    Richard Donner's 1987, franchise-launching. Lethal Weapon, which remains fun but requires much of one's analytical ability be shut down to keep the film from jumping the rails. Just enjoy the action, the birth of what would become franchise cliches, seeing Mel Gibson well before we found out that he really is crazy, and otherwise contemplate how it views 34 years later for those of us who saw it when it was new, including how we each processed Danny Glover's character's getting "too old for this shit" as a 50 year-old then vs now. Oh, man, to remember that I was 26 when that came out. Oof!

    The original (1974) Taking of Pelham One Two Three, had a snarky, tough guy cop role for star Walter Matthau, and a film that took both the intervention of New York's Mayor Lindsay and a $70,000 anti-hijacker insurance policy to get New York City Transit to grudgingly allow filming there. Fun, among other things, for capturing the feel of New York in the early middle '70s, and pitting Matthau against a quartet of armed hijackers led by Robert Shaw. (Available on TCM Watch - if you have TCM - through May 28th)

     Six years later, Matthau starred in the action spy comedy Hopscotch (1980, 1 hr 44 min), about a highly successful Cold War field agent, Miles Kendig, who becomes a threat once he's effectively squeezed out of his position by a petty, bitter, career climber (Myerson, played by Ned Beatty) who came up through dirty tricks channels. He stays at least one step ahead of those interested in stopping him from publishing a tell-all memoir that would be at the very least embarrassing to key players on both sides of the Iron Curtain. While  based on Brian Garfield's espionage novel of the same name, an initially very dark and serious screenplay was rewritten as a comedy specifically to get Matthau to take the part.

     Officially, the screenplay was by Garfield and Bryan Forbes, but Matthau himself not only had strong input, he wrote the scene where we're introduced to Isabel (played by co-star Glenda Jackson), and the final scene of the movie. While reasonably smart in many respects, the need for comedic elements repeatedly becomes more important than impeccable plotting, so one has to turn a blind eye to - or more aptly sustain a knowing wink at - several junctures, increasingly during the final half hour. If you have TCM, you can sign in and watch it on TCM Watch through June 13th.
     While not a great fan of musicals, I do enjoy some, including Robert Wise's West Side Story (152 min.), which, like me, turned 60 this year. (This was another TCM viewing.) I'm presuming this American, urban, gang-centered reworking of Romeo and Juliet is familiar to most.

     Hopefully no one reading this is among those who are retroactively scandalized by the brownface role for Natalie Wood, playing a Puerto Rican, Maria.
     Steven Spielberg has a new version of this coming in December -- and I'll eventually see it, I'm sure.

     It doesn't look bad, and I so far like that he didn't decide to change the era. Still, that's over half a year away.
     Arriving today on Hulu is a stop-motion style animated comedy created by Jordan Blum and Patton Oswalt: M.O.D.O.K.
     Oswalt voices the lead.
     This series is one of the last surviving projects started under the old Marvel Television group, which has since been collapsed and put under Marvel Studios. While borrowing freely from the the character pool of the Marvel Universe, this is its own, separate reality -- which is only of any importance to certain stripes of comics geek, including me. I'm fine with parodies, but canon in a shared universe is important to me.

     In the comics, M.O.D.O.K. was the result of an experiment to genetically manipulate a human being into being a living computer -- with sketchy, suitably comic-bookish, over-the-top elements that don't translate well past adolescence. Consider, the acronym stands for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. When one's maybe 8 years old that sounds bad-ass and, somehow, serious. Roll into even one's double-digits and that aspect doesn't hold up well unless one takes it as being a sort of in-joke for the scientists

and techs of A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) that ran the experiment... or maybe think that it did sound bad-ass to people who were in the AV and chess clubs, shoved into lockers in high school and left with emotional development arrested in adolescence. Who knows? Who really cares?
       A.I.M. operatives typically wear protective gear that looks like beekeeper outfits (though, oddly enough, not in the panels I'm running here), and have become in hindsight a sort of expression of S.T.E.M. education pursued with complete neglect to the humanities. Then, to imagine A.I.M., take that truest nerd tech culture and spin it into a corporate environment.
     Anyway, later writers reached back to rewrite history a little, making it that the original project was M.O.D.O.C., with that final C being for Computing. The K for Killing became an impromptu, post-mutation rebranding by the big M himself, in an understandable burst of bitterness. That at least makes more sense. You

wake up to find better than 85% of you is now a giant head - not a pretty one -  with nearly vestigial limbs, and see how cranky you are. A couple cups of coffee ain't fixing that mood.
     Again, sticking to the comics side of this for a few, if one buries the details of the acronym, MODOK's a potentially tragic and creepy character, but at least for now I'm guessing that Disney's decided they have more than enough villains in the Marvel vault that they don't need to carefully preserve this one for the (relative) live action screens, especially as it would be so CGI-dependent.
     Here I've run key panels here from the delayed telling of his origin: George Tarleton was a gifted technician from Erie, PA, but at A.I.M. he was a low-level tech who happened to be low man on the totem pole in the wrong room at the wrong time. He was

drafted to have his genes rewritten, becoming a misshapen horror. In the tradition of Frankenstein, their creation proved beyond their control. He promptly killed the guy responsible, and took control of the operation.
     Anyway, that's the comics side of this, which doesn't seem to be transferring to this animated parody. The comics origin would be something of a major mood-killer if they kept that intact. In this Hulu series it seems he's just a sort of terribly unattractive super-nerd who had been running A.I.M. That's my expectation so far -- the show's just landed, and I've seen little more that what's in the trailer. A recent, interim comic series played with it being an externalized delusion, trying to make it "fit" the rest of the continuity. I'm hoping they didn't try applying that here.
     It is what it is, and as I've known this was coming for the past few years it's just something to accept the existence of and try to enjoy. I know Oswalt and the others who've worked on it had a good time, and I'm not going to be the poop at this party by leaning on how this will likely forever mark the character as a comedic one for the masses. There's no victory in fighting that, and if I'm honest in my recollections I remember me and early grade school, comic-collecting pal, Jack P., referring to MODOK as flying around on a futuristic toilet seat. (Hey, we were in third grade...)
     Indications are that even if it somehow manages to fails otherwise, it's rich with comics reference in-jokes which should be entertaining for those of us casually steeped in those details.
     It's on Hulu in large part because that gave it more freedom of content, as Disney+ has no plans to place anything on their platform that's rougher than PG-13. It's part of the reason that Disney essentially arranged functional ownership of Hulu a year or so back, so they'd have an appropriate spot to aggregate properties they'd never put on Disney+, including much of the Fox movie and tv material they absorbed in that purchase. The House of Mouse slowly devours the world.
    The stop-motion style work was done by Stoopid Monkey Stoodios, the folks who've been creating Robot Chicken episodes for about sixteen years. All ten episodes of this series dropped today, and a second season is reportedly planned. Once I've had a look, I'll likely come back here to append some reactions in red.
     And so, I am.
     The first three episodes largely fell flat for me, or at least just felt like narrow versions of typical Robot Chicken material, frustrations of a nerd shtick. That it was all being done at the expense of M.O.D.O.K. and A.I.M. - played for low-level, mostly generic laughs - just struck me as a waste.
     Fortunately, by the fourth episode the C-List villains were brought in and the show began to take better shape. From that point on it became more entertaining. Sure, it's still mostly a disrespectful funeral pyre, but it had more substance, nuance and creativity.
     Landing today on Amazon Prime is a show focused on stories of isolation and connection: Solos.

     I only know what you've just seen there in the trailer, and it has me interested enough to want to take a look, and to avoid fishing around for any other information on it in the meantime.
     Arriving today on Netflix is a heist movie set in a zombie apocalypse version of Las Vegas... starring Dave Bautista. It's Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead.

     It should be enjoyable even just for the expected skin-thin, videogame-style characters. I'd completely ignored this film during all stages of production, and had all but forgotten about it during the past year. Spotting Tig Notaro in the mix in the trailer saw me diving for some info, quickly learning that she was a beyond the last minute recast for a part, filmed all of her parts solo, and was digitally grafted into the film. That she replaced a comedian I'd never heard of also meant I'd not heard about the allegations leading to the recast... and at the moment I don't feel moved to dig into that.
     I'd known from Tig's statements last year about COVID fears, and how deeply she retreated for safety during the pandemic such that her participation in the upcoming (fourth) season of Star Trek: Discovery (still officially set for sometime yet this year) was limited. This made seeing her in a new film trailer all the more of a surprise. I'll be very interested to see how the effect comes off, knowing that she filmed all of the scenes in green screen conditions, talking and reacting to tennis balls and tape marks. The only cast members she's met so far have been via Zoom.
     The technical achievement of overlaying Tig's performances on already-filmed scenes is by far the highest achievement in this film. If one wasn't alerted to it, and so on watch, I sincerely doubt it would have been noticed. Anyone who reports otherwise, unless, perhaps, they happen to work in film, I would at best doubt their honesty -- and otherwise would predict them to be lousy movie-watching companions.
     The film itself is largely another heist movie, albeit with the zombie apocalypse complication, and the additional layering of two classes of the undead. All of this with a class warfare element that's the most convincing part. Things happen when they do because the plot demands it, so people fight like hell and then give up on a teammate with alarming suddenness, and characters fight for inches when there's the need to build tension and then nearly teleport from one location to the next because the clock's running down. At last check it seemed to be doing very well for Netflix, but, then again, people are looking for escape, and as subscriber's they've already bought the ticket.
     Next Thursday, the 27th, Netflix viewers will finally be getting the second season of Ragnarok, a Nordic, live action fantasy adventure about the return of the gods.

     I'm blown away that the first season landed on Netflix January 31st 2020 -- it truly feels so much longer ago, especially as I know I didn't get to it right away. In just the past few minutes I started to reacquaint myself with that first season. This new season, like the first, will have six episodes.
     A day later - next Friday - the second half of season five of Lucifer will arrive. This will be eight episodes, rounding out a sixteen-episode season.

     The trailer refreshed my memory of where they'd left off, and reminded me that the stakes were continuing to rise, leaving precious little to no room left. (I'm reminded of the similar waves of escalation gone through in two, cycles over the 15-season run of Supernatural.) After this, at some point we're to get a ten-episode sixth, final, season. As strained as the subplots have sometimes become, the leads have remained entertaining, and I'm interested in riding it out.
     At eight episodes, this half-season (completing season five) is longer than the full season for the other two shows I'm mentioning in this section. So, these were episodes nine through sixteen of season five.
     Lucifer and cast are back with a mostly family-themed semi-season, often with theme parallels between the crimes being solved and the relationship dynamics of the main cast. It starts with the ramifications of the previous half-season's finale, the appearance of everyone's daddy, God himself. It's a mostly fun season, with various characters getting spotlight episodes. The second of these (episode 10) is a musical episode, which frequently didn't work for me as well as I'd hoped because it was all cover versions trying to be adapted to the characters' inner struggles, rather than original songs. Having seen original numbers work so nicely in items like Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and the seventh season Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Once more, with Feeling," I know how well it can work if the effort's expended. Suitably, that episode is titled "Bloody Celestial Karioke Jam."  The standout number in the mix, for me, was Dan's (Kevin Alejandro) rendition of the Squirrel Nut Zippers' "Hell", in an old, Latin big band musical style at Lucifer's club -- though I'm open to some of that being my lack of familiarity with the original. It was new to me, and so I had no previous associations with it. Certainly, other cast members had better pipes and sweeter tunes, but this was the one that worked best for me. Here's the fairly non-spoilerish audio for that.

     If I recall correctly, they had all but the last episode shot before the COVID shutdown, so when they went back to finish that under safety protocols in late September 2020 they also went ahead and filmed the entire sixth season - which will be a 10-episode finale - so all of that's in post-production. No announcement as yet as to when we'll see it, but even if they knew it would be a poor move to say anything about it this soon after releasing the latest eight.
     Another of those cases where I'll be sorry to see them go, but am also interested in seeing where the final ten episodes lead.
     Arriving that same day will be the third season - the show's last - for The Kominsky Method. This Chuck Lorre series' first two seasons were very entertaining. Michael Douglas plays the eponymous actor, Sandy Kominsky. Depending on the kindliness of one's view, Sandy's either a Has-Been or an Almost Was, who parlayed whatever it was he had into becoming an acting coach. Years of cusp-of-Hollywood lifestyle and serial womanizing have left his life largely in ruins, he's having a difficult time coming to grips with how late in life it really is, and who he himself is.

     Despite regrets at learning last year that series co-star Alan Arkin - who plays Norman Newlander, Sandy's long-time agent and friend - would not be returning for season three, Douglas and the rest of the cast have been good enough to keep me interested.
     Coming back a week later, I can happily say they did a wonderful job of closing out this story. It was alternated - sometimes simultaneously - funny and touching.
     I'd watched most of the first episode early Friday morning, when it was too late to go back to sleep and too early to head out to work. By the time I got back to it that evening I'd been sandbagged by a piece of mail letting me know that a friend had passed away weeks earlier at far too early an age. The remainder of this 6-episode series finale proved to be well-timed for me, with its blend of nostalgia, regret, gratitude and hope. Life carries hope with it.
     Netflix backed a conclusive winner with this series. This is a solid addition to the archives of this streaming platform. Content that more people will be entertained and enriched - or at least reminded of things that so easily get mislaid - by.
     So much piling in as we head into the summer-launching holiday weekend -- but that's next week.
     That's going to be all from me for now. Take care, and if your part of the world's doing some early dive into summer the way mine seems to be, try to keep cool. See you back here next week -- and in the meantime don't be shy about leaving any confirming or contrary opinions on the shows mentioned here, or reactions on these weekly pieces. - Mike