Quaran-TV, part 14
Oct. 31st, 2021 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I suppose at this point I really need to rename this series of posts, since we're not in any kind of quarantine to speak on (apart from self-imposed limits). Sigh.
This month I seem to have watched my way through a lot of TV and films. I suspect this is due to a combination of cold/rainy/dark October weather keeping us indoors, and our closest local friends in Ely moving away, which has basically rendered our in-person social lives nonexistent.
This month, I've finished six TV series (while also being midway through many more).
The North Water is a grim historical miniseries set on a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. I'm not the only person who has compared it to The Terror — it's another story about violent, selfish nineteenth-century British men travelling to the harsh landscape of the Arctic, and suffering the consequences of their acquisitive rapaciousness. I'm not someone who needs all their fiction to be about fundamentally good people trying to do the right thing, but if all the characters in a work of fiction are irredeemable monsters, I need the work to be saying something more interesting than all men are beasts, and if you take them to a sufficiently harsh environment this beastly nature will reveal itself. Victor Kelleher has done this theme better, many many times, and he was writing dystopian novels for Australian teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lucifer probably needs no introduction at the point of its final season, and I wish I could say it finished on a high note. I was glad the show found a second home on Netflix, but this is possibly one of the few TV series that I prefer to hew to a more episodic rather than serialised format. I like it when it's case/monster-of-the week, and I'm less interested in the overarching mythology. And this final season involved time travel shenanigans, which for me are always a risky proposition. Creators need to be careful with time travel plots — because they can easily fall into a trap of rendering all character growth, and all character choices utterly meaningless. And when it comes to a show whose foundational principle is the importance of free will, that's a problem.
Brand New Cherry Flavour is a Netflix miniseries that is much more to my taste. It's an adaptation of a novel (which I hadn't read) set in 1990s Hollywood, a surreal revenge fantasy in which a young woman director pitching her first short film is betrayed by her potential producer and turns to the occult to get back at him. At this point, things degenerate into a claustrophic nightmare filled with body horror. The show does a great job at evoking both the look and feel of Hollywood in that era, and the look and feel of the visual media of that period. It even has a suitably 1990s thematic thread of young women seeking power in the occult and being ruined by it. I loved it, but heed my warning if you have a problem with visual gore.
Hollington Drive is a British crime drama, the next in a long line of such stories set in idyllic suburban locations whose charm (genteel wealth, everyone knows everyone) turns sinister and claustrophic when a murder rips the close-knit community apart. It doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking With these concepts, but a strong central performance by Anna Maxwell Martin and a focus on the relationship between two adult sisters makes it worth watching.
Ridley Road is a BBC historical drama set in 1960s London, based on real events in which members of a Jewish antifascist organisation went undercover in the resurgent British fascist movement and gathered enough evidence of crimes being committed to put the movement's leader in prison. I assume the show takes some significant liberties with the experiences and identities of the real figures involved in all this, but it does a great job of evoking the look, feel, and political and cultural climate of the era, and it's obviously great (if terrifying) to watch the group of Jewish operatives outwit and take down a pack of violent fascists.
The Long Call is an adaptation of another Ann Cleeves (of Shetland fame) detective novel, and it has all the hallmarks of her work — haunted but fundamentally good people feel sad in picturesque British locations (in this case in Devon) while solving crimes. The detective in this case is a gay man in a stable and loving relationship, and, refreshingly, while he's haunted by his past (he's a survivor of a fundamentalist cult), unlike other tormented TV detectives he doesn't deal with his personal pain with alcohol, drugs, self-destructive behaviour or by destroying his relationships with everyone who cares about him. Instead, he hugs his husband or swims laps across the idyllic sea. It's a refreshing change!
I mentioned last week that we saw Dune, so I won't go over that again (except to say that my love for it has not abated). I've watched two other films this month:
The Truffle Hunters is a sweet-natured little documentary about the unbelievable market for truffles, and the eccentric community of ageing Italian men who — with their specially trained dogs — sniff out this expensive commodity and sell it to dealers (who then sell it on at eyewatering markups). There are intense rivalries (none of the eponymous truffle hunters reveal the exact location of their patches of forest to anyone else, the training of the dogs is a closely-guarded secret), there are surprising dangers (for reasons of secrecy, most of the hunters gather their truffles in the night, which for a bunch of men in their seventies and eighties is obviously less than ideal), and, most amusingly, the sales of truffles resemble shady back-alley drug deals. I loved every minute of this film!
Venom was a film I'd been avoiding due to my own personal irritation with migratory Tom Hardy fandom and its tendency to overhype every project he's ever involved with. (There's nothing really wrong with this fandom — all they are is loudly enthusiastic — they've just been annoying me ever since Inception was a thing, and they've made me unjustifiably wary of any media in which Hardy is involved.) In any case, Venom is exactly as silly as I expected (down-on-his luck journalist ends up infected with a sentient symbiotic alien, which gives him superpowers), but it was exactly the right kind of B movie far for a lowkey Saturday night at home.
This month I seem to have watched my way through a lot of TV and films. I suspect this is due to a combination of cold/rainy/dark October weather keeping us indoors, and our closest local friends in Ely moving away, which has basically rendered our in-person social lives nonexistent.
This month, I've finished six TV series (while also being midway through many more).
The North Water is a grim historical miniseries set on a whaling ship in the nineteenth century. I'm not the only person who has compared it to The Terror — it's another story about violent, selfish nineteenth-century British men travelling to the harsh landscape of the Arctic, and suffering the consequences of their acquisitive rapaciousness. I'm not someone who needs all their fiction to be about fundamentally good people trying to do the right thing, but if all the characters in a work of fiction are irredeemable monsters, I need the work to be saying something more interesting than all men are beasts, and if you take them to a sufficiently harsh environment this beastly nature will reveal itself. Victor Kelleher has done this theme better, many many times, and he was writing dystopian novels for Australian teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lucifer probably needs no introduction at the point of its final season, and I wish I could say it finished on a high note. I was glad the show found a second home on Netflix, but this is possibly one of the few TV series that I prefer to hew to a more episodic rather than serialised format. I like it when it's case/monster-of-the week, and I'm less interested in the overarching mythology. And this final season involved time travel shenanigans, which for me are always a risky proposition. Creators need to be careful with time travel plots — because they can easily fall into a trap of rendering all character growth, and all character choices utterly meaningless. And when it comes to a show whose foundational principle is the importance of free will, that's a problem.
Brand New Cherry Flavour is a Netflix miniseries that is much more to my taste. It's an adaptation of a novel (which I hadn't read) set in 1990s Hollywood, a surreal revenge fantasy in which a young woman director pitching her first short film is betrayed by her potential producer and turns to the occult to get back at him. At this point, things degenerate into a claustrophic nightmare filled with body horror. The show does a great job at evoking both the look and feel of Hollywood in that era, and the look and feel of the visual media of that period. It even has a suitably 1990s thematic thread of young women seeking power in the occult and being ruined by it. I loved it, but heed my warning if you have a problem with visual gore.
Hollington Drive is a British crime drama, the next in a long line of such stories set in idyllic suburban locations whose charm (genteel wealth, everyone knows everyone) turns sinister and claustrophic when a murder rips the close-knit community apart. It doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking With these concepts, but a strong central performance by Anna Maxwell Martin and a focus on the relationship between two adult sisters makes it worth watching.
Ridley Road is a BBC historical drama set in 1960s London, based on real events in which members of a Jewish antifascist organisation went undercover in the resurgent British fascist movement and gathered enough evidence of crimes being committed to put the movement's leader in prison. I assume the show takes some significant liberties with the experiences and identities of the real figures involved in all this, but it does a great job of evoking the look, feel, and political and cultural climate of the era, and it's obviously great (if terrifying) to watch the group of Jewish operatives outwit and take down a pack of violent fascists.
The Long Call is an adaptation of another Ann Cleeves (of Shetland fame) detective novel, and it has all the hallmarks of her work — haunted but fundamentally good people feel sad in picturesque British locations (in this case in Devon) while solving crimes. The detective in this case is a gay man in a stable and loving relationship, and, refreshingly, while he's haunted by his past (he's a survivor of a fundamentalist cult), unlike other tormented TV detectives he doesn't deal with his personal pain with alcohol, drugs, self-destructive behaviour or by destroying his relationships with everyone who cares about him. Instead, he hugs his husband or swims laps across the idyllic sea. It's a refreshing change!
I mentioned last week that we saw Dune, so I won't go over that again (except to say that my love for it has not abated). I've watched two other films this month:
The Truffle Hunters is a sweet-natured little documentary about the unbelievable market for truffles, and the eccentric community of ageing Italian men who — with their specially trained dogs — sniff out this expensive commodity and sell it to dealers (who then sell it on at eyewatering markups). There are intense rivalries (none of the eponymous truffle hunters reveal the exact location of their patches of forest to anyone else, the training of the dogs is a closely-guarded secret), there are surprising dangers (for reasons of secrecy, most of the hunters gather their truffles in the night, which for a bunch of men in their seventies and eighties is obviously less than ideal), and, most amusingly, the sales of truffles resemble shady back-alley drug deals. I loved every minute of this film!
Venom was a film I'd been avoiding due to my own personal irritation with migratory Tom Hardy fandom and its tendency to overhype every project he's ever involved with. (There's nothing really wrong with this fandom — all they are is loudly enthusiastic — they've just been annoying me ever since Inception was a thing, and they've made me unjustifiably wary of any media in which Hardy is involved.) In any case, Venom is exactly as silly as I expected (down-on-his luck journalist ends up infected with a sentient symbiotic alien, which gives him superpowers), but it was exactly the right kind of B movie far for a lowkey Saturday night at home.