Trying Times - Reviews & Recommendations by Mike N.

 

 Friday, once more! Video diversions...

   ... including some late additions I've tacked on near the end.
   This week I'll aim for a series of (relatively) quick nods to recent and ongoing items.

   A nine-part, first season for Watchmen began October 20th, two Sundays back, on HBO. My expectation is that, provided the audience is patient, the relevant backstory for this alternate timeline will be rolled out and explained. Don't rush it, but instead soak in the details of this world, as if you were a tourist. For those with some background in both the original comics series and the 2009 film, this is based on the events in the comics, not the film.
   The current story action is set in 2019 of a timeline where Adrian Veidt's plan to heal the Cold War and unite the major nuclear powers by engineering what seemed to be an extradimensional, alien attack in 1985. This series is set 34 years after those events.

  The first episode quickly gives most of the audience a real history lesson, by presenting them with the Tulsa race riot of 1921, an act of white-on-black genocide that turned Tulsa Oklahoma into what to all appearances was a very one-sided war zone. A very dark bit of U.S. history that few of us ever found out about in a classroom.
  In 2019, we see that essential elements of vigilante culture have been incorporated into the police force. Primarily, the civilian identities of police officers are secret, and the police use masks (mostly cloth ones) to conceal their identities, and so protect themselves and their families from reprisal. Each has to maintain an official cover story concerning their occupation, so their friends and neighbors don't know they're actually police officers. As a balancing move, their use of firearms are strictly regulated. They need to get authorization from a duty officer at headquarters before a remote signal is sent to unlock their weapon in the field.

   A White Power organization steeped in conspiracy theories, the Seventh Kavalry, adopted Rorschach's mask and his writings, presumably in the wake of them being at least partially published following his final adventure. In 2019, after a lull of almost four years during which authorities had begun to hope they'd simply disbanded, they suddenly resurface due to a traffic stop prompting one of their members to attempt to execute a police officer. An official statement from the group warns of a major operation soon to launch.
  The early episodes are very promising. The second episode advanced the contemporary plotlines, while continuing to fill in bits of history. Sufficiently rich in detail that it will warrant rewatching.
  HBO appears to have scheduled it to run straight through for the nine, consecutive Sundays, so it at least appears we won't be cheated by a Thanksgiving (U.S., of course) skip-week in late November.

  

   October 25th saw the second season of The Kominsky Method drop on Netflix. As with the first season, it's 8 episodes, each running about 25 minutes or less. The series stars Michael Douglas as the eponymous Sandy Kominsky, who after a brief burst of fame early in his career set up a business as an acting coach, with his own school. Years later, he's 74 years-old, with a series of divorces behind him, and age getting him to reluctantly question his priorities. His best friend is the eternally staid Norman Newlander, played by Alan Arkin, who's 80 and has been Sandy's agent for all of his career.
  This season adds Paul Reiser to the cast, as Martin, the ponytailed, retired high school teacher boyfriend of Sandy's daughter, Mindy (Sarah Baker). As he's a contemporary of Sandy it makes for an interesting situation, helping Sandy glimpse how his own history of dating substantially younger women looked from the outside. The relationship dynamics are much more entertaining than I'd expected.
  It's a comedy series that focuses on late life transitions. More and more of one's friends and associates are dead or dying, and one's left to grapple with his own mortality and identity, especially in the face of gradual erasure by a younger, faster world that can treat older people as irrelevancies. Handling all of this as one's cultural touchstones are forgotten by the mainstream. Recommended, especially the deeper one's getting into AARP territory.


   As a final note, over on Amazon Prime, the second season of Jack Ryan dropped today. I haven't seen any of it beyond the trailer, but as I spoke about the show back on October 4th, the first season was surprisingly enjoyable for me. I'm generally not a fan of modern, special ops/ anti-terrorist political thrillers, but it was handled well, between interesting characters, even when they skirted formulaic relationships, and avoiding falling down a jingoistic rabbit hole. Generally, the hard-liner, super-patriotic lines were given to characters we're not meant to think well of. Hopefully this second season will hold up.

Late additions: With the sequel still out in theaters, I see that Netflix added Zombieland today. Meanhile, Hulu added Chinatown and its sequel, The Two Jakes. Over on Amazon Prime, they've added the James Bond films Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Die Another Day.

   Next time I'll be looking at an item I've revisited periodically across the years, in the wake of my latest trip back to 1966.

                                             Mike Norton
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