Some Mysteries and Dollops of Death - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 Three items this week, two of which I've seen, one I'm hoping to get to later today. Oh, and a quick tack-on mention very near the end.

One of the late 2019 films I didn't get out to see, but had been interested in, debuts as part of Amazon Prime's offerings today: Knives Out.

   An Agatha Christiesque mystery, centering on a wealthy crime novelist's 85th birthday gathering which soon has a suitable curve thrown. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, I'm curious to see how it and its star-pumped cast plays out. This includes Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee

Curtis, Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Jaeden Martell,  and Toni Collette, with Christopher Plummer as Harlan Thrombey, the above mentioned wealthy crime novelist at the center of the story.
 As with every third thing in recent years, the reactions to the film have been socio-politically polarized. In this case, writer/director Rian Johnson has become in recent years a target by a subset of largely right-leaning Star Wars "fans" who got upset with Johnson for getting female empowerment and social justice themes into the latest trilogy, generally "destroying" their childhoods and chafing their man-bits, and so have made it their business to denigrate anything Johnson is involved with.  Of course, a whodunnit opens the door to a broader array of criticisms, as it gives a combative audience so many more details to work with. Any logical flaws, if the plot twists are seen coming, or if a twist was forced simply to avoid a more obvious and rational plot path, all become targets; M. Night Shyamalan has been dogged by people for this set of things since The Sixth Sense tagged him as someone who builds "twists" into his movies, apparently rendering each of his subsequent films as a grim challenge to a joyless subset of the audience, dedicated to avoiding fun and entertainment as a point of personal, competitive honor. Add comedic elements, which can unfortunately sometimes be used as cover for loose plot points as a matter of whimsy, and the possibilities for contention increase.

Anyway, even a passing glance at some open comments sections demonstrated a political bias on the negative side, one which frequently referenced a perceived or presumed liberal bias by the film's supporters, including the various critics and panels that heaped praises on it.
    Me, while I'm hoping the layered mysteries will hold up at least under their own weight, I'm looking forward to seeing the cast at play, especially with several of the players going against type. High on that list is Chris Evans, who's largely spent the past decade portraying champion of honor, propriety and rectitude, Steve Rogers/Captain America. I'm looking forward to seeing him as a shameless vulture come 'round for the reading of the will to find out what the patriarch's left him.

    Unless the day derails for me, I expect I'll know how the film worked out before Friday's gone.

    Saturday note: I did, and I enjoyed it. Ultimately well-layered, it threw me a little (as intended) before the mid-point by seemingly laying everything out, but there was another layer of plot in play. There were a few items that were telegraphed and easy to predict, but that didn't drag anything down for me.

   Meanwhile over on Amazon Prime, an original production that landed there at the end of May is The Vast of Night. A largely character-driven film set in a small New Mexico town in the 1950s, it centers on two teenage friends, switchboard operator Fay, and local radio DJ Everett, and a mysterious signal that interferes with the radio broadcast and signals coming through the switchboard. The characters were more engaging for me than the plot, but it has an overall charm that's given it a broad appeal. It's the events of a single night, it's framed as if it were an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish anthology series, Paradox Theatre.

  An independent film shot over less than four weeks in 2016 in a small Texas town, chosen largely because it and a gym there had the overall period feel. Reportedly done for the relatively small sum of $700,000, I've found myself oddly vexed to find out that they spent $20,000 removing the three-point line from the basketball court in the gym, because that didn't exist until 1986. See, for me, it would have been completely unnoticed, as nearly everything involving sports is, and I resent the money being spent to appease anyone who would have noticed and made a fuss about it.
  Skipping to Netflix, just released this week (June 10th) was Reality Z. It's a Brazilian series, looking at a zombie apocalypse through the lens of the microcosm of a reality show.
   It's a take on/openly inspired by the 2008 British 5-part series, Dead Set (also available on Netflix, btw) which posited a zombie apocalypse impacting contestants and production staff for a Big Brother type reality show, where all attention had been focused inward on the world of the artificial social competition they'd constructed. In 2008, the infectious bitey, zombie deal wasn't the well-trod industry it's since become, and they had the big bonus of running Dead Set on the same channel and time that not many weeks before the audience had been tuning in to follow Big Brother, so the Brits had an audience well-primed to be drawn into the premise.

  Set against the lush, jungle-surrounded urban environment of Rio de Janeiro, they gave their reality show a decadent, heavily-sexualized, costumed theme suitable to the home of the annual Carnival. They did it by way of ancient Greece, creating a modern Olympus and casting the reality show contestants in the role of various gods. Spelling that all out, I'm more sympathetic to how it went from a likely alcohol-fueled pitch session to being greenlit, as the concept sounds interesting. Taking the generally self-important mindset of a reality show competition contestant and encouraging it with an aura of godhood, complete with costumes and decadent surroundings, and letting the intrigues of these newly-dubbed gods lead to a contest of attention for unseen worshippers, as the relative popularity of contestants in the eyes of the audience factor heavily in who remains in play.

  Unfortunately, what came out of all this is less intriguing.
  It may be largely intentional, as most of the people involved in and drawn to a reality competition show like the show within this one are unlikely to be the cream of humanity. Still, I have a low tolerance for watching stupid people behaving in fashions that suggest stupidity is the sport in play. There are characters who simply can't die quickly enough to satisfy, and it can be all the more aggravating as they often end up taking down better characters with them.

  On the plus side, the episodes are all around - nearly all under - thirty minutes each, so the investment in the entire 10-episode series is just about 5 hours. At times, though, the episodes feel much longer than that, and there's ample weight for the argument that one of the things about the series that inspired this that they should have copied would have been to keep it to 5 episodes.
 On the other hand, there's a fairly strong shift at the mid-point of the series, which helps.
  The series is dubbed, and while not done so terribly it frequently doesn't match up with the specifics if you're like me and have closed captioning on wherever possible. It's not a major disconnect most of the time, generally just a matter of phrasing and word choice, presumably as the dubbing talent did impromptu rewrites as they tried to better match the actors' mouths and gestures.
  It seems odd to spend this much time writing about something I'm not really recommending. It's not as if it's bringing anything new to the genre, nor doing any of the old things better. I do have the sense that many people are hungry for escape, to immerse themselves in a different set of circumstances for a while, and there are benefits to doing so using a scenario that's worse than the reality we're living through. Whether or not one wants to compare and contrast the state of Brazil in this series with the actual country's current situation with COVID-19 and a sharply rising death toll is a matter of choice.
  As I'd mentioned I don't know how many weeks back, the cable channel Comet had begun to run the '90s sci-fi series Sliders. They run two episodes each weekday between 4 and 6 PM Eastern.
  Next Tuesday they come back around to the start again, with the two-part pilot. If that's of interest in and of itself, then great; I was a fan of this frequently network-hobbled show, too, though one frequently had to watch it with one lobe turned off. What I specifically wanted to mention, though, is Wednesday, the 17th, when at 4 PM they'll hit the second episode, "Fever", where they arrive in a timeline where a pandemic is the current norm. No heavy reference here - the core concept for the episode (unfortunately, like too many of the series' episodes) is almost painfully simplistic, and would have more likely resulted in a much different timeline - but the opening scenes where they begin to find out what's going on, and start to interact with a generally masked, fearful of infection, are now a little eerily too-familiar.
   Next time I'll have a timely heads-up for a couple of returning series whose first seasons I enjoyed, along with whatever else comes to my attention and interest.
 Stay safe and sane, or whatever mental state works best for you. - Mike