Time for another dose - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

   Another relatively bare bones, random bit of potpourri this week, rather than working to a theme.
   Hitting Netflix two weeks ago (and I watched it fairly soon after, but it simply slipped through the net of things I got around to mentioning) was a super-power metaphor of an urban drug crisis: Project Power (2020, 114 min, Netflix)
    Starring Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dominique Fishback, it's set in New Orleans where a highly unusual drug has suddenly hit the illegal market. A drug called Power. A capsule, once twisted to activate it, then swallowed, grants anyone five minutes of one of a grab bag of superpowers -- and/or they might just explode. You don't know what you'll get until you try.
  Someone has come to New Orleans to distribute an initial supply, at no cost, to the city's dealers for them to charge their customers as they wish.

  Much as with Ang Lee's often-disappointing Hulk (2003) there's a nodding attempt to provide a basis for the abilities via those of various creatures in the natural world. As with any of these things, it ultimately calls for a willing suspension of disbelief, even if ultimately just for the question of where extra mass is coming from in at least one case. How such things strike me these days is more a matter of mood, whether I

take them as an honest attempt to address a plot point or a patch lazily pulled from a tool kit and slapped on. A much bigger deal to me 20 years ago than now.
  Ably acted and comfortably paced, it's sufficiently entertaining. I'll leave it to the individual viewer to contemplate what else might have been done with the themes of drugs and the use of a society's economic underclass as test subjects, both via covert and overt routes. Or just take it as it is, as a fantasy that brings several, desperate, personal agendas to a crossroads.
  Appearing on Netflix today are two items, one of which was a former YouTube Premium (then YouTube Red) exclusive.

  Cobra Kai (seasons one and two) takes the events of The Karate Kid (1984) and jumps ahead 34 years, to see what's become of Johnny Lawrence, the blond kid, and lead bully who Daniel LaRusso defeated in his comeback rally in that film's climax. It's been a long, long fall, but, now in his 50s, Johnny's finally realized he's hit bottom. Seeing a young man in his neighborhood bullies, he decides to rebuild by focusing on the best aspects of his world when he was young and on top of it. He decides to reopen the titular dojo and become the new sensei, leading to a rekindling of the old rivalry with Daniel.

  The path that Johnny's on has taken him around to being a different sensei than the one who taught him, and is perhaps becoming much more like Mr. Miyagi than his protege' Daniel has. The wheel turns, and we're sometimes surprised to see who we've become.
  While the Karate Kid movies never loomed particularly large for me -- I was 23 when the first one hit, and didn't see it until it hit cable videotape or cable, so I wasn't in the primary, younger demographic for whom it likely meant much more -- I enjoyed it well enough that all of the key elements stuck with me. I was interested in this new series from when I first heard about it, but wasn't looking to add any paid streamers in 2018, so I just let it pass in silence.
  Well, now YouTube formally passed on continuing the series, so it's transitioned to Netflix, where the third season is set to be released sometime next year, with at least the possibility that they'll do a fourth -- which was more than YouTube was offering. Two seasons of ten roughly half-hour episodes each.
  Also arriving on Netflix this week is a Spanish-Argentinian crime genre film with a comics twist, as a series of murders all have thematic connections to superhero origins from comics, requiring bringing in someone with an in-depth background. Unknown Origins (2020 - though done in Madrid in 2019; 1 hr 36 min; TV-MA; Netflix). A perhaps too tightly-wound and serious detective is paired up with a comics fan who refuses to leave his hobbies behind as childish things, and both are under a head of Homicide who also happens to be a cosplayer.
  I'm not expecting a peak crime thriller, but it should be a fairly good, marginally grisly time with multiple points of interest for someone who never outgrew comics. I'm mostly bracing myself for the dubbed dialogue.

 Post-watching: It wasn't a bad ride, though one has to selectively turn off one's mind here and there to make it through. A bit more thought in terms of staging the scenes (particularly for the Hulk-related scene) would have been appreciated, and the radioactivity component is completely ignored, though it suddenly, selectively, becomes important in a later murder.
  It owes more than a few things to Seven (1995), including a senior cop on the absolute brink of retirement helping to bring the newly-transferred detective up to speed, themed murders requiring special background to interpret,  the need to step outside of legal channels in order to get the necessary information to find the person behind it all, and the person behind it having a distinct agenda he is mortally committed to.
  Beyond that, while I suppose there were cost factors that kept them from showing the actual comics (original artwork and all) being referenced, the gimmicked-up versions were a little off-puttingly crude, and there's at least one glaring error from the story's comics expert while discussing coloring issues in early stories and Iron Man's armor going from gray to gold. That it was such an unnecessary, careless error bothered me more than a simple mistake.
 One nice nod to the modern genre, there's a post-credits scene, too.
 The dubbing was a little off-putting, yes, but it was done fairly well, and they ran the closed captions off the dubbed script, which helped smooth it out.

Amazingly (well, I'm, once again, stunned by how quickly time's passing) August is speeding to a close, and so with it Turner Classic Movies' Summer Under the Stars daily spotlight.
  Today's (Friday, Aug 28th) star is Paul Henreid, and I have my DVR set to record Now, Voyager (1942; 118 min.) at 8pm Eastern. Starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains, it's coming to me highly recommended as an essential Bette Davis outing, and is one I'd never made time for.

   Sunday, the penultimate day of this series, will be devoted to Charlton Heston. I've no trouble separating the actor and his roles from his lamentable neoconservatism shift in the '70s and beyond. I'm also fairly immune to being put off by what these days has become the seemingly unforgivable sin of cultural and race appropriation by caucasian actors. Yes, they're in make-up, pretending to be someone they're not. I'd understood that was much of the point, as they're not documentaries.
  The day includes his three sci-fi turns - The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, and Soylent Green (which was also Edward G. Robinson's final picture, and one I remember quite fondly watching with a buddy in a long-vanished theater back in 1973) - along with Ben Hur, Khartoum, and the bizarre casting choice in A Touch of Evil, along with several other films.

  With season two of the violent, profane, action "superhero" semi-parody The Boys set to appear a week from now, on September 4th, on Amazon Prime, it's a good time for me to rewatch the first season. (September seemed so far off such a seemingly short time ago.) On September 4th we're supposed to see the first three episodes, after which it'll be released weekly.
   Here's the season two trailer -- don't watch it if you haven't seen season one, as it'll definitely spoil several things from season one.

   That's all I have the time for now. There's work to be done (even here in The Future bills refuse to be self-paying) and I have plenty to watch.  Stay well and keep cool.  - Mike