Unhappy Trails, Inc. - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 A mixed bag this week, but with a darker theme on balance. I didn't set out with that in mind, but it's what I've recently watched. I'll likely be tweaking this as Friday rolls on, as it's been a distracted week and there were more items I'd wanted to get in here.
  In Vivarium (2019; R, 1hr 28 min; currently streaming on Roku), young couple Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) decide to go house shopping. They meet up with a peculiar realtor, Martin,

who tells them about a new development called Yonder. Following him, they're lead to a suburban development that made my childhood in Levittown, PA seem nuanced, character-rich and architecturally-varied. Row upon row of identical homes, devoid of all signs of life. Martin takes them to #9, and begins to show them around. They soon lose track of him, and come to realize he's vanished. Perplexed, and at least mildly creeped out by the experience, they get back in their car and leave. Or at least attempt to. (I know, you saw that coming.)
   All attempts to leave find them eventually rolling back in front of #9. And now they're out of gas.
   Perplexed and spent, they decide to spend the night and tackle the problem anew after daylight.
   Come the morning, Tom tries to get a navigational clue by getting up on the roof of the house. The view reveals a surreal landscape, as Yonder stretches to the horizon. Suburban sprawl to the Nth. And even the clouds have a surreal, uninspiring, cottonball sameness to them.

  Setting out on foot, they use the Sun as a point of reference to keep them on as linear a course as possible. Yet, ultimately, they wearily find themselves somehow having circled back to #9. Now there's a carton of packaged food and supplies waiting for them. Furious with frustration, Tom sets fire to the house in a desperate bid to summon help. The couple sits down by the curb as the house blazes, eventually drifting off to a probably not entirely natural sleep.
   They awaken to find the house restored, with no sign of damage.   After that, things become even stranger, starting with the contents of a new box.
   Before we met Tom and Gemma, during the opening credits, we were shown scenes of the life cycle of the cuckoo -- its egg left in another bird's nest, hatching, it pushes the other hatchlings out of the nest, then becomes the sole focus of the parent's care. Growing, it eventually becomes a monstrous, demanding thing, larger than the mother, consuming everything she offers. This will figure into the next stages of the story.
  The film gives us a nightmarish, cyclical tale, ultimately giving us information while never providing an unequivocal answer to some questions. Much like life, come to think of it. We only come to find that whatever's behind this is inhuman, alien, of unknown origin.
 Dark/Web (2019, 8-part series; Amazon Prime).  First, I want to note that this is a distinct series, and not to be confused with the 2018 series Dark Web, which I haven't watched. As with anything you're typing into a browser bar, syntax is all.

  A small group of men and women suddenly receive an insistent stream of emails from someone they lost track of years earlier, after high school. A social fringe girl named Molly Solis. Someone who was never really important to them, and had been all but forgotten. The messages include short stories, nightmare tales of tech overwhelming and destroying lives. Tales tailored to affect each of the recipients, ultimately drawing them back together to try to pull the pieces together and figure out whatever the message is behind this sudden, almost frantic contact. After all, this wasn't someone who figured prominently in their lives. Why was it that she was seeking them out, as if they were somehow important to her?
  Over the course of the 8 episodes we get two layers of storytelling, as the individual, dystopic stories are presented to us - allowing for a wide range of tales - and the connected story as the recipients begin to reconnect and in turn catch a sense of urgency to recall what any of them remember of Molly, then to try to figure out what's become of her.
  This has been available for over a year, having landed just past mid-July of 2019, presumably just lost in flood of whatever it was we were doing back there before so much changed so radically out here.  Parallels to Netflix's Black Mirror are likely to be forever the fate of any series of dystopic tales of life gone awry due to the impact of one or more tech advances. It's a fair point of comparison, but shouldn't be seen as a been there, done that dismissal. It's merely an acknowledgement of theme. In the case of this series, we effectively get a double dose of it as the sometimes (often?) outlandish aspects of the accompanying tales play off against the somewhat more grounded mystery of the overall series.
   A varied cast of innately, intentionally flawed characters, each is challenged in some way to confront truths about themselves, their degrees of self-absorption, and their history of inevitably treating some in their lives as props.

   The overall story of the mystery of Molly Solis is likely to, free time allowing, pull you from one episode into the next. That was the case for me, though it's a personal weakness that I have weak brakes when approaching a series made available to me all at the same time. My do as I say, not as I do advice would be to give yourself a schedule for watching the series. For one thing, the overall mood, and definitely that of often urban legendsish tales embedded along the way, is downbeat, and probably not something any of us should be huffing like airplane glue. Also, a quick binge will unfairly leave a muddy memory path, which isn't fair to at least some of the individual tales. Some of these stories within the story drew me in sufficiently that I momentarily forgot the larger tale, and as some character traits crossed over between characters in the main story and those in these tales, the confusion is often intentional.
  Both to give yourself a little fresh air and to give the stories a little more of a chance, I'd advise spacing the viewing out a little.
   For those will little time to spare for their video distractions, I will recommend Troll.
  Currently on Hulu, it originally ran on FX. It's a series of brief therapy sessions of a literal Troll, being seen by a long-suffering therapist. Nine episodes, each averaging just a little over three minutes, if you don't have the time to spare for this then I guess you're left to glancing at animated gifs.
   As you might expect for a show that's a handful of extremely short episodes, there's no trailer. Here, though, is the first session:

 An enjoyable series, surprisingly engaging for such brief visits.

  On the Life After Network TV cancellation front, arriving today on Netflix, we're getting a first block (8 episodes) of season 5 of Lucifer. A series originally on Fox, where it ran for three seasons, it had a 10-episode fourth season on Netflix back in May 2019, and this block of 8 episodes constitutes half of its fifth season.
  The overall story is of a bored Lucifer (Tom Ellis) deciding to come up to Earth, open a night club, and at the very least take a long vacation from the duties long ago forced on him, essentially abandoning Hell. Circumstances soon find his life becoming enmeshed with that of LAPD detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German) with leading lady looks and an interesting background that's revealed in time. Lucifer has some unique talents, including the ability to get nearly anyone to confess their truest, deepest desire. He also is invulnerable... at least most of the time. He also always tells the truth, though most take any statements he makes about himself to be the showmanship of an LA club owner spinning a decadence-loving persona.
  Success operating as an odd team, Lucifer becomes a consultant to the LAPD, specifically paired with the initially less-than-happy-about-it Detective Decker, giving the show a crime procedural format. Some people were bothered about that, but some people are actively looking for things to be bothered about. Are there a surfeit of crime procedurals with a romantic tension subtext between the leads? Absolutely. Does this inherently make any of them bad? No.   The relationship between the leads, the potential repercussions for Lucifer effectively thumbing his nose at his Father by abandoning Hell, and various threats posed by those who don't want the Devil walking free on Earth, provide the running plots that string the various homicide investigations together. The show also builds a fine array of supporting characters over time, of both the human and supernatural variety. Watching how they do and don't mesh over time is part of the fun.
  Loosely (oh, so very loosely) based on a version of Lucifer created by Neil Gaiman for his comics series Sandman, and which then spun off into its own series, it's really best to just take this show as its own thing. The comics series has been collected in trade editions, and are very enjoyable, but there's no good looking to one thinking to find the other. The tv show is its own animal. Two good and separate things.
  The series seems to be flourishing on Netflix, whereas it rarely performed strongly on Fox. When they put together the 10-episode fourth season for the streaming platform they thought they would only have one more to work with (which was honestly more than I expected, thinking initially that we would just get a single Netflix season) we instead not only will (eventually) get a 16-episode fifth season (half of which we're seeing today), but they've added a sixth and final one to wrap up the tale.
  I'm reluctant to run the fifth season trailer here because not only would it spoil many elements of the series so far for any who might be looking to start, but it struck me as being very self-spoiling, unless they're throwing out red herrings. So, instead, I'll just put the initial series trailer here. If you want the fifth season trailer it's easily found on YouTube.

   Has the series gotten thick with almost self-parody level romance novel scenes? Yes. Yes it has, as my just having watched the recap preceding the first new episodes. I'll take some refuge behind them seeming less blatant as they happened in context, as opposed to being distilled to a syrup in a recap.
   (Note at the end of 2024: The show hit its final episode of season 6 back in September of 2021, drawing the series to a close. Sometime this past year I did a complete series rewatch and was still generally pleased with it.)
   Another week that's gotten away from me, I want to keep the C7 blog train running on time, so I'll get this up now. If you're reading this in the first half or so of Friday it may be worth swinging back around a little later. If I do come back to add anything I'll add a note in red somewhere up top.
   Until next week -- the final weekend of August 2020 -- continue to try to keep cool (the heat's been savage for many this summer) and sane, or at least calm.  - Mike