My picks this week are off the streamers. A Netflix Seven part limited series and a US re-working of a cult UK show…

This weeks picks include another adaption of Daphne Du Maurier’s classic book and another big budgeted season of Star Trek: Discovery

ENOLA HOMES (Netflix) Based on the Young Adult novel series by Nancy Springer, this film finds Sherlock’s younger sister (the titular Enola – played by Stranger Things star Milly Bobby Brown) stirring up trouble, solving mysteries and carving out her own place in wealthy Victorian England. Despite having a famous sibling, she’s very much her own person in the way she goes about playing detective. The director is a chap named Harry Bradbeer – and he brings an infectious energy to the stuffy upper crust setting by having Enola break the fourth wall with amusing asides and comments -  a tactic he used frequently on the many episodes of “Fleabag” he directed.

THE VOW (Binge/Foxtel) is a new HBO documentary series about NXIVM, a cult founded by Keith Raniere who originally sold it to his followers as a ‘multi-level marketing’ company that aimed to help and support women in business, with the program's main emphasis being – as Raniere himself said -  'to have people experience more joy in their lives'.  Suffice to say, that’s not exactly how things unraveled.

AN AMERICAN PICKLE

A very beardy Seth Rogen is Herschel Greenbaum, a Polish immigrant who in 1919, arrives in America with his wife and starts work at a pickle factory in Brooklyn, New York. A rat-related workplace accident sees him fall straight into a vat of pickle brine, only to marinate in there for a century before emerging in our present day, dazed and confused. He ultimately comes face to face with his adult grandchild, Ben (also played by Seth Rogan) and through a series of misadventures, sets about building a pickle empire.

THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

This engaging and informative documentary explores the rise of social media apps, particularly Facebook and the damage the phenomenon has caused to society by hijacking our own neuroses and addicting us to a validation machine. Raking in billions for the data we provide, surveillance capitalism is all pervading. The most compelling thing aout this documentary are the interviewees: they are all former employees (and executives) of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and others. Might the makers have an axe to grind? Possibly. Though the conclusions drawn here are not radical and what they say is very convincing, it’s what we always knew but encapsulated in such a way that it’s impactful. Seeing former designers of a product discussing their regret at its creation and development, is cause for concern.

The New Mutants  was made back in 2017, at 20th Century Fox. Since then Disney purchased  20th Century Fox and its back catalogue, so this film was done and dusted - but has been sitting on a shelf for three years. The story starts with Native American teenager Danielle Moonstar (played by Blu Hunt) escaping in the middle of the night as an unseen entity is obliterating the township on the reservation where she lives.  She is knocked unconscious during the huge explosions and wakes up in a secure hospital – which is old and creepy - run by Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga) - she runs the institution  - which is for young mutants who are still coming to grips with their powers. Dani is introduced to a small group of other teens - who are also being kept there under similar circumstances: there’s a jock type named Roberto (played by Henry Zaga) who turns white hot when his libido kicks in,  Rain Sinclair (played by Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones) who can transform into a werewolf at will. Sam Guthrie ( who’s played by Charlie Heaton, who plays the older brother in Stranger Things) who has the ability to fly at supersonic speeds. And Illyana Rasputin (played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred recently in Emma) and she’s an antagonist to Dani – she’s a pretty awful person actually and she’s able to teleport, use her eyes and arms as weapons - y’know, the usual. They basically all have to come to terms with traumatic events in their lives caused by their powers as well as navigating the strange situation they all find themselves in. It’s essentially ‘Breakfast Club meets X Men’ with more of a dark, Stephen King vibe.

Cobra Kai was made by Youtube, starting back in 2018 – it has a following already but it’s landed on Netflix, this past week so there’ll be a lot of fresh eyeballs on it. There’s two seasons that are available to binge and Season Three is on it’s way (delayed thanks to COVID).

The setup is the iconic 80’s classic The Karate Kid – which ended with Johnny Lawrence (played by William Zapka) the cocky and aggressive antagonist, getting crane-kicked in the face by Ralph Macchio’s limping and seemingly beaten Danny Larusso. This show then hits the fast forward button  and re-imagines those characters thirty-four years later. Johnny (played once more by William Zapka) is now in his 50s, lives alone in a rundown apartment and is generally at rock bottom.

After losing his construction job, he’s down-and-out and on the skids – and one night he intervenes in a street fight, defending his teenage neighbour from a gang of bullies using karate. The young kid he saves asks Johnny to teach him karate. Initially he’s reluctant, then Johnny agrees and decides to reopen the Cobra Kai karate dojo from the original film, as a chance to recapture his past and give himself purpose and motivation again - but this act of reopening the infamous dojo, rekindles his rivalry and hatred of Daniel LaRusso – who has landed on his feet in life and is happily married with a couple of kids and owns a successful car dealership. The pair square off once more and we’re treated to a bath in 80’s corn, with a distinctly knowing and tongue-in-cheek edge.

In 1950’s America, the Jim Crow South is a hellscape of tentacled beasts and filrthy rich occult obesessed honky’s trying to open gateways to other dimensions. Produced by Jordan Peele (Get Out & Us) and JJ Abrams, it’s a nod to the pulpy anthology science fiction shows of that period, as well as a clever reappraisal of the inherent racism and white supremacy that exists in the literary works by giants of the pulp sci fi genre such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and HP Lovecraft.

The Swallows of Kabul is a beautifully animated, heart wrenching tale of two couples living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, in the late 90’s.

Christopher Nolan has always used his films to noodle with themes revolving around time and chronology. Memento famously played sequentially in reverse, opening with the end scene and finishing with the first. Interstellar had its characters visit a planet in a far-lung galaxy where one hour equalled seven years back on earth and explored the emotional impact of that on its characters. Dunkirk – his last film, was arranged in time-based sections of one hour, one day, one week etc. Inception messed around with the same ideas of chronology and slowing time - as well as using the storytelling language of a heist film as a basic structure to hang Nolan’s fixations with time on. In much the same way, Tenet uses the framework of a spy thriller to deliver similarly brain-spraining thrills….

Two diametrically opposed True Crime documentaries. I’ll Be Gone in The Dark is an atmospheric and creepy trawl through the mind of the late Michelle McNamara, who was a crime writer/blogger, podcaster, wife of Patton Oswalt and obsessive ‘citizen detective’ in the thrall of the epic cold cases of the (sadly prolific) East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker (EAR/ONS) who terrorised the California city of Sacramento in the 70’s and 80’s. McMillion$ is a jaunty and humourous romp through a web of fraud and felony in a true crime documentary about how the hugely popular marketing game juggernaut ‘McDonalds Monopoly’ is swindled by an insider mastermind, to the tune of millions.

Better late than never, here’s some radio reviews from past weeks with some cinema and streaming recommendations….

HAMILTON (Disney Plus)

One of the boldest creative choices in the much-lauded Hamilton is that black, brown and Asian people star in pretty much all the lead roles, in keeping with one of the leading themes of the musical itself: ‘who gets to control the narrative?’. It invites the audience to consider how white people have re-told and controlled the historical narrative in the US (and indeed, in Australia) for so long that its worth considering how that has affected our perception of historical figures from our not-too-distant past.

THE OLD GUARD (Netflix)

The Old Guard graphic novel by Greg Rucka

The Old Guard adaptation on Netflix

In Netflix’s The Old Guard (lands on Netflix today) Charlize Theron plays Andromache the Scythian ( or Andy for short), a 6000 year-old immortal warrior who’s been fighting the good fight for eons. Andy leads a tight knit group of dedicated immortal mercenaries that include Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), a member since the Napoleonic Wars, and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), a gay couple who’ve been in love since the Crusades (though they killed each other for centuries till they realised how they felt for each other). In Afghanistan, U.S. Marine Nile Freeman (Kiki Layne) is killed in combat, resurrecting in time to kill the dude who just killed her. Nile is shocked, confused and traumatised. Andy tracks her down and recruits Nile for her team.  

France, 1938. Jewish-born Marcel Mangel (Jesse Eisenberg) works in a Butchery owned and operated by his father Charles (Karl Markovics). Marcel disregards his father’s attempts to push him into the family business and spends his time performing Charlie Chaplin routines in a local cabaret bar and painting backdrops in his room for a one man show he plans on staging.

At the same time, Marcel’s cousin Georges (Géza Röhrig), along with a small cadre of resistance supporters, smuggle Jewish orphans from the concentration camps and supply them with false documents so they can hide in plain sight at Catholic orphanages and schools.

Soon, Marcel gets involved in not only the orphan smuggling but also with the struggle against the Nazi occupation itself, when he decides to commit to helping his resistance fighter brother Alain (Felix Moati).

Marcel’s life in Vichy France becomes about survival. He has a burgeoning romance with a fellow Resistance fighter named Emma (Clémence Poesy) and she, along with all the other resistance fighters understand the sacrifice required, something that is writ large in one harrowing sequence where Emma and her sister Mila (Vica Kerekes) undergo some seriously disturbing mental and physical torture at the hands of the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon’ SS Officer Klaus Barbie, a monstrous sadist who himself was the subject of the 1988 documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, ‘Terminus’ being the Hotel commandeered by the Gestapo and the SS when they occupied the city of Lyon.

Most audience members will not have heard of Marcel Mangel, but they would have heard of Marcel Marceau, the stage name he would later assume. Marceau himself rarely spoke of this part of his life, the details used in the scripting of this film were themselves cobbled together from different sources, including the firsthand account of Marceau’s cousin, Georges Loinger.

There are some well-observed moments of transcendence as Marcel performs mime for an audience of terrified orphans. These sequences threaten to tumble into the god-awful treacle of Life is Beautiful and call to mind Roberto Benigni’s incessant clowning in that film, similarly deployed to distract children from the horrors surrounding them. This can be calamitous territory for a filmmaker (as Jerry Lewis discovered for his unfinished 1972 disaster The Day the Clown Cried) but Writer/Director Jonathan Jakubowicz shows restraint here and handles difficult scenes with deft direction.

Eisenberg still carries typecasting baggage from his numerous twitchy teen/fast-talking hipster roles, so it takes a moment to believe him as a young Marcel Marceau, though the performance he delivers is quietly intense, depicting Marcel as someone who is ungainly under stress, but at ease in his own skin, whenever performing his mime.

The emotional impact of the film, despite the true-life story it is based on, feels strangely slight and though it does pull its punches at times, it still makes for rewarding viewing. It’s a well-crafted tale and one which deserves to be told, revealing the secret traumas of an artist’s formative past.

THE GREAT

This is a new period drama satire, that’s arrived on Stan, it’s set in 18th Century Russia and stars Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great and Nicholas Hoult as Emperor Peter. Apparently, historians know a lot about Catherine’s experiences during her life is because of the extensive memoirs she left behind. Her writings describe her husband, the emperor Peter as a “drunkard,” “good-for-nothing” and an “idiot.” Take a dash of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and a decent amount of The Favourite (Showrunner/Writer Tony McNamara wrote that film as well) and you have a good idea of what to expect.

FILTHY RICH: JEFFREY EPSTEIN

This four-part series examines Epstein’s charmed life of slithering his way past any obstacle and achieving a surreal level of financial success. Now most people are aware of who Epstein was and probably saw the news when he mysteriously – and I do want to emphasise ‘mysteriously’ - died in jail, while awaiting trial and while under suicide watch. An independent medical examiner concluded that Epstein’s injuries were consistent with someone who was strangled from behind. Nothing to see here then. With all the dodgy stuff he was doing, he’s so toxic that neither side of the US political aisle wanted to even pick at the scab that was Jeffrey Epstein, let alone point an accusatory finger at anyone else.

About a year ago, Ad-Rock and Mike D aka Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond (the remaining members of Beastie Boys) hosted a theatrical presentation at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York. The pair took the stage to chronicle the band’s 30-year history. Behind them on a colossal screen:  photographs, TV and film clips, home videos and archival pieces played along as they recounted the highs and lows of their careers. The event was staged by filmmaker Spike Jonze, who has said he approached the stage show as if it were the live-theater version of a documentary.

Hail Satan? is made by documentary filmmaker Penny Lane and chronicles the recent beginnings of the organization known as The Satanic Temple in the United States – in particular their political activism. The documentary also asks the question ‘Who are these people who identify as Satanists – and what makes them tick?’ I think the answer to that is something many people will find quite surprising – because it’s such a broad variety of people. For them, Satan doesn’t represent evil — instead the figure of Satan to them represents rebellion, a freethinker who dared to question the ultimate authority. So by using that as a jumping off point in their ideology, the way to worship and to express their beliefs isn’t by sacrificing humans or animals. It’s political protest. One of The Satanic Temple leaders’ states at one point that “Activism is a Satanic practice” – essentially in the act of openly questioning and defying authority.

Greg Daniels (The Simpsons, The Office US & Parks and Recreation) brings his latest comedy Upload to Amazon, Fleabag and Killing Eve writer Phoebe Waller Bridge exec produces the new HBO thriller Run and Netflix releases the ESPN Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls documentary The Last Dance internationally.

Thor does serious damage to a lot of brown people who speak different languages in the ‘Man On Fire meets John Wick’ carnage-a-thon Extraction, Ricky Gervais blends crass humour and feel good humanism in After Life Season Two, US Comedian Duncan Trussell fuses his wide ranging psychedelic podcast with some seriously trippy visuals courtesy of animator Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) in The Midnight Gospel and Silicon Valley star Thomas Middleditch and Parks and Recreation’s Ben Schwartz team up for epic improv comedy in Middleditch & Schwartz.

This week there’s one shiny new series on Amazon: Tales from the Loop

The mundanity of the extraordinary…Tales From The Loop

Also - Two binge watch recommendations: M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Cribbing Rosemary’s Baby…Servant

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…

Jane Levy, star of The Evil Dead & Don’t Breathe (and clone of Emma Stone) plays Zoey Clarke, a coder who has been recently promoted a managing role at a San Francisco tech company called SPRQ Point. An earthquake occurs while she is getting an MRI and afterwards she discovers that she can hear the thoughts of other people, expressed by those people in the form of popular songs - essentially being Zoey’s own private musical.

Contrasting with that, Devs is a mysterious descent into the very stylised and shadowy world of ‘Amaya’, a tech company that’s developing quantum computers and exploring their capabilities. The CEO of Amaya is Forest (Nick Offerman) an enigmatic (and possibly dangerous) tech visionary. He’s compelled to protect his secrets when a new employee starts asking too many questiuons though things are complicated futher when the employees girlfriend starts poking around, asking the central question of the show: “What is Devs?”.

UGLY DELICIOUS Season 2 (Netflix)

 Chef David Chang continues to explore the food of different cultures and the commonalities that bind us all. Features Danny McBride and Aziz Ansari. Very entertaining and also very bingeable.

I Am Not Okay with This ( Netflix) follows Syd (played by Sophia Lillis from Sharp Objects, It Part One) navigating the usual waking nightmare of high school: Cliques, bullying, a best friend who she secretly fancies, the usual stuff. One exception though: she’s developed superpowers.

HUNTERS ( Amazon)

A motley group of Nazi hunters living in 1977 New York, lead by Al Pacino's Meyer Offerman, track and kill Nazi war criminals who they believe are conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the U.S. Hunters melds fact (‘Operation Paperclip’ - google it) and fictional genre elements to create a highly entertaining mix of comic book style pulp and moving drama, that is both provocative and fun. It’s copped critical heat because of this mix of styles but it’s intent is honourable. The way it addresses antisemitism in the USA and incorporates historical fact about the US Government’s complicity in giving refuge to war criminals is commendable.

Avenue 5 is a luxurious passenger ship owned by eccentric oligarch (and passenger) Herman Judd (played by Josh Gad) and it’s at the end of its pleasure cruise, heading back to Earth. A malfunction on the ship causes it to go off course, meaning it will now take three years to get home to earth. The Captain, Ryan Clark (Hugh Laurie) tries to figure out a way to manage the situation BUT he was originally hired solely for optics -  to reassure passengers and provide a pleasant sense of security -  not to captain a ship, a fact he initially hides from Judd, engineer Billie McEvoy (Lenora Crichlow), and associate owner Iris Kimura (Suzy Nakamura). While this ship wide meltdown unspools, passenger service employee Matt Spencer ( Zach Woods – aka Jared from Silicon Valley) attempts to calm the passengers and deploy meaningless HR techniques to find some way to manage a crisis that cannot be controlled or contained.

Altered Carbon’s second season will arrive on Netflix next week. The sci-fi series is based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name and is set in 2384. It depicts a humanity that has transitioned to a new state of being through the use of a revolutionary technology: uploading consciousness. Human bodies are hot-swappable – and therefore death has no permanence. So it’s a big shift in how humans see themselves and their perception of existence itself. Human consciousness is data – and can be stored on what is known as a ‘stack’ – like a molded plastic vertebrae -  and can be inserted into newly created, customised synthetic bodies known as ‘sleeves’. All this is available to the rich, the connected. If you’re poor or in prison…then you’re shit out of luck. So a new class evolves and into this milieu comes our protagonist: mercenary and gun-for-hire Takeshi Kovacs, played by Joel Kinnamon in Season One and in Season Two, Anthony Mackie.

It’s Molly Ringwald’s 52nd birthday. Listen with your ear-meats as I discuss coming-of-age teen flicks and name-check some of my personal favourites.