The Talented Ms Highsmith

Sylvia and I finished RIPLEY (2024) on Netflix last night, and we both quite enjoyed it. In the spirit of the show, I asked Bing to create an image of Tom Ripley meeting Patricia Highsmith in Rome as Carvaggio might have painted such a meeting. 
 

Quick Take: Maniac

Imaginative, funny, heartbreaking, heartwarming, brilliant, tender, everything. Maniac. 

Lost in Space Again

I just screened Netflix's re-imagining of Lost in Space. It's better than I anticipated, with a solid cast giving depth and nuance to each member of the Robinson family, who find themselves stranded on an alien world when their colonization attempt goes awry--the same premise as the original, but with far better production values. 

This time around, the Robinsons' Jupiter 2 is just one of a fleet of human spaceships fleeing Earth in the wake of an environmental catastrophe caused by a comet or asteroid strike. Unfortunately, the Jupiter 2 lands on a glacier, and the family evacuates just before the ship, white-hot from atmospheric friction, melts the ice and sinks, lost. Circumstances place plucky Will Robinson, the youngest member of the family, into an initially unsettling first contact situation, while oldest daughter Judy must be extricated from the ice. 

Drama on the new world is interspersed with flashbacks of the Robinsons' life on Earth before emigration. These brief segments provide important context and backstory for the characters, giving the audience reason to care about the jeopardy they face in the present. 

In fact, things look so bleak for the characters 50 minutes in that I began to wonder if, perhaps, one or two might not survive. The showrunners do a good job of amping up the stakes, although there's a bit of necessary - and literal - deus ex machina by the episode's close. 

The show also handles Dr. Smith and the Robot in a new and interesting way, though the other character from the original show. Major Don West, doesn't appear - or if he does, he's unnamed as of yet. There's a fun cameo, as well. 

All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised. 

Stranger Things 2 Think About

Tonight I finally started watching season two of Stranger Things. While I understand that Stranger Things is designed to evoke feelings of nostalgia, I was almost frightened by the strength of my visceral reaction to tonight's episode. My response had nothing to do with the plot, and everything to do with the feelings the show evokes through its cinematography, music, sound design and set design.

Everything is so analog, even when the kids visit the video arcade to play Dig Dug. No one has cell phones; the computers use Commodore 1701 monitors, just like the one I had in the 80s. The pace of life feels so much more relaxed and carefree--but then again, it's told from the point of view of junior high school students.

While I love today's modern communications and the potential for good they harbour, I can't help but miss the days when you could be truly out of touch and alone for a few hours. It was the kind of freedom I'm not sure humans will enjoy ever again. 

The Lighter Side of the Moon: MST3K's Triumphant Return

In the not too distant past, Stephen Fitzpatrick introduced me to Mystery Science Theater 3000, a television show unlike anything I'd ever seen before. The concept was deceptively simple: in the near future, a mad scientist kidnaps a blue-collar worker and forces him to watch the worst movies ever made, monitoring his mind to see how the movies impact the man's sanity. Joel, the victim, builds some robot friends to help him endure the agony. We, the audience, watch as Joel and the robots screen the films, making fun of them with "riffs:" well-timed bon mots and sometimes quite obscure literary and cultural references. Stephen secured episodes via a friend who had satellite television - a rare luxury back in the late 80s - and Stephen dutifully "circulated the tapes," as the show itself exhorted, with his circle of friends. Those get-togethers remain a fond memory.

Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, I watched the show infrequently on VHS tapes, mostly borrowed from Stephen; I don't think I ever watched the show live, not having the requisite cable TV channels. Later in the 90s, I picked up episodes on DVD, and since then I've probably seen about a third of the show's near-200 episode run. To this day, I quote riffs from Joel, his successor host Mike, and the robots whenever it seems appropriate.

Yesterday, a new batch of episodes appeared on Netflix, made possible by original creator Joel Hodgson and a massively successful crowdfunding effort. I watched two of the new episodes ("Reptilicus" and "Cry Wilderness") yesterday, and I'm happy to report that, if the rest of the 14 new episodes are true to form, the rebooted MST3K is a wondrous success. The cast may be new (led by Felicia Day, Patton Oswalt and new host/victim Jonah Ray), but they've done an incredible job of capturing the goofy je ne sais quoi that made the show so special. Most importantly, the riffs are as sharp and funny as ever, transitioning seamlessly into the 21st century as if the show had never gone off the air back in 1999.

I look forward to watching the rest of the revival episodes over the course of the next couple of weeks. Maybe even today and tomorrow, AKA "Next Sunday, A.D...."

Five Came Back

Many film buffs know that some of Hollywood's most famous directors went overseas to capture the tragedy of the Second World War on film, resulting in propaganda shorts like Frank Capra's Why We Fight series or documentaries like John Ford's The Battle of Midway, which you can watch on YouTube below:

I've seen a few of the films that resulted from the wartime experiences of these five filmmakers, but I don't know much about the stories behind the stories, so I'm really looking forward to this. 

Stream Trek

Today CBS announced that Star Trek will return to television in January 2017. You would think that I'd be thrilled, and I was - until I discovered the distribution model. The first episode of the new series will be broadcast on CBS, but all further episodes will be available only via CBS' proprietary streaming service.

I understand why CBS is doing this - they're trying to compete with Netflix, just like everyone else, and they think making Star Trek exclusive to CBS All Access will get them millions of new subscribers. Personally I think the move will spark a pretty huge fan backlash, but we'll see.

Lovers of television as an art form now have to wonder if the looming death of broadcast cable will really be the boon some of us imagined. Already there are two shows I'd be interested in that will require me to sign up for two different streaming services: Star Trek on CBS All Access and The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime. How long will it be before people are subscribing to five or six different services in order to see all the shows they like? It'll be like cable television all over again - pay for two hundred channels and watch half a dozen shows among them.

(Because I'm Canadian, it's a little more complicated; according to today's news, the CBS All Access deal is available only to people in the USA; international distribution is still being worked out. So Canadians might see the new show on Global or CTV or maybe even CBC.)

I'd be less disturbed if the new Star Trek were premiering on Netflix, mainly because their model is a little more consumer-friendly; the content isn't tied to any one particular network or studio.

In the end, of course, I'll just buy the Blu-Ray sets, assuming CBS releases the new show to physical media, which is no longer, sadly, a given.