Vida, Season 1 (2018)

 

After the sudden death of their mother Vidalia (“Vida” for short), estranged sisters Emma and Lyn return to their old neighbourhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.  They need to settle up their mother's tangled estate, in particular determining the fate the bar she owned, which has become a prime target for developers looking to gentrify (that is, make more white) the primarily Latinx location.

For the career-focused, Type A Emma, this is all an unwelcome distraction from the life she's forged away from the family she feels cast her out.  For free-spirited but directionless Lyn, it is an opportunity to reignite old romances and maybe sort out her life a bit (though probably, just make new mistakes to compound the old).

Neither woman expects to remain in the old neighbourhood for very long.  They expect to just come in, wind up the estate and leave.  But there's a lot they don't know about their own family and about the place they left behind.  Perhaps even some things worth staying for.

Vida is a series about the experience of Latinx people in the United States, especially Latinx women, and Latinx people of the LGBTQ community.  To ensure authenticity, series creator Tanya Saracho deliberately assembled a writing team with personal experience of these lives.  All the writers are Latinx; only one is a cisgender male; over half identify as queer.  I certainly lack the knowledge to say whether she has succeeded, but the show has won praise from numerous people who are far more qualified to judge than I am, so it seems likely she did.  

This is also a show about relationships; this includes romantic ones, of course, but also familial ones (sister to sister, daughter to mother, and so on) and platonic friendships.  All of these relationships are sometimes messy and challenging, but they are also capable of being rewarding and constructive.  It's nice to see a show tackle the complexities of interpersonal relationships with such openness.

That openness definitely extends to sexual relationships.  Vida features a  considerable amount of nudity and a number of high impact sex scenes, and for that reason may not be to all tastes.  These scenes do have a clear story purpose, however, rather than existing for mere titillation.  They show how sexual intimacy can often be emotionally and physically messy, and they frequently show some aspect of the participants' personalities.  The first time we see Emma have sex, for instance, she tells us a great deal about herself even though she never says a word.

Vida explores what its characters (think they) want and how that compares to what they actually need to be fulfilled.  How the characters process and address the gap between what they have (they they) want and what they actually need is a key part of the narrative and of the characters' development.  It's all smartly executed.  The writers have delivered writing that is compelling and interesting, and we ploughed through the six episodes of this season in only a couple of nights.

As good as the writing is, I can't complete this review without also praising the cast, who deliver strong performances.  All of the central roles require a lot of vulnerability and demand a lot of the actors, and every one of them fully fulfils the brief.

Steel Dawn (1987)

 

Nomad, a swordsman, wanders through the desert in a post-World War III world. He searches for his mentor's killer, the assassin Sho.

Nomad's travels bring him to the settlement of Meridian, where he finds work on a farm owned by the widow Kasha (who is, of course, young and attractive), and becomes friends Kasha's son, Jux.

Meridian, however, is not without its troubles.  A local landowner named Damnil has employed a gang of thugs to harass the town and gain a monopoly on the local water supply.  Kasha and Jux are among his targets.

When Nomad proves more than Damnil's thugs can handle, the land owner hires a deadly assassin - Sho, naturally - to get rid of the interloper.  The stage is set for a showdown.

Steel Dawn owes a considerable debt to the western Shane; in that film, a drifter comes to town, befriends a young boy, and helps small land owners stand up to a corrupt cattle baron.  It is of several films that star Patrick Swayze made with his real life wife Lisa Niemi; she plays Kasha, of course, a role that features some hysterically 80s hair.

Released in the same year as Dirty Dancing, this low budget post apocalyptic adventure attempted to try and cash in on the (unexpected) success of that film and Swayze's resulting surge to stardom.  The effort was unsuccessful.  There are good reasons for that, I think.  Much of the fight choreography is mediocre, and the script - in addition to being heavily derivative of another, better film, is pretty weak.  It has a tendency to try and skate by doing just the absolute minimum.

As an example of this, there's a brief scene early on where Nomad meets a dog.  The encounter is not hostile, and the dog then disappears from the screen for almost an hour, before abruptly turning up once more to rescue Nomad from imprisonment.  That kind of Doggie Ex Machina needs more effort to set up.  At least show the dog hanging around the farm and Nomad throwing it some of his food, or saving it from mistreatment.

The best part of the film?  Probably Brion James.  Best known for playing big dumb bad guys, he here gets to play the role of Nomad's big dumb sidekick, and is really rather fun.

Overall, this is only for fans of 80s post-apocalyptica.

Saved by the Bell, Season 2 (2021)

 

After a year of learning from home, the student body returns to Bayside High.  This one again includes the transplants from the far less wealthy Douglas High School, which was closed due to budget cuts.

The kids - and their parents and teachers - will have to face a new host high school tribulations and wacky shenanigans this year, most significant of which is the regional 'Spirit Competition', in which the Bayside kids will face off with their nemeses from nearby Valley High.

All is fair in love and war, and the Spirit Competition is absolutely a war.  The jinks, they will be high.

This second season of the sequel-slash-reboot of the 90s TV series of the same name picks up more or less where the first season left off, albeit with the acknowledgment that an entire school year pretty much happened off screen.

The cast remain great fun, bouncing off one another well, and while the writing is often deliberately overboard and exaggerated, it is overboard and exaggerated in really smart ways.  A lot of time and attention was spent on getting just the right mix of silliness in place, such as the amusing little references to Elizabeth Berkley's role in the notorious box office bomb Showgirls.

It's also nice to see more long-form story telling taking place over this season.  While every episode continues to feature an immediate focus and plotlines that are resolved within it, the writers have also included the loose season-long arc of the Spirit Competition as a framing mechanism for the episode-by-episode shenanigans.  This helps make the season feel more connected and less 'episode of the week'.

It also results in some entertaining character arcs.  Coach Slater and Mac Morris both get solid character development as they learn a few life lessons while remaining still recognisably the same people, and Aisha's new romance is all kinds of adorable.

Alas, the show has not been renewed for a third season.  I would absolutely have been turning up for Senior year, if it was.

Charlie's Angels (2019)

 

Elena Houghlin discovers that an energy conservation device that she helped invent, 'Calisto', has the potential to trigger fatal seizures when used.  She tries to raise this with her head of development, but he proves determined to cover up the issue.

Elena turns to the secretive Townsend Agency for aid in exposing the truth and preventing the dangerous device from going into use across the world.  The Agency sends its 'Angels' Sabina and Jane to make contact with Elena, but the meet is interrupted by a deadly assassin.

It seems that someone is determined to keep Elena's story a secret, and as their efforts to regain Calisto continue to be thwarted, Elena, Sabiona and Jane come to suspect that someone with the Townsend Agency itself is working against them.

This third big screen adaptation of the Charlie's Angels TV series was not a success at the box office, and its release attracted a lot of histrionic whining from men who had their feelings hurt by the film's subtle and not so subtle pokes at male privilege.  Personally though, I thought this was good fun.  

The cast are all solid, delivering the film's constant stream of banter in a natural and entertaining style. Kristen Stewart in particular, in the role of Sabina, demonstrates excellent comic timing.  

The film offers good action set pieces, too.  There's a good variety of types of action; fist fights, gun fights, car chases and foot races; in a broad variety of locations, and the narrative purpose of each scene is clearly defined.  This scene is about saving Elena from the assassin; this scene is about trying to recover the Calisto prototype; and so on.

With the exception of camera's tendency to ogle Kristen Stewart's bottom, this movie feels more truly feminist than the earlier iterations.  Let's not forget the original got a lot of mileage out of 'attractive women get tied up'.  I have a strong suspicion that this cost it with critics and male audiences.

If the film has a weakness, it is that it perhaps puts a bit too much focus organisation the Angels work for, and assumed knowledge about the Townsend Agency.  I think when you're re-starting the franchise after a long break, as this was trying to do, it might be better to go with a more stand-alone storyline.

Paper Girls, Season 1 (2022)

 

1 November, 1988.  Four young women (Mac, Tiff, KJ and Erin) rise in the pre-dawn hours to begin their jobs as bicycle-riding paper delivery girls.  For Erin, it is her first day on the job.  For the others, it is 'the worst day of the year', as they know that Halloween's most dedicated (and often inebriated) celebrants are still out and about, and will almost certainly get in their way and complicate their jobs.

This year, though, there are even stranger folk about than the usual ghosts and witches.  Strangely-clad outsiders, speaking a foreign language, steal a walkie-talkie the girls are using.  When the four teenagers pursue, they stumble into a conflict between warring factions of time-travellers.  The deadliness of said conflict is soon made apparent, and as the quartet scramble to survive, and the sky turns pink, they find their escape path leading them into the very strange world of 2019 ...

This show is based on a comic book of the same name, but I think it is a fairly loose adaptation.  While the TV show and comic share the same core cast and the same basic premise, a lot of the plot specifics seem to be different.  Certainly, the girls' initial jump into the future in the comic is only to the 1990s, not the modern day.   My knowledge of the comic is fairly limited, though.

Judged purely on its own merits the TV show is a pretty solid one.  It is perhaps a little slow to get started, but once the cast reach 2019 - which is by the end of the first episode - things begin to motor along quite well.

The cast is definitely one of the strengths of the show. All four of the young actors are very good.  They're all obviously a bit older than the characters they are supposed to be playing, though not quite to the "30 year olds pretending to be in high school" standards of some other TV shows.  And when that's the only complaint I can level against them, they are clearly doing their jobs well! 

The supporting cast are also good.  I particularly enjoyed Mac's interactions with her vastly more grown-up brother in the modern day, and when they later end up in the 1990s, KJ's encounters with her older self's girlfriend were delightfully done.

Budgetary constraints clearly were something of a limitation on the show.  In an era where producers are spending tens of millions of dollars per episode, Paper Girls has a decidedly less opulent look to it.  We're certainly not at early 1980s BBC levels of poverty, but there is a clear gap between the money being splashed on screen here and what I saw in a show like Carnival Row.

Alas, the show does not seem to have found the audience it deserved, and has been cancelled after one season.  It's a shame I won't get to see the end of the Paper Girls' story (or at least, the TV version thereof - I could still read the comic!), but I am sure I will see the cast in other things.  They definitely deserve success.

Hotel Artemis (2018)

 

On June 21, 2028, a riot breaks out in Los Angeles over the privatization of the city's water supply. In the midst of the chaos, professional criminal Sherman attempts a bank robbery.  This goes badly wrong, leaving half his team dead and his brother Lev critically wounded.  They don't even get away with much in the way of spoils, though Lev does steal a fancy pen from a well-dressed bank customer, despite the man saying that doing so is a terrible mistake. 

Sherman and Lev escape to the nearby Hotel Artemis, a secretive hospital that treats only criminals.  This is run by "The Nurse", who has not been outside the Hotel for 22 years, due to her severe agoraphobia and her grief over the death of her son.  The Nurse has a strict set of rules for the hospital: "No weapons", "No non-members", and "No killing of other guests".

Of course, the fact that we're watching a movie ought to clue you into the fact that pretty much all of these rules are going to be tested during the next couple of hours ...

Hotel Artemis has a truly top notch cast, several good action scenes, and some snappy dialogue, but it unfortunately felt rather less than the sum of its parts, to me.  I place most of the blame for this on the execution of the sub-plots.  One example is the Nurse's breaching of her very own rules.  This whole sub-plot feels a bit orphaned.  While it does tie into the Nurse's trauma about her son, it doesn't really connect up to the broader action within the hospital on this particular night, and the exposition it delivered could easily have come from somewhere else that potentially could have been used to strengthen our understanding of other, more central themes of the film.

Similarly, one major character's fate is left essentially unresolved. I don't actually hate this as an idea.  The character's personal journey has arguably already been 'finished' through the choices they make and the reasons behind them.  But I don't feel that the execution quite works: it doesn't feel finished, even if it technically is.  I suspect this is because the characters choices feel more like they are made to facilitate someone else's story, rather than to complete their own.

This lack of a sense of conclusion is actually a recurring theme within the film; for most of the characters, I was left saying "wait, that's the ending you're giving them?".  The whole movie feels like a case of an intriguing premise that doesn't deliver on its promise.

I will say that I did appreciate the film's trenchant criticism of the privatisation of essential utilities like water and law enforcement. Thumbs up for that at least.

Killjoys, Season 4 (2018)

Dutch, D'Avin, Jonny and the rest of the Killjoys crew have discovered that the real enemy behind the alien menace of the Hullen is "The Lady", a mysterious and malevolent entity that exists in the psychic(?) stasis realm of "The Green", and who seeks a way to (re-)enter our world through the minds and memories of humanity.  If she ever succeeds, it would mean Bad Things.

This fourth batch of Killjoys episodes reminds me a lot of season 2.  Like that season, a major theme here is that your enemies might not be who you think they are, and that the obvious "bad guys" might have good reasons for their apparent malevolence.

That's a potentially interesting arc to explore, but as with season 2, I don't think it really works.  These ten episodes have to justify a pretty huge shift in not one but two enemies into allies, and for my tastes it has pretty limited success in doing so.  These characters have shown active pleasure in their own 'wickedness' before now, and their journey to the side of the angels is pretty much justified solely by the old rubric 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

Also like season 2, I think this series suffers from trying to do too much, too fast.  The show covers a lot of ground here, in addition to the shifting alliances there is a new arachnid menace, a cross-species pregnancy which leads to a baby that rapidly develops into a 'vital to the plot' teenager, and all sorts of other shenanigans.  For my tastes, even as individuals elements and episodes can be quite enjoyable, it doesn't really gel as a whole.

A Star is Born (2018)

 

Ally is a waitress with aspirations to be a singer-songwriter.  One night she is performing an Edith Piaf number at a local drag bar, she is spotted by country rock superstar Jackson Maine.

Maine is struck by Ally's powerful vocals and stage presence.  It doesn't hurt that he finds her easy on the eyes, as well.  The two go on an impromptu, rather rambling date, where Ally sings some of the lyrics she has written.

This new relationship with Ally, and the energy she brings to his life, his music and his tour, revitalises Jackson at a time when his alcohol and drug problems were beginning to damage his career.  The two fall in love, get married, and make beautiful music together.

But as Ally's star begins to glow ever brighter, Jackson feels the shadows creeping back.  Can Ally's light really keep his darkness at bay, and what will be the repercussions for her, if it can't?

This is the fourth filmed version of A Star is Born, and the third to be set in the music industry (in the original, the setting was Hollywood itself).  It's not technically a musical - no-one narrates their feelings or provides plot exposition via song - but music is definitely an integral part of the story.  And on that front, it is a triumph.  The smash hit "Shallow" is clearly the stand-out number, and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but all of the original songs, principally written by the film's two main stars in collaboration with Lukas Nelson, are impactful and memorable.  They are a key part of the movie's success as a work of entertainment.

The casting is also excellent.  For me, Lady Gaga was a real revelation as she proved more than capable of holding her own as a Hollywood leading actor.  I can see from IMDB that it was not her first role, but it does seem to be the first on this kind of scale, and she looks entirely at home.

The rest of the cast is also good.  Bradley Cooper does a good job of making Jackson Maine into a flawed man, bordering on a screw-up, while still remaining sympathetic.  Sam Elliott is as dependable as always.  Perhaps the biggest surprise outside of Lady Gaga was seeing former shock comedian Andrew Dice Clay turn up as Ally's father, Lorenzo.  Apparently this is a role that Robert De Niro was interested in, and I have to say that as good as De Niro is, I don't think the film lost anything at all by using Clay.

If I were to make one complaint about the film - and it's me, so I will almost always find at least one complaint to make - its that the narrative ultimately centres Jackson more than Ally.  Despite the fact that Ally is the bright new star, and the one on the rise, the film is much more about how her arrival and ascent impacts Jackson, than on Ally's experience.  When this story gets filed for the fifth time - which is almost certainly will, though perhaps not in my lifespan - I hope that we finally get a version that centres the female character's experiences and ambitions.

That one quibble aside, however, this is an exceptionally well-made film.  It's not as emotionally powerful on the second and subsequent viewings as the first, but few things are.

Well worth seeing.