Well, readers, as promised, a renewal — the second part of this return-to-form, to catch ourselves up on the last 4.5 months of streaming releases, TV and film alike.
I hope by straddling in the more recent titles amidst the less recent ones, each new part will both recover the past and reconsider what’s new — this time with a careful character study from one of our living cinema’s greatest acting directors, two fantasy series about asserting personal identity, and two lightweight films about the business of show.
The Wheel of Time (Season 2)
Amazon Prime • Drama / Fantasy • One’s Own Merits
Synopsis
Six people wrestle for control over themselves, so that they may later return control to others.
My take
Despite at best reluctant reviews for its premiere season (see mine from November 2021 here), The Wheel of Time returned to our screens in early September with three initial episodes; and, to my surprise and delight, these three episodes opened many doors, both literal and figurative, liberating the series’ potential from the rough confines it squeaked through in its début eight episodes. The improvement was palpable, even without considering the obvious bump in funding it (like so many other series that could) received heading into its sophomore season. Yes, it’s really the writing that has expanded the practical and conceptual world of The Wheel of Time this time around, primarily by upending expectations and pressing established characters against the limits of their identifying characteristics. Protagonist Moiraine Sedai (still played dutifully by the generally under-appreciated Rosamund Pike) is now cut off from the Source, a reality the new season wastes no time in exploring for its weight onto her otherwise rarely exposed psyche. Several other previously concealed characters also see their motivations and complications exposed, enriching the interpersonal drama, especially in response to the first season’s final diaspora of the six central characters. Now spending time among more carefully constructed arrays of supporting characters, each of those six central figures must act and reäct more carefully than ever before. It’s compelling stuff.
The unequivocal cherry atop this sundae season, however, is certainly the deeper arcana the primary plot provides in one of my favorite tropes: the ritual of progressive skills. Weakly but consistently represented in many other adolescent — especially supernaturally adolescent — dramas (e.g., in the TriWizard Tournament within Rowling’s [1997-2007] Harry Potter series, in the eponymous games within Collins’ [2008-2010] Hunger Games series), the ritual of progressive skills has shone best on screen twice to my recollection:
in Princess Moanna’s three-part quest for the Faun in del Toro’s (2006) El Laberinto del Fauno, and
(perhaps ironically) in Tris’ faction test in Burger (dir.), Daugherty, and Taylor’s (wri.; 2014) Divergent.
In both these examples, the adolescent protagonist is pressed to mature through a vice on her deepest and dearest fears and aspirations. Not only must she quickly learn to subdue and control the instinctive reactions her often primal emotions inspire, in order to not fail (or — worse — die), but also must she just as quickly learn to replace those primal reactions with reasoned strategies. This transformation must prove her not simply a person who can ‘play the game’ but moreover a person who can understand and react to the entire board. In Cartesian terms, it’s the lesson of an embodied mind recognizing that it actually holds the reins to its body (and not the other way around).
All good writers of coming-of-age dramas recognize this ritual’s importance, whether their stories be supernatural or not (for a non-supernatural example see:
Juno’s relationship with Mark and Vanessa in Reitmann [dir.] and Cody’s [wri.; 2007] Juno,
the conversion therapy experience in Edgerton’s [2016] Boy Erased, or
the near entirety of Wells’ brilliant [2022] Aftersun).
Unlike his or her notable peers in each text, the protagonist who (often at great pain and/or against heavy odds) prevails through the trial(s) then emerges an adult — at least, a beginner version of one — a designation often diegetically recognized as much for its responsibility as for its possibility. In essence, the ritual commends the character from the wailing grasps of untrained youth into the autonomous aims of a focussed adulthood. This season The Wheel of Time happily grants us six such trials, each tailored to one of the six original members of the group that set forth from the Two Rivers in season one. While not all of these trials are equally neatly packaged or obvious to the audience, together they make a compelling and thematically united season. The clearest and best, Nynaeve’s trial of the Arches, had me literally applauding from my sofa.
I suppose, if you’re not the type of person who geeks out on shorthand depictions of adolescence or fantasy dramas, then this show won’t ever be for you; but, for all of you who can appreciate the YA-like grist, this new season of The Wheel of Time is:
Temperature check
Hot
Theater Camp (2023)
Hulu • Comedy • Curtains
Synopsis
A theater camp in upstate New York must figure out how to survive after its co-founder and director slips suddenly into a coma.
My take
Best for its comic asides to Noah Galvin’s latently talented Glenn and for its winkingly insipid yet still somehow touching final number (“Camp Isn’t Home”), Theater Camp, the culturally masturbatory brain child of the dubiously “talented” Molly Gordon and her friends Nick Liebermann and Ben Platt — I’ll spare Galvin the immediate association — is a middling farce whose ever tighter circles around adolescent theater nerds’ inside jokes leave little room for theater-agnostic viewers to run with and actually enjoy the comedy. While I fully admit that the idea of Joan, Still (i.e., the absurdist’s idea of a musical within the screenplay) was and is a brilliant one, the disconnection that the plot chooses to impose between itself and that great joke — a disconnection that sadly consumes screen time exclusively for an utterly uninteresting performance from Gordon herself — prevents the film’s inspiration from ever really making its solid mark (save only perhaps that one final number).
My honest recommendation, readers? Unless you’re regularly bopping to “Best of Broadway” showtunes in your ears, then this one is NOT for you. Don’t believe me? Check out Graff’s far more engaging (and far better sung; 2003) Camp (featuring young Tony, Emmy, and Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick) and only thereafter, if you’re earnestly still craving more of the like, come back for Theater Camp.
Temperature check
Cold
The Holdovers (2023)
Peacock • Comedy • Letting It Go
Synopsis
A curmudgeonly teacher at a New England boarding school reluctantly redresses lapses in the educations of students whose parents left them alone over winter break.
My take
Da’vine Joy Randolph is poised to win the Oscar this year for her thrilling supporting work in Alexander Payne’s new film, The Holdovers.
The first Giamatti-Payne collaboration in nearly 20 years (since the pair inimitably collaborated over Merlot in Napa Valley; see Sideways, 2004), it is a thrill to see the two at work together again. Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is a perfect fit for the actor’s talents: a shrill, sheepish, tyrannical, compassionate, insensitive “student of the old guard” who issues Latin from a lectern with as much concentrated fervor as a laser from a high tower — the man must have been such fun for Giamatti to play! For his efforts, I wouldn’t be surprised if Giamatti too walked away with more than one golden trophy this awards season.
However, the queen of this film is, indeed, Da’vine Joy Randolph herself. Rendering a heartbreaking performance as an aggrieved mother on staff at the boarding school where Giamatti’s Hunham teaches, Randolph swims with articulate finesse through both the shallow and slow and the deep and choppy waters her character as written must cross. Perhaps more than any other supporting performance this year — from a male or female actor — she made me believe that she WAS that character; and the emotional story of her arc on paper, when followed with such fidelity, becomes its own reward.
Beyond these central performances and the capable hands Payne and his screenwriter David Hemingson used to respectively direct and pen them for the screen, The Holdovers shines most and best via its depiction of setting: the careful yet expansive designs of the production, the period-perfect make-up and hair, and the tinted cinematography, which together instantly convey the time and feel of the action in each scene. One needs only the single frame of the boys with long shaggy hair in loosened ties amidst the frosty tundra of December’s New England, to understand instinctively the where and the when of the environment.
Certainly a personal Top 10 film this year, The Holdovers is well worth the watch.
Temperature check
Hot
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (Season 1)
AMC+ • Drama / Horror • The Optics of Desire
Synopsis
A repressed Black businessman receives lessons in blood and bacchanalia from a haunting new friend in early 20th-century New Orleans and from a haunted old journalist in mid-pandemic Dubai.
My take
Like most of us I expect, I completely missed the official début of this series in fall 2022, when it was released on its home streaming service, AMC+. Fortunately for at least me, AMC+ was running a “pop-up event” on Max through the end of October, so I revisited the oversight.
And this one, readers, may indeed be worth your gander. A gothic goose, feathered according to its original taxonomy, this new adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (Rice, 1976) is surprisingly a worthwhile reïnvention of what could have once been the epic on-screen romance between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Yes, this new adaptation embraces the homoëroticism that Neil Jordan’s (1994) film conveniently scratched out, but doesn’t rest on any laurel there. No, this new adaptation also meaningfully updates setting and enveloping structure: Now the journalist, some years his original’s senior, remeets the vampire Lestat in his modern mid-pandemic apartment in Dubai for an immediately obvious dive into the coincident and competing varnishes of excess over decay and quarantine over curiosity. Much as Rice sketched out the story begging readers to examine their own notions around class, sex, and desire in the superficially bleak light of vampirism, a centuries-old discoloration of malady tinged with hunger, so now does Jones (creator) and the rest of his creative team imbue that sketch with modern hues, begging viewers to examine their own notions around disease, cold war, economic disparity, and interpersonal politics in the sallow but industrial glaze of a vampire’s darkened 2022 apartment. No, this modern vampire cannot suffer and die from a pandemic, but that immunity is meant as no consolation; the character entreats the curious to flirt with their own mortalities all the same. Drawing close to anyone, vampire or not, implicates a person into real risks. Where does one find the right balance? Which is bravery and which else, monstrosity? And is single-mindedness a kind of immortality, a mental perseverance over time onto an idea or philosophy that only age and change can cure?
This first season, understandably, provides no answers except more questions; and perhaps it’s on the strength of Rice’s original story beats alone that this relentless interrogation without discussion remains upright throughout all its seven episodes, asking as much as it does; but there is something charming and faint — the memory of a strong heart — here, especially in Sam Reid’s callously manipulative leading performance, that keeps this one going, even when the beat-by-beat replay occasionally feels like a dull replica.
Temperature check
Tepid
The Burial (2023)
Amazon Prime • Drama • Objection
Synopsis
A droopy Southern businessman hires a flashy personal-injury lawyer to sue a Canadian corporation for breach of contract.
My take
Fine leading and supporting performances from Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones salvage the tatters of a screenplay that, albeit based on true events, somehow feels paper thin.
A film about the encouragement of noble enterprise in especially the predominantly Black American South, The Burial is “feel good” fare for anyone seeking a completely innocuous, completely safe drama set within the social and legal systems of the mid 1990s. Spineless in the way prime critics of Greenbook (Farrelly [dir./wri.], Vallelonga, & Hayes Currie [wri.], 2018) assaulted that film’s craft and narrative in early 2019, this film shines only through the performances of its actors: Foxx right at home in the shoes of a garish and bombastic salesman of an attorney and Jones tailor-made for the lugubrious but optimistic client aspiring for a good cause. Foxx’ lead flounders only when forced to consider the actual legal grounds on which the case in focus in the film actually rests; a performance better for the dazzle than the deed, his greatest chemistry (with, for example, his on-screen wife, Amanda Warren) imbues the film with the attractively unserious heart it needs to win over mass audiences uninterested in the tougher chords of actual lawful scrutiny and preferring only the veneer of its socially applauded trappings. Jones, on the other hand, sings, never floundering in his support as much as restless in a character he clearly understands so well but seemingly is given so little to do with on the page.
With a better screenwriter, this would-be-compelling legal drama could have sat alongside A Few Good Men (Reiner [dir.] & Sorkin [wri.], 1992) and Philadelphia (Demme [dir.] & Nyswaner [wri.], 1993) in our collective cultural memory of especially popular and acclaimed courtroom features reminiscent of the American 1990s. As it is, it’ll likely fade away into obscurity without so much as a second glance at what is honestly a fairly interesting non-fiction story.
Temperature check
Tepid
The vampires are tepid. Perhaps room-temperature. Comes with being undead I think.