[Hot Tea] April 4th - May 1st
Serving #16
Readers! Readers. My sincere apologies for having skipped a serving two weeks ago. Suffice it to say here, my schedule has unfortunately been edging out my tea times recently.
Never fear, however! We are not omitting any content here. Today’s serving is meant to cover the full slate of new streaming media that’s premiered over the past month.
If the e-mail distribution cuts off this post, because of its volume, be sure to click through to the full website OR download the brand new Substack iOS app. to read the entire post. (If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.)
I Love That for You (Series Premiere)
Showtime • Comedy • Workplace
Synopsis
A survivor of childhood leukemia attempts to live out her professional dream as a host on a fictional equivalent of the Home Shopping Network (HSN).
My take
Vanessa Bayer is the protagonist of one of my all-time favorite comedy clips to share with others: an L.A.(?) brunch scene from Netflix’ under-acknowledged I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Robinson & Kanin [creators], 2019). Showtime’s new I Love That for You feels like the fever-dreamt extension of one sketch from that show, a torturous but rewardingly comic scrutinization of the anxiety-riddled tension between the desire for more for the self and the shame of what it often costs to realize that desire. Grabbing the golden ring necessarily means grabbing it away from other people *and* letting go of whatever else one previously may have been holding.
As our aspiring ring holder, Bayer is the ideal centerpiece for such a comedy; her signature scrunching, self-apologetic awkwardness is the firm (if staccato) bass note that this type of comedy needs, a note above which irregular harmonies of uncertain resolve, seeming connection, and fleeting contentment can be played as if on strings to delight the audience. Partner players in these harmonies, Bayer’s costars Molly Shannon and Jenifer Lewis, the proverbial carrot and stick respectively of personal motivation, offer sparkling humor and dry wit and appear (at least initially) well cast also (though it remains to be seen whether the arc of the series, or at least its first season, will allow them the growth space to transform their two-dimensional tandem pair into anything more three-dimensionally human).
That parenthetical task is now the show’s challenge: elaborate not just the context or obstacles Bayer’s protagonist must face, but moreover the characters who populate that context or create or reject those obstacles. If successful, the show could exceed its current “expanded sketch” category, however temporarily entertaining on its own that categorization may in fact be.
Temperature check
Hot (but cooling?)
Ozark (Season 4 Part 2 — Series Finale)
Netflix • Drama • The Good of the Family
Synopsis
After the dissolution of their plan to free themselves from indenture to a Mexican cartel by its head’s erratic nephew, a Midwestern husband and wife tread a delicate balance between power and force in order to stay alive and together despite external contests and hardships.
My take
I wrestled hard with the earlier part of Ozark’s final season. As excited as I was for the story to be reaching its conclusion, I lamented the choices the storytellers were making in finding a way to reach the drama’s end. A cataclysmic catalyst ex machina was not, in my opinion, the right way to cure a drama in its final moments.
Now on the other side of that debate, I am relieved to say that, in this later and final part of Ozark (newly released in its entirety on Netflix this past Friday), the storytellers appear to have reconsidered. Without giving away too much, I can say that the degree of internal work the writers have done to use what they already had in a final flourish is admirable and feels much more à propos of the show I came to love in its prior three seasons than the show it was turning out to be this past fall.
Story beats aside, I must add, there’s never been a better time or case for Jason Bateman’s conflicted reserve. In the series’ final seven episodes, he does everything necessary in order to win the Emmy award for Lead Actor in a Drama series. Hopefully, the Television Academy will notice — both him and Laura Linney’s outstanding directing of, in my opinion, the best episode of these final seven, the fourth.
Temperature check
Hot
The Batman (2022)
HBOMax • Action • The Man, the Mythos, the Madness
Synopsis
Persistently troubled by his past, the caped crusader untangles a web of lies and political deceit in order to jail a notable nemesis early in his career.
My take
To any movie-goër weaned on Christopher Nolan’s idea of the Batman or even on Tim Burton’s, Matt Reeves’ will look like heresy. Not the sleek agile dark knight of justice nor the unquakably stern comic playboy of Gotham, this new sophomoric instance, actually in his second year of fighting crime, shows Reeves’ earliest roots in writing and directing: his work creating and steering The WB’s hit series Felicity (1998-2002). While of course Keri Russell’s and Robert Pattinson’s characters have little in common except perhaps their faintingly pallid complexions, beneath the surface their shared naïveté at navigating themselves within a simulacrum of New York City makes them two of a kind. What this parallelism does for the Batman series in the long term is yet to be determined, but judging from the short term of this film I’d wager that over-exposition, dull vignettes, and a tiresome “Will he? Won’t he?” are in our future. It’s not that this new take on the DC character is inevitably bad per se; it’s just that I, and I’d expect you, don’t have the emotional stamina to care about three hours of nuanced but fictional “good vs. evil” political intrigue dyed beige and rarely punctuated by actual action, however well researched the whole of it may be re: the source material. Take note, Reeves, if you be reading: Reverential adherence to cultural history is gilding lilies for no one’s garden, when that history is long-removed from your audience’s experience. To that audience — no, let’s say it properly — to us, readers, attempting to read such a history will be as alienating as any of the Riddler’s coded queries, to any everyday observer not already in on the joke.
Temperature check
Cold
The First Lady (Series Premiere)
Showtime • Drama • Historical Fiction
Synopsis
Three women in different eras of modern American history must adjust to a role required of them by their husbands’ careers.
My take
It seems to me, readers, that Showtime has been making an extra effort recently to ‘make good’ on its paid streaming platform; with The First Lady and I Love That for You now premiering and Super Pumped (Koppelman & Levien [creators], 2022) recently ended, the network appears to be once again striving for attention share by means of quality in the market. I’m glad. Viola Davis owning a project offering her an extremely meaty and popular role is more of what I want to see on my screens, and I am definitely entertained by the result, just as I was while watching Super Pumped.
My critical thoughts about The First Lady, however, are mixed. Beyond the entertainment factor, the show (in its first three episodes at least) feels a bit fumbly. Here’s why: It feels uncertain about its own path, too uncertain to be stable.
A descendent of:
the B storylines in the HBO Originals:
Game Change (Roach [dir.] & Strong [wri.], 2012) starring Julianne Moore in her Emmy Award winning role as Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and
John Adams (Hooper [dir.] & Ellis [wri.], 2008) starring Laura Linney in her Emmy Award winning role as the nation’s second First Lady, Abigail Adams;
FX’s Emmy-nominated Blanchett-led Mrs. America (Waller [creator], 2020); and
Netflix’ core drama (the first show to ever sweep all seven “top” Emmy Drama categories in a single year) The Crown (Morgan [creator], 2016 - Present),
The First Lady tries to take an incisive look at the actual events transpiring in the political power circles around and about notable women — a good goal, readers. However, “tries” here is importantly not “succeeds.”
Success would mean, in my eyes, better use of the raw materials the show naturally has as talents. Consider the premise alone: a behind-the-scenes political drama foregrounding real women in history. This premise alone is rich with material, on several counts.
Behind-the-scenes political dramas like Michael Clayton (Gilroy, 2007) and The Tragedie of Macbeth (Shakespeare, 1623) are fundamentally flush with tension and consequently ripe fruit for any ambitious actor. (Consider what Tilda Swinton was able to do within Michael Clayton, for example. Apart from her generally recognized skills, the reason why she was able to give perhaps the best supporting performance from an actress in the past 15 years there was the material: darkly political and tense, ripe for dramatic exposition and storytelling.)
When political dramas are based on real events, they’re all the more interesting, especially for anyone in the audience who remembers the events — or at least their “on-stage” versions — from having lived through them. (For me — and, I’d wager, for all of you — such is the case with at least Davis’ Obama storyline in this new series.)
Female-centered political dramas offer eyes onto otherwise under-acknowledged trade-offs people striving for influence make between their social expectations and their own individual desires, and (at least to me) these trade-offs are far more interesting than the raw contests for ‘power among the already powerful’ that most male-centered but otherwise similarly set political dramas tend to offer. (If you need convincing here, revisit The Wolf of Wall Street [Scorcese (dir.) & Winter (wri.), 2013], the A storylines of Game Change and John Adams, or even the shift from the early to the late seasons of House of Cards [Willimon (creator), 2013-2018] to see the contrast.)
With Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson joining Davis as First Ladies Betty Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Michelle Obama respectively, this début season additionally entices with its cast, which Davis hopes will be the first of many featuring high-profile actresses playing these otherwise behind-the-scenes figures in history. Coupling the virtues of the premise with those of the cast feels like a first-rate recipe for success, or at least for a show that knows where it’s going. Owing to that recipe, I started watching with sincere interest but, now having watched the first three episodes, I’m wondering whether that interest will ever really pay out. In other words, is there enough substance in the show beyond its initial blush of material, to allow it to offer more than just mid-depth readings of the human stories at its center? Are the talents that the show inherently has being used well enough, to draw out those deeper readings from its premises? So far, contrary to my expectations, it feels like, no, with the possible exception of Anderson’s storyline. Roosevelt’s sharp mind and eye, grown in connection with the White House while her uncle Teddy was in office there, make her story the deepest cutting (even if Davis’ Obama will inevitably draw in more viewers).
Of course, there is the through-line: Women intimately connected with the men who led the country played instrumental roles in getting those men into that leading role, each in her own specific way and with her own specific costs to career, time, and ambition. Yet, that through line charts only the path from A to B, with nothing to say about how quickly or deeply we travel that path.
Maybe the rub here is that there is little to uncover about the personal and professional life and struggles of a woman so constantly in the public eye over the past 15 years as Michelle Obama, so little that even a proper peek behind the “on stage” version of her life to which the voting populace was privy over the actual course of those 15 years feels like a ‘weak tea’ reading of a otherwise rich and rewarding human story. That Roosevelt’s life and struggles stand out the most here and simultaneously are the farthest removed from our collective social memory may thus be no coïncidence. Still, even if that lack of proper calibration were true, its consequence would be, I think, that we judge Anderson’s storyline less leniently than we have, not Davis’ more so.
Ultimately I just feel that, if we’re going to give these women the A storylines in a major platform’s ‘hero’ series, then we need to spend A-level effort at presenting and understanding them, effort that in my head looks a lot more like the broken montage of Swinton’s anxiety-riddled self-prep. in Michael Clayton or Blanchett’s generally tense uncertainty in Elizabeth (Kapur [dir.] & Hirst [wri.], 1998) than like Obama’s poisedly confronting the media in order to walk her daughters to school.
I believe that the material is there, show-writers. I hope you find it.
Temperature check
Tepid
Barry (Season 3 Premiere)
HBOMax • Comedy • Point & Shoot
Synopsis
Pushed past the breaking point, an aspiring actor tries to set to rights the history of corruption and murder he can’t seem to shake.
My take
It’s Act III of Bill Hader’s off-kilter romance about a mild-mannered former soldier turned hitman and his love of acting, and the glass on the emergency supplies is already shattered. The main character and by extension we in the audience are left to either cut ourselves on the shards while we’re rummaging through the chaos for sustenance, or else quit altogether. Either pathway could be the better one; it’s impossible to tell right now. All I know is, the shrill note of absolute breaking that still hangs in the air has left my ears ringing, and there is no going back: there is only forwards. Bang, bang, readers. How do you react?
Temperature check
Tepid
Russian Doll (Season 2)
Netflix • Comedy • e=mc^2
Synopsis
Years after the events of the first season, the sardonic granddaughter of a Hungarian immigrant attempts to better her family’s history when mysterious circumstances allow her to loop back through time.
My take
Solipsism, my friend, I didn’t know you were invited.
In what feels like an unofficial theme of this serving of Hot Tea, we find ourselves staring down yet another new installment into an existing series without any idea whatsoever of what to do with itself after killing its complex prior life/lives. Ozark managed to find its path, The Batman sadly did not, and Barry can’t yet remember whether or not it loaded the gun it’s aimed at us. Of all these stories, however, Russian Doll is the most egregious, mainly because it had the most promise and the least follow-through.
Russian Doll’s first season was a remarkable piece of episodic television. A series that knew what it was and what it wanted, the season weaved together a highly intricate tapestry that we in the audience together were all the more delighted to find out was actually one continuous thread. It made storytelling history, despite reüsing a nearly hackneyed device famously first introduced to mass audiences in Ramis and Rubin’s (1993) Groundhog Day and despite taking on a rather glib attitude about it. Thematically consistent yet inventive, the season earned its 13(!) Primetime Emmy nominations, including two for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series and three technical wins (for its cinematography, production design, and costumes).
Russian Doll Season 2, by contrast, breaks its loom. In fact, I’m not even sure that it’s even trying to weave anymore, the results so far from internal or methodical consistency with season one. I suppose, if you step back far enough and squint, you can kind of see the resemblance between a highly regularized time loop and relatively free-wheeling time travel; they’re both non-standard time pathways… But, I ask you, readers, is this the begrudging calculus we want to be performing in order to find credit for this new season? Where’s the detailed storytelling, the dramatic and personal writing, the careful consideration of the context? Better, where’s the resolution of the cliffhanger divide between worlds at the end of Season 1? I don’t know about you, readers, but a “let’s just erase all that and start off with something totally new but still vaguely similar” attitude is not it for me. I don’t need a rehash. I just want the story to grow organically. In only a few minor ways does that organic growth happen here. The rest, I’m afraid, is self-cannabilistic weeds.
Ouroboros, ouroboros, ouroboros.
Temperature check
Cold
Heartstopper (Season 1)
Netflix • Drama • Teen-aged Romance
Synopsis
The chance seating of a star athlete next to a queer pariah catalyzes connections for both characters that threaten social fraction elsewhere.
My take
A recent interview of actors Kit Connor and Joe Locke on iTV’s This Morning frustrated me. The actors and the interviewers alike claimed that nothing like Netflix’s new queer teen drama Heartstopper had ever been available before. Now, I recognize that this type of hyperbole is meant as marketing device, designed to drum up as much excitement about and interest in the new show as possible. The more excitement and interest, the more viewers; the more viewers, the more subscribers; the more subscribers, the better Netflix’s return on investing in the series and others of its kind in the first place. It’s a business choice, plain and simple, one executed safely indirectly through the words of its series’ young and naïve actors. Still, the unchallenged existence of the wholly untrue claim is a distraction from reality. Let me, in the course of this take, set the record straight.
Though there are many ways to classify Heartstopper (e.g., a teen drama, a queer romance, a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story), there is no way to classify it as the first of its kind.
Get Real (Shore [dir.] & Wilde, 1998),
Juno (Reitman [dir.] & Cody [wri.], 2007),
Beautiful Thing (MacDonald [dir.] & Harvey [wri.], 1996),
The Way He Looks (Ribeiro, 2014),
Mario (Gisler [dir./wri.], Hess, & Moriette [wri.], 2018),
Glee (Murphy, Falchuk, & Brennan, 2009-2015),
Bend It like Beckham (Chadha [dir./wri.], Bindra, & Mayeda Berges [wri.], 2002),
Queer as Folk (Davies [creator], 1999-2005),
Maurice (Forster, 1913),
My Own Private Idaho (van Sant, 1991),
Call Me by Your Name (Guadagnino [dir.] & Ivory [wri.], 2017),
Three Months (Frieder, 2022), and
Netflix’s own Sex Education (Nunn [creator], 2019 - Present)
are just some of the many fair to outstanding streamable media available, center-staging stories about adolescents’ coming to terms with their sexualities with one another. Most of the titles above deal with specifically queer characters or themes, and three even deal specifically with field sports as an important in-story setting. The oldest reaches back over 100 years, and the most recent I reviewed on this very Substack not more than three months ago. So, to even entertain the idea that Heartstopper is in any way groundbreaking is, therefore, to believe a fantasy.
That necessary correction out the way, my take on Heartstopper, readers, is otherwise generally positive. It delivers on its promises, and — for those of you who haven’t fully absorbed the cast list — hides 2018 ‘Rich Pick’ Olivia Colman in a supporting role as the mother of one of the two main characters. In short, it’s the exact type of narrative fiction Jared Frieder wanted to make with Troye Sivan and Ellen Burstyn earlier this year: Definitely better than “the slightly better than made-for-TV rom-com gay teens didn’t know they were looking for,” Heartstopper is tender and sweet, if (forgivably) melodramatic, and affords young queer love the space everyone ideally would have to explore, grow, and enjoy strong connections.
Expect to be charmed, but not wowed.
Temperature check
Tepid
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
Netflix • Documentary • The Ivory Torso
Synopsis
Corporate advertising effecting racism in beauty and fashion shakes down a once top-tier brand of young American streetwear.
My take
Ever been with someone who made you feel like trash but who was ‘o so hot’? Ever want to scream at that person, “You’re a MONSTERRRRR!!”, and then casually backwrite any affection you actually once had for that person? Ever wish that that diatribe cum correction could take place gradually over 1.5 hours of documentary and inter-spliced interview footage?
Temperature check
Tepid
Tokyo Vice (Season 1)
HBO • Drama • Yakuza, Ya lose eh?
Synopsis
Through his ambition to become a crime journalist in Japan, a young American finds himself imbroiled in a corrupt system controlled by organized crime.
My take
Who here is an Ansel Elgort fan? I’m peering out into the imagined crowd you’re virtually making for me, readers, and seeing maybe one or two hands, maybe — and understandably so. The worst part of last year’s West Side Story (Spielberg & Kushner) — even for the people who liked the film — and the forgettable romantic lead in adolescent dramas like The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Divergent (2014), Elgort is a bit like the present-day Errol Flynn: a fair stand-in and attractive enough centerpiece to ground lightly dramatic romances, but no seriously gifted actor by anyone’s estimate.
In Tokyo Vice, Elgort’s unremarkable passability, however, actually helps him. He is maybe a better fit for the lead character, a relatively physically unassuming but determined American crime journalist living in Tokyo, than anyone else I can think of. If ever he were to turn in a good performance, it would be here.
Having now watched the entire season of Tokyo Vice, I think Elgort succeeds, but only mildly. Quirkily, he and his character shine brightest, pushing the show to shine also, in those tone-breaking moments that help balance the otherwise dire subjects of the plot. In one such moment, Elgort’s Jake Adelstein and his perhaps friend / perhaps “colleague,” a young conflicted member of the yakuza, sing “I Want It That Way” by The Backstreet Boys loudly in a car together as they drive through Tokyo. That intersection of worlds, of languages, of cultures, and of genres is the sparky mix that lifts Tokyo Vice from cut-and-dry crime drama to interesting character study. The scene is minor, and it may seem flippant, but it’s meaningful.
For the characters, the song exchange signifies:
a growing bond in their willingness to be vulnerable, albeit in a small way, with each other for perhaps the first real time and,
simultaneously, a mutual recognizance of their individual humanities, thrown together elsewhere in tension and conflict perhaps much more by incompatible circumstances than by incompatible beliefs.
For the show, the exchange underscores the time and the mood of the main action; it reminds us not only that the story is set in 1999 but also that the characters’ realities are, quite unlike the tenor of the song, truly grim.
For the audience, beyond that reminder, the exchange simply offers us time to breathe, to release the breath we may have been holding during the scenes of dramatic tension immediately preceding it, and to allow ourselves to embrace these characters, even when we instinctively may be wary of one, if not both.
Altogether, it’s in those almost easy, fleeting moments that the show finds its stride, generally starting in Episode 4 and then enduring onward.
For me, even if Elgort has a problem with conveying gravitas overall, we can still embrace him and this series as an example where he demonstrably tries.
Rinko Kikuchi and Ken Watanabe delightfully support.
Temperature check
Tepid
Roar (Season 1)
Apple TV+ • Drama • Anthology
Synopsis
Everyday women each struggle with a facet of their lives in a loose anthology on sense-making and authority.
My take
If this is Apple TV+’s true response to Netflix’ Black Mirror (Brooker [creator], 2011-2019), then I’d say Netflix doesn’t have much to worry about. More like a soft grey looking glass, Roar’s premiere season spreads its menace lightly, like jam onto semi-toasted whole wheat, rather than dares to dose it heavily, as if with a tub and a ladle. Disconnection and dysphoria figure, yes, but as minor players beneath the overwhelming safety net of emotional comfort the series forwards as its cornerstone theme. It’s almost as if the show runners wanted to darken just a hair of vignettes otherwise taken from Lifetime “Television for Women,” and then see if that set point worked for anyone. It’s new, readers, yes, but it’s also very dull and I’m quite surprised that top-tier talent like Nicole Kidman and Cynthia Erivo signed onto an episode each.
The premises of the episodes are interesting, but they all feel arbitrarily cut short by a need to resolve dramatic tension simply and clearly without scaring the audience. “O, you see, it wasn’t monsters after all; it was just the shadows of your inner turmoil on the wall.”
Of course, this premise is also that of many a Black Mirror episode, but the important difference there is that Black Mirror never tries to apologize for its tactics, as Roar consistently so intently does.
The most interesting two episodes are the two that stray farthest from this self-apologetic mien. In Episode 3, Betty Gilpin plays a woman asked to literally take her place on the wall as a trophy for her wealthy husband while, in Episode 7, Meera Syal plays a woman who finds she can always return her husband for another, if she wants to. In one episode through gravity and the other levity, Roar shows the best of what it can do — which is still, honestly, not all that impressive — by departing naturally from each premise to a logical and well-paced conclusion that feels unlike the shrifts of the dramatic tension found elsewhere in the season. Women fumble and ponder their fumblings, with a dip into contemporary surrealism that improves rather than undermines the point. The storytellers make no apologies for their contrivances, so their protagonists grip tangibly to the edgy surfaces they’re left with, once the dust settles: no magical or contrite munificence; just sheer consequentialism.
If Roar can head more capably in that coherent direction in any potential second season, then it might actually turn out to be mediocre.
Temperature check
Cold
The Flight Attendant (Season 2 Premiere)
HBOMax • Comedy • Cute, cute espionage
Synopsis
Recruited as a civilian informant for the CIA, a troubled flight attendant attempts to piece together a conspiracy implicating herself in international terrorism.
My take
Did all the second-season writers attend the same flaccid workshop? At least, if anyone was copying over anyone else’s shoulder, it was the writers of Russian Doll Season 2 copying the writers of The Flight Attendant Season 2, not the other way around. Although it too fails to achieve the (albeit lower) bar of its first season, at least The Flight Attendant fails less egregiously than that other show. Part of this saving credit is certainly due to Kaley Cuoco, who continues to hold up the entire series on her shoulders, performing now not just one instance of herself, but several in a veritable ‘mind palace’ of alter egos. That sparkle aside, I’m not sure that flying into the airspace of Cody’s (2009-2011) United States of Tara is the right way to steer this Flight to the kind of landing where all the passengers applaud. At least, however, there are drinks aboard. (Too soon?)
Temperature check
Tepid
Not So Pretty
HBOMax • Documentary • Exposé
Synopsis
A four-part documentary uncovers the legacy of carcinogenic and otherwise dangerous contamination behind many everyday household products.
My take
For anyone unfamiliar with the “best practices” of corporations bending rules and avoiding accountabilities in order to sell us more products — especially in personal care, grooming, and cosmetics — this four-part docu-series will be an eye-opening censure of perhaps many of your favorite (or your mother’s) favorite brands.
As a documentary exposant, the series is gripping in its effects, albeit basic in its techniques. The visual storytelling adds little that brings the content of the piece above what an excellent article could offer, despite the ample room that cosmetics for instance lends the subject. For that missed opportunity, I can’t fully sing this miniseries’ praises, but can nevertheless say that it’s still worth the watch, especially if you care about the looming long-term hazards in your self-care products.
Temperature check
Tepid
Night House
HBOMax • Horror • Who’s there?
Synopsis
A widow senses a malevolent presence in her lake house.
My take
I was lucky enough to see Night House over two years ago, at the last pre-pandemic Sundance Film Festival. The film’s description grabbed me, partially because of Rebecca Hall whom I’d known and appreciated in Allen’s (2008) Vicky Cristina Barcelona and White and Stoppard’s (2012) Parade’s End (and whom I would later come to appreciate even more, for her wonderful work on last year’s Passing, a five-time ‘Rich Pick’ nominee and one of my top ten films of 2021) and partially because of its genre: horror, a notoriously difficult motif to make shine. I wanted to see, in plain terms, whether this attempt could clear the cobwebs.
While Night House is limited by the scope it chooses for itself (i.e., a single-character-focussed domestic horror about essentially a poltergeist), it pleases and surprises in the aesthetic methods it uses to play out its scope. The image I chose above illustrates one such method; though not exactly in the film as shown there, the interplay between the visible and the invisible, whose traces can still be felt everywhere, is the backbone visual conceit of the piece. The related choice to use an almost negative representation of the invisible reality assists in spiking that conceit over the net. It’s simple thematic consistency in visual storytelling, from head to toe, and it’s effective — not least because the negative world is palpably creepy in its red-ringed darkness.
I can’t predict well how many of you readers are open to horror, let alone excited by it, but, if I’d ever suggest a recent film from the genre to anyone here, I’d choose this one. Like a great short story, it’s successful in telling its simple story well.
Temperature check
Hot
A Very British Scandal
Amazon Prime • Drama • Historical Fiction
Synopsis
The Duke and Duchess of Argyll court, couple, conflict, and cut loose in 1960s Great Britain.
My take
In the slightly renamed second season to Frears and Davies’ (2018) A Very English Scandal, Claire Foy does her best to put on a brave face while trying to raise a shipwreck full of jewels from the bottom of the sea. Paul Bettany helps little. O, funnily enough, their characters do the same.
Temperature check
Cold
Retrospective
On hold until next time, readers.
Cheers! 🫖
I LOVED Heartstopper!