It’s the end of the calendar year and the time of the December holidays, so it’s no surprise that film and television distributors have started unloading crates of new material for us to check out.
On deck I see a hopeful revival of a once culture-defining comedy, a reality competition show for male erotic dancers, and a holiday-themed miniseries on romancing men. Festive napkins up, readers! Let’s begin.
And Just Like That (Series Premiere)
HBOMax - Drama - Identity Politics
Synopsis
Three fifty-something women compare their lives with the lives of others in a post-pandemic New York City.
My take
The return of beloved characters from a long hiatus is often a cause for joy. The recent reboots of television series that helped define American culture during their original runs — series like Kohan and Mutchnick’s (1998-2006) Will & Grace; Williams, Barr, Carsey, and Werner’s (1988-1997) Roseanne; and Marlens & Black’s (1988-1993) The Wonder Years — have all been met with an eagerness like a wishfulness that, somehow, a temporary portal back to a time when we knew less but felt more would smack of joy, instead of an emptiness proving that our needs long ago moved on...1 Risking that emptiness for joy, we in the at-home audience are eager to be those same first-time viewers who fell in love; and production, of course, is eager to provide us the necessary fix (i.e., why boot a gamble when you can reboot a sure thing?).
Though it comes packaged under a different title, this reboot of the famed HBO Original Series Sex and the City (Star [creator], 1998) — an original series that helped HBO define what “HBO Original Series” now means to the culture — is no exception from the rule: An eagerness to return to the high-fashion, “smart AND sexy” world of Carrie Bradshaw and her NYC-based companions and lovers is just about as joyous a prospect as one could imagine for any millennial or Gen X-er who tuned in avidly for first helpings. Even the threat of emptiness made real by a true vacancy — specifically, the departure of Samantha Jones from the fourth seat at the table — looks like a cherry glaze on our eagerness sundae, for how joyous the prospect is. Questions about how will the new show handle the departure and what will the remaining characters say overwhelm curiosity, however morbid, about how much the new series will feel like the old one. For me, well, does it even need to?
Indeed, interrogating myself beyond that joy-piqued and emptiness-skirting interest, I knew one thing perhaps many others did not or could not believe about And Just Like That: no, not that it had a boorish title, though of course it does. No, I knew that I couldn’t stomach a repeat visit to the maudlin melodrama of especially the second of the franchise’s two movies AND I never believed that the show could be what it once was before those movies again — and not just because Catrall had firmly exited stage left.
Sex and the City defined a moment and an era. It reined in the messy joie de vivre of an aspirational urban set who fancied themselves causes celebrées even though others within their world thought they were just everyday women, and it did so in style. For the viewers at home, viewers who cemented friendships alongside their quickly beloved characters’ (and inadvertently changed the course of the show from one concentrated around the single’s plight to romance to one concentrated around a friend group’s fight to support its members), that style — that lighting in a bottle powered the drudgery of the rest of the week (and amply so). After just a few seasons of showing just how very much in touch the show was with the culture, Sex and the City would come to set the standards it had once only appealed to.
Knowing this history firsthand, I knew, it would be a massively tall order to expect any reboot to be able to ride Thor’s horse gaily through the town square ‘just like that’ again. Anyone expecting to see that parade, I sincerely felt, would be sorely disappointed. No, instead, I looked ahead: for a new chapter.
And, to this new show’s credit, it does attempt to provide a new chapter. Samantha’s absence in both our reality and the show’s reality is quickly cycled through in the first fifteen minutes, while new characters — one from each remaining character’s individual life — are simultaneously waiting in the wings to fill her conspicuously empty fourth chair. The problem that arises with each of these new characters, however, is that they hold up a mirror so that we can see the Gorgon’s true face: The show is so behind the current culture, that it must now play catch-up — frankly, lots of catch-up — to cover the very large steps we’ve all (whether we want to admit it or not) taken away from it since it last aired.
And, it turns out, these women aren’t very good at catch-up. Every single one of the ‘ingenues’ the remaining characters introduce reads too purposefully as an attempt to plug the gaping hole the show feels it created by focussing its heyday storytelling on the woes of relatively privileged straight cis-gendered white women. Now, the show seems to feel, it must become everything to everyone in order to gain viewership and become beloved and popular.
And, to that notion, I don’t even know where to begin to respond. Perhaps suffice it to say, as a person who is not and was not at any time a straight cis-gendered white woman I am confident that on-screen identity matching is not what I require in a series, nor what first attracted me to Sex and the City, nor what caused me to stick with it over its six seasons, nor even what creates my interest in any new series today. I’ll add, as editorial privilege, that to disagree with me on that note would be not only to suggest that you know my preferences better than I do, but also to suggest that those preferences turn neatly on superficial descriptions alone. I’d bet, many ‘others’ would agree with me.
In fact, my sense is that we ‘others’ aren’t looking for ourselves to show up in a ‘modern-day’ Sex and the City, full of dash and pizzazz; there are plenty of other shows where we can see our faces represented in the characters — stylishly, to boot — and hear, moreover, our complaints and desires represented in their storylines (even currently on HBO). No, my sense is that we, non “straight cis white women in their 50s,” would favor far more seeing a tightly focussed and well-written drama about people, identities aside, than seeing this franchise succumb to its own idea of public demands on stock diversity and inclusion.
Now, I should check myself: At fewest one person in the writer’s room seems to know what I’m saying to be the case. A scene between Carrie and her protégé literally calls the writer out on the true demands we as an eager public are making on her character: As the “OG sex columnist,” she needs to deliver on her cred. and not just giggle coyly in an eccentrically fashionable outfit. AND — brief spoiler alert — the fact that she then goes home and asks her sixty-something husband to masturbate in front of her so that she can watch was promisingly new enough IMO, that I got hyped about it for a second — to be clear, not in any way because I have personal desires to see Chris Noth, his character, or any sixty-something man slowly stroking his penis per se, but rather because if I were to see that kind of scene in And Just Like That I’d know for sure that the show were here to play and stay, not to pull punches. After all, assaulting the historical sex-based imbalance in mainstream displays of overt physical sexual arousal2 would be a first-of-its-kind, head-on take-down of patriarchal privilege to make even the absent Sam Jones proud.
But the show ultimately doesn’t go there. Rather than pursue the bold line, the show devolves to the easy one: sarcasm, lazy jokes, and — you guessed it — giggles. To top it all off, the very next shot catches Carrie staring insipidly at the trinkets in her closet. (Can you feel how hard I’m rolling my eyes, reader?)
In the end, it seems, this reboot of the once cutting-edge and culture defining Sex and the City will be no more sharp commentary on social strictures than a glitzy heel and a second-hand saying. Too bad — I wanted Carrie Bradshaw.
Temperature check
Cold (and often awkward)
The Hand of God
Netflix - Drama - Coming of Age
Synopsis
Life presses a boy to mature faster than he otherwise might, in 1980s’ Italy.
My take
Taking cues from Fellini, writer-director Paolo Sorrentino romanticizes the male gaze in his new The Hand of God, so that the visual delights of awkward teenaged boys, strapping young men, and their overweight forefathers alike are on full display in his rose-tinted limelight. Women dazzle or dull, existing entirely as either supple bombshells, dressed to be visually enjoyed (if dressed at all), or fargone crones, clinging to whatever other trappings of “wealth” they can muster. Thinking men mock the simple and commend each other for it, and athleticism is a cornerstone of the community. It’s a real boys’ boy’s world. If only it could stay that way…
…at least, that’s the vibe. Sorrentino’s young protagonist faces a series of challenging turning points that force him to step up, out of his boyish dreamland and into harsher “men’s realities,” when it’s clear he’d much rather everything remain the way it was; and his story is told in such a way that, to the audience at home it’s clear, the storyteller wishes the very same.
If only they’d both had a better perspective on it… — that’s my wish. You see, reader, The Hand of God in my opinion is a self-preening and fairly dull ode told on, for, and by languid slobbering straight male tongues that wish they were half as elegant as the beauty they mean to capture. Pretending otherwise is exercising complicity with their entirely a-moral projections around work, gender, and even sex.
And I say “complicity” here purposefully, because I take strongest issue with one pivotal depiction of sex in the film as emblematic of the overall perspective I consider troublesome to view nostalgically. Spoiler alert — when an elderly noble woman takes advantage of both her position of respect and authority in his family and his fresh grief over his parents’ sudden demise in order to literally groom him into losing his virginity to her, the film later celebrates the whole affair as a maturing rite of passage for the teenaged protagonist — a point of view we’ve seen many times before, though crucially never when the genders are reversed. No, if an elderly man had ever mentally cornered a young girl into having sex with him and then proclaimed self-satisfactorily afterwards that it was for her own good, it’d be rather difficult, I think, to find anyone willing to celebrate the affair afterwards as a tonic for the girl’s maturity.
It’s this perspective’s lack of a willingness to be self-critical on full view here, that disappointed me most about the film. Only one character’s sadistic pranks ever meet a critical turning point, so I know that the lack I see is not for want of willingness or capability.
If no one else in film criticism is talking about this issue, I seriously wonder why.
Temperature check
Cold (and spiked)
Ron’s Gone Wrong
HBOMax - Animation - Comedy
Synopsis
A lonely middle school student bonds with a comically malfunctioning android, to the chagrin of its manufacturers, his family, and the other students in his class.
My take
Almost a well-written comedy about technology and friendship, Ron’s Gone Wrong goes right where it seamlessly blends wry or ironic absurdity with the quotidian obligations of our ‘modern’ lives (e.g., telling your name to your new device, remixed retweets that “go viral”).
Where it actually loses its footing is in the hard left turns it forces itself to take, to remain the wholesome “family-friendly” comedy its marketing so means it to be — as if there were really people out there crying, “Aw, you mean, children are lonely and social media CAN’T help?!” 😒 No agenda there….
Watch because, now that it’s streaming, it’s easy to see and entertaining to behold, but maybe stop midway, when it starts checking its own reality for being too loose.
Temperature check
Tepid
The Landscapers
HBOMax - Drama - True Crime
Synopsis
A coyly calculating straight couple defends its innocence against suspicion of having murdered her elderly parents.
My take
Olivia Colman and David Thewlis are great actors, no question. The story their performances tell is an interesting one, no question. The whole drama hangs together interestingly — well, question.
Splicing in meta-storytelling stage-work apparently lifted from von Trier’s (2003) Dogville but lit like Soderbergh and Gaghan’s (2000) Traffic, to spice up a dryly comic police investigation, feels generally like a really odd mixture of elements. Use all those things to surround Colman in a rumpled cardigan and Thewlis stooped gawkingly through glasses, and I think I need to back away.
I bade myself return after week one to HBOMax’s new The Landscapers, but not with excitement. Someone, please, right this ship before anyone else attempts to board. I’m seriously in danger of getting seasick.
Temperature check
Tepid (Why do we need a ship, even? Aren’t we supposed to be on land?)
The Unforgivable
Netflix - Drama - Family / Crime
Synopsis
Having served the majority of her criminal sentence for murder, a woman struggles to reconnect with society, especially the younger sister she left behind.
My take
Sandra Bullock swings and misses big in this hyper-serious, emotionally manipulative new film. Obviously intended as another awards vehicle for her and its distributor à la Jenkins’ (2003) Monster for Theron or even Daldry and Hare’s (2007) The Reader for Winslet, The Unforgivable may reach a temporary popularity stemming from Bullock’s pedigree but, I expect, will quickly flag as people actually watch it.
Ms. Bullock should take note, ‘deglamorizing’ to play a ‘serious role’ means more than unfinished hair and an exasperated look — and, to her make-up team, even that much was unsteady.
Temperature check
Ice (Frigid)
With Love
Amazon Prime - Romance - Androphilia
Synopsis
A straight millennial Latina, her gay brother, and their trans-female cousin negotiate allegiances to their hearts, careers, dreams, and familia on five sequential holidays.
My take
At the right time and in the right place, Amazon drops a charmer. No profound emotional truths, but simple endearing storytelling fills this holiday hearth warmer. And for a miniseries about romancing men, wow, are all those men handsome — bonus points for knowing one’s audience.
Temperature check
Hot if you like dissolving marshmallows in your cocoa; tepid if not
Swan Song
Apple TV+ - Drama / Sci-Fi - Letting Go
Synopsis
An ailing designer considers under-going an experimental treatment for the sake of his family.
My take
Apple stamps this navel-gazing drama with its recognizably pristine design sensibilities, as if to remark in no uncertain terms that this film too is “an Apple product.” Fascinated as the company is by the boundary-breaking possibilities of technology, an emotion-focussed film that reads in many ways more like a model home than a lived-in narrative is a miss in my book. At least we can watch two-time ‘Rich Pick’ Mahershala Ali cry poetically amidst the carefully curated morass.
Also, pick a genre.
Temperature check
Tepid
Station Eleven
HBOMax - Drama / Sci-Fi - Apocalypse Now
Synopsis
Sudden tragedy marks the beginning of a new chapter for an ordinary Chicagoän and the young actress he meets at a mercurial film star’s theatrical début in King Lear.
My take
Station Eleven is in many ways the cultural child of AMC’s The Walking Dead and HBO’s The Leftovers; a gritty drama about survival in the face of major environmental shock, the new show thanks its parents (as well as countless other forebears including Soderbergh and Burns’ [2011] Contagion) for relieving it of the need to start with small talk before diving right into the trauma. We, the viewing public, are all too primed for recognizing a world bereft through pandemic tragedy; only here we can watch it safely on the cushions of our screens.
Jumping in time back and forth, the show attempts to use complicated editing to make a puzzle of itself, so that it perhaps later can solve that puzzle for us with a dramatic flourish — an unctuous move, in my book. Once core premises are established, flashbacks inform on the backstories of the main characters, while flash-forwards answer questions viewers always have about how life goes on post a severe global event. These storylines appear to fit together but, at least as far the premiere three episodes go, feel ultimately more like different shows, diverging from a single moment, than like one show, with a complex and branching plot line.
That feeling of incoherence is my biggest complaint about this new entry. Flashy obfuscatory editing can wound as much as it heals. Unless the show convinces audiences it’s interesting for more than just its game of “hide-and-seek” around the narrative, I doubt it will endure.
Temperature check
Tepid
Finding Magic Mike
HBOMax - Reality Competition - Erotic Dance
Synopsis
Aspiring erotic dancers compete to be named the new “Magic Mike” and win $100,000.
My take
A show that’s 100% upfront with its viewers about why they’re likely there and what the show hopes they nevertheless stick around for can’t be all that bad, right? I mean, a reality competition show about stripping that itself strips away a veneer to expose what’s really at play for the audience at home is operating with a healthy dose of self-awareness, we’d say, yes?
Not especially exciting or boring, the new reality competition miniseries from one of the original members of the erotic dance troupe in Soderbergh and Carolin’s (2012) Magic Mike entertains. Really, that’s enough.
Temperature check
Tepid
Retrospective
Again, readers, we skip the retrospective for this episode, in light of the volume of new content above. Happy viewing!
This wish is literally the premise of The Wonder Years.
Recall that in its original run Sex and the City featured several episodes discussing female masturbation and in one of those episodes presented an entire storyline showing Samantha in the act.