television

HiT Piece: The Pitch

May 6, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I wrote a flash fiction piece for Hollywood in Toto just in time for Ramadan:

“You’ve got five minutes to wow me,” Ms. Biedermeyer said, leaning forward with her elbows on the glass table and her fingers steepled in front of her mouth. “Shoot.”

Trying to ignore the sweat prickling across his lower back, Bobby said, “Thank you, Ms. Biedermeyer. I’ve been a big fan of your work since the early 2000’s, and—”

“Time’s a-wasting.” Ms. Biedermeyer tapped the jeweled crystal of her David Yurman classic. “I got a lunch with DuVernay in ten minutes. Chop chop.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Bobby shuffled his papers, cleared his throat, and said, “The show I have in mind is similar to Roy O’Donohue, but it turns the genre conventions on its head, and—”

“Why do we want to have two of the same show on TV?”

“No no no,” he said. “This is different. You see, we start out with a traditional Muslim family instead of a semi-Catholic one.”

Ms. Biedermeyer returned her French tips to their steeple. “And?”

And you’ll have to click through to read the rest!

Foreign TV Rocks. Sometimes.

April 11, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Long-form storytelling through the medium of television is, like everything, a mixed bag. Just because you can make a 10-episode miniseries, it doesn’t mean you should, or that your story has enough skeleton to support the meat. When Hollywood isn’t stuffing its preferred political/cultural narrative down the viewer’s throat, it’s producing reboots and sticking electrodes onto ancient, bloated franchises to keep their legs twitching. (This is our fault.) So I’ve gone a little further afield for my video entertainment, focusing on foreign television programs.

La Trêve (The Break) Season One is a series I wholly recommend. A Belgian crime show in French, it takes place in Heiderfeld, a small town in the Ardennes, where a young black soccer player’s body is found on the banks of the nearby river. Yoann Peters, a police detective who has just moved back to Heiderfeld after a 20-year absence, investigates the crime, and we find, as is typically the case in such stories, that there’s a lot more to the town, the murder, and the townsfolk than anyone might think. Yoann Blanc as Peeters does an extraordinary job of portraying a deeply flawed man, making you like and dislike him at the same time. The other performances are likewise excellent, transforming them from a collection of quirky small town characters into actual people with lives and desires and personalities. Is it slow-moving at times? Yes. Does it matter? No. You want to see what these people are up to. You want to get to know them better. And you want to see what happens next. Even if you’re not a fan of crime shows (I’m not), you’ll enjoy Season One.

La Trêve Season Two picks up a few years after the first season in a new town with a new crime and a number of new characters. Peeters is back, of course, because there wouldn’t be a show without him, and he’s tried to move on after the last season’s horrible circumstances. Unfortunately for him, he’s pulled back into police work when an old acquaintance asks him to help her patient: a young man accused of a horrible murder that she’s sure he didn’t do. There’s less whodunit in this season than the first, which leaves room for the show to include more of the side characters, many of which are fringy sorts of reprobates who make the slowly-disintegrating Peeters look like a Carmelite nun by comparison. I enjoyed it as much as the first season, even though it’s not quite as good. A little over halfway through season two they introduce a strange twist that in any other show would seem cheap, and the last minutes of the final episode are a real kick to the gut.

Si No T’hagués Conegut (If I Hadn’t Met You) defies easy categorization. Is it a love story? A science fiction yarn? Both? A Spanish show, set in Barcelona, it posits a neat if not entirely original idea: a man (Eduard) loses his wife and family in a tragic accident, and a mysterious woman gives him a device that allows him to visit alternate universes and times to explore a number of what-if scenarios regarding his past, his family, and his potential culpability in their deaths. The scenery of Catalonia and Barcelona is nice to watch, and I found the difference between Mexican Spanish and Barcelonian Spanish to be a treat to hear. The storytelling was clumsy throughout, however, bludgeoning the viewer with obvious hints, but it kind of makes up for it with pathos. How do you go on when your wife and children are taken from you so suddenly? It’s a nightmare. The science behind it didn’t work well, but that wasn’t the point. The acting was uneven at best, and most of the other characters were likable enough. What makes this show stand out is how incredibly unlikable and irritating the female lead (Elisa) was portrayed. She’s angry and remote and bitter and snappish and entirely disagreeable throughout. It’s clear that she was written that way, but it made it most difficult to sympathize with her. One thing I found is that in the later episodes, when they portray Eduard and Elisa getting intimate, it was uncomfortable to watch, as though I were witnessing a sibling making love. Ew. This one’s a mixed bag. I kind of recommend it, but if you quit a few episodes in, you won’t miss a lot.

Osmosis is a French science fiction show that takes place in Paris. Interesting idea, decent special effects, horrible storytelling. Set a few years from now, when tech companies are assisted by AI, it tells the story of Paul and Esther Vanhove, a sibling pair who are developing an app that purports to find the user his or her soulmate. You get a tattoo, take a nanomachine pill, and the face of your soulmate appears in your mind’s eye. Sounds fascinating, right? The way they do it makes no sense. All of the beta testers’ soulmates apparently live nearby, which was too much of a coincidence to ignore (they should’ve hung a hat on it). The plot only moves forward because of bizarre personal decisions made by the characters. Worse yet, there’s a kind of SpongeBob SquarePants-style of plotting in which certain things happen that should end the show right there and then, but are handwaved later on as no big deal. It’s like when SpongeBob falls into a paper shredder, is completely disassembled, and then pops back to normal an instant later. Funny for a cartoon, not funny here. There’s no resolution at the end, no sense of a story ending. Think of it like an overlong Black Mirror episode: preachy, tedious, and simple-minded.

The Haunting of Hill House

December 20, 2018 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

At the time of this writing, the Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House carries an 8.8 rating on IMDB. It’s a ten-episode adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of a family who moves into Hill House to flip it, finds ghosts inside, and is traumatized for decades afterward. Critics called it “essential viewing,” “often stunning,” and a “non-stop thrill ride.”

Like the horror film Get Out, I can’t help but wonder what Hill House‘s fans actually watched, because what I saw was horrible, tedious trash filled with every narrative cliche imaginable.

The performances were unremarkable, but the speechifying from just about every character was notable for its appalling self-indulgence. Once, twice, or more per episode, one character or another would just launch into a bland, affect-less speech that ate up time in a presentation that was six hours longer than it needed to be. You could walk the dog, wash your hands, and grab a fudgsicle from the freezer and still not miss anything during those endless speeches. They just went on and on and on.

What didn’t help was that every one of the characters was entirely unlikable. Substituting bickering for conflict, they sniped at each other endlessly, making them generally unpleasant to watch. Hugh Crain as the patriarch was an ineffectual buffoon, played with all the intensity of a doorknob by both Henry Thomas and Timothy Hutton (who tried to put me out of a job once; I’ll tell you about that some day). Carla Gugino as his wife Olivia pranced about the house in robes and wedges, too substantial to be fragile, too irritating to be tragic. The other characters, their children, filled their roles exactly the way they were written: unable to evoke even the slightest pathos.

Thematically, it follows today’s standard horror trope of Us vs. Them, not Good vs. Evil. The protagonists were motivated by survival rather than moral imperative, and the antagonists weren’t all evil: they’re just eking out undead existences in a haunted house. Christianity is specifically derided as being of no more importance than Buddhism. There’s no God, there’s no Devil, there’s just people and ghosts. Despite that the story’s about the spirits of dead people annoying/haunting/killing the living, the idea of an afterlife isn’t addressed. And, most importantly, there’s no reason given for anything that happens in the movie. Why is the house haunted? I don’t know. Why does anyone who dies in the house haunt it? Got me. Why couldn’t any of the characters do the right and moral thing by having the house torn down? Because ghosts, that’s why. Enjoy the show. There’s lesbians in it. And family drama.

I’d be tempted to write off the massive wave of love for this waste of time as paid studio shills, but I’ve seen enough people rave about it on social media to convince me that the appreciation for The Haunting of Hill House is genuine. Which is unfortunate, because it shows that the gap between garbage and quality has become so wide that it’s pretty damned difficult to accept media recommendations anymore.

Odds and Ends 7/11/2017

July 11, 2017 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

Few people seem to talk about the Amazon show Fortitude in the horror circles I dip into. Is it horror? An exquisitely slow-burn thriller? I’m seven episodes in at the time of this writing and the show is hard to categorize. This can be a bad or a good thing, depending. There are horror elements to it, in addition to police procedural and mystery. I have difficulty understanding about 15% of the dialogue, what with all the accents. Stanley Tucci steals every scene he’s in, which is amazing considering the strength of all the other performances. Once I’m done the first season I may do a proper write-up, but despite its somewhat frustrating slowness it’s a show I look forward to watching each evening.

***

Here’s a fragment of conversation I had with my son as we took a walk around the neighborhood not too long ago:

Sonny Boy: I can’t wait to go to gramma and grandpa’s.

Me: I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun there.

Sonny Boy: Yeah. I’ll miss you and Mommy.

Me: You’ll be too busy having fun to miss us. But if you do, it’s okay. We’ll miss you, too.

Sonny Boy: I know your parents are dead. Do you miss yours mommy?

Me: *thinking* Yes.

He didn’t notice the long pause before my answer, or if he did, I’m certain he didn’t know how to interpret it. How could I tell him that I miss the person my mother was supposed to be instead of who she was? My wife, Sonny Boy’s mother, is a great example of who a mother is supposed to be; I thank God every day that Sonny Boy has her as his mom and doesn’t have a different experience. It’s taken me decades to learn, understand, and internalize the truth that people are not their experiences. There may be something wrong with your experience of something, but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Many children of substance abusers don’t accept this, but grasping it is vital to achieving that one thing so many find impossible to do: forgive yourself.

Amazing how a simple question from a little boy can get the gears going.

***

Netflix recommended that I see the movie Bokeh, because it’s got an end-of-the-world flavor to it and I’m kind of partial to that. In it, two lovers vacationing in Iceland wake up one morning to find that they’re the last people on the planet. Where the movie succeeds is in the cinematography, where beautiful scenery is captured in rich hues. Where the movie fails is in everything else. In narrative, ideas, core, and tension, it’s as empty as the world the two lovers find themselves in. The protagonists embody every nightmarish thought Generation X and Boomers have about the millennial generation, down to the bearded hipster with his retro camera and the impossible-to-please girl who hints at a religious upbringing without having taken anything away from it. Watching it with the sound on or off makes no difference. No questions are answered, and few are asked. Despite all that, you might like it. If you watch it, drop me a line and let me know where I went wrong.

Three Brief Science Fiction Reviews

March 28, 2017 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been dealing with an illness that has taken both antibiotics and steroids to return me to a semblance of health, so during that time I watched a good bit of television (in-between chills, cold sweats, massive headaches, and numerous other symptoms too tedious to describe). In the interest of making my recent unpleasantness a learning experience, I will review what I watched as I lay shivering on the couch.

Travelling Salesman: At the risk of sounding pretentious and lah-di-dah, I will label this movie an “intellectual thriller.” Not that non-intellectual thrillers aren’t entertaining; I liked John Wick and The Accountant, for example. Anyway, what makes Travelling Salesman an intellectual thriller is how much of the film takes place in a single room, focused on a conversation. Sounds boring, right? It’s not. What they’re talking about is an amazing thing they’ve done under contract to the U.S. government: they’ve solved one of the most difficult problems mathematics has available, and now must deal with the repercussions. The mathematician characters all act according to type: the stuffy professor complete with sweater vest, the quirky weirdo, the brilliant slob, and the wunderkind star who did most of the work. Everyone perfectly cast, particularly the government functionary who comes to negotiate the remainder of their contract: a smooth-talking, blandly handsome man who’s obviously over his head yet still tries to hold his own in a room of literal geniuses. Aside from a few incomprehensible bits it’s a great film, one that I enjoyed immensely. 5 out of 5 stars.

The Zero Theorem: It’s a kind of spiritual successor to Terry Gilliam’s earlier film Brazil, though utterly lacking Brazil‘s heart. Sharing the same bizarre, surreal aesthetic, it attempts to handle heavy themes like faith, purpose in life, and existential crisis, but fails to elevate any of them. Christoph Waltz does a good enough job with what he’s been given, making him the only thing in the movie worth watching. Matt Damon, despite his camouflage suits, doesn’t add anything. Everyone else is forgettable, particularly the love interest. I wanted to like it because I loved Brazil, but couldn’t. 2 out of 5 stars.

Travelers: A Netflix series of twelve episodes, it has a familiar premise: people from a future dystopia mentally time-travel to the present day, take over the bodies of people who are about to die, and work like heck to prevent the horrible events of the future from occurring. Been there, done that, right? Yes, but somehow this works. Part of it is the casting: everyone’s very, very good, including Eric McCormack, who pulls off his role with just enough humor and weakness to make himself believable. The stand-out performance is Jared Abrahamson, a teenager taken over by a much older time-traveler who, to his great credit, doesn’t do a George Burns impression from the movie 18 Again!. Even though Travelers doesn’t reveal its secrets until rather late in the series, which gets frustrating, there’s still a lot to like. If we don’t know the stakes, we can’t be depended on to care about what happens; nevertheless, each episode still manages to make itself an entertaining experience. The crew makes the best of a relatively low budget through acting, writing, and heart. And yes, it obviously takes place in Vancouver. It’s okay. You get used to it. 4 out of 5 stars.

Did I spend my sick time wisely? I hope so.

Review: Goliath

December 1, 2016 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

At The Loftus Party, I reviewed the Amazon series Goliath:

The Amazon series Goliath is a riveting show, particularly if you like legal dramas. I don’t. For me, the legal genre ranks just above romantic comedies and right below wisecracking buddy films (Midnight Run excepted, of course). But my wife put it on while I was in the room, so what was I going to do, leave? I had great fun mimicking an English accent and saying, “Just so,” “Cheerio, chaps,” and, “As you say, Mrs. Codswallop,” all throughout her viewing of multiple seasons of Downton Abbey, so I couldn’t deprive her of my disruptive asides.

Is the entire program as riveting as the rest of the review? Click to find out!