Rewatching LOST: Season 1

Hello! if you originally subscribed to my blog because you heard about my book, Never Saw Me Coming a brief update: publication date is 9/7/21 in the US, 9/2/21 in the UK. We are currently in the process of cover design, but are not quite yet in the advanced readers copy game. I will be honest and say it’s hard to start seeing “Most Anticipated Books of 2021” lists coming out and you’re not on them, but those tend to be front loaded, and they do them seasonally.

In the meantime, when I’m not attempting to do home workouts, tending to my Literary Assistant (dog), or worrying about the next attempted coup, I’ve been somewhat feverishly been rewatching Lost.

I told a friend I started rewatching Lost and she said WHY in that exact tone of voice of people who are still angry at the ending of the show and how it increasingly unraveled as the seasons wore on. But really.. what else is there to do? I was in the mood for something that had a lot of lore behind it and let’s face it Lost’s ending was better than Game of Thrones’ was. But more important than my existential-level boredom crisis while the world is ending, is the fact that my current work in progress is a large book with an ensemble cast and multiple timelines. I was a HUGE fan of Lost when it came out—an early adopter from the time I started to see the mysterious billboards in LA when I lived there. Love or hate the show, I don’t think you can argue against the first season being really solid for a lot of reasons. Part of the reason the show turned out be a disappointment is just that—it started out so strong that people’s expectations became so high. As much as some writers like to talk down about TV, I think TV teaches us really critical lessons about storytelling, about characters, tropes, and what fans respond to. Clearly this show did some things really really right.. and also some other things really really wrong.

via GIPHY

The Good..

Atmosphere/ Setting: Who can complain about a gorgeous island in Hawaii, with beaches, jungle, and plenty of exotic locations to explore. There are a lot of books/films/shows where the setting has as much importance as a “character” as humans do, and this is more true for Lost than anyone. For one, you love to look at the island—whether it’s a beautiful shot of the mountains, the lush-looking jungle, the beach, or some of the more creepy locales, it’s just easy on the eyes, and the show’s creators did a great job of using location to their advantage. You got the sense that they were on an isolated island, but that the island was big enough to hide various mysteries. (To throw in a neg, one of my peeves about the first season is that they never do a thorough survey to explore the entire island. For all they knew, they were actually on peninsula attached to a wholeass country, or there was a resort somewhere on the island [this happened on the The Golden Girls once], or, I don’t know, a whole self-sustained weirdo commune of semi-bad people..?) The setting had so many nooks and crannies that it was perfect for a series of mysteries, but the setting itself was also a mystery that spread out over the course of the entire series—what does “the island” want? What is it exactly? Where even is it?

Ensemble Cast: My recollection, at least, was that at the time it started airing (2004), there just weren’t any shows like it on air—not just that it had huge production costs, and was a weird combination of mystery/scifi/fantasy, but that it had a huge ensemble cast. The cast is at its pinnacle in the first season: almost everyone who’s a major character is explored and is also interesting.

Also consider, Lost was wildly diverse in 2004. Six out of the 20 main characters (ones important enough to get flashbacks and major plot lines) were minorities—that just wasn’t happening back then. Two of those characters, Jin and Sun, are still main characters despite not speaking English at all (Jin) or most of the time (Sun). With the exception of Michael and Walt, they all make if through all six seasons of the show (and TBH, I didn’t need more Michael, although I thought they could have answered more questions about Walt—I never knew if that was just bad writing, a lack of time, or the fact that Malcolm David Kelley had hit puberty at a rate too rapid to make sense for the show’s timeline). It also had a significantly overweight character, Hugo, who is not just a sidekick or there to be someone’s best friend. They lean hard on him for comic relief (the main sphere of influence for any overweight character) but to be fair Jorge Garcia is a funny actor, and often times he’s the stand-in for the viewer, expressing how crazy something that just happened was. (Rewatching this show reminded me of the now-forgotten trend of saying Dude when something objectionable happened). But on to address a diversity elephant in the room: Naveen Andrews. I like Naveen Andrews. He’s a good actor and a handsome fellow (and shout out for promoting my exact brand of curly hair). But it’s super cringeworthy that they cast an Indian to play an Arab. It falls under the “any brown guy will do” line of casting, ala “Jimmy Smitts can play this guy, right?” type of thinking. It’s not like there weren’t Arab actors back then—plenty of them got cast to play minor roles in Sayid’s flashbacks. Did viwers look at Naveen Andrews and think that he passed as Arab? (He 100% didn’t for me, but perhaps I’m saying that as an Indian and as a somewhat Arabic speaker.)

Two things that were really impressive about this first reason with respect to cast. One is that in any series, you have an arc for that season and an arc for the overall entire series. Putting aside the latter for now, within that first season-wide arc, there’s also an arc per character. It’s some pretty impressive planning to consider that just about all the main characters got major arcs in Season 1 and that these were intertwined with the overall mystery of Season 1. Another thing that was really satisfying (and continued to be, even when the show got worse) was seeing new character interactions over time because they had such a large cast of characters to work with. You have standard dyads (Jack vs Lock) or triads (Jack vs Kate vs Sawyer) but then you’d have occasional moments of people who hadn’t spent much time together suddenly forming a group (Lock + Boone on hatch duty, Sawyer + Micheal + Jin on the raft.)

Clue drops as cliffhangers: If I can take you back to 2004.. there was no Netflix. Well, there was, but it was a service that sent you DVDs in the mail in these envelopes and somehow the DVDs never broke. (I remember a friend of mine worked on the streaming side of Netflix and I thought it was weird and not sustainable lol.) Lost was a show that you watched, glued to your TV, and then had to literally wait a week for the next installment. It caused a frenzy of people discussing what various clues meant—I remember getting into heated arguments.

As the author of a thriller (ahem!), one thing I’ve paid sharp attention to is what keeps people turning pages. It’s cheap but it works: drop a “what the fuck” clue and end a chapter/episode—works every time. The first season had the luxury of walking into an entirely blank slate—anything could be on the island.. and they really gave us a smattering of everything. But the first time you heard the smoke monster?? (many thought it was a dinosaur). When Sawyer shoots and kills a polar bear? When we discover that all-around Island Man John Lock was actually in a wheelchair before the plane crash? When the light turns on in the hatch? All moments when viewers yelled WHAT—and there is nothing you want more than that as a mystery writer.

Some really stunning moments:

Plane crash: as someone who is scared of flying, the plane crash (shown over and over across the entire show…) is probably in my top three terrifying fictional plane crashes (along with Flight—a not very good movie with a very good plane crash scene—and Castaway).

Jack telling Shannon that Boone is dead: More on this later, but I hated Shannon as a character and was sort of benignly indifferent about Boone. (It’s shocking how flushed Ian Somerhalder is in Lost vs how pale he is in Vampire Diaries. And the wigs they gave him for later guest appearances on Lost are a TRAVESTY!!) Maybe it’s the COVID-isolation-for-almost-a-year, but this made me cry (along with the below two scenes) even though I knew it was coming. It was just filmed so well—no talking, a great musical score, most of the group celebrating the birth of Claire’s baby, Shannon and Sayid coming back from their date, having absolutely no idea what’s been going on until Jack walks out to tell them. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been in that awful position of catching happy, unexpecting people off guard and having to tell them that someone they loved has died, but it was such a good, good scene.

Sawyer telling Jack about his father: I’m a hardcore sucker for enemies-to-friends stories and also curmudgeons and well, Sawyer in general. But here are two people who didn’t like each other coming to a sort of “we’ve been through enough to respect each other” understanding, Sawyer is going to leave, possibly forever (possibly because he might die), and he finally decides to tell Jack that he’s figured out that the man he talked to in a bar in Australia was actually Jack’s father, and that he (Christian) was sorry but didn’t know how to say it, and was proud of him. Matthew Fox (Jack) is a champion crier. I don’t know of another male actor who does it better while still looking attractive. Here is a just a selection of good cries:

(I’m not 100% sure but I think the last one is a clip from the actual scene I’m talking about.) But the first thing he does when he realizes what Sawyer’s saying is turn away as he starts to cry, which felt extremely real because that is exactly what I do when I cry (I can relate to the whole “trying to pretend I don’t have residual psychological traumas that maybe aren’t entirely dealt with because busy dealing with whole world is on fire stuff” haha 2020 thing).

Season finale: I thought it was masterful, one of the best season finales I’ve ever seen on TV, and some of the very last scenes were ones I thought about long after the show had ended. Think about the fact that they wrangled 20-something characters into three different important threads that all converge within the finale: Rousseau doing the fake-out to take Claire’s baby, the mission to blow the hatch up with dynamite, and the raft crew taking off. You had no idea how the raft crew would do, but between the music and acting, felt elated when they took off with everyone’s help—and then (tears!) Vincent tries to swim out to the raft. For all its faults, I don’t know if a show ever had a better season finale than the quick switch from the raft crew being “rescued” only to have a weird scraggly Gordon’s Fisherman dude say “thing is… we’re going to have to take your boy” right over to the hatch being blown and seeing the long tunnel down and having no idea what was down there. I remember not being able to sleep the night of that finale because I kept thinking about the WTF moment of “we’re going to have to take your boy” and what on earth was in that hatch.

My favorite characters:

via GIPHY

Lock: You can dislike him for sort of being a zealot, or someone who makes decisions without discussing it with others, but the thing I consistently liked about Lock is that he was unpredictable but for real reasons. In badly written fiction, people do shocking things for no purpose other than throwing a twist into the plot. But Lock always did weird things because he had his own agenda and it made sense with his internal logic: the island healed him of his paralysis so he thinks that various things are “supposed” to happen. It was also pretty pleasing to see the contrast between his pre-crash life, where he’s a pathetic loser, to how strong and agentic he is on the island. It’s like he’s written his own fan-fic.. so of course he doesn’t want to leave, and doesn’t want anyone to figure out who he is. I’ve also loved Terry O’Quinn back from when he was on an obscure show called Millennium, a Chris Carter/ X-files-like show which now that I think about it, had some similarities to Lost. I think he’s a great actor who can go from outright creepy, to strong, to vulnerable, and at some really great moments, funny.

Sawyer: Ignore the fact that Josh Holloway is just really hot with killer dimples and just consider how interesting Sawyer’s character is. He’s a person who profoundly hates himself, and wants others to hate him, who has annoying nicknames for everyone, and probably would have voted for Trump (if he wasn’t a felon, which he might be?), but I can’t help but like the guy. Sure, the show is rife with people with daddy issues, but he has these contradictions I find emotionally interesting. If given time to prepare, he will act obnoxious or even cunningly in a self-interested way that makes people dislike him—but when there’s an emergency (a fire at the campsite, when the Others try to take Walt off the raft) he unthinkingly responds by doing the “right” thing. This is far more palatable than what they do with Jack (see below). It also creates lots of fun situations where as a curmudgeon he warms up to others despite his desire to keep himself hated. (One of my favorite music-overplaying-montages from the first season is everyone on the beach, and Sayid throwing him a piece of fruit even though they’ve already fought). Sawyer isn’t trying very hard to be a hero (see: Jack) but sometimes he is one which gives him more complexity.



The Bad..

Jack: The show’s unrelenting focus on Jack (both in the first reason and in general) is a significant problem. I read that the creators/writers originally intended to kill him in the pilot but “You can’t kill the white guy.” Not that I’m complaining that he stays alive, but that the show is so overwhelmingly focused on him that I felt like he was being shoved down our throats. Having a doctor on the island does create a lot of good moments. And in the first season, I was fine with his flashback storylines: his messed up relationship with his dad, his marriage, and how he has trouble with his savior complex. But the show went overboard in its focus on him such that it didn’t make sense in some instances, or took away from other characters. He becomes the de-facto leader of the survivors—but why? Because he’s a doctor? (or the white guy..?) It absolutely would have made sense for him to be one of several main decision makers on the island, but not The Guy. Why was Jack calling the shots so often when Sayid had military experience and Lock is like a literal mountain man? Time and time again there is some dangerous situation where Jack has to go somewhere—and on top of this, typically insisting that someone like Kate doesn’t go—when this doesn’t make sense at all because he’s the only doctor amongst the survivors. Kate’s actually right in every single one of these arguments (which keep happening!!): Jack is too valuable to be carrying around dynamite and to be traipsing through the woods in search of Bad Guys. What he should have been doing is training an army of assistants in his field. (Much like Lock and Sayid should have been as well.) Not only this, every time anything remotely interesting happens, any other cast member has to say, “We have to tell Jack!” “or get Jack!” or “we need Jack!” (when these are not medical emergencies). In fact, the show suffers from people constantly saying Jack’s name. (people on this show in general say people’s names too often, but it’s the worst for Jack.) The cost of this is that a lot of that leadership stuff could have been spread out to other characters and given them more to do plotwise. (see Sayid below). In particular, Kate’s character gets weaker after the first season—as someone who’s really resourceful and scrappy, it would have been interesting to see her as more of a decisionmaker and less of a “No I’m going you can’t stop me”/ love triangle attendee.

Shannon: Shannon is the worst of the survivors. Don’t get me wrong: I liked her weirdass near-incest plotline with Boone. And introducing a character who is so obnoxious and self-centered creates a lot of natural tension for a situation where everyone has to help each other out. But she doesn’t really have an arc, when an obvious, great arc would have been that she grows the fuck up. Her relationship with Sayid is not growing the fuck up; Boone even says to Sayid that she would inevitably find an older guy amongst the survivors to take care of her and do stuff for her, which is exactly what she does. Translating the French maps (as obnoxiously as possible) and being a love object doesn’t redeem her. And later in Season 2, having an episode where we see that her stepmother was mean to her after her father died and cut her off financially doesn’t really make my sympathize with her (compare that to Kate’s childhood, Sawyer’s, or even Hurley’s—or Sun’s terrifying figure of a dad!) The worst part of this is that in no way shape or form did I believe that Sayid would fall in love with Shannon. There’s more substance to him, and he’s still hung up on Nadia. I think the writers knew they were going to kill Shannon off early in Season 2 by one of the tailees accidentally killing her, and they knew that fridging her could make Sayid go into some interesting places emotionally. But this was… not good.

The Ugly…

What do you make of a thing when you have all the right ingredients for a cake—fresh eggs, Guittard chocolate, King Arthur flour—but then the thing you end up with is all kinds of wrong? In the long run, can we still say Season 1 of Lost is good if it eventually declines to a pretty bad place?

Tune in (at some point) for an entry about Season 2, which contains my favorite Lock moment of all time.

Review of Doctor Sleep (major spoilers)

While I was waiting to be let into the theater for this movie, the woman sitting next to me opened a newspaper and there was a full-page review of Doctor Sleep, a negative one, and I thought, Oh great. I was already walking in with bad expectations—the trailer for this movie doesn’t do it any favors. It felt a bit like, LOVE THE LITTLE MERMAID? GUESS WHAT WE MADE THE LITTLE MERMAID 2!! Included were some reshots of iconic parts of The Shining, which only pointed out the impossible task set up by making a sequel to The Shining: how do you follow up on a Kubrick film that is one of the most classic horror movies out there? A movie beloved by pretty much everyone (excepting Stephen King himself). Add to that that the villain appeared to be a hot, female version of Slash from Guns N Roses—I didn’t really think the movie would be any good, but found that over time, the movie kept winning me over.

When Doctor Sleep the novel came out, I had the same reaction—did we really need a sequel to The Shining? But several people insisted, no, it’s good, it’s actually very much about alcoholism. (I never read the book—my reading of horror trickled to almost nothing since the 2000s—the alcoholism thing was a hard sell for me). But what I admired about this movie is not just that it’s well plotted, that the shotguns that are hung over the mantel do in fact satisfyingly go off, but also that it did interrogate some interesting thematic content that a lot of horror movies are lacking.

Well let me first say this, I’m not sure Doctor Sleep is actually a horror movie. It’s not scary—maybe the last act is a little, and there’ s a scene of a kid getting killed that’s a bit intense, but the overall feel of the movie was something more like dark fantasy. During my initial negative feelings of the movie, you see this cold opening that is similar to It. A little girl off on her own encounters Rose the Hat, who seems to want to be friends/ eat her. The thing is, Pennywise is scary, even when he’s being friendly—Rose the Hat just isn’t. What is up, I thought, with a villain with an occasional Irish accent and a black hat and a band of random carnies. Rose isn’t really the villain of the movie though.

We grow to learn that Danny Torrance, after surviving the events at the Overlook Hotel, has not surprisingly been traumatized by those events. Drinking blunts both the trauma and tamps down his shining. He moves to a new town where he befriends a man literally named Bill who gets him a job, a room for rent, and an introduction to AA. (If you’re not familiar, AA was founded by a man named Bill W and AA attendees sometimes refer to themselves as “Friends of Bill W.”) Dan forms a cute pen pan relationship with another person with the shining—this turns out to be Abra, a kid living a thousand miles away (played very effectively by Kyliegh Curran—in particular during the eye-changing scene).

Rose and her band of merry assholes are basically psychic vampires who have been hunting kids to “eat”—this is never really as scary as Pennywise, but ultimately I was fine with this. Where I started to really like this movie is when it took turns I wasn’t necessarily expecting. And if you’ve consumed a lot of Stephen King, you can definitely feel the Stephen King in it. When things really start going to shit—Rose detects Abra’s existence and is out to get her, prompting Dan and Abra to finally meet—I was surprised to see Dan and Abra decide to tell Abra’s father everything (casting aside the often tiresome trope of “we can’t tell anyone for reasons/or they’ll think we’re crazy!”) Dan also tells Billy the whole deal—Billy who is basically the most solid, bestest friend you could ever ask for—and the two embark on a mission together. I loved these scenes of them together and was super sad to (SPOILER) see Billy get killed. But it never felt like Dick Hallorann’s death in Kubrick’s Shining (who basically shows up to get killed so that Danny and his mom can have a giant snowmobile to get out of Dodge.) It felt really appropriate—when things get really bad, Dan doesn’t have a sponsor who is always going to be there. Really, really bad things are going to happen, and he’s going to have to get through it on his own.

Particularly after recently rewatching the new version of It and its second chapter, it was satisfying to see a psychic battle between Abra and Rose visually depicted in a way that made sense. Not only did it make sense, but it was both visually interesting and tense. (One of the significant failures of It Chapter Two was its inability to depict the whole Ritual of Chud in any way that made sense— it just didn’t translate well from the novel, and ultimately felt a little ridiculous). Not so here—Abra and Rose have a confrontation that I think in lesser hands would not have worked.

A really satisfying element of this movie was Abra herself. Most often, horror movies have children for the sole purpose of being innocent victims of potential violence—the stakes are raised just based on our fear of bad things happening to small humans. I found myself very satisfied with a character like Abra: she’s incredibly psychically strong and knows it, maybe even revels in it. She’s not hapless—she’s agentic and an active partner in moving the plot forward. I got the impression that she was actually stronger than Rose, but this was never done in a way that didn’t make you lose a sense of stakes.

This movie, unlike what the trailer may imply, is not a rehashing of Kubrick’s Shining, relying on the same old elements for cheap scares. There are hints of music and occasional shots, but the director (Mike Flanagan, who directed an episode of The Haunting of Hill House—which I loved—in addition to Hush, another solid horror movie) was pointedly not making The Shining 2—which was the only way to make this movie successfully, I think. Despite the fact that the trailer is filled with familiar images (the blood getting off the elevator, the creepy twins), that’s not at all what this movie is. It’s a movie in its own right.

But yes, there is a part where you go back to the Overlook Hotel—and this is not done cheaply—the storytelling earns it. (This is the only point in the movie where they go all in on musical callbacks to The Shining—and because the movie earned it, I found myself smiling. It also earns the long, overhead shots of the windy drive up to the hotel—this time in winter rather than the summer opening of the first movie.) Dan is fucked up because of everything he’s seen, and he has spent years trying to avoid that trauma by drinking. For supernatural reasons, it makes sense for the final confrontation of Dan + Abra vs Rose to take place at The Overlook: Dan knows it to be a place where hungry entities await their next meal. The hotel itself is very powerful—perhaps more powerful than all of them. But going back to the hotel provides the most satisfying moments of the movie because Dan is finally going back to confront the trauma he never did previously. After turning various valves in the boiler room (a nod to the novel—a key element left out of Kubrick’s version), he wanders the rotting hotel, finally coming to an oddly immaculate ballroom in a recreation of the above scene. Dan really wants a drink. Floyd the bartending ghost is only happy to provide one. We don’t see Floyd at first, but Dan immediately addresses him as if he is Jack Torrance. Finally, decades after his father’s death, he confronts his father not just about his own trauma, but about Jack’s trauma. And much like how Dan’s “Floyd” is Jack, who is Jack’s “Floyd”?

The novel The Shining is far more about alcoholism than the original movie version (let’s just set aside the TV remake, starring the guy from Wings, which, while more faithful, starred the guy from Wings.) Stephen King is often writing about his own addiction issues, and was often writing while actively being addicted, and Doctor Sleep might be the closest thing to being directly about his own monsters. (Rose literally survives as a semi-immortal being by consuming something that you have to kill others to get—when she consumes it, her wounds are healed, and she can live a bit longer). I think if others don’t like this movie, it might be because they wanted more horror elements, or The Shining 2, or maybe they object to the down-home sensibilities of King’s storytelling—but for those of us who like him, this style of storytelling is something familiar while also sometimes being surprising and satisfying.

Review of It: Chapter 2

Sounds like most people are on the same page: sadly, this movie doesn’t live up to its predecessor. It’s just not as smart or as scary as Chapter 1 but to be fair I also think making Chapter 2 was going to be a tall order any way it was done. It made me wonder: is It really possible in movie form? The book is just so long and weird, and it’s hard to have both time periods fully fleshed out. In the book, the best parts are the parts in the 50s when the characters are kids. And the mythology only really works because of kid logic—it’s harder to sell that when they’re adults. That in and of itself would have been a hard hump to get over, but ultimately this movie stumbled both over that hump and others.

This second part clearly lacked some of the magic of the first movie, which was some perfect configuration of well-cast kids and genuinely creepy and/or scary scenes. I loved how the first movie depicted the start of their relationships and spent the time on character development so that you really believed how close and important they were to each other. My only criticisms of it where the strange omission of the very overt racism against Mike, the omission of Patrick Hocksetter (and that deeply disturbing fridge scene), and how they set up the final confrontation to be about saving Bev, rather than running straight into the fire to kill It.

If this second part was going to—unlike the miniseries—get into the weird mythology in the book, it didn’t quite work to leave that out of the first part. Stephen King himself says that sometimes he makes things worse in his books by explaining why scary things exist in the way that they do. Do I really need to know that Pennywise is basically an alien that hitchhiked to Earth on a meteor? It’s almost more scary if you don’t know at all. The mythology in the book is just plain ridiculous—silver bullets and the ritual of CHUD and the turtle—but it works during the 1950s part because they’re kids. The book spends quite a bit of time on the silver bullet issue: finding the silver, making the bullets, testing to see who was best with the slingshot. The slingshot itself was so emblematic of the book: kids fighting a powerful entity with a slingshot—a literal David and Goliath. If the entire crux of the fight revolves around belief being the thing that gives them power, it doesn’t actually matter which mythology they happen to come across the the encyclopedia or whatever—as long as they believe it.

The movie handled this pretty clumsily in the second part. It takes a while for the Loser gang to reassemble in Derry—I guess I was okay with that. But rather than bringing in CHUD, and glamour, and silver bullets in the first movie, they kept it all for right when the adults get back to Maine. And it takes the form of Mike drugging Bill with psychedelics so the latter and re-experience the research that Mike did with unnamed Native Americans to figure out how to defeat It… The whole Native American mysticism might have worked better if they were actual people rather than a convenient trope. In my memory, the book handled it better—as kids, they build a sweat lodge and go into it and have visions—it works because it’s something that the kids would have seen on TV or read about in school and totally believed. Even as I was watching it I was pulled out of the story for a moment to think about how clumsy this was. It was infodump and also took away some of Bill’s agency.

It’s impossible to depict visually how CHUD was in the books—a battle of wills—so instead the ritual takes the form of each Loser having to go off by themselves to find an “artifact.” This is where the movie starts to drag. Each person has a flashback and as much as I love the child actors from Chapter 1, this started to feel laborious. Mainly because each person got their own scary scenes when they were off by themselves and I didn’t find the scary scenes that scary. The special effects weren’t that great, and seemed to lack some of the slow creepiness that wasn’t necessarily high tech but was good from the first movie. There are some great scare scenes in the first movie: when Stan first sees Pennywise at the stanpipe, the fridge scene, the movie projector scene, the scene right after Bev brains her father. And they weren’t dumb jump scares—they were good—like the not-from-the-book scene where one of the boys (Stan, I think) is forced to go into his dad’s office but he’s scared of a painting that’s in there. (the painting comes to life, naturally—but a painting is just the sort of weird thing a kid would be scared of). The scares in this movie felt too much like the effects you’d see in a low budget horror movie on Netflix: not that realistic and not that original. (With the exception of the fortune cookies—I’ll give them that.)

Despite being somewhat bloated, some significant angles were cut from the book, mainly Bill’s wife Audra also being in Derry (and bewitched by the deadlights) and the full context of Bev’s marriage. The adults in the film definitely felt like older versions of the kids, but they also didn’t feel as fleshed out. It’s hard to translate the internal narrative from the novel to film without voiceover. The novel has the space to really stretch out and fully characterize the entire ensemble cast. The end result is that the adult versions of the kids lacked a sort of fullness in the film. Bev and Richie felt like they had a bit more to them, but you could entirely forget that Bill was supposed to be their leader.

They did a couple things really well: the movie was really well cast (despite the fact that I would love loved to have seen Jerry O’Connell as Ben and Amy Adams as Bev). But the cast was underutilized. There’s one brief, really creepy scene of Bill Skarsgard without his clown makeup on. (Although as creepy as I found it, the introduction of the idea of It in human form but pre-Pennywise just raised questions that didn’t really have answers). I respected that the movie, unlike the miniseries of my youth, didn’t edit out the hate crime that occurs in the novel. (My recollection is that the novel opens with that scene). I saw a Slate criticism of this scene, but like pretty much every Slate article, it exists for the point of critiquing something from a political standpoint that lacks any sort of depth. The point of that scene (It was published in 1986, btw) was about how Derry is rotten to its core. Derry looks like an ideal New England town. But It isn’t the only thing deeply wrong about the town. This is a town where people observed Mike (as a child) running for his life from racists who are going to do god-knows-what to him when they caught him and did nothing. A town where a bunch of boys are carving an H into Bill’s stomach and a car drives by, pointedly sees this . . . and keeps driving. The same place where adults are weirdly blase about the fact that so many kids are missing, or don’t seem to notice that something is traumatizing their kids. So there’s a hate crime—which was written to mirror an actual gay bashing that really happened—and what’s terrible about it is that no one is going to help the two men who are being attacked. And one of the attackers is a teenager, maybe even younger.

But two failures I can’t really forgive: Bill Skarsgard was totally underutilized. I don’t know what it is about him, but he is just one of those actors that I absolutely can’t take my eyes off of, even when he’s in stuff that’s kind of bad (cough cough Hemlock Grove). The first part of It was at its absolute scariest not when he was biting off people’s body parts or turning into various monsters, but when he was being creepy and unnerving. Case in point: his very first scene where he meets Georgie— he’s sort of wall-eyed and out of it and drooling a little and being otherworldly.

The other thing? How It is actually defeated. Metaphysical stuff aside, even twenty-something years later, I still have a clear image of the adult versions of the characters at the end of the books, stomping on It’s eggs and ripping It’s heart out. The final fight in the movie, though, it ends up boiling down to the characters surrounding It and shouting, You’re nothing! This just . . . doesn’t work. We know the characters don’t actually think It is nothing because four seconds ago they were screaming hysterically and spoiler Eddie was just fatally stabbed spoiler. Contrast to in the book, the kids are young enough to actually believe in silver bullets, a verbal talisman, and that an inhaler can have magical properties. The Ritual of CHUD stuff is hard—and taking it away sort of negates Bill being their leader— but I think they could have made do with Eddie dealing the lethal blow with the piece of iron-wrought gate being used as a spear. Back to my point about this being a movie or not—I almost think the only way they could have done all the CHUD and turtle stuff was if this had been a TV show, where they would have gotten the time to flesh out the mythology (because if it comes in bits it seems more reasonable, as opposed to one bad acid trip at Mike’s house.)

TLDR: Don’t think you need to see this in the theater, in particular because it will take your entire afternoon, but worth renting.

Poldark Season Four: In Which Some Things Come To A Head

I finally got to finish Season 4 of Poldark—I got distracted with writing a book, rewriting it, and then this thing. Season 4 felt short—some things were very satisfying while others didn’t quite work for me.

Let’s start with the weirdest and most moderately-warm-dishrag: Justice for Morwenna. 98% of Morwenna’s scenes have involved her suffering horrifyingly—if not by Ossie assaulting her then by him or his mother threatening to take away the one thing that seems to bring her any joy in life, her son.

Happy to see Ossie finally bite the dust, but his manner of death was pretty unsatisfying. I was hoping it would involve Morwenna breaking a wine bottle and going wild on him, or even just some good of fashioned poison; it’s been difficult to just sit back and watch Morwenna get shit on over and over. So ultimately Ossie’s undoing is self-made—the creepy affair he has with Morwenna’s sister results in the sister’s husband going Clue on his ass with a candlestick. A very nice candlestick. The fact that Morwenna doesn’t have a lot of agency in her situation felt reasonably fair at first— lots of girls were forced to marry whoever and were then unhappy—but the fact that she never ends up having agency is ultimately frightening. It just felt like her situation kept going from bad to worse with no end in sight. We do get a more-or-less happy ending with her tentative marriage to Drake—the one drop of sugar in a season finale filled with intense negative emotions.

The politics in the show aren’t really nuanced to be intriguing in and of themselves. Ross is always heroically arguing for something obviously right, like the idea that poor people who make terrible wages shouldn’t starve to death in abject poverty while rich dudes with monocles laugh heartily over bowls of caviar. The show always wants to give Ross the moral high ground on everything but Elizabeth. Wealth disparity, in this world, is due to men’s insatiable greed, but it doesn’t really get into, say, what was going on with colonialism at the time, and about where a lot of those men in London probably got their wealth. Oh well.

London also plays host to a wife swap: Ross heads off to the big city without Demelza and ends up spending a lot of time with Caroline, who has fled there in the wake of her losing her baby. Meanwhile Demelza and and Dwight do the same back home. Happily this didn’t devolve into another infidelity plot. I’ve always found Caroline and Dwight’s relationship to be cute but reasonably complicated enough to be interesting. They’re clearly different people from different walks of life, but I like how they make it work. In a red-herring subplot, Demelza accompanies Ross back to London, where she attracts the attention of high-“class” Monk Adderly aka #metoo in a tricorner hat. This plotline wasn’t particularly shocking (of course Ross responds withe righteous anger tinged with dudely violence), but the fish-out-of-water elements of London for Demelza were interesting. We’re used to seeing Demelza be fiercely competent and independent—she manages the land back at Cornwall entirely by herself in her husband’s absence, and this burden only gets bigger once Ross gets elected into office. But in the eyes of the London elite, she will always be the scullery maid Ross married. Some of this is legitimately how people look at her, but some of it is the differences in class between her and Ross that she doesn’t have to feel in Cornwall, or at least not that often. Back home, she’s afforded a lot more freedom as someone from the lower classes she’s able to do more and say whatever she wants.

But the main course of this season is really various explosions happening within the main conflict triangle of Ross, Elizabeth, and George Warleggan. Finally we get some really satisfying fireworks: mainly Ross explicitly saying what we’ve all been wondering—he confronts Warleggan directly (with Elizabeth in the room, no less) and says WHAT do you WANT exactly? You have wealth, you have Elizabeth, you have everything (including an impending knighthood). George doesn’t have a good answer to that question. He is weirdly obsessed with Ross, and it’s too easy to assume that assumption is based entirely on Elizabeth. (Or at least, the above statement has to be true if the show is to survive without Elizabeth.)

Oh Elizabeth. I was literally shocked when she died. When Ross stress-horsebackrides to the Warleggan home when he hears Elizabeth is ill, and walks into that room and George says, “Oh Elizabeth, she’s dead” I actually thought he was playing a terribly cruel trick on Ross. Because her character arc didn’t feel finished to me. There could have been another entire season or more of her moving toward something, or doing something. There was some satisfying confrontation between Elizabeth and her husband- when Geoffrey Charles points out that Valentine is “the spitting image of Uncle Ross” George flies off the deep end. He stone cold turns on Elizabeth (fair) and Valentine (not fair—and really heartbreaking to see). Particularly seeing how overjoyed he had been when he found out that Elizabeth was pregnant once again (and I thought it was nice that he specifically wanted a girl). Ah, what a way to manipulate us with that turn.

But ultimately, Elizabeth’s death doesn’t make sense to me. The show weirdly has a flashback (which I don’t think it has done before?) to show her getting a tincture that will cause early labor back before she had Valentine. So when George finally comes to once again question Valentine’s paternity, Elizabeth’s solution is to convince him by having another “premature” baby. . . ? So he’d think that she just has a tendency to have premature babies? I know she dies in childbirth in the books, but I always had the thought that Elizabeth could be more fleshed out. Now that this is her final demise, it just feels like her entire story is about her being the bone that two dogs are fighting over. I don’t know if she ever grows as a person—her plotline for several seasons revolved around her hiding Valentine’s paternity. All of the other major and minor characters in the show are capable of plotlines independent of Ross except for her. When I said I wanted her to more actively do things, I didn’t mean take a tincture and die (the plot equivalent of “go jump in a lake.”) She gets the short end of the stick—to be a plot device for Ross and George. Although it does provide the opportunity for Ross to point out that they (he and George) are the ones who have done this to her.

With the somewhat tiresome love triangle disposed of, maybe there is somewhere more interesting for the conflict between George and Ross to go. It’s a fair guess that George will go off the deep end, even though Elizabeth wasn’t exactly holding him back from being evil. The last shot of him this season is of him with his children, newly widowed, holding the newborn baby—I couldn’t help but feel for him, despite him being an awful person. Elizabeth was the only thing in his life that seemed to bring him any joy—will it now be nothing, or maybe will the focus move to the baby? Is poor Valentine about to be shipped off to boarding school? (On second thought, given the duels and fires and Dwight’s incapability to keep anyone alive, maybe Valentine would be better off . . . ?)

See you next season.

Here’s another Poldark post about the first half of Season 4.

Review of Midsommar (spoilers abound)

On a scale of 1 to What in Sam Hill, with 10 being Mother! and 1 being Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog, Midsommar probably ranks at about a 9. I wish I could say I recommend it, but I can’t.

My expectations were super high because it came from the same Writer/ Director as Hereditary, possibly the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, but also one I have enormous respect for for its writing, acting, and thematic content—I didn’t even care that the plot actually isn’t that interesting.

The first thing I heard about this movie was that it occurs almost entirely in daylight (this isn’t exactly true—only the Sweden parts are) which was certainly intriguing. The movie has the same slow pace as Hereditary and The Witch—it takes its time to unfurl, focusing a lot of attention on atmosphere. In the first twenty minutes, I definitely felt like I was heading toward something like Hereditary—I felt like something equally horrifying was around the corner and was cringing in preparation for it. The film opens with Dani (Florence Pugh) dealing with her douchcanoe boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor, who eerily looks like a young Chris Pratt). I liked that the movie was willing to spend the time to show their relationship dynamic: he’s already checked out of the relationship but is the sort that stays in it because he’s too cowardly to break up. Dani is in exactly the sort of relationship you are in during your twenties: trying to cajole emotional support about of someone with low emotional intelligence who is fundamentally selfish but unwilling to admit it. She tries to get comfort about a disturbing email she received from her sister who has a history of bipolar. Just as Douchcanoe is talking to his friends about how he has to break up with her, he gets a phone call from Dani.

I thought this was handled well— filmed in a way that was disturbing, tense, and well choreographed—Dani’s sister has killed both their parents and herself with carbon monoxide from their car. Although this is not the most violent way to die, its filmed in a way that is visually disturbing. You get the sense that you are seeing it from Dani’s imagined perspective. This makes the phone call to Christian appropriately disturbing: Dani is just screaming. Cut to him trying to comfort her as she is just primally screaming—this reminded me of the epic mourning wails of Toni Collette in Hereditary (for which she should have won an award). So … awkward.. not the best time to break up after all.

Rather than displaying any sense of emotional honesty, Christian lets Dani tag along on his bro-trip to Sweden, led by his so-nice-he-must-be-creepy Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Pelle is the only one who is actually nice to her, which immediately makes you think he is three steps away from putting them in an industrial-sized Vitamix. They are accompanied by Christian’s anthropologist grad school friend/ rival Josh (William Jackson Harper) (who, other than the floral arrangements, provides the movie’s only color), and Mark (William Poulter), the comic relief.

At this point, the movie moves away from a lot of the super atmospherey stuff that made Hereditary and The Witch so great and turns into the standard cult movie I’ve seen dozens of iterations of. You get to the isolated cult location. Everyone’s super nice. Something mildly disturbing happens, but because it’s a horror movie nobody Nopes the fuck out of there. Then people start to disappear one by one, and then it all comes to a head. I was kind of hoping for more than this, and ultimately the film doesn’t deliver more than this. It definitely makes its time to move through the trope though. We get to see a lot about how the commune that Pelle grew up in functions—more than we need to, because I’m not sure if it matters how they function, or that their holy book is written by a deliberately inbred prophet (who ultimately has some Chainsaw Massacre tendencies). The nope moment occurs when the outsiders are viewing a cultural ceremony which results in a man and a woman jump off a cliff to their deaths. Some of the outsiders are horrified, although more interestingly Christian and Josh really aren’t—they see the anthropology grad student equivalent of dollars signs in their eyes.

The movie probably is fundamentally about the relationship between Christian and Dani. He doesn’t really see her. He doesn’t, as Pelle manipulatively but rightly points out, make her feel held. This was a super interesting thematic aspect that I wish was tied more to Dani’s trauma. We know her sister’s action has basically orphaned her, but I felt like the movie was on the verge of saying something interesting about romantic relationships that ultimately it didn’t say. Christian is selfish. He doesn’t think, wow, we just witnessed two violent suicides while my girlfriend is still suffering from PTSD after her entire family was killed— maybe we should get out of here and eat comforting Toblerone at the airport ASAP. There always has to be some compelling reason why people in horror movies stay in bad places: haunted houses, creepy asylums, communes where people smile a little too widely. The reason in this case is that Christian and Josh have decided they want to do anthropological research at the commune. (One thing that felt spot-on about Christian was that he was lagging in trying to figure out what his thesis would be—ultimately his idea is derivative of Josh’s).

A lot of the foreshadowing is so direct that it isn’t even really foreshadowing: we see historical renderings of a woman feeding a man pubic hair and menstrual blood (Josh is then fed such a . . . meat pie. . . by a witchy ginger who wants his sperms); we see a bear being set on fire (Josh eventually goes out tauntaun style in a bear). This made things less tense. We know that people are going to get up in the middle of the night and do unwise things and get caught. I was more interested in Dani’s nightmares, which connected to the horror of her family’s death. Lately I’ve been thinking about how all horror, fundamentally at its core, is about the fear of death. We’re terrified of monsters, but we’re never going to encounter them—the only real terror is the very probable terror of having the deal with the death of loved ones (and ourselves, eventually).

As expected, both Christian and Dani are made to succumb to the cult. Dani feels some terror and confusion and gets drugged out of her mind, but in an interesting scene (that brought to mind the remake of Suspira) she connects with them emotionally as they mirror back her screams in a moment of emotional distress. She dances in an endurance contest, losing sense of reality and her identity. Ultimately, and as you suspect, she is named queen of the festivities and is given a choice to pick the last of the human sacrifices. Shall she pick Jorgen-or-whatever-blond-anonymous-dude, or Christian, whom she has just discovered having sex with the ginger witch? (to be fair the sex was bizarre and not exactly consensual—on the other hand, Christian is a douchecanoe, and you get the sense that her decision to select him isn’t entirely about that particular act, but her disappointment with him in general).

So . . there’s the movie. For all its flaws and ridiculousness, I liked Suspira for the thematic content about women, about power, and maybe even about dance. Midsommar felt like it started to kind of be about something (Dani’s orphaning) while also being about something else (her relationship with Christian), but then veered into something else (a LOT of showing things about the cult which ultimately don’t matter) without dipping its toes back into the first two things enough. What, then, is the movie saying — that douchcanoes are disappointing—? they are, but is the cult just a vehicle for demonstrating this? Texas Chain is not a movie about the relationships between the kids who eventually run into Leatherface—it’s a story about a family. Hereditary is a story about mourning; The Witch is a story about the control and repression of women. I think Midsommar is missing the final stitch or two that would have tied the whole thing together.

Review of HBO's Euphoria, episodes 1 -3

File this under “mildly chagrined, but would still watch.” Euphoria is not a high-brow drama about teens. It’s a well-filmed horror show for parents where you’re supposed to eat popcorn and think about the good ol’ days. Hear me out:

Rue (Zendaya, 23) is back from rehab with no intent on getting better. Parents in this show are easily fooled, absent, or are predators hunting teens. She forms a friendship with the new girl in town, Jules (Hunter Schafer, 20). I guess Rue is tapped in enough with the cool kids to get invited to the parties, but not enough to have any actual friends other than Jules. In this sense, she’s floating in the middle of no where without anyone sensible to ground her, and has no interests other than drugs. We get the sense that this is tied to her father’s slow death from something probably like cancer.

Everything about this show is mega-angsty with no levity whatsoever—that doesn’t make it unwatchable, but it creates this very specific category of watchable that I find compelling while at the same time significantly depressing. I felt the same way about Skins and 13 Reasons Why. It’s independent of whether or not these shows are actually well written, but for me it does throw a glare of nonreality to them. There is tons of angst in being a teenager, but these shows tend to show the most extreme version of this—I don’t think this is because it’s supposed to echo reality, but because older people—particularly people with kids—are drawn to it the way we slow down on the highway when we see an accident. If you were to make a list of things that make parents clutch at their pearls, this show is a grab bag of them.

THE INTERNETS! Kids use it to share sex tapes of other students as a form of shaming or humiliation. To use anonymous sex apps to meet up with strange S&M dudes in hotels. To buy fake urine to pass drug tests that oblivious moms force you to take. They definitely don’t use it to watch people play games on Twitch, to make funny videos on TikTok, or to do anything of substance related to an interest or hobby.

THE DRUGS! Peak pearl-clutching: your daughter may be in a drug-dealers house and somehow be forced into a situation where she will literally have to lick fentanyl off the knife of a brown drug dealer with facial tattoos. Rue is apparently isolated enough that none of her friends are willing or able to say, so . . . maybe this is self-destructive? (Edit, I wrote the above after episodes 1 and 2— episode 3 is a little bit better at indicating that Rue is friends with Jules and Kat, although on the whole, I don’t think these friendships are three dimensional, which kind of makes the first person narration from Rue telling her friends’ stories not quite work for me. We’re supposed to see Rue-Jules as one of these hyperintimate female friendships you have when you’re young—episode three has a drop of this— Jules saying, “I can’t watch you kill yourself” and some of Rue being jealous, but not too much of their actual bond, which is mostly shown by them riding bikes).

BOYS AND SEX! Pretty much every male on this show is a horrorshow nightmare dumpsterfire. The only halfway decent one is the drug dealer (not the fentanyl one—the white one that Rue is friends with). There’s the one who sort of shames/ manipulates Kat (Barbie Ferreira, 22) into having sex with him in a roomful of other boys, only to post a video of it online. When she discovers this no one (even other girls) seems to have any empathy for her, even though one must imagine these other girls are dealing with the same horrorshow nightmare dumpsterfire boys. There’s Nate (Jacob Elordi, 22) whose sociopathic tendencies are starting to evolve into controlling behavior centered around his girlfriend (who in an act of revenge, has sex with an older boy [played by a 24 year old] in a pool in front of him, then lies about it later saying she blacked out.) Girls are either hypersexualized or being raped—nowhere in between. Jules has been talking to someone online and meets up with him at a hotel for a disturbing sexual encounter she does not seem to enjoy—the man involved turns out to be Nate’s father.

This show feels like a dark fantasy—I can’t use the word idealized because that has a positive connotation, but in this world, everyone is beautiful and makes terrible mistakes. There’s no compassion, no friendship, no awkwardly fumbling toward sexuality with a boyfriend who actually has a soul. No one’s laughing at anything except ironically. Recently I talked to one of my friends who’s a child therapist and she said high school has radically different tracks— if you were on the nerdy honor roll track, the notion of a party where someone might legitimately die of anything other than a peanut allergy seems outlandish. So maybe my own high school experience was just vastly different than licking fentanyl off a knife. It was closer to Freaks and Geeks except I really didn’t have friends to play D&D with.

It made me think about why we like these hyperdramatic shows about teens that take themselves super seriously in their negativity. Consider Skins where there is, I swear to god, a situation where Tony (high school student) is in some sort of dangerous situation in a warehouse where a scary dangerous guy demands that he (Tony) have sex with his (Tony’s) own sister (Effy) in order to placate the scary guy. Compare to Friday Night Lights where Julie feels pressured to just get sex “over with,” arranges alonetime with her boyfriend Matt (insert heart emoji), only to have him discover that she isn’t really ready and to suggest that they could just, like, hang out, which they do, making fun of each other’s feet and goofing around.

Think about how these shows mix sex and lurid things in a bid to be “real” or at least this is what they say they’re doing. But notice how they tend to cast actors that are a lot older; they want to show good looking people having sexy times, or maybe even really being in peril, but then there’s the conundrum about feeling weird about casting people ages 14 to 18, the actual age of most high school students. If they were actually working with actors that young, there’s a variety of things they’d have to more seriously consider, and we as viewers would have to ask ourselves some difficult questions. This isn’t a “real” show any more than Skins was. There’s actually a scene where Nate buys his girlfriend lingerie. I’m sorry, but when in the history of the world has a high school boy 1) bought his girlfriend lingerie and 2) it fit perfectly even though men who have been married for 10 years are still mystified by the whole bra/band/cupsize thing and also even if you know the size that doesn’t mean that any particular thing will fit you?

TLDR: Euphoria= listening to a superhip soundtrack while being stuck in the passenger seat of a car driving very quickly towards a brick wall with stylized graffiti on it.

Review of HBO's Sharp Objects (has spoilers)

I'll lead with the positive: the main reason to watch this show is not the murder mystery, but for the execution of how the story is told. (In a weird, obverse opinion of my last review of The Blackkklansman). 

Positives: the performances were incredibly strong all around, but in particular Amy Adams (Camille), Patricia Clarkson (Adora, her soft-spoken but histrionic southern belle of a mother), and Eliza Scanlen (Amma, her not-quite-right wild-child half-sister). I loved the Southern Gothic feel when Camille returns to her hometown, complete with a lovely-but-creepy house with a wraparound porch. 

The thing that kept me intrigued, and the thing I admired about it the most, is the way it was filmed to resemble human memory, as opposed to linear storytelling with breaks to make it easier for the viewer: ie, Camille sees the hingey-thing on the back of the toilet, then we stop the story for a liner flashback of that entire memory so that it's easy to digest. Even though I think they didn't do this because Camille is a damaged, fractured person, I think stylistically how they actually did it is closer to how people experience memory. A scene is interspersed with brief flashes with no explanation, sometimes so momentary we can tell that she's thinking of two things at once. Or even more than two. This felt literary to me, which is why I didn't need tons of intrigue to the storytelling aspect. I'm rewatching the first episode right now and they just showed a brief cut of Camille looking at the hingey part of the toilet--a full 6 hours before we actually see the story of why that matters. I hadn't even noticed it the first time around. 

Negatives: I never thought the show was boring like other viewers apparently did (I didn't mind the somewhat unnecessary Calhoun Day diversion), if you put the entirety of the show together, there's about 20 minutes of Camille driving, listening to music, or drinking vodka out of a water bottle. We get it--she's an alcoholic. I don't think people need to be shown more than two or three times. 

I was a wee bit frustrated with the (first) climax which occurs in the house. Ultimately, Camille is incapacitated with whatever poison her mother has given her, and is feebly trying to cry out to once-lover/cop Richard while she is prostrate on the bathroom tile. Ultimately it is Richard & co who rush in to save the day, arrest Adora, and spirit the sisters away for medical treatment. Was this not agentic enough? Just before this, Camille had made the discovery (..or rather, was given the information by Richard) that Adora had probably been poisoning Marian, Camille's younger sister who had died of a mysterious illness when she was younger. Death by munchausen by proxy so Camille rushes to the house, realizing that Amma--currently "ill" in the care of their mother--is in danger. She encounters a bizarre dinner tableau: a sickly Amma dressed in a white nightgown and a crown of flowers, her mother setting up a massive feast to her and her creepily silent husband. In an interview, Gillian Flynn mentions that she wasn't bothered by the show's decision to have Richard rescue Camille, more or less, because Camille did do something agentic: she takes her sister out of the line of fire by pretending to be sick and taking on her mother's "care" (ie, poison) herself. The action has the duel duty of both proving her suspicion, and giving Amma some time to recover. So she did do something agentic, but I realized this morning what really bothered me:

She runs into the house, thinking that her mother killed her little sister, and is possibly in the process of killing her other little sister... but she enters the house and silently sits down at the table? How about forming some distraction, grabbing your sister by the arm, and running off? What's to stop her? Her mother's in her 60s, and Camille is young. How hard would it have been to overpower her? How hard would it have been to grab that blue bottle of whatever noxious "medicine" and throw it across the room? Flush all the pills down the toilet?

Two practical things: can we please please please retire the female reporter who sleeps with people involved with her investigation thing? And did Camille really have no where where she could stay except for with Adora? No per diem from the paper? How much is a hotel in that small town? Given the high psychological price of staying in a home filled with trauma... why stay there rather than the Motel 6?

My only other problem was with the ending. It bothered some people, but I liked it. I was definitely not expecting an ending that abrupt, but stylistically it made sense to me. And I had already taken my eyes off the screen when the cut-scene appeared during the credits. If the entire story is through Camille's perspective, it wouldn't make sense for the cut scene of the murders to appear in the normal timeline of the show. My problem was that the scene itself was so fast it was sort of incomprehensible. I rewound and watched it 2 more times. While I think the images were great (particularly that really disturbing ending one of Amma) I actually misinterpreted what I had seen. The girl getting killed by the river I got, but I definitely didn't think that the image of Mae, Amma's new friend, gripping the fence was supposed to be her getting killed. I got that something violent was happening, but didn't necessarily think it was murder until I read recaps this morning. 

On the topic of Amma being the murderer (which I suspected the entire time), one plot-holey thing. They find the bloody pliers in Adora's house and it's assumed she was involved in the murders. Yeah, but fingerprints--whose fingerprints would be on those pliers? Amma's, not Adora's. (I doubt she wiped prints off if she didn't bother cleaning the blood off.) This made it a bit unrealistic to me that Camille would be the one to discover Amma, rather than physical evidence catching up with Amma. (who is arrested in the book, and her friend Mae's death is more in view.) 

And really smart to put the trailer for True Detective with Mahershala Ali right after.. It looked so good that I was sold before they even said the words "True Detective" (good advertising, considering I didn't like the first season, and skipped the second.) 

Review of Blackkklansman

I hate to say it, but here is a thing which started with a great premise, but then failed in its execution. It had everything working in its favor: a great hook and timeliness. A black cop who pretends to be white over the phone in order to infiltrate the KKK. Even the pre-setup: he's the first black cop in this particular precinct, and they warn him that he is going to to have to "be the Jackie Robinson."

It's based on a true story, so I can't fault the story for going where it does which is to say to pretty expected places once you know the premise. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) enlists Flip (Adam Driver) to play the part in person, Flip is conflicted, Stallworth starts a relationship with Black Power activist Patrice (Laura Harrier) only she doesn't know he's a cop (and yes, she would mind.) 

This movie was startlingly long. When I was sitting there I was thinking, crap I wanted to get to bed at a reasonable hour. I left the theater and looked at my phone, expecting it to be 11 (the show started 7) and was surprised to see that it was only 9 pm. How on earth does a movie feel two hours longer than what it actually was?? Even while watching it I kept being pulled out of the story by thinking "this scene is much longer than it should be" and I found myself wondering about how established artists can get away stretching their arms and taking up space and making work that is too long but emerging artists have to trim their work to be beyond super-lean. 

So if it felt too long, I have to wonder if there was enough story to fill out two hours. Surely there should have been, but yet it didn't feel like it. The movie could have gone more into depth on both Stallworth's and Flip's characters. What's Stallworth's background, what did he study in college (there's a point to mentioning that he avoided Vietnam because he was in college), what is his family like, and what made him want to be a cop? For about ten seconds, the movie touches on the fact that Flip, while Jewish, grew up without really "being Jewish," and maybe an interesting conversation about identity could have been had here. We are given bonked-over-the-head examples about why Patrice might have been driven toward the Black Power movement, but this movie painfully, painfully lacks in subtlety. What, for example, distinguishes Patrice from any prototype of a young student involved in the movement? (Nothing). Maybe the heavy-handedness of the movie was intended to make it more easy to digest for people who don't know much about that time period. But I would have rather seen scenes putting everything in context than scenes that felt like 40% of them could have been cut without sacrificing anything. 

The unsubtleness of this movie is a mismatch with the sort of audience that goes to see a movie like this. The parallels to modern day America are really obvious--enough so that the obvious nods to the present day could have been written a bit more obliquely or even not at all and we still would have seen them. But if you didn't feel like everything was spelled out in enormous billboard-sized capital letters, there's the ending.. After the movie ends there's a few minutes of documentary footage ramming home the parallels today. As if it needed to be stated. This included the graphic footage of the people being murdered/injured in Charlottesville by a white nationalist plowing a car into them. We've seen that footage--everyone sitting in that theater had. It isn't news to us, and felt weirdly misplaced and jarring, like being hit over the head with a bat while hanging up anti-bat-hitting posters. 

Give Poldark's George Warleggan the plot he deserves

A couple of weeks ago, I blew through all three seasons of Poldark in one weekend, or maybe close to it. I had it on in the background as "period piece background noise I didn't expect to really capture my attention," but it totally did. (Apparently I also weirdly forgot my fetish for 18th century men's fashion.)

Not only is the show filled with lush scenery (waves crashing on rocks beneath dramatic cliffs, people riding horses in haste, etc.), but the writing is really, really good. Particularly in Season Two, with the infidelity plotline, every single character involved responds in a way consistent with their character, and in ways that highlight both their positive and negative traits.) (Well, I'm not sure Elizabeth has any positive traits, but whatever). 

Season 3 had me pondering the fact that the writer's haven't entirely taken advantage of villain George Warleggan. The WETA blog says he is a flatly evil character, one step away from twirling a mustache; I don't entirely agree, but they do have something of a point.  Over the course of the series, George shown himself to be cold and conniving when it comes to both business and life--sometimes playing unfairly. He is weirdly obsessed with taking Ross Poldark down--and what is this based on other than the fact that he basically hates Ross for having what he doesn't: the support of the townspeople, actual love from his wife Elizabeth, a sense of honor. Ostensibly, he has beef with Ross because Ross is "responsible" for inciting the riot that led to the shipwreck being looted (the shipwreck containing some of George's property). But we all know that he 2% cared about the property and 98% just wanted Ross to be tried and hanged--which seems a bit extreme. 

But I just rewatched Seasons 1 and 2 and took a closer look at him. The development of his relationship with Elizabeth is a weird mixture of creepy and pitiable. It's clear he likes her when she's married to Francis Poldark and is already attempting to put the moves on her. When he first propositions Elizabeth, more or less, unless I'm wrong, she didn't seem repulsed but genuinely caught off guard. Surprised, but not "oh God how do I get out of this." I think for her it came out of left field. I do believe, in his own strange way, George loves Elizabeth. (I'm not sure why, because everyone seems to fall in love with her based purely on looks...?) 

Maybe there was a world where Elizabeth and George could have been happy--this makes me sad. Her decision to marry him was both practical and eyeroll worthy. She's a widow and her mom has just had a stroke. Standing beside the drooling mother's bed she asks the doctor, "But who will take care of her--?" then a look of distain comes over her face when she realizes that the caregiver could be her. God forbid we don't have servants to do something, or have to get a job, or figure shit out for a while before she might actually fall in love with a man who wants to marry her. Okay, I realize that's unfair--the aristocracy didn't work back then. Although I did wonder how hard it would have been to scrimp and pinch for a while--sell off some of her crap and let some servants go. Instead, she spots George through the window getting rid of some pesky serfs who want to work her land, which apparently by law is their right. He could take care of her, and she wants to be taken care of. And I never go the sense that he was disingenuous in his offer to take care of her; someone purely evil wouldn't do that. 

She marries him, quickly, and for his money basically, but I got the sense that she had some hope that maybe it would work out. George quickly ruins any chance of this, mainly through his desire to get rid of his Poldark stepchild. Really much of her hatred of him stems from actions he does solely out of his obsession with Ross. (It's more like he himself is a worser enemy than Ross is.) It didn't have to be this way, but he does several things that destroy any hope between them: getting the governess and wanting to send the stepson away, and the trial against Ross which was overkill. A really unexpected turn for me at least was that Elizabeth and George start to become an evil couple together--which was relieving because many many many shows/books/movies fall into the trap of "the first love is the only-est, best-est love." Her turn toward the evil was somewhat satisfying because her unhappiness brought out the nastier parts of her personality and I didn't find much about her redeeming anyhow. 

But George is more interesting to me. Sometimes there's this one grain of humanity in him that makes me feel sympathy or want him to have a turn of character. He suspects that "his" baby with Elizabeth--Valentine--is actually Ross Poldark's but you get the sense that he's almost tricked himself into thinking the baby is his. At least until stonecold Agatha tells him the truth. He seems really broken by this, and I don't think it's just because of Poldark. No matter how despicable George is, Elizabeth wronged him and continuously lied to him. Sure, there were various strictures on women that made life hard for them, but I can't see Demelza making that series of decisions. Sure-- George is pathetic--he gets all sniveling when Elizabeth (lying about the paternity issue) threatens to leave their home, and let's be clear George is dishonorable and nasty and single minded. I don't know why he seems to love Elizabeth, but he does. I truly wondered if he actually loves Valentine and this was a serious blow to him (he doesn't have an heir after all). I love the moment that followed: Ross going out to look for Demelza in the dunes--of course we think he's about to catch her in the act of cheating--but instead he comes upon George, who is dazed with the realization about Valentine. For a split second George is a human, but then he goes back to being George. This moment echoed back to the moment when George found out that Ross's baby had died and for a split second was at a loss. 

Don't blame George for the infamous toad incident in season 3. Oh damn, this show got dark. What started as a funny prank against George--Demelza's brother Drake putting toads in George's ponds--gets hella dark when Morwenna has to marry the gag-reflex-inducing Reverend Osborne Whitworth. At first the Reverend just seemed like a pervier version of Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice--funny, foppish, and gross. But then it gets much darker than the tone of Poldark generally with him being physically abusive and a rapist--I kept waiting for Morwenna to be rescued at the last minute. And it's George and Elizabeth--who has now drunk the evil George Kool-aid--who have pushed this marriage into existence. Because it's a "good match." (There's one weird misstep in the plotting here: when Morwenna's weird sister showed up, I thought for sure she would pretend to try to seduce the Reverend and then murder him . . . but instead seemed to like boffing him??) [Another tangent, how on earth is the guy on the left played by the guy on the right??] 

Here's the thing: George has no idea how bad the Reverend is. He knows Morwenna isn't crazy about him, but how many women got to marry someone they were crazy about? You know who does know just how bad the Reverend is? The good doctor Dwight. And while he does try to press the pause on the Reverend's appetites for Morwenna after giving birth--that's all he does-- presses the pause button. George's sin, really, was that he wanted to control Morwenna and family wealth by marrying her off--Dwight's sin strikes me as worse (albeit not outside of what would have been typical male behavior back then.) 

It's clear that Poldark is headed towards more political storylines, and that both Ross and George will be players. The only two things George cares about are himself and Elizabeth and I'm not even sure about the second part. His political identity could easily get tied into his sense of honor; if Poldark wants to keep treading the same waters, we could have Ross and George square off again and again. Or . . .

Make George the villain he deserves to be. George should be smarter than he is on the show. He's made his wealth rather than inherited it, so it's a little unrealistic that his deviousness is pretty consistently ham-handed. I wish they would let him be as full blown smart as maybe a man who's made his own wealth might be. And while Ross clearly has flaws, sometimes he falls too hard on the "good guy who's always right" side (at least when it comes to the shows political plotlines.) Moving the show towards increasingly political plotlines leaves a lot of room for complex machinations--I would love to see George pull off some Cersei-level political maneuvering rather than say, printing slanderous pamphlets. I would love there to be something Ross and George could agree on--a common foe where they would have to work together despite despising each other! Someone who offends George's honor and Ross' political sensibilities-- but I'm not sure the show has that sort of sensibility, particularly after what happened with Morwenna. If Morwenna isn't going to save herself, it would be nice if we just didn't default to Ross saving the day. Too often shows default to "good guys save people, bad guys hurt people, and if bad guys save people they are redeemed." There's a few other options-- like bad guys doing the "right" thing for an entirely different reason. Bad guys responding with a level of retaliation that the good guys wouldn't "stoop" to in a way that is more satisfying to viewers. Bad guys outmaneuvering other bad guys because they are more clever.

Update 6/10/2019: a surprising number of people have read this article. Life has occupied me; I will return with another longform article about Poldark in June after I’ve had a chance to watch the most recent season. I’m hoping it will be me coming back after seeing some interesting developments in this villain.

8/13/19: and here’s that other post as promised, about the rest of Season 4

via GIPHY