What Are you Watching on TV - January 2022

Happy 2022!

Last month I started watching the streaming service HBOMax for early big tent premieres, e.g. Matrix Resurrections. Haven't tried any series; considering Station Eleven, which I believe is only accessed through Max. I've been trying to navigate through the streaming database, which is harder to use than cable HBO, at least on Xfinity. Anyways, Max has a feature not on cable HBO: Hubs. Hubs collect non-HBO collections. Maybe a half dozen Hubs available. The two that caught my eye:

1. TCM (wider selection than the Turner Classics Movies archive on Xfinity, with many items from the Criterion Collection). I'm hoping the selections don't rotate off after 2 weeks or so, as is the case with Xfinity, e.g. the Satyagit Ray movies.

2. The Studio Ghibli collection. I'm guessing that the Ghibli includes the entire output by Hayao Miyazaki for the studio, as well as some others not by the great animator. Had a chance to view Kiki's Delivery Service for the first time; with the adventures of a 13 year old witch making her first visit to the non-witch world. Witches apparently go through the rite of passage at an early age.

So, my 2022 resolution is to explore the TCM & Ghibli hubs. (Because cable HBO is easier to use, I'm hoping the popular series & movies stay on cable.)

Waiting for the last episodes of:
Station Eleven
1883 Western
Dexter: New Blood
Mayor of Kingstown
The Book of Boba Fett. If you haven't seen Temuera Morrison in NZ 1994 drama Once Were Warriors, an horrendous story of domestic violence. Be prepared to care.
Just finished Fortitude 3 seasons. A slow starter, but once the bodies start piling up.....
Now watching Vincenzo (Netflix) How to describe? A Korean consiglieri for a mafia family runs for home after the death of his boss, and is caught up in a legal fight to demolish a building complex that holds a secret that only 3 people know. Funny and original, but it has 20 episodes to plough through.

Werewolves Within
A newly assigned forest ranger arrives in a new town. When the power goes off due to a blizzard, the citizens end up in a lodge waiting out the storm. Unfortunately, a werewolf starts randomly killing the citizens. I enjoyed it though I am not a big slasher devotee.
This dark comedy was based on a video game.

The NetflixDVD for Brighter Summer Day had been sitting around for maybe a year. I wrote about it in Oct. 2020 as part of this thread. I watched it on TCM & wanted to watch it again to see if I could identify & determine the roles of the more significant of the 80 or so cast members, mostly male, & also try to isolate some of its many themes. Ended up watching it twice; the second time with a voice over commentary that covered the dialog. It’s long, 4 hours, but I didn’t find it dull. Anyway, Netflix now has its DVD back.

Back to the commentator, whose name I didn’t catch. I didn’t always agree with him, but he knew the late director/writer (Edward Yang), and was able to quote from his letters. The film began as a project planned at a more audience friendly length, but kept expanding. Yang was asked whether the story could be continued enough for a TV series, and he replied that he had enough material for 300 episodes! Make no mistake, though, this isn’t a soap opera. Regarding casting, I learned that most of the younger cast members were amateurs. (This may explain why Yang uses a lot of long to medium shots to account for the amateurs’ acting limitations. Or, in one of the later medium shots, one or more of the speakers is cut off visually by the framing.)

Political background. The film does not include the indigenous people of Taiwan; the Chinese population, especially with the influx of immigrants fleeing the Communist mainland pushed those people into enclaves (unless the Japanese occupiers had a hand in it). Also, that the Chinese immigrants clashed with the long time Chinese inhabitants. The equivalent of the Jets & the Sharks are the 217 gang & the Little Park Gang. Part of the animus between the 2 gangs, is that the 217 (the address of their district) are working class & consist of native-born (in Taiwan) Chinese, while the Little Park (also a geographic identifier) are the sons of middle-class government/office workers who are part of the newly arrived immigrant Chinese wave. Keeping in mind that the Japanese formerly ruled Taiwan, and were kicked out at the end of WWII, the Yang scene setting meticulously creates the Taipei of the late 50’s/early 60’s, where the unwanted immigrants were housed in abandoned Japanese homes. But by the time the movie was filmed (in the late 80’s), most of those Japanese houses had been demolished. If it seems odd that the Xiao family’s house is rather spacious for a poorly paid government clerk, it’s because the filmmakers had to locate them in a guest house used by the Imperial Japanese family, one of the few examples of that kind of domestic architecture still remaining at the time of filming.

Although the murder at the end of the film is, as I noted in the earlier review, based on an actual event that was notorious in Yang’s youth, there is another event based on a historical occurrence. The Little Park massacre of the 217 is a dazzling set piece, and is used as part of the steps leading to the murder. In actuality, it happened some time after the murder; the police ignored it mysteriously, & no one was ever arrested. Some viewers wondered about the absence of police, & this explains why; Yang made the film with a Taiwan audience in mind, & they would have recognized the background. Maybe Yang staged it in a typhoon to explain why the authorities weren’t in the picture.

The commentator explains the main storyline of Xiao S’ir as an idealistic kid who becomes a killer as his idealism is crushed by his school experiences, his father’s arrest by the secret police, the brutality of the Little Park gang, his brother’s violent beating by his father, and what he sees as the social promiscuity of the girl (Ming) he tries to protect from the 217s. Yang & his amateur actor (Ming, played by Lisa Yang – this may have been her only film acting role) play her as something of a cipher. Ming is someone whom males project their fantasies & whom the culture of the time expects to act a certain way (her ailing mother tells her to hurry and grow up so she can take care of her), who only breaks out of her wall of silence or conventional small talk prior to the final act. The commentary was recorded in the early 90’s, but in 2022 Xiao S’ir, at least in the final section of the film, seems like the avatar of male toxicity, a stalker who fantasizes controlling “his” girl. Early on, we see that he is capable of violence, and most of his discourse with the adult world is lies, which alienates him from groups & isolates him, when his ideals seem to have been compromised. His identity has become rigid.

There are examples of a change of heart in the film. Honey, the leader of the Little Park gang returns from exile & tries to make peace between the 2 gangs – he is pushed into traffic by the leader of 217 & killed, leading to the 217 revenge massacre cited above. Sly, who made S’ir help him cheat on an exam, and plays both sides of the gangs, has a change of heart and tries to reconcile with S’ir, which S’ir rejects physically. Third, not seen by S’ir, is his father’s mute reconciliation with his wife, after he yells at her after he has experienced interrogation by the secret police. Interesting, in the outburst he curses her practical suggestion to work for a different boss after he loses his government job, raging at the compromising nature of “women” vs. his ideals of honor & integrity; conservative Confucian culture vs. the compromising female who undermines it. S’ir in one scene affirms that he will try to be like his father. In the climactic scene, Ming finally speaks, telling him she will make her own decisions, and the dam finally bursts as his rigidity is unable to cope with the girl asserting her own identity.

I finished Station Eleven, which I thought was excellent. There were some notable differences from the book, but I thought they were well done and didn't diminish the original story.

I am currently watching The Queen's Gambit on Netflix.

>5 featherbear: woah, I had no idea of that history; but then I know little about Taiwan.. Guess I should learn more. Thanks for that review

The Painted Bird (2019). B&W. 170 min. (2 hr 50 min.) Director & Screenplay,
Václav Marhoul. Screenplay based on the novel The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. Cinematography, Vladimír Smutný.

Wasn’t available via NetflixDVD, so I rented via Prime Video streaming. Watched it twice within the 48 hr limit. Read the book in high school, powerful impact back in the 60’s. Kosinski may be better known for the novel Being There, which was a successful Hollywood movie. Some controversy over authorship, because at that stage in his career, Kosinski, a Polish immigrant to the UK, had a very shaky command of English; The Painted Bird was written in English. Also, it was passed off as autobiographical, based on Kosinski’s experiences as a DP (displaced person) during & after WWII, but it appears it was not based on his life. Interesting rumor that whoever wrote it was based on Polish director Roman Polanski’s experiences as a child. In any case, the vignettes generally have some analog in European & colonial history.

In retrospect, the structure of the novel might actually be a collection of nightmarish fictional vignettes tied together by the child’s journey. The movie pretty much sticks to the novel, which probably would have been unfilmable in the 60’s. When the film was premiered at European film festivals, viewers were running for the exits after the first couple of scenes. One reviewer was puzzled at the reaction; had none of them read the book? Maybe not; the novel may have been forgotten (like a bad dream) over the years.

The black and white photography is superb. The cinematographer seems to be emulating the landscape vistas of John Ford's Western films & of the rural hovels of his The Grapes of Wrath. as well as the films of the silent era & Ingmar Bergman. But the characters are the opposite of the salt of the earth settlers & farmers in the Ford & other American films. The production values are high; the credit scroll is lengthy (making the movie less than 170 min.) Most of the actors are, I assume, Czech, & amateur, although a handful of actors are recognizably mainstream. Re: silent films: they were viewed with recorded or live music; the film has throughout almost no music to underline how to interpret what you are seeing.

Though the film takes place toward the end of the war, the director, following the novel, focuses on the peasant population between the German and Russian armies. While the Germans speak German & the Russians Russian, the peasants speak, for the most part Interslavic, a kind of Esperanto that an Eastern European critic had a hard time understanding. It apparently includes vocabulary from Czech, Polish, Slovak & Ukrainian sources. (Since the Slavic actors probably didn’t speak Interslavic, I guess most of the film is dubbed, which applies to the actors playing Germans & Russians.) As the same critic points out, the use of Interslavic is evidence that the production’s peasant population is meant to represent a generalized Eastern European rural & lower middle class population of the time period. (The critic thought the director was intending to slander the Slavs. As I recall the book implied that all the horrors take place in rural Poland; perhaps Marhoul’s intention was to avoid the appearance that the only Slavic miscreants in this period were the Poles.)

The movie opens with a scene of a pre-adolescent boy running through the woods with his squealing pet, pursued by a gang of peasant boys, who run him down, beat him, & set fire to the pet. (You’ll be glad this is shot in b&w) I’m not sure if this is in the book; perhaps an allusion to the opening of the Sam Peckinpah movie The Wild Bunch, with the children watching a scorpion being overwhelmed by ants. The boy (who remains unnamed throughout the film) returns to the house of his aunt. The shot of the house with its creaking well-pump, could be as an Oklahoma homesteader’s dwelling. A plane flies over the house; the Nazi insignia is the one clue of the time period; the boy was being chased by the local kids because he has been identified as a Jew. The woman is his aunt; his family has left him with her to be safe. The boy retrieves a portrait of his family, which is how we will identify his father when they are finally reunited at the end. The aunt dies unexpectedly & the boy tries to walk home – but where is home?

That the boy is reunited with his father at the end has been interpreted by some viewers as the only sign of hope in the film (the last shot is of father & son on a bus, returning to their family). But it’s undercut in a number of ways: the father’s concentration camp # isn’t going away; the boy writes his name on the bus’s window condensation, but it keeps fading away. I disliked the one song transitioning from the end to the credit roll, but I wonder if the Disney-like sound with its Broadway keep your chin up mood was meant ironically. The thread of the narrative is to provide vignettes that show how a blank slate child takes up the advice of the Russian sniper he meets near the end of his journey: an eye for an eye (it rounds out one of the opening vignettes where a jealous miller gouges out the eyes of his hired hand for looking at his wife). The boy picks up the eyeballs on the floor, tracks down the blinded man, & tries to make things right by putting the eyeballs in the man’s hands & guiding them to his empty sockets. This only serves to emphasize to the man his permanent condition, and the boy leaves him crying in the forest. Such things can’t really be fixed or made better. It’s not that all of the revolting things seen by & done to the boy happen to a specific boy; it’s the things that were seen by & done to so many lost children during a conflict, and especially the pariahs, in this case the Jews, or the Muslims. While taken in by a bird collector, the boy watches as he paints a bird given to him by a girlfriend, and releases it to fly off to its flock where the flocks tears it to pieces. The collector eventually hangs himself in grief, after the girlfriend becomes the village pariah for being a “slut,” & is murdered by the village women, for having sex with their young sons (perhaps to foreshadow the boy’s experience with a brutal pedophile). The film takes place in a specific historical period, but the vision is of a dystopian world where most people have become acolytes of death.

I am reading Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman by Dwayne Hickman. I also got the final (6th) season of Dobie Gillis to watch. I was too young to see the original series when it aired but I remember it being re-runned so I had seen a lot of the episodes. I am really enjoying his autobiography.

Enjoying PBS Around the World in 80 Days and All Creatures Great and Small.

>10 nrmay: Me too and just added Vienna Blood.

Started watching 2 series on HBO and HBO Max. Peacemaker may only be available on HBO Max. Created & written by James Gunn, creator of Guardians of the Galaxy (1 & 2). He also is responsible for the HBO MAX movie Suicide Squad sequel that came out this year & greatly enjoyed & wrote about briefly in December. Peacemaker (John Cena) was a minor character in Suicide Squad Gunn killed off. He is resurrected for the series.

Peacemaker is a doofus wannabe Batman; like his predecessor (Peacemaker & Batman are DC properties) he’s athletic with lots of gadgets, but unlike Bruce Wayne, he lives in a trailer, and his uniform is too loud for lurking around (as some of his colleagues mention). His goal is to achieve peaceful resolutions by killing all the bad guys, even if women & children become ancillary damage. He has a Robin character named, rather obviously, Vigilante (played by Freddie Stroma – when he’s not Vigilante he goes by Adrian). Unlike Bruce Wayne, Peacemaker’s father (Robert Patrick) is live & kickin’ and perhaps the worst person on earth – foul mouthed, spitting racist & misogynistic venom at an Asian detective, constantly demeaning his son -- with a personal armory that would be the envy of any Batman.

As in Suicide Squad 2, Peacemaker is recruited by the black ops group managed by the ruthless Amanda Waller (Viola Davis guest star) to be part of an assassination squad (or go back to prison for life) with colleagues Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji) & Harcourt (Jennifer Holland, doing a Black Widow parody persona), and Economos (Steve Agee – the squad’s computer nerd). Murn, Harcourt, Economos are professionals & have nothing but contempt for Peacemaker (did I mention he has a pet bald eagle – “Eagly” who accompanies him everywhere?), but the last member of the squad is Leota Adebayo, & she somehow clicks with the hapless Peacemaker. Leota is actually Amanda Waller’s lesbian daughter, added to the squad to keep an eye on them for her mother. Leota claims to be a master of all forms of weaponry & martial arts, but she is reluctant to kill people & other living things.

Unfortunate because the job is to kill a “butterfly” (& wife & kids, & anyone else in the way); butterflies are aliens who can’t be distinguished from humans (ripped from today’s conspiracy headlines). Based on a map displayed toward the end of one of the episodes, it looks like the assassination squad has its work cut out for them & much alien goo will be spilled. I’ve seen 3 episodes which were funnier than Guardians, and the movies were both very funny.

Somebody, Somewhere can be accessed via HBO cable or HBO MAX. Only one episode was available when I watched. Episodes are only a half hour, it seems. A dramedy featuring Sam (Bridget Evertt). Takes place in small town Kansas. Sam returned from New York to spend a year taking care of her sister who was dying of cancer.

The series begins after the sister’s death. Sam has not emotionally recovered & is making ends meet with a dead end job. We meet her Kansas family; her judgmental sister rings true; dead brained brother in law; calm father; mother not dwelt on. At work she meets Joel (Fred Hiller), who knows her from high school & Show Choir (like Pitch Perfect), where she was apparently a sensation. He persuades her to visit a gathering of what she imagines will be adult Show Choir but turns out to be a gathering of small town outsiders, who dance to amateur singers with Joel accompanying on piano. The name “Joel” may be an allusion to Joel Grey the cabaret MC in Cabaret. Sam has shown up, & from the stage Joel cajoles Sam to do a song. She starts tentatively & then steals the show. How do outsiders survive in a Midwestern small town? This is not treated as farce as in Parks & Recreation (although like Parks, episodes are 30 min. like network sitcoms). What happens in the next episode? HBO series come out once a week, so there will be wait.

In real life, Bridgett Everett was an escapee from a small town in Kansas, worked in low paid restaurant jobs for years, and in late middle age became an outrageously raunchy cabaret singer, a blue Sophie Tucker. Although her sister did die of cancer in Kansas, Everett never returned, so some of Sam’s grief may be Everett processing her grief/guilt. The series uses certain parts of her story, but it’s written by Hannah Boss & Paul Thureen.

For more about her, see this interview from The Ringer: .From the Alt-Cabaret Stage to HBO, Bridget Everett Is Still Singing.

>12 featherbear: I watched the first episode of Somebody, Somewhere based on your review here and I enjoyed it. It seems very different from most TV, and I like the way that the actors look and act like regular people. I intend to continue with it, and it's nice that the episodes are short, for when I don't have time for a full-on movie.

Since I am spoiled for choice on all the streaming channels, so that I often can't decide what to watch when I feel like watching something and spend endless time scrolling through every option, I decided to start a project to watch movies/TV series based on books in my library. Most of these I have already seen, of course, but they will be fun to revisit.

Some series I have watched recently that fit the bill:
Station Eleven, which inspired this idea and was really excellent
11/22/63: I recently got access to Hulu, so I watched this; I liked it pretty well, but I am fairly intolerant of ads by this point, so I'd get distracted whenever they came on. I don't think I liked this series as much as I liked the book.
It: My son wanted to watch the original TV miniseries, so we did so together, and it was just as cheesy and fun as I remembered.
The Stand: This is the original TV miniseries, not the remake, which we watched after It. This series holds a treasured place in my heart, as I have seen it many times, and I love the story. My son was upset that all his favorite characters seemed to die, even though I warned him that in apocalyptic stories, lots of people die by definition.

Cat Ballou
In the old west, a school marm (Jane Fonda) gathers a group of misfits to help avenge her father's death. I have seen this several times. It has a great cast with Lee Marvin as the drunk gun fighter. I always liked this film and decided to rewatch it after reading Dwayne Hickman's autobiography who also starred in it. Comedy/Drama/Western

>14 JulieLill:

I'd like to see that one again!

>14 JulieLill: omg, loved that movie! Watched it in the trailer my sis and brother in law were living in on a very small screen tv. This is soon aftre their marriage of which my parents did not approve so tensions were a little tight. Think the movie help) How did it stand up over time?

>16 cindydavid4: It still holds up in my own opinion!