Five Cool Things and Weapons

Poker Face: Season 1

Rian Johnson created this homage to 1970s-era detective shows (it specifically owes a great debt to Columbo). It stars Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, who is almost supernaturally able to tell when anyone is lying about anything. For reasons I won’t spoil, she finds herself on the run from a ruthless casino owner. She’s living off the grid, taking odd jobs and traveling about the country. Naturally, everywhere she goes, someone gets murdered, and she uses that unique ability of hers to solve the crime.

Buy Poker Face: Season One Blu-ray

Similar to Columbo, the episodes are set up so that it isn’t so much a whodunnit, but a howcatchem. Each episode typically begins in a new place, where we are introduced to new characters, and for 20 minutes or so, we get to know them without Charlie around. Then there is a murder, and it flashes back a little, where we realize Charlie was hanging around that scene, sometimes just barely off-camera. Her bullshit detector clues her into something fishy with the death, and she pokes around, solving the case by the episode’s end.

Because it is a case-of-the-week storyline, they get to bring in lots of fun stars for single episodes, including folks like Adrien Brody, John Ratzenberger, Chloe Seveingy, Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Nolte, and a host of others. The series has a ton of fun with Charlie’s ability. Sometimes she tells people she knows when they are lying, sometimes she doesn’t. It’s a lot of fun watching the different ways they answer her questions (or avoid answering them, as the case may be), depending on what they know about her and her abilities.

The show has a lot of fun with everything. It is full of call-backs and pop cultural references. Lyonne is perfect as Charlie, and the guest stars are all wonderful.

Andor: Season One

Before watching the new season of this series, me and the family decided to rewatch the first one again. I’m not the first person to say this, but Andor is the best thing Star Wars has put out in a long while. It doesn’t so much expand the Star Wars Universe but takes a deeper dive into the world we already know.

Buy Star Wars: Andor – The Complete First Season Blu-ray

The series takes place a few years before the events of Rogue One, following Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he evolves from a rogue thief to a leader in the rebellion. I love that it delves into the inner workings of the rebellion. We get a lot more of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the Galactic Senator who is secretly funding the rebellion, and are introduced to Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard), an eccentric antiques dealer who is one of the main organizers of the rebellion.

On the other side, we see so much more of the bureaucracy of the Empire, with enormous numbers of people working desk jobs or doing intelligence work. In this first season, it digs into the prison systems and how they essentially became slave labor camps.

It is ultimately a story about Andor rising up to meet his destiny, but I love all the little details and insights it provides into this wonderful world George Lucas created so long ago.

Army of Shadows

Oddly enough, it was Andor that made me think about this classic French film from director Jean-Pierre Melville. There is a scene in the middle of Season One of Andor that finds Luthen Rael making an impossible decision. He has tasked some of his best men to make a raid on the Empire, but according to one of his spies, the Empire has learned of this raid and will destroy them when the attack is made. But if he calls the raid off, the Empire will realize there is a mole amongst their ranks. When he decides not to call the raid off, thus sending his men to their deaths, the spy asks Luthen what exactly it is that he’s risking in this rebellion.

Buy Army of Shadows (Criterion Collection) Blu-ray

It seems to him that Luthen sits back, far away from the battlefield, making life-and-death decisions without ever having to put his own skin in the game. Luthen makes it oh-so-clear that he is risking everything, his fortune, his life, his very soul for what he is doing. Making these decisions is destroying the thing that makes him human, and yet he does it because he believes in the cause.

Army of Shadows feels of a kind with that message. It is about a group of men and women within the French Resistance. But it isn’t a film about great wins that tip the scale of the war. In fact, the only two major setpieces aren’t about them doing something major against the Nazis but helping their people escape torture and death. Mellville, who was part of the French Resistance, knows what he’s talking about.

The characters all seem resigned to their fates. They know what they are doing will have little effect on the war, that their lives will likely end in capture, torture, and death, yet they fight on. They simply must. To not fight is to give in to evil.

Melville is a great filmmaker; he made several of my favorite film noirs, but this is his masterpiece. It is, at times, thrilling, heartbreaking, and a testament to the willingness of common men and women to stand up for good. That’s something we desperately need in these times.

Twin Peaks: The Return

The original series was a quirky little mystery about a quirky FBI agent who comes to a small town filled with quirky people trying to solve a murder. It was about damn good cups of coffee, obsessions with noiseless drapes, strange dreams, and a lady who talks to her log. Oh, there was a surreal weirdness to it, and darkness under that veneer of quirk, but those things were over on the edges of things; the show didn’t generally dwell on them.

Buy Twin Peaks: From Z to A Blu-ray

The follow-up film, Fire Walk with Me, was all about the darkness. It seems to be challenging the audience. “You think murder in a quirky small town is fun?” it seemed to ask. “Well, here is the reality, and it is horrible,” it replied. We see the trauma and abuse Laura Palmer endured until she was murdered. We dive deep into the dark underbelly of this seemingly cute little town.

Twin Peaks: The Return bounces back and forth between the light and the darkness. There are hilarious scenes with charming characters, and bleak, horrifying scenes of violence and horror. Sometimes they happen back to back. Late in the series, there is a scene where two of my favorite characters from the original series reunite. They share a beautiful, lovely moment. Everything is sweet, the music swells, and the camera cuts to blue skies and happy white clouds. Then the skies turn dark, the clouds become menacing, and the camera pans down to menacing characters up to no good. That’s the show in a nutshell.

But there is so much more. It begins some 25 years after the events of the original series. It picks up with the cliffhanger that was never solved due to the original series getting cancelled. But it doesn’t do what you expect it to. It goes somewhere weird with it. We eventually run into almost all of the original characters, and they are older, wiser, and sometimes even more quirky. And there are new characters and bigger mysteries, and even more Lynchian weirdness. There is an entire episode that is almost entirely wordless, makes very little logical sense, and is full of surreal images. There are large swaths of the series that I don’t understand at all.

Yet I completely loved it. The entire series is maybe one of my favorite things ever. I can’t wait to start it all over again.

Moonlighting: “Atomic Shakespeare”

My wife and I periodically revisit television shows that we both loved when we were growing up. Moonlighting ran for five seasons in the mid to late 1980s. It starred Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd as two detectives with a will-they-or-won’t-they relationship (they eventually did, and the ratings plummeted). It was greatly influenced by the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, with the actors spitting out rat-a-tat dialogue at an amazingly rapid pace.

Buy Moonlighting – Seasons 1 & 2 DVD

This seasons two episode is a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (fit within the confines of an hour-long American television episode), complete with massive sets and some Emmy-winning costumes (they say it was the most expensive episode ever made at that time). The series works incredibly well within that setting, and it remains ridiculously fun to watch.

Weapons

Josh Brolin and Julia Garner star in this new horror film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger. They are investigating why all but one kid in the same class mysteriously disappeared at the exact same time on the exact same night. I quite liked Barbarian, and this trailer has me excited about what Cregger has in store for us.