Five Cool Things and Are We the Baddies?

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop

Growing up, we lived in the same town as most of my mother’s family. Mom would often drop me off at my grandparents’ house when she had some errands to run, or had a doctor’s appointment, or just wanted some alone time. When the weather was nice, I’d usually play outside, or I’d borrow a couple of quarters and walk to a nearby convenience store to play video games. When the weather wasn’t nice, I’d stay inside and watch TV.

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My grandmother was usually perfectly happy to let me watch whatever I wanted – she even paid for The Disney Channel just for us grand kids. But there were a few shows that she really liked, and for them I’d either have to find some other means of entertaining myself or watch them with her.

Perry Mason was one of those shows. She loved it and watched reruns every afternoon. It wasn’t a show I particularly loved; it wasn’t something that I watched at home, but it was interesting enough that I’d sit and watch it with Grandma. I don’t remember much about the series (and I haven’t watched it since those days with Grandma), but I do remember Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, the clever attorney who always defended someone who seemed absolutely guilty, but wound up being proved innocent at the last moment.

I haven’t thought about that show in years. A few years ago HBO made a Perry Mason series with Matthew Rhys. I haven’t watched that one, but I remember people being annoyed that it was more of an origin story for the lawyer, following him as a private detective instead of a genius inside a courtroom.

It was that series that first brought my attention to the fact that Perry Mason was originally brought to life in a series of novels by Erle Stanley Gardner. I didn’t pay that fact much mind at first, but a few weeks ago I was browsing the aisles of a new-to-me bookstore and came across a non-Perry Mason by Gardner.

The cover indicated the Perry Mason connection, and as it was published by Hard Case Crime, a publisher I usually adore, I bought the book. It landed on my shelf and remains unread to this day. But that name stuck in my head so that a couple of weeks later when I was browsing the aisle of another bookstore, I went looking for a Perry Mason novel. I randomly grabbed this one – Gardner wrote over 80 Mason novels in his lifetime and despite the fact that they are some of the best-selling books of all time, some of them, especially the earliest ones, are surprisingly difficult to find.

That’s a long introduction to talk about this one book, and I find I don’t actually have that much to say about it. I did quite like it. I naturally heard Raymond Burr’s voice whenever Mason spoke, but I’d also argue that the language used in the books had a deep effect on the rather distinctive voice that Burr used as Mason. Again, I haven’t watched that old show in decades, but reading the book completely brought out his voice clearly in my head.

Interestingly, Mason did not spend much time in the courtroom in this book. He was much more of an investigator than a lawyer. He did call upon private detective Paul Drake to do a lot of the footwork, and I was pleased to see Della Street as his faithful secretary. But Mason also drove around the city, knocking on doors, asking a lot of questions, and looking for clues.

This particular case involves a bishop who may or may not be what he claims to be (Mason notes a bishop is often called upon to do a lot of public speaking, and a stutter would make that difficult), an old drunk-driving case, and a dispute over an inheritance. But the plot doesn’t matter a lot to me in these things. They keep the pages turning, but what I look for is some good writing, and interesting characters, and this book has that in spades. I’ve already bought several more Perry Mason books and have started reading my next one.

Weapons

With Barbarian (2022), Zach Cregger proved he was a director of horror movies to keep an eye on. With Weapons, he’s placing himself in a field with folks like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. It starts with an interesting premise. At exactly 2:17 in the morning, all but one child in Justine Gandy’s third-grade class awoke from their slumber, crawled out of their own beds in their own homes, ran out the door, and completely disappeared.

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That’s a great mystery to build a movie on. But much like Barbarian, the film doesn’t go where you expect it to go. We don’t follow the police or any other investigator trying to solve the mystery. Instead, the film follows several characters, showing how those events affected them from their own perspective, slowly revealing what happened.

It begins with Ms. Gandy (Julia Garner), who is deeply affected by her student’s disappearance but is also considered a major suspect by some of the parents. She’s forced to take some time off by her principal (Benedict Wong) and fills that time with day drinking and bothering the one student in her class that didn’t run away.

Time reverses just a little bit, and we then follow that angry parent (Josh Brolin), and we see some of the events we just watched Ms. Gandy experience through his POV. Then we see the perspectives of the principal, a cop, a homeless drug addict, etc. Through each person’s perspective, we gain a little more information on what happened. Then we see a perspective that gives us the real story, and it is absolutely nuts.

It totally worked for me. It had everything I look for in a horror movies – jump scares, existential dread, a foreboding sense of doom, graphic violence – and it went in directions I absolutely didn’t expect.

The Institute

Based upon the Stephen King book of the same name (which I mentioned in this previous Five Cool Things), The Institute is a new series from MGM+. Like the book, it follows two separate stories that eventually converge. Unlike the book, which began with one story, followed it for a few chapters, then abandoned it for a huge chunk of the rest of its pages, the series overlaps them. Which makes sense, because while that was an interesting literary strategy for King to take, abandoning a central character for multiple episodes would have completely failed in a television series.

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The first story follows Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes), a former cop turned drifter who just sort of happens upon a job as a night knocker for a small town. He’s hired by the police to wander about the downtown business district making sure all the doors are locked and that nobody is up to no good. He meets a lot of people that way and makes some friends and basically shows us that he’s going to be the hero of our story.

The other part follows Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman), a 12-year-old genius who has some light psychic powers. He’s kidnapped by the Institute, a shadowy government agency that grabs lots of kids with psychic powers and puts them through torturous tests, all for some secret plan that supposedly will save the world.

It is a perfectly fine adaptation and a pretty good show. Season One ends on a cliffhanger that is actually extremely close to where the book ends, so it will be interesting to see where they go with it if there is a Season Two. One thing I found interesting was that in both the book and the series, the Institute seems to have seen better days. The buildings are run down, they are completely short staffed and, the head of the Institute, Ms. Sigsby (Mary Louise Parker), regularly complains they don’t have enough kids to do their job. Neither story explains why this is, but it feels like it was created during the heyday of the Cold War, but changing politics have led to it being poorly funded and likely not even known about by all but a select few. Anyway, I think that aspect would make for an interesting thing for it to explore in Season Two.

Murderbot

This Apple TV+ series stars and was produced by Alexander Skarsgård. He portrays a cyborg security robot that becomes sentient and manages to bypass all of his safety protocols. But since he cannot let anyone know this information (for fear the mega-corporation that created him will destroy him if they find out), he must play along like he’s still a good robot. He’s hired by a new-agey, hippie-ish, very woke group called the Preservation Alliance. They take him to a remote planet for…reasons. He must obey their every whim and protect them from the various hazards on the planet, all while really just wanting to be left alone so he can watch television.

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It is a breezy, very funny little series with a delightful runtime of just under thirty minutes per episode. In a world awash in very serious, very “important” hour-long dramas, it is refreshing to find a series like this that can still connect on an emotional level, while also providing a wonderful bit of entertainment.

Eddington

Directed by Ari Aster, Eddington is set during the 2020 pandemic, right in the midst of the Black Lives Matter riots. It stars Pedro Pascal as the well meaning, left-leaning mayor of Eddington, a small Texas town. Joaquin Phoenix is the much more conservative sheriff. Aster absolutely nails the 2020-ness of its setting, which is both a compliment and a complaint. All the arguments about masks, and the protest against white supremacy (led by white people who constantly lecture the few Black characters about how they should feel) seem just a little too real. A little too soon. We all lived through that stuff not all that long ago; sitting through a movie about it was difficult.

The sheriff decides to run for mayor, and things get heated between the two of them. Then things get weird (and violent) in only the way that an Ari Aster film can get. It is a very good film, but I made it a double feature with Weapons, and I felt absolutely worn down at the end of that day.

“Are We the Baddies?”

This video from the old sketch show That Mitchell and Webb look has been making the rounds recently and it feels absolutely perfect for these times. In it a couple of SS Officers begin to realize that they may actually be fighting for the wrong side. David Mitchell’s timing is perfection and every single line is both hilarious and timelessly on point.