Ozark: Season 1

I wasn't prepared to like Ozark very much, and as such, I almost didn't even give it a shot. Ho-hum, another tale of a middle-aged white man doing bad things, getting in over his head. Haven't we had enough of this yet? Breaking Bad was exceptional, but every single derivative of it feels like it's had diminishing returns. This time around it's Jason Bateman's turn. Ha! Jason Bateman! Michael Bluth! As a money-laundering fuck-up who's down to his last chance and needs to move his whole family to the middle of the Ozarks just to try to wash some drug money through, like, titty bars and riverboat casinos. Can you blame me for being skeptical?

But Keith told me it was really not so bad, and so I decided to at least give it a shot. And Keith was right! And I liked this a lot more than I ever liked, I dunno, Bloodline or whatever. Too many of these hour-long dramas suck ass because they just drag and drag and never really stop dragging. What draws me to something like Sneaky Pete, then, is the pace of play. The more balls you've got in the air, the more impressed I am by your ability to juggle, you know? And Ozark is, I mean, it isn't exactly fast-paced, but it's telling a fairly compelling story about more than one character and it's moving along at a respectable pace and it's all done after ten hours. Not bad, right?

Alias Grace: Season 1

It's the second Margaret Atwood television adaptation this year, and with so, so much less fanfare than The Handmaid's Tale. This is the true-ish story of an Irish immigrant working as a Canadian housemaid in the 1840s who either did or did not gruesomely murder her master and his housekeeper. The extent to which she is guilty - and if guilty, truly culpable for the murders - is the ongoing subject of a psychiatric interview she is giving fifteen or twenty years later.

This wasn't bad, at all. And since it's a miniseries, and only six episodes long, it was a very easy commitment. Pleasant, enjoyable, just fine. But in this age of "way too fucking much television, all the time, for everyone," I'm not sure this really stands out as must-see TV in 2017 - but that's on 2017, and not on this show, which feels like something that easily could have cracked a top ten list a few years ago.

In fact - wait, what's that? Oh my God, is it a "Bets TV of 2017" list already? In friggin' November? Why, yes it is! Courtesy of none other than Time Magazine! (http://time.com/5037916/top-10-tv-shows-2017/) December is no longer part of 2017, guys; "December 2017" is now part of 2018, I guess.

Anyway, look at that, Time Magazine ranks this show sixth best on the whole damn year. (Their ninth best show is also some sort of four-day Katy Perry livestream. So, grain of salt, and such.)

Thirteen

This was completely fucked up in a way-too on-the-nose way, but I couldn't bring myself to hate it. Young Nikki Reed, young Evan Rachel Wood, young Vanessa Hudgens, all of them more or less my age, all of them in this movie about being a teenager in shitty, shitty 2003 Los Angeles. Holy shit, what a culture, what a cesspool. Holly Hunter was also here, and also great.

One of the craziest parts about being thirteen - and being a teenager in general, but really, thirteen - is how horribly underdeveloped your brain is. And don't get me wrong, you're physically undeveloped too, or like, partially developed at most. But even though you're awkwardly caught between having a child's body and an adult's body, holy shit, the real scary part of it all is just how fucking dumb you are. It's fucked up, is all I'm saying. And this movie gets that! (And, ironically, it was cowritten by a fourteen-year-old. Okay maybe just most teenagers are dumb as hell.)

Sully

Went into this with a slightly different approach over on Letterboxd, but to me this is a quintessential movie that didn't need to exist for any other reason than that some sort of movie about the miracle on the Hudson needed to exist. Think about it.

There was a big and memorable event in real life, and we live in an age where we need to make all of the big and memorable events into movies, even though real life is as documented and widely seen as it ever has been.

But the problem with the miracle on the Hudson - from a cinematic standpoint - is that the whole thing happened in less than five minutes. So how do you stretch that out into a ninety-minute movie? Furthermore, what was notable and wonderful about this particular event was that it was a fucking plane crash in the middle of New York City (or rather, between New York City and the New Jersey portions of the New York metropolitan area) with about as little actual drama as you could imagine and hope for. "A very competent pilot successfully did his job, and the flight crew and passengers all cooperated, and an enormous rescue effort was launched and completed in, like, half an hour or so, and everyone lived and no one was even seriously hurt." That's great! That's, frankly, amazing! But that is not a movie.

So in order to make it a movie, Clint Eastwood and his crew need to really hammer home that, you know, maybe Sully wasn't actually a hero, but a reckless son of a bitch who made a very bad decision and then lucked into a flawless water landing. There were airports nearby, after all! And so Mike O'Malley is cast as this computer-humping dude who trusts simulations over experienced pilots, and boy does he want Sully's ass for this! And so thus the real drama in the film doesn't concern the actual event itself - again, five minutes long and thankfully tragedy-free, albeit very suspenseful - but instead, a courtroom hearing (or rough equivalent) in which Sully maintains he had no time to make it over to one of those other airports, now get your dang computers and engineers and fancy math out of my face already. (Clint Eastwood, ladies and gentlemen!)

But what are we left with? We're left with a movie where the suspense isn't about whether or not Tom Hanks can land that plane safely on the water, but instead about whether or not Tom Hanks can convince his bosses and himself that he had to land the plane on the water. So the most climactic scenes aren't, you know, the fucking water landings, but instead simulated airport landings that end up failing, vindicating our man Sully.

Isn't this all kind of self-defeating? Big event, okay, now let's make a movie about that big event, only it turns out the big event in no way supports an entire movie, entirely because everyone at every level was competent and in control the whole time, but it's hard to make a movie about competence and success, because there's really no drama there, so now instead our movie focuses on the question, "but wait, was Sully really a hero?" which is an interesting enough route to take if this is, in any way, a movie about how Sully was maybe not a flawless pilot, but it is emphatically not that movie, it is a movie meant to celebrate his heroics, but in order to do so we have to go through the charade of questioning his heroics in the first place. What? I don't doubt that Sully had to face an assload of scrutiny after the landing, but were the investigators actually out to nail him, or were they just taking their jobs - to find out anything and everything that leads to airline crashes so we can attempt to learn from our mistakes - very seriously? Did we have to make them bad guys? Did we have to make the essential conflict in this movie "Sully vs. everyone who questioned what he did?"

But here's the thing - of course we did, because in order to have a movie, or at least a movie with a big budget and Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood, we need to have a conflict, because without a conflict there is no plot. So rather than just saying, "hey, you know what, maybe this isn't actually something we can make a movie out of," we collectively willed this thing into existence, and it needed "bad guys" beyond the birds the plane hit, and so why not make the investigators fill that role?

In short, then, they had to manufacture all of the conflict in a movie based on a real life event. Artistic license is one thing, but honestly - why make this movie? Why make this movie? If we're going to make shit up anyway, why base this movie on a real event with a real hero? What's wrong with a movie where it's Sully himself having doubts about whether or not he did the right thing, and then the investigation board confirms to him that he did, rather than putting him on trial for it?

Whatever. This just didn't need to be a movie! Except for the fact that - I know, I get it - someone had to make it a movie. At least it was decent! At least it wasn't bad!

Nurse

As far as sexploitation goes, this was pretty dumb but also a little fun, and self-aware enough to be campy and over-the-top instead of taking itself seriously at all. Coming in briskly at under ninety minutes, it's the tale of a femme fatale who works as a nurse by day and then murders cheating husbands and rapists by night. It all comes off the rails very quickly - like, twenty minutes in it's teasing a lesbian roommate angle - and I think at the midway point the movie completely shifts perspectives and narrators without marking any sort of clear delineation, but there are worse things a movie like this can do.

The Mountain of the Cannibal God

More total bullshit to throw on in the background while I grind around the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy VI. Alright, so the name of this one is "Mountain of the Cannibal God" in Italy, "Slave of the Cannibal God" in America, and "Prisoner of the Cannibal God" in the UK. The latter two are almost synonymous, but the English title makes perfect sense whereas the American one absolutely doesn't; there are cannibals in this movie, sure, and they live in a mountain, yes, and they take plenty of prisoners, who they later eat, but slaves? No, no slaves. Part of me thinks the "slave" portion of the name was added in order to sexify and kink up the title for American audiences in 1978. There's nudity here, and sex, and even sex with an animal! Yeah, this one cannibal just starts, no shit, fucking a giant pig toward the end. Why?

Speaking of animals, that's really the only part of this that merits any discussion. There's a lot of animal-on-animal violence in this movie, between a snake eating a monkey and a hawk fighting another snake and a lizard at one point getting his belly slit open. (Okay fine, that last one was human on animal violence.) And given that this was the 1970s, not to mention an Italian production, there's absolutely no reason to believe these weren't the kind of animal fights that handlers behind the scenes would be setting up. Unless this is like Terrence Malick or Planet Earth, where the animal violence is just found footage. (But then, no, a dude slitting a lizard's belly open is in no way "found footage.")

HarmonQuest: Season 2

This was probably a little better and stronger than the first season of HarmonQuest, and it definitely had a better and more detailed animation to it, and for my money it had better guest stars too. (Although the Aubrey Plaza episode from the first season remains a series highlight.) I think it's cool - potentially volatile, but cool - that Erin McGathy, Dan Harmon's ex-wife, remained a main castmember of the show after the two of them got a divorce.

Otherwise though, it's exactly the sam show it was in Season 1. Dan Harmon and two other regulars play a  customized tabletop game, and every episode is but one chapter in the larger story, and there's always a guest star, and it's pretty consistently very funny. And that's that!

Escape From Tomorrow

Here's a movie I've long been interested in. It's a very amateur effort, but it's famous for the way it was made: in Disney World, in secret. The film follows a family of four, mainly the father, as he endures a psychological breakdown in the middle of Disney World. The way it was filmed is that film crews consisted of regular-looking dudes with handheld video cameras, not unlike what you'd expect to see, in general, if you went to Disney World. Disney has chosen to ignore the film's existence rather than pursue legal action, which is a big win for fair use law.

Anyway, the shame of it all is that the movie really isn't very good. It starts out as this deeply disturbing piece of psychological horror, one I had to look away from constantly. But it ends up being this ridiculous and absurd and silly pile of campy bullshit. Is Disney World hell on earth? Yeah, probably - but this film would have been better and stronger if it had anything bigger or more controversial than that to say! Oh well. Glad I finally caught this one, even if it wasn't very good.

Amateur Night

I had Hulu open on my laptop while I was playing some SNES last night, and this very bad and very bland movie just started playing. The poster kind of says it all, believe it or not. Jason Biggs, a dweeb and a schlub, the "amateur" the title refers to, needs to make some real quick cash because his wife's thirty-six weeks pregnant and they have no health insurance. So he gets hired by a pimp (a "distributor") to drive a prostitute around for the night from job to job. Before very long there are two other hookers joining in and Jason Biggs is hand-washing a bag full of dildos and then Ashley Tisdale squirts lady cum all over him.

Okay, yeah, maybe the poster doesn't say it all. At all. But Jason Biggs' face on the poster certainly does.

I mean this is just a total piece of shit movie. It was apparently released last year. I had literally never heard of it - have any of you? And maybe the saddest thing about this movie is Jason Biggs. Do you remember like almost twenty years ago how he played awkward teen goober very well, the kind of guy who'd fuck a pie or superglue his hands to his dick? And here he is, in 2016, still playing the kind of guy who has to bumble around hand-washing a bag full of dildos and getting hooker cum all over himself.

I mean, just take a glance at the Jason Biggs filmography: (https://letterboxd.com/actor/jason-biggs/by/release-earliest/) Look at the posters. In Saving Silverman and Anything Else, he's being crushed or otherwise held down by a beautiful woman - just like in the poster above. In the Wedding Daze poster, hey, look, handcuffs - just like in the poster above! (Side note - I love how the Wedding Daze poster just straight up apes the typeface of the American Pie series. They're like, "fuck it, it's a Jason Biggs movie, you know what to do.")

So as I said - the poster says it all. Ugh, what a total piece of shit this was.

The Florida Project

Guys, this one was just excellent. Can't quite call it "dark," since it takes place in the vibrant and beautiful and hella tacky world of Orlando, Florida, but it's beyond dark. It's outright tragic! And yet also weirdly wonderful and happy and innocent, as it's largely seen from the point of view of a fun-loving six-year-old girl. Does she know, can she even comprehend or fathom, that her horrible mother can barely afford to keep them off the streets, living week-to-week in a rundown motel outside of Disney World? Of course not - she's just a kid who wants to run around and go swimming and take selfies and eat ice cream with reckless summertime abandon. This is a movie about a community of marginalized people - the type of people who turn to petty crime and small scale hustling and prostitution in order to scrounge up enough cash to keep going for another week. It's downright depressing. It's also downright life-affirming.

Lady Bird

Sacramento, 2002, some shitty and nondescript Catholic school. Meet Lady Bird, a high school senior whose family is poor as hell and who really just wants to get the hell away from her hometown already. Played by the always-charming Saoirse Ronan, she does all the same shit you remember doing in high school, like fighting with your parents, falling out and making up with your friends, being embarrassed about your home life, trying to befriend the cool crowd, worrying about your sex life before it even gets started. You know, classic coming of age type stuff.

What sets this one apart is how real and genuine it feels. It's not so much a slice of life as it is a large collection of very quick slices of life, but then, isn't that what life really is, in the end? The Boyhood influence feels unmistakable here, the way we cut from a shocking discovery to a bad break up, the way a whole year passes in what feels like the blink of an eye, but this is a breezy and pretty funny hour-thirty that takes place across a single year, not three hours long and drawn out. (Come to think of it, the depressing mom who just wishes her kid would be more grateful feels curbed from Boyhood as well. Look, it's not an issue - I absolutely loved Boyhood, even after all the understandable and predictable "pretentious" backlash.

I really liked Lady Bird. It was charming, quick, and felt very genuine. And it does feel like the kind of movie that'll get better in my memory with time rather than sizzling fast and then burning away. But for now, I can only call it "very good," and say that I "really liked it." Words like "great" and "love" - I'm just not there yet! Maybe one day.

Lady Dynamite: Season 2

God, I remembered how manic and zany this show was, but I'd forgotten just how funny this show was. Mitch Hurwitz, Arrested Development - heard of him? Yeah, he's a Lady Dynamite co-creator, and it shows. But the real star here is Maria Bamford, who's completely unafraid to "go there" in absolutely slapdash fashion. It's probably to the show's detriment when it comes to attracting new viewers - this season and last one both open with some very cringey, very off-putting bits that surely alienated plenty of people popping in to check this out - but the show is better off in the long run for embracing and amplifying the manic and bipolar tendencies of its protagonist, who is of course based heavily on the actress and comedian portraying her. I like this show a lot!

Better Things: Season 2

Count me among those who thought this show made a pretty significant jump in 2017. What felt like - I'll say it - a Louie knockoff of sorts in its first season really came into its own this year. Someone somewhere on the Internet pointed out that we're in a golden age of shows and movies that deal with struggling parents - not always single, and not often even poor, but just parents who are doing their best, but, come on - kids these days, right? I'm not a parent, and won't be a parent of a teen for at least  thirteen years, so I can't honestly say that I relate, and yet there's something fundamentally and basically human about this idea of taking care of, and loving, one or more people who hate your guts at worst and get completely irrationally angry at you at best.

The poster really says it all - Sam Fox, played and written by Pamela Adlon, just lives in a constant state of being on the tipping point. It's good! It's a show whose worst episodes are forgettable but still enjoyable and whose best episodes are really touching and deeply moving and memorable. It isn't consistently great, or anything, but it's at least occasionally great here in Season 2, which is more than  I could have said for Season 1. That makes sense, right?

Adam Ruins Everything: Season 2

There's not a ton to say about this one. Occasionally interesting, rarely shocking - the whole premise is that a know-it-all sets people straight on common misconceptions. The host, Adam Conover, is affable enough, but the whole show just sort of feels like a series of PSAs for misinformed people. I'm glad it exists, but it's just all over the place; some episodes are a breath of fresh air in our post-fact-based social climate, but others seem to be rebuttals to misconceptions nobody actually has. Cases in point: one episode this season was called "Adam Ruins Conspiracy Theories," and dove right into all the reasons it's absurd and irrational to believe the moon landing was faked, but also touched on the psychology of why it's so tempting to believe in conspiracy theories even against our better judgment. But then the next episode began with a segment about how detox treatments are a giant scam with no basis in science. Doesn't everyone know this already? Who are the straw men whose minds Adam is changing, here?

I realize that common sense isn't as common as a lot of us like to believe, and I really don't want to sound like I'm taking a smarter-than-thou approach to this show. (I've watched two seasons of it! I like being informed!) But after 42 episodes, it's clear Adam is starting to reach a little bit in order to ruin things.

Tough to say whether or not I'll be back for a third season of this. I'm really trying to cut back on my TV in 2018, and there's no reason I can't let episodes build up on the DVR and then pick and choose the ones that sound interesting, rather than making this appointment viewing. But then, if I clearly don't care all that much about the show, what loyalty do I owe it?

Comrade Detective: Season 1

Here's a complete oddity, a deeply brilliant concept with an Adult Swim-stupid level of execution, courtesy of Amazon Prime. I don't know where to begin describing this one, but hang tight and I'll try.

Okay, so you know how in the 1980s there were plenty of movies and shows in America that just served as blatant Cold War propaganda? Shit like Red Dawn and Rocky IV and Miami Vice where the villains were Russians because Russians were the villains, so to speak? Movies where the bad guy is a bad guy because he's a communist, rather than, say, an asshole or a murderer or a rapist or something apolitically immoral?

So, Comrade Detective is an imagined version of the other side of that coin. Specifically, what if in Romania in the 1980s there was a cheesy buddy cop show where they just jammed the idea that "American capitalism is evil" down their viewers' throats? That's what Comrade Detective is. It purports to be, and presents itself as, a real and actual show from 1980s Romania, rediscovered and dubbed over in English for American audiences in 2017. But of course no such show actually ever existed; this is an entirely new show, filmed and created in the present day, albeit with actual Romanian actors, and actually in Romania. (Or at least actual Eastern Europeans in Eastern Europe.) And then everyone's lines are dubbed over by the likes of Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jenny Slate, and Jason Mantzoukas.

It's such a great concept, and it strikes a particular chord in 2017, with a burgeoning socialism movement in America, and the complete lack of subtlety is the joke - but it doesn't always work, and it ultimately wears a little thin. It's also completely unclear to me what's being lampooned here. Is it American capitalism? Is is blatant '80s propaganda pieces? Is it shitty 1980s Romania after all? The alleged 1980s show is presented as anti-American propaganda, but by shining a light on how stupid propaganda is, are the real creators of Comrade Detective making a joke at the expense of what they imagine 1980s Romania was like? It's not clear to me if this show has sympathy or contempt for '80s America, for '80s Romania, for political propaganda pieces, for the modern day socialist movement, and so on.

I'm never a fan of explaining the joke, but here's an example of what I mean. In the second episode the main characters come upon a copy of the board game Monopoly in an American's car. They explore it back at the station, and ultimately this line is spoken:

"You're telling me that the purpose of this game is to drive your fellow citizens into poverty so that you may get rich? [Pause.] That's diabolical!"

I mean, yes - it is diabolical, and it's exactly the right image of America that would drive a patriotic Soviet Romanian bananas - but it's also, frankly, a concept that should drive us all bananas. It is the evil, greedy aspect of capitalism, laid bare. And of course the show never bothers to pause or present the virtues of capitalistic society, the same messages that actual American shows and movies would preach - that hard-working people might be able to make a better life for themselves and their families. It's completely ridiculous, but it's perfectly reasonable to assume that if there had in fact been an '80s buddy cop show in Soviet Romania, that this would be exactly the kind of scene it might include.

That the characters are dense as bricks and idealists is, of course, part of the charm. They simply can't be bought, saying things like, "why would I need money, when the benevolent government of Romania provides me with food, housing, and health care?" But the show is also, as I said, as dumb as anything you'd find on Adult Swim. (That makes sense; Adult Swim is full of stupid genre parodies, which this absolutely is.) One of my favorite moments occurs when the two main characters arrive at the American embassy, and it's just fucking enormous and ostentatious, and two morbidly obese guys are sharing a plate full of cheeseburgers in the background.

Even at only six forty-minute episodes, the whole thing does sort of run out of steam. The joke gets stale after an episode or two, and then you're just left watching an intentionally shitty and old-fashioned buddy cop show. So I can't say I loved this show, or even really liked it a lot. But I'm very glad it exists! I'm happy that a show this specific got made, and I'd rather see a great idea get executed in a slightly subpar manner than see the same old prestige antihero shit that gets made year after year.

You're the Worst: Season 4

When it comes to good serialized comedic storytelling, fourth seasons can be tough. First seasons are for introducing characters and plots and conflicts. Second seasons are the best seasons, because that's when shows really dive on into their own nitty gritty messiness and get to show us something new and special. Third seasons, you essentially get to build on a second season and bring it to some sort of breaking point. But fourth seasons? Fourth seasons, you've got to start over. Or at least you've got to redirect your characters, reconfigure your conflicts. Your characters should not be the same people with the same flaws and needs and brokenness after three seasons. Something has to have happened to them, for better or worse and often both, for the show to have any real narrative arc.

BoJack Horseman pulled this off very well this year. It had a shaky first season but became just a glorious gut-punch of a series in its second season, kept on pulling that thread in the third season, and left the titular character and a few others at absolute low points in their lives. BoJack is still one of my favorite shows and one of the best things on TV, but I was never under any illusion that Season 4 was going to be better than Seasons 2 and 3. And it wasn't. But it was still very good! They didn't just keep ramming their characters into rock bottom; rather, there was growth. There was change. There was still sadness and brokenness, sure, but it was a new sadness and brokenness, you know?

Veep pulled this off, too. Actually I don't think Veep really hit its stride until its third season, and then it was just this absolute force in its fourth and fifth seasons because of the groundwork laid out in its first three.

Oh, Silicon Valley. There's one I worry is floundering a little. It's still an enjoyable show, but man, it is the same show its always been! Like I even had to just check whether it had been on for three seasons or four, because they're all the same.

Parks and Recreation and The Office also lost a little something off their fastballs somewhere around their own fourth seasons. Parks rebounded, but leaned heavily on heart and late Obama era "anything is possible" feel-good-isms in its final years; The Office was just sort of all over the place and messy, but its own sheer weight was enough to keep it afloat even after Steve Carell left.

Anyway, all of this is to say, You're the Worst was in a tough spot entering its fourth season. Its initial central premise - that two genuinely terrible people not interested in pursuing a relationship were, of course, perfect for one another - hit an impasse in the Season 3 finale, when a marriage was proposed, accepted, and immediately called off in the span of, like, one on-screen minute. How do you rebound from that? For a while it looked like this whole season would be an extended "Gretchen vs. Jimmy" war. And that really could have been something! Gretchen and Jimmy are both terrible people - broken, and therefore understandable and easy enough to sympathize with, but terrible all the same - and so the show really could have made hay out of them trying to emotionally destroy one another. And that's sort of how things started out, sure enough. But then, halfway through the season, Jimmy and Gretchen just sort of made up. And where did that leave us? It left us watching secondary characters and tertiary characters just being dicks to people. That's fine, and there's even a version of this show where that's funny, where that's all we could hope for. But the second and third seasons really were very good! And they dove so much deeper than a show whose premise is "these people are assholes" really should have. Like imagine Always Sunny taking a deep, serious look at, say, Charlie's mental incapabilities. Or Dennis's completely fragile ego. That show has done these things, sure, but it's always been through a comedic lens. It's always from an ironic distance. You're the Worst has gone there, though, earnestly. "Oh, here's Gretchen, and she's deeply and horribly depressed. Here's Edgar, and he's got crippling PTSD from his time in Iraq. Here's Lindsay, so unhappy in her marriage that she's aborting her baby and cucking her husband under the guise of saving their relationship. But Season 4 took a breather, took a step back, and sort of just said, "look, these people just being total assholes to each other is funny enough." And that's too bad! You're the Worst had surprisingly become a legitimately great show. Now it's just another intermittently funny one.

Vice Principals: Season 2

Man. Here's a show I'm glad existed, I'm glad happened, and I'm glad I watched it, but I really can't figure out if I even liked it very much. I felt similarly about Eastbound & Down - no, okay, I definitely liked Eastbound & Down for the most part, but it was never really clear to me if Kenny Powers was an asshole I was rooting for or an asshole I was rooting against. Double that sentiment and you've got my reaction to Vice Principals, a show whose two protagonists are miserable, terrible "left behind" white men of sorts, just angry all the time, feeling entitled to something the world never gave them, failures as husbands, unpopular and reviled at work. Are these guys supposed to have our sympathy, or just our unending scorn? Surely it's complicated - and, like I said, I'm glad this show existed and I'm glad I watched it - but for the life of me I can't figure out how I feel about it. I think I liked the first season more than the second, and I think the show was totally inconsistent in its pathos and its humor, but ultimately I have no idea what it said or did or tried to be, if that makes sense. There was a take I read last summer, during the first of what were only two planned seasons, that called Vice Principals a perfect encapsulation of Trump's suburban America, and obviously that take has influenced me enough that I consider this a show about angry entitled white men, but to say that the show intentionally tapped into those vibes - especially when it was filmed before Trump became a serious candidate, let alone the President - is giving it way too much credit, no?

Last Week Tonight: Season 4

I go back and forth on this show all the time, constantly asking, "should I just cut bait and run?" At its best it's both funny and informative, but I also worry that at times it's a little stale and choir-preachy. (Oh, Donald Trump did another embarrassing and potentially dangerous thing? I didn't know!) Still - it scratches an itch, it does educate and inform, and the jokes and dumb shit hit my funny bone more often than they miss. Is every other long-form segment or so a giant snoozer? Sure, but I appreciate what the show is going for with all of those. Plus, come on - is there a better half-hour of television to fold laundry in front of? I'll be back in 2018, John Oliver!

Murder on the Orient Express

Loaded cast, but this is exactly what you think it is: a perfectly enjoyable but ultimately forgettable movie. Picture, in your head, a 2017 adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. It looks pretty, you know the writing holds up already, the actors give it a certain weight, but this isn't going to be anything new or special whatsoever, you know?

It was fine. And fine is much better than bad! But at least bad tries, you know? Sometimes.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Yeah, it's just a Saturday of mediocre background comedies for us, I guess. This one - I'd heard it was really, really not good. And, good news! It was only not good! It wasn't even bad, I'd say. Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher play two bored-ass suburban spouses, and then Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot move next door, and they're just these super-human people who are gorgeous and talented and, uh, international special agents! And then Zach and Isla get pulled into their latest caper, and they all win, and then the movie ends. But don't worry - at one point Isla Fisher gives Gal Gadot a big old smooch!  Like right on the mouth! Ay caramba!

Okay, yeah, maybe this was pretty bad.

But forgivably bad! Jon Hamm is, I continue to insist, obscenely underrated as a comic actor. Am I being blinded by how handsome he is? Yes, probably, sure. But still! He's funny! And so is Isla Fisher, even if she really isn't very funny here. But then, the movie only asks her to be funny for like, two scenes.

You know what this feels like? This feels like a perfect plane movie. Just something you can throw on and not really care strongly about, a pleasant but formulaic romp through some explosions and some laughs. There's a place for movies like this, really, which is why I hesitate to call it "bad" outright. But that's the best I can do, really. "Not bad, but, okay, maybe pretty bad." There are worse things in life!

Horrible Bosses 2

Not really sure what I was hoping for. This wasn't bad, really, by any stretch - but like the first one, it was just sort of a mildly and intermittently funny comedy. Sudeikis, Bateman, and Day have an admirable chemistry for three guys who, presumably, had never really interacted before the first movie, but the plot's still razor thin here and the whole movie sort of feels like an excuse for a payday for everyone involved. Chris Pine makes for a fun little addition; Christoph Waltz is completely wasted, on the other hand. And Aniston's sex-crazed hijinks have very diminishing returns. I mean, let's put it this way - every single person on that poster has been in much, much better things. (Even Sudeikis has Sleeping with Other People!)

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

Got the day off (thanks, troops!) and it's way too cold to do any yardwork, so here I am, inside, catching up on my TV backlog. The second season of Lady Dynamite came out last night, and I forgot how much I loved that show until I dove back in today - just brilliant shit, folks - but more on that in a few days or a week or so.

After two episodes of the show, I backed out to the search results for "lady" on Netflix, and this obscenely long title caught my eye. It's been ages since I last watched a movie I knew absolutely nothing about, and this looked simple and harmless enough, so I threw it on in the background while I went off to do some dishes and fold some laundry and write up my thoughts about Nathan for You. With a title this long and specific, I thought it might be a low-budget horror movie, or perhaps a single-location thriller like Phonebooth or Open Water or something. Or, perhaps, a straight-to-Netflix parody of a movie like that.

Nope! Couldn't have been more wrong.

This is a French psychological drama of sorts from 2015, set in the 1960s, itself a remake of a movie from the '70s by the same name I've never heard of. Okay, fine - I'm on board. The subtitles are a bitch, because now I have to watch the screen instead of just listening, but, fine - I'm barely invested in this, it means nothing to me, so even if I only come away understanding ten percent of the plot, I can always Wikipedia in the blanks if I even care.

Turns out, the movie was nothing special - not bad, well-shot and well-paced, and with a solid performance at the center from Freya Mavor and her legs (more on this to come) but with an absolutely ridiculous plot twist involving a - hey, speak of the devil - Nathan for You-level harebrained scheme. It was a fine movie, nothing special, competently made, but not at all memorable. Very stylish, very pretty in a period-appropriate way, but there was really nothing notable about it whatsoever.

Except!

Except for one thing. One huge thing.

You hear a lot about the "male gaze" in movies, in television, in games, in any visual medium created by mean, for men, the idea that when the camera lingers on a woman for a split second too long, or catches her in a certain light, or when the costume she's wearing accentuates certain, uh, assets, that it's small-scale sexual fantasy fulfillment on behalf of the director or meant for the audience. Hell, it's even there in Renaissance artwork - it's always been here and it probably always will be. There's a spectrum of male gaze-iness for sure, and it's usually subtle and non-distracting, and even when it's at its worst and most overt (hi there, enslaved princess Leia on a leash in a metal bikini) it's often easy to dismiss or ignore, especially as a man, especially in a world where we're all so used to it and accustomed to it. But it's a very real thing, and when you know where and how and why to look for it, you see it everywhere. And you see when it isn't there, like in the new Wonder Woman movie, where a female director manages to put Gal Gadot in essentially a corset and bikini briefs and

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this. Think about just how bad and blatant and shameless a movie would have to be with the male gaze for you to notice, like ten minutes into a psychological crime thriller you know nothing about, that the director is absolutely, ravenously horny for his star actress - and more specifically, for her legs. I present to you now several frames from the movie. Please keep in mind that these are not cropped images, but entire frames.

Alright, nothing egregious so far. Just a beautiful young woman in her underwear. Racy, maybe, sexy - but nothing out of the ordinary. This is standard male gaze, nothing more, you might tell yourself. Okay, but circle back to these when we're done and see if you can't tell that something else is up here.

And, sure, okay, on its own this is nothing out of the ordinary. Women striding around in a tall pair of heels is a common trope, and it's eye-catching, and it's head-turning, and these are some great legs to boot. It's not weird that "the camera" loves them, tracks them, follows them, has no interest in what's going on above her waist in two separate shots as she enters a gas station.

This one might even be a stretch on its own, but maybe you have to understand the context of the scene to understand how weird this shot is. This woman is starting to think she's going crazy, as this little boy tells her there's a body in her trunk. So she exits the car and walks to the back to investigate. This is a moment where, perhaps more than any other in the movie, it'd be nice to see her face, her reaction, her apprehension. But, no - we get that same lithe, confident stride. Am I overthinking it to point out that the boy's head is level with her waist, as if to suggest that the two characters in this scene are the boy and the woman's legs? Probably! But, come on.

She's dancing on the beach here - pardon the blur! And pardon the upskirt-esque camera work. Just had to have this shot of her twirling around in her very '60s miniskirt to expose her extraordinarily long and thin thighs, I guess.

Here we have not one but two separate shots, interrupted by a male character's stare, of the main character putting on a pair of six-inch wedges. Note that we get two completely different angles of foot coverage - arches and toes as she puts on the left shoe, then underneath and behind the right. Note that the director included both of these shots and ask yourself - why? (Come on. Why else?)

Okay, so it's as clear as day by now that "the camera" has a thing for legs and feet. That's fine! I'm not here to kink shame, and I think all of these shots are sexy too! But, Jesus. There's nothing symbolic here. The shoes, the miniskirt - none of them hold any symbolic value to the characters or to the plot.  It;s not like she's barefoot when she's scared or shaken, and then strutting confidently when she's not. It's a very abstract movie, sure, more style than substance as I mentioned - but if you think all of these leg shots have any value beyond fetish fuel, I can assure you - they do not!

Last one, a little icing on the cake - if you were in denial before, get a load of this one. No, this is not from the "point of view" of any character hiding or spying or creeping. This is simply the camera, set up all voyeuristically behind a corner, just gobbling this up.

And here's where I think it's important to make two more points. The first is that, while I've shown you all kinds of leg action, I gathered the above dozen frames from trailers and one-minute scenes on YouTube; the rest of the movie is just as loaded with them. The second is that, come to think of it, at no point in the movie is the main character wearing anything that covers anything between her upper thighs and the tops of her feet. Like, she may have been in close-toed heels at one point, I can't remember, but definitely never in pants or even a knee-length skirt or dress. (Return, now, to the second picture, where she's sort of wrapped in the blanket. See what I mean?)

The reason I bring all this leg attention up is, again, to point out just how obvious and unshakable the male gaze was here, even for me, a male with a "gaze" of my own! And with all the terrible reports coming out of Hollywood about directors and sexual proclivities and power imbalances, I have to wonder - this actress, this woman, Freya Mavor - 22 when this came out, probably a year or so younger when it was shot - when she got the script for a remake of a 1970 crime thriller, did she expect that she was signing up for... this? Just fueling her director's masturbation sessions? 

I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if the movie kept focusing on, say, her ass. Or her chest. (I mean, this overtly, this often, yeah, sure, I might have.) And I shouldn't assume that Freya Mavor  wasn't totally comfortable with this, or maybe even in on it. And I shouldn't even assume that the director - Joann Sfar, a comic book creator - is dirty or skeevy or nefarious whatsoever. Because that is kink-shaming, and that's not me, I swear! Maybe the first day the pair met for shooting, he was just like, "listen, you have gorgeous legs, and I want to get my camera on them as often as possible," and she was okay with it, and all for it, and totally flattered. But I guess my bigger point is, holy smokes, this guy just couldn't help himself. "I was only gonna remake a noir crime thriller thing but hubba hubba, check out the gams on that tomato!" It's distracting as hell, it takes away from the rest of the movie (which, granted, wasn't worth a lot to begin with), and frankly it's just sort of tonally jarring. "This woman is starting to doubt her own mind, and oh by the way, don't you love the shape of her knees?"

I suppose the learning experience I can take form this is that the absurd leg focus here is really no different from, like, making Natalie Portman's space shirt all torn and wet in the second Star Wars movie, or putting Margot Robbie in panties for the entirety of Suicide Squad. Oof. "Red-blooded males" really are disgusting creatures, aren't we?

Nathan for You: Season 4

Nathan for You is a show I was first introduced to by Sweeney four years ago, and yet I've never posted about it on the blog until now. No need for me to recap the premise, but it's a very funny and extremely cringe-inducing pseudo-reality ostensibly show about Nathan Fielder helping out struggling businesses in bizarre and unconventional and questionably legal ways.

Or at least, that's what it used to be about. Here in its fourth season Nathan for You really became more of a show about a sad and lonely business reality show host who goes to insane lengths to justify or legalize the actions he's taking to help struggling businesses.

It's one thing, for instance, in the first season, when Nathan tries to garner some buzz for a frozen yogurt shop by introducing a poo-flavored yogurt. It's a simple concept, the show spends ten minutes on it, and then we're on to the next segment. It's quite another thing, in the fourth season, when Nathan wants to help a shipping company out by reducing the tariff rates on smoke detectors by rebranding them as musical instruments. In order to establish that they're musical instruments, he needs to establish a precedent that a successful band has used them in a recording before; in order to do that, he needs to assemble a band in the first place, then force them to use a smoke detector as a musical instrument after they come up with a catchy single. Then Nathan needs to get local radios to play the song; all of them refuse, citing the annoying smoke alarm beeps interspersed. So then Nathan has to make the song a viral hit, which he accomplishes by staging a fake town meeting on behalf of Shell (yes, the oil company) which ends with a shitty little canned PR video that uses the band's song. Nathan shows this to his new band's lead singer and songwriter, who is enraged - "that's not really our song's intention, man, to support Big Oil like this." So Nathan convinces him to stage a protest in front of a Shell gas station in which the band gives away free gasoline while playing their song. This, understandably, makes the local news, which gives Nathan the legal precedent he needs to establish that, yes, in fact, at least one instance has occurred in which a band has used a smoke detector as a musical instrument, making smoke detectors qualify for a lower tariff rate for the international shipping company.

That was long-winded, and I left out about three steps of the process. Point is, this is what Nathan for You is now - a virtual laboratory for human contact for a sad, lonely man. What's absolutely unclear to me is how much the real Nathan Fielder is living vicariously through the Nathan Fielder character presented on screen. The real Nathan went through a divorce a few years ago, and it wouldn't shock me at all if this newer, deeper, sadder version of Nathan for You is an intentional manifestation of a real-life deeper, sadder Nathan Fielder. But then, who even knows which parts of this show are staged and scripted, and which parts are genuine? Who can say how much of Nathan's horribly awkward persona is an act? Who knows what the few recurring characters on the show think of it all, and to what extent they're in on the joke?

I can't say Nathan for You is as clever or funny as it used to be, and the stunts feel more and more forced by the year. But it's evolving in other ways and continues to provide a fascinating look at one man's loneliness - and however fake or real that man and his loneliness are, it's still a fascinating endeavor. This season ended in a two-hour special that stretched the limits a little bit - easily could have been an hour, frankly - but that special itself ended with maybe the darkest and most depressing scene imaginable for this show, for this character, for this man.

This show's lost some speed on its fastball, but it's now commanding the edges of the plate like it never used to. It has been fascinating to watch it change and evolve and become less about the hijinks and more about humanity. I'm excited to see where a fifth season goes, and if there is no fifth season, I'm excited to see what Nathan does next. He's still only - holy shit, and no offense to him - thirty-four years old! Here's hoping he's got decades of content left in him.

Thor: Ragnarok

I think I'm turning a corner on Marvel, guys - but only because Marvel itself is turning a corner!

I shouldn't overstate this; I've liked and disliked Marvel movies in roughly equal measure for ten years now, so the idea that I've enjoyed the latest Thor and Guardians and Spider-Man movies shouldn't be surprising. But, still - one thing these movies all seem to have in common is that they're very much their own things, beyond just being "superhero movies." Spider-Man Homecoming was as much a high school movie as it was a Marvel movie (although the Marvel parts - the third act in particular - were really, really dumb). Guardians felt exciting and boldly crazy and zany. And now Thor: Ragnarok is a legitimately funny movie, and legitimately a Taika Waititi movie.

I mean this is so fucking dumb, and it knows it. Look at the poster. That's the Incredible Hulk in Fisher Price gladiator armor. That's Cate Blanchett amping up the glam-camp in her Maleficent-on-steroids helmet. That's a 1980s WWF typeface aesthetic, no doubt about it.

Is Marvel good now? Marvel might be good now. Marvel was never bad, but it was aggressively bland for such a long time. Is Marvel fun now? I think Marvel might be fun now. And that's such an exciting prospect to me, this multi-billion dollar franchise just throwing caution to the wind and not taking itself so damn seriously.

[Sees Black Panther trailer.]

Aww, fuck. Marvel still takes itself way too seriously, you guys.

Stranger Things: Season 2

Oh boy. Brace yourselves, because here comes my take on Stranger Things 2. In fact, just to draw out the suspense, let's look back at my take on Stranger Things a year and a half ago. Here it is:

Stranger Things is the type of show that's addicting and excellent while you're watching it, but that starts to fall apart pretty quickly when you pull at the seams of its plot. That's not meant to be an indictment - the show is an homage to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King and 1980s adventures in general, and it ends up being everything it could have wanted to be and more. I'm hoping for a second season, but I also want that second season to have nothing to do with this cast or setting whatsoever. Leave well enough alone, you know?

Well, damn. They didn't leave well enough alone! But we'll get there. My take on the first season was basically, "this show was an enjoyable '80s homage." And in an earlier, simpler time, my take would have ended there. But no! That was my take in July. And as we all know all too well, our takes are no longer our own; they evolve in relation to the takes of those around us, and of the zeitgeist as a whole. Sometimes there's positive feedback thing going on, where we can be talked into liking something more or less than we initially did because everyone else does. Other times, we dig in our heels, and overblown reactions can cause us to slide even farther away from critical consensus with cries of "overrated" and "underrated." This, I think, is what happened to me with Stranger Things. I liked the show just fine in July. By the time those kids were passing out peanut butter sandwiches at the Emmys two months later, I was over them. When I saw my fiftieth Buzzfeed promoted tweet about "look what the Stranger Things kids are up to today" in, like, December, I was a little annoyed. And when the trailer for the second season debuted at the Super Bowl in February, I was almost rooting against it. "This? Why is this the big Netflix hit, of all things? This show wasn't even that good!"

But hype's a powerful thing! Because when late October rolled around and the second season of Stranger Things was imminent, there I was, excited all over again.

Okay, speaking of hype. Enough with the preamble. Here is my Stranger Things 2 take.

It was still enjoyable and easy to watch, but also kind of deeply flawed this time around, with all kinds of pacing issues, and were it not for the "all's well that ends well" final twenty minutes or so, I'd almost consider this whole second helping a sneaky disaster. Not commercially, obviously. But like. Damn!

Nine episodes, and you take the show's most iconic character, and you separate her from the rest of the characters until the very end of the eighth episode? And you give her, in the seventh episode, a standalone episode of her own that just flat doesn't work, just as the action and conflict the rest of the characters are enduring is finally ramping up a bit after way too many expository episodes?

Here's what I understand, before I go any farther. I understand that any show with mass appeal is going to appeal to different people for different reasons. Breaking Bad was one of my all time favorite shows, and it was also one of the all time favorite shows of people who never understood or realized that Walter White was the bad guy, or at least a bad guy in general. I loved what the show did with Skyler and Walt and their fragile, tenuous marriage, and how it explored that they're both flawed people who have put their own pride and greed before their relationship; plenty of other people who loved the show were always content to just call Skyler a bitch. So I know that what I liked and didn't like about the first season of Stranger Things might not be what others did - what you did - but this is my review, my horribly long-running rant, so bear with me.

Here's a short and incomplete list of things that worked in the first season, among other things. The big dumb sinister government lab having no real explanation or backstory. The friendship between the four boys, and how it's challenged and changed by the disappearance of Will and emergence of Eleven. Winona Ryder as a frantic, crazy mother. Steve. Eleven not really having a backstory beyond "science experiment wunderkind." Dustin's goofiness. Jonathan and Nancy not getting together, but becoming good friends. Eleven's quirkiness, especially in her school-appropriate disguise. The bullies at school being just as frightening at times as the monsters from the dark world from Metroid Prime 2. The relationship between Will and Jonathan and their mother. The relationship between Mike and Nancy and their parents. Hopper being a slacker and an alcoholic. The title sequence.

Season 2 seemed to go out of its way to not put the four boys together after the first few episodes. This wasn't all bad, and the Dustin-Steve pairing that emerged in the second half was probably worth the trade, but there was just so much room here to continue to explore these four kids and their relationship to each other as girls continue to enter the picture and as middle school transitions into high school. Oh, do you know what else Season 2 seemed to think? It seemed to think that Nancy and Steve didn't belong together. Which, again, fine - this gave us Dustin and Steve, as well as some great solo Steve material - but Jonathan? Look, he's a nice guy and all, but no. Completely introverted, no signs of being emotionally mature enough to foster a teenage relationship. Just, no! You know who else was almost entirely absent this season? Mike and Nancy's parents. And you know who just sort of became a super-parent foster dad out of nowhere? The former slacker and recovering alcoholic, Hopper.

Oh, and Barb? Bob was Barb all over again. Not quite, since he was a grown ass man and sort of got to go out like a hero, but Barb enough in the sense that everyone gave twenty times as much of a shit about saving Will from dying as they did about Bob and Barb actually dying. So it goes!

Also: Billy. Why? And while we're at it - why Max? Aside from to give Lucas and Dustin something to sort of fight over, but not really fight over. She's an object, not a subject, even if she skateboards and is great at video games, you know?

I dunno, guys. All of these beats felt predictable. You kind of knew which kids would pair up into which relationships right away. You kind of figured out who would die (Bob. Just Bob.) fairly early on. This season just felt weirdly rushed and underplanned. What's the big scary monster this time? It's a slow-moving spider in the netherworld, or maybe it's a bunch of dog-sized monsters that'll eat your face if you don't have, you know, guns or whatever. And of course they kept Eleven separated from the rest of the crew for the entire season, because if she were involved in the "let's raise this slug monster" plot, she'd have killed that motherfucking thing from the get-go.

And what the hell was Brett Gelman doing in this show? I don't just mean that he felt oddly out of place here - I mean, really, what was even the purpose of that character? What purpose did he serve?

Look, this could have been so much more Stand By Me than it was. It could have been darker, or it could have been more fun. It could have been anything it wanted to be. And this is what it decided to be.

And what the fuck was with that seventh episode. This is X-Men now? Heroes? Oof. Jesus.

The larger story didn't really take shape until the sixth episode or so, and by then there were only effectively two episodes left, and how was the day won? How was it saved? Not through any novel or clever means - just Eleven doing Eleven things, all over again, and not even sacrificing herself for all of four minutes in the process this time.

Should Will have died? Should Hopper have died? Either someone bigger should have died, or Bob shouldn't have died. But I'm cold on this whole season, which felt tonally inconsistent and completely unsure of what it was and what it wanted to do. Some great performances, don't get me wrong, and even some solid character arcs, but what else was there? I dunno. Talk me down. Defend the show Defend the season. What did you love about Stranger Things 2?

Patriot: Season 1

This show - something from Amazon Prime I'd never heard of and never seen any advertisements for until someone on Twitter mentioned it offhand - is legitimately one of my favorite shows of 2017.

Let's start with the concept. Shitty title aside, the show's about a CIA-esque intelligence officer going under non-official cover to deliver a large quantity of money to an Iranian political candidate in Luxembourg. It's ostensibly a political thriller, but what it actually is is just the blackest, darkest, driest comedy I've seen. This is tonally the Coen brothers and visually Wes Anderson. How could I not love it?

Michael Dorman stars as John Tavner, alias John Lakeman, the absolutely broken and miserable man pictured in the poster above. He has taken to dealing with his PTSD and existential depression by retelling his experiences in droning, monotone folk songs. It's perfectly absurd, and holy shit does it just plain work. His actual boss, the one tasking him with acts of international espionage, is his father, played by Terry O'Quinn, who trusts him explicitly to handle anything and everything thrown at him, up to and including the murder of otherwise innocent people. But, again, tonally, it works. There's a weird, slightly satirical distance between this man who literally orders his son to murder people in Europe and the idea that, shit, they're just a father-son pair who are very close and love each other very much. Rounding out the family is John's older brother, the "fuck up," who is merely a Texas congressman rather than an international spy. He sleeps until one and wears absurd track suits everywhere - and he's maybe the only character in the whole show who is unabashedly happy.

To go undercover, John needs to get a job at a very specific company that does business in both Luxembourg and Iran, which is how he finds himself in way over his head posing as an industrial engineer at a piping firm based in Milwaukee. His boss there? Kurtwood Smith, who is somehow even more of a Red Forman character here than he was as Red Forman, just an extremely old school hardass who instantly dislikes John "Lakeman" and senses that he's distracted and lazy, as if piping isn't the single most important thing in the world to him.

Some might complain that the show has a convoluted plot. It does - but that's very much intentional, and part of its Coen-y, Anderson-like charm. What should be a simple bang-bang money exchange in Luxembourg goes, obviously, horribly awry, and suddenly John finds himself travelling back and forth between Milwaukee and Luxembourg trying to maintain his cover as a piping expert while committing all sorts of nefarious crimes in the name of re-securing a bag full of cold hard cash. By the third episode or so (out of ten) we've got, among other things:

• An airport employee stealing the bag, and then John murdering of a few of the airport employee's family members in the act of retrieving the bag, igniting a rivalry with a family of large Brazilian men
• The Iranian contact in Luxembourg double-crossing our protagonists, and instead preparing to funnel these funds directly toward an Iranian nuclear weapons program instead of against it; he too ends up murdered by John.
• The lone Luxembourg City homicide detective investigating these murders trying to piece everything together, interviewing "Lakeman" and his piping company coworkers in both Luxembourg and Milwaukee.
• Kurtwood Smith's Red Forman character looking for any and every reason to fire "Lakeman," and John's constant struggle to remain in his good graces.
• Some poor schlub at the piping company being pulled into the undercover operation when "Lakeman" needs his pee to pass a drug test.
• A security guard at the piping company overhearing this entire conversation, and knowing who and what "Lakeman" is, and holding this blackmail opportunity over him.
• The only other candidate for John's piping engineering job, suffering from brain damage after John pushed him in front of a truck to get the job, beginning to slowly regain his memory of, you know, John pushing him in front of a truck.
• The mysterious wife of an Iranian nuclear engineer on her way to Luxembourg in order to obtain the bag full of money.
• Throughout it all, John desperately misses his wife. Wouldn't you?

It's a lot to take in, and again, that's the point. Facing any one of these issues would be a crippling obstacle for any of us, and here's poor miserable John trying to balance and stave off all of this, to the point where something like "get your paperwork in tomorrow or you'll be fired" is, like, the eighth-most pressing thing on his to-do list.

This isn't a show for everyone. I get that. It's very unapologetically going for a very specific tone and style, and if that tone and style aren't for you, hey, sorry. But such is the age of Peak TV, right? If the '00s were all about the emergence of a few certain shows being critically and commercially successful "prestige dramas" that rivaled middlebrow movies, then the onslaught of streaming options we face today is all about there being something for every single niche and specific taste, there being an outlet for almost every voice with something to say, you name it. That I never once saw an advertisement for Patriot, even within Amazon Prime's streaming app itself, is very telling, and really too bad. But if word of mouth is still worth anything at all, then please - any and all of you reading this, give this thing a shot! The entire pilot is available on YouTube; watch the first eight minutes or so to get the crash course on the vibe and style they're going for. If you like that, stick around. That's all!

Tower

It's crazy to consider now, but in 1966 when an angry 25-year-old went on a killing spree with a sniper rifle from the tower in the middle of the UT Austin campus, it was an entirely new phenomenon. Today we'd just call it another mass shooting almost indistinguishable from so, so many others, but the concept of a "mass shooting" just didn't exist in 1966.

This documentary uses a mix of rotoscoping, archived footage, and survivor interviews to recount the stories of many of the heroes and victims of the tragedy. This might sound callous, but even at eighty minutes in length it feels just a little too long; by the time the tower is stormed and the shooter is killed, you're just ready for it to be over, you know?

What depressed me most about the movie is how there are going to be documentaries about Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Pulse Night club, Vegas, you name it - or, how's this for depressing, maybe there won't even be. Ugh.

Life

Here's the deal. This is exactly what you'd get if you remade Alien with the special effects from Gravity.

And if that sounds awesome, or at least pretty cool, hey, I agree! This was a thoroughly enjoyable space thriller.

But if it sounds entirely derivative and lame, hey, I agree with that too! This was, by all accounts, immensely run-of-the-mill and forgettable.

There's really nothing wrong with it, at all. There just isn't a whole lot it's bringing to the table, either. Good, fine, easy to watch, and probably better than I'm making it sound, but it loses points for being just so formulaic and been-there-done-that.

Snowfall: Season 1

Whew. Finally finished this one. Don't bother.

It's not bad! If it were bad, it would have been an easy show to cut ties with, like, instantly. You've all seen I'm not shy about bailing on a show these days. Instead, Snowfall - which marketed itself as the story about how "crack started" or something - was just sort of mundane and fine and serviceable. It's exactly the kind of show it feels like we already have way more than enough of. Nothing wrong with these historical hour-longs but man, I need something more. Or like, literally less. If this is a six-episode season, I'm all aboard, baby! At ten? Eh. (At thirteen I'd like to believe I would have cut this.)

Anyway, this show will be back for a second season, but I sincerely doubt I will be.

Super Mario Odyssey

It's been a big year for Nintendo. A new console and new games for two of their largest franchises: Zelda and Mario. When Breath of the Wild dropped earlier this year, I considered it a smash hit (as did the majority of people). Now, we got Super Mario Odyssey. For me, this was a long awaited return to the gameplay we haven't seen since those dearly loved Galaxy days. 

But the question remi: Does Odyssey hold up?

Yeah, it does. Undoubtably. 

Mario has -- and likely always will be -- a staple in platform games. The gaming mechanics always feel so smooth and natural that it doesn't take long before you can pull of crazy combos to navigate challenging obstacles. With Odyssey, we are introduced to Cappy --  your sentient hat sidekick -- and this guy brings with him a whole new list of moves Mario can now do. At surface level, you just throw a hat out and it will help you hit enemies. But when you're not using Cappy to boop badies on the head, you're using it to take control of their bodies. (Something somewhat similar to a Kirby-effect.) And when you're not possessing other chaaracters (who have their own list of special moves you to explore), you're using Cappy in weird, new ways to extend your jumps and help Mario pull off amazing combos that allow you to reach new areas of the game. Reddit is flooding right now with gifs of players using Cappy to pull of some ridiculous moves that allow Mario to enter areas developers may or may have not intended gamers to get to.

Aside from the gameplay and mechanics, which in and of themselves makes this game an essential buy, we also the world(s). When trailers were first dropping for Odyssey, I though this might be a story about Mario sailing around the world to come home -- if I'm to draw any conclusions based of Homer's work with the same name. I was half right in my predictions. Mario isn't necessarily on a journey to get home, but he is on a journey nonetheless. A journey that takes him across many different environments (and maybe some off-world locations -- I'm not going to reveal too much) in order for him to reach his destination. (OK. Small spoiler. You're trying to save Peach from Bowser -- SHOCKER!) The places you explore along your adventure are fun, colorful, and expansive. There's a lot to discover and your efforts and consistently rewarded with treasures and coins. (Oh! Worth noting your coins actually mean something in this game. So collecting them is now an essential endeavor.) Some worlds you'll travel to are even heart-warningly nostalgic to the Mario64 days. However, I'll refrain from providing any more details because all of the fun comes from the surprises that are yielded from your desire to explore every inch of these worlds.

I think my only downside to the game's mapping system is that there's no central hub Mario runs around in. You have an airship of sort of that takes you place to place, which is... OK. It's not that it's a bad feature, I just love the idea of having a central hub that I'm constantly returning to and slowly expanding by unlocking additional areas. That was the beauty of Peach's Castle in Mario64. While it looked plain on the surface, it quickly becomes clear there's more than meets the eye there. It would have been nice if Mario's ship offered that same sense of wonder. Sadly, no. This is by no means a deal breaker. Just comments from the peanut gallery.

So, while I've have beaten this game within several hours of gameplay, it's quite clear that there's still a lot to unearth. I'm making this post because I've technically reached the narrative conclusion (e.g. Mario vs Bowser) and hit the credits. But looking back on the game, it's obvious there's still so, so, so much to do. 

I write this now with roughly 260 moons collected, but it seems I need to get around 500 to unlock the next big event. And ~900 moons to 100% the game. Time to stop playing dress-up with Mario's seemingly endless supply of costumes and get back to hunting down those moons.

Oh! One small note. I faint dream that would be nice to see addressed in the next game. Do you think we can do away with the Bowser-kidnaps-Peach-and-Mario-has-to-save-her storyline? Sure, it's iconic to the franchise. I get it. But we're 30-something years out since this game was first created, shouldn't it be time for something new? How about a story where Peach is the central character and she fights Bowser on her own? Or a story where Mushroom Kingdom is being attacked by a brand new evil and Mario, Peach, AND Bowser have to team up to save the day. I got nothing against this game, Nintendo, but would it hurt to try pushing the envelope a little more. I know you can do it! I mean, just look at what was accomplished in Breath of the Wild. Anyway... I've made my case. 

One last thing before I forget. Here are my game rankings for the year. It's a tough pick... but I think I still prefer Breath of the Wild over Mario Odyssey. Maybe the further I get in Mario, the more my preference of it will change, but as of right now, it's holding the #3 spot!. 

That just leaves Cuphead in my inbox to finish (IF I CAN!). Anyone else got a recommendations for a 2017 title that could overthrow these giants?