Patriot: Season 2

Man, I absolutely loved this show in 2017. It was so, so niche, and so specifically felt like a thing that appealed to me directly. (Read my glowing review here: https://back-blogged.blogspot.com/2017/11/patriot-season-1.html)

I knew Season 1 would be a tough act to follow, and I braced myself for something... lesser, in Season 2. Frankly I was just thrilled that such an obscure and unheralded show was getting a second season. That said, holy shit, Patriot was even better than I expected it would be in Season 2. Now, that doesn't mean it was as good as Season 1 - lightning so rarely strikes twice! - but for the first half of Season 2 I was just completely loving it. The wheels sadly started to come off around the penultimate episode and the whole thing ended with what felt like a bit of a whimper - just way too dark, even for this show, but with the tiniest trace of closure for the series, which is bittersweet, because man I'd love to see a third season of this thing, but I'm just not sure where they'd even take it.

Anyway, watch Patriot. It's an absolute blast.

Ugly Delicious: Season 1

Here's an eight-episode food show on Netflix that Marissa and I have been watching since, like, March. I liked it a lot! The show features renowned chef David Chang traveling around the world eating food and talking about food and comparing food with a bunch of recognizable actors and comedians and food people.

If that sounds entirely ho-hum to you, it's not! It's not a pretentious show. The "ugly" right there in the title is as honest as it gets. Chang's not a handsome man, and he's constantly stuffing his face full of food that falls apart or drips down his chin. None of the dishes and meals are shot like traditional food porn, either - this ain't Chef's Table.

The first episode is called "Pizza" and in it, Chang and various friends eat authentic pizza in the heart of Naples and then also eat Dominoes. Then they go to Tokyo and have a tuna-and-mayonnaise pizza. Then they go to Frank Pepe's in Connecticut to partake in the famous clam pizza, the top-rated pizza in America. They eat smoked salmon pizza. They debate what makes pizza "pizza," and it's not nearly as "is a hot dog a sandwich" as it sounds like. They debate whether or not pizza is an Italian dish or an Italian-American dish. This is what the show is! It's David Chang traveling all over the place, eating food, watching food get made, at some of the best restaurants in the world, and talking about food and culture with his friends.

The best episode of the seeason was "Fried Chicken," which in addition to everything I described above (but with fried chicken instead of pizza) features some incredibly deep and diverse discussion about racial stereotypes and caricatures.

Weird enough, Ugly Delicious was just renewed for a second season yesterday, eight months after it debuted but more or less exactly when we finally finished it. Cool! I'll definitely be back for more.

American Horror Story: Season 8

Wow! This show again. I've already quit this thing twice, first in 2012 (mid-Season 2) and then again, for what seemed like for good, in 2014 (mid-Season 4). But then this season - the eighth, holy shit! - was pitched as a combination of Seasons 1 and 3 - you know, the only two of this show I've ever finished. How perfect was that? So I bit the bullet and dove back in for the first time in four years a few months ago, buckling up and preparing for whatever the hell might happen in American Horror Story: Apocalypse. And holy shit., you know what happened? Within the first ten minutes of the first episode, the apocalypse happened! Nuclear goddamn war, wiping out the vast, vast majority of the human population.

What followed was an absolutely incoherent mess of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks as characters from Seasons 1 and 3 (and others, apparently) just sort of made their way into this narrative - most of them having died, already, in their respective seasons - and oh man the whole thing was just stupid and pulpy satanic worship stuff, where the witches from Season 3 end up saving the human race thanks to time travel and other various tricks. Sarah Paulson played three, maybe four different characters in this. What a mess! What a dumb, silly mess.

All that said, I didn't hate this. The seasons of American Horror Story that I've bailed on - Asylum and Freak Show - tended to dwell on the disgusting and the demented; by contrast, the two seasons I've completed, Murder House and Coven, were full of campy horror tropes - the first season a delightful and surprising modern ghost house story, complete with plenty of jump scares, and the third one just a big old witch-on-witch-on-witch catfight between old-timey racist slaveowners, voodoo queens, and bratty teen celebrities. So yeah - Apocalypse was ridiculous, and it didn't really hit on any sort of thematic or character-based, I dunno, significance? But it was an easy enough epilogue of sorts to those two seasons I'd at least enjoyed, a somewhat enjoyable crossover of sorts.

Lastly, some rankings. I've seen three full seasons of this show and bailed on two more, without so much as knowing what happened in the other three. but but me in whatever camp goes 1-3-8-4-2. God, some people just loved Season 2. Guys - I just couldn't, with that one! It had the distinct tone and atmosphere of the Saw movies, but with psychotic abuse and mental breakdowns in lieu of the dumb gore-puzzles. No thank you!

Kidding: Season 1

Here's a sneaky great one, a new show on Showtime that I've heard described as "what if Mr. Rogers had a nervous breakdown?" It's an accurate description, but it doesn't really do the show much justice. It was made by a screenwriter named Dave Holstein, but it's produced and at least partially directed by Michel Gondry, whose fingerprints are just all over this thing. Jim Carrey's here, cast perfectly as a sad sack of a Mr. Rogers figure who lost his son to a car accident and his wife to a divorce shortly thereafter, but who has to keep wearing a smile and singing happy songs on his PBS show every day. We've got Catherine Keener, Judy Greer, Justin Kirk, and Frank Langella all giving wonderful performances. Oh, and Tara Lipinski pops in briefly to portray a fictional, super-shitty version of Tara Lipinski. It's surreal and wonderful and I'm thrilled we're getting a second season of this totally unique show, this weird and darkly comic exploration of grief and parenting and human tenderness.

Here is maybe the best single clip that shows the whole range of what the show has to offer. I guess it's missing a lot of the fun, surreal elements, but, just give it a whirl and see if the raw, shitty emotion on display throughout this clip and the record-scratching familial reaction to it don't tickle something deep down inside you. Minor spoilers, I guess:

At any rate, this show came out of nowhere to become one of my favorites of the year. I can't praise it much more highly!

Apocalypse Now

Here's the second-to-last movie in my backlog, a DVD I must have bought all the way back in college, Francis Ford Coppola's famous Vietnam War masterpiece and Heart of Darkness adaptation, Apocalypse Now. Specifically, here's the "Redux" version, which clocks in at nearly three and a half hours.

I respect the absolute hell out of this movie, but I'm afraid it's not a perfect ten for me. How much of that comes from the run time of this alternate, extended cut? Probably plenty! I can easily picture a shorter and simpler version of this movie, a less meandering one, hitting home harder and more succinctly. But that is not the version I watched, and alas, not the version I am here to blog about today.

One more DVD, guys. One more and then finally I can shut the book on this ten-year project of watchign every DVD I own.

The Deuce: Season 2

Very glad that this show exists. There's too much TV out there these days, but it's nice to see that David Simon's still doing solid and methodical hour-long dramas that walk you right through a story without unnecessary diversions or go-nowhere plots. Every character here is here for a reason, every scene is here for a reason, and even if the show isn't exactly thrilling from start to finish, you never feel like your time is being wasted.

That's really all I want form TV now, is to feel like my time is not being wasted. Thank you, David Simon.

Succession: Season 1

I finished this show about a month ago, I think. Liked it, didn't love it, it had its moments, you know the drill. I gotta say, Succession never really appealed to me when HBO was running ads for it in the early summer. Only after I heard more than one person rave about this show was I like, eh, sure, fine, I'll give it a shot. And even then, it was my wife who wanted to watch it!

Gah. Be back for Season 2, I guess.

American Gangster

Shit, remember when I would post about movies on this blog? Yeah, this is the first Blu-ray I've watched in well over a year. It's just not a thing I do anymore. I'm sorry! (I'm not sorry.)

Two DVDs remain, and then I've officially completely and entirely eliminated my movie backlog.

This movie was really not so good. That's the only take I've got.