Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's 'While We're Young'
Instead of just focusing on one issue, movie or TV show, I'm going to open up the floor and ask a question. If a friend asked for a recommendation of a movie or TV show, what would you tell them? What should people try giving a chance?
I'm gonna make a few suggestions and do some quick reviews of recent shows and movies that might be worth taking a look at. Continue below the fold for more.
► While We're Young
Noah Baumbach's career has included Frances Ha, The Squid And The Whale, and Greenberg. Here's a pretty apt description of what one should expect going into any one of those films.
An attempt to chart every stumbling step of post-adolescence, from the shell shock of the late-teen years to the scary free fall of life after college to the self-imposed waiting station occupied by grownups who refuse to grow up.
With his latest movie,
While We're Young, Baumbach looks at generational differences. It's been described as "an art-house
Neighbors" that looks at the interaction between 40-something spouses (Stiller and Watts) and the millennial couple they befriend (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried).
The most fascinating thing about this movie was the conversations it inspired among people I know after they saw it. For most people, choosing to have a child is not something that can just be added onto their lives without other changes occurring as well. Things change. Lives change. It's a huge decision that has ramifications for decades, and this movie makes you think about how those choices are made or passed by. There come points in life where you have to make decisions that seem to wall off others. Do you take that shot and max out your credit cards making a movie, trying to make it with your band, or creating your business idea? Or do you keep your steady job and hope that "someday" an opportunity will come? And if someday never comes, there's either bitterness or a longing to recapture a misspent youth.
► Black Mirror
When this series finally made it to Netflix and a larger swath of the American public last fall, it caused a
buzz on the internet. Created by Charlie Brooker and heavily inspired by Rod Serling's
The Twilight Zone, most episodes of the series are set in a not-so-distant future. While the series is only seven episodes in length, they vary greatly in subject matter and tone, but with all sharing a theme of the interaction between technology and humanity. The "black mirror" of the title is the reflection given by a television, smartphone, or any electronic device with a screen.
The result is something that is both shocking and very thought-provoking.
- The National Anthem: The prime minister of the United Kingdom is awakened early one morning to the news that a member of the royal family has been kidnapped. The kidnapper uploads a video to YouTube of a frightened Princess Susannah reading a ransom letter. The singular demand? The princess will be killed unless the prime minister agrees to broadcast and stream himself having sex with a pig before a 4 PM deadline.
- 15 Million Merits: To describe this one might be too spoilerish. It works better if you go into it not knowing. But here's a slight hint: Imagine Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops, merge them with Facebook, and have American Idol at its center.
- The Entire History Of You: Set in a world not too far in the future with a technology called a "grain," the crux of the story deals with the unraveling of a relationship. The grain is an implant that records all events that occur in a person's life, and allows people to access and review it inside their own head, as well as broadcast the memories to monitors and TV sets. In short, it's like having a GoPro camera inside your head. Mothers can review what their children have been doing, security at the airport just looks at your memories for the previous week, and when you're having sex with your wife or husband you can access your memories of being with a different partner. But what happens when this sort of technology is used by a jealous husband? The episode borrows many of its themes from Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, and the story is being adapted into a film by Robert Downey Jr.
- White Bear: Another episode for which I can't describe much without giving away spoilers. But the resolution to this one gives a lot of people what they claim to want with the issue at the heart of the story, and you see how awful that would be, even if the person arguably deserved it.
- White Christmas: The story is probably one of the most unsettling explorations of high-tech forms of slavery and the potentials of being deemed a non-person by your friends, loved ones, and society.
15 Million Merits and
White Christmas are probably the most thought-provoking episodes of the the series, since the themes apply very much to the present-day. But
The Entire History Of You was to me the most disturbing episode, because I can imagine that technology actually one day happening and the situation occurring. There are already relationships in which boyfriends and girlfriends demand to read emails or want access to their partner's phone in order to review texts. That episode only imagines a scenario where things are taken to a whole new level.
► Togetherness
My personal measure for how good or bad a relationship is going is whether it can deal with silence. I have a tendency to talk too much and make meaningless small talk, since I just hate the feeling of people staring at each other with nothing to say. But if you can sit with someone you like and there's either no silence or the quiet times aren't awkward, then things are probably going to turn out all right.
Created by Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, and Steve Zissis, HBO's Togetherness centers on the relationship between four friends. Brett (Mark Duplass) and Michelle (Melanie Lynskey) are a 30-something husband-and-wife with kids, with Michelle's sister, Tina (Amanda Peet), and Brett's best friend, Alex (Steve Zissis), moving into their home after personal setbacks. There are two overarching storylines to the first season of the series: the complicated, friendzone-ish relationship between Alex and Tina, and the slow destruction of Brett and Michelle's marriage.
What does it mean when your wife would rather masturbate to reading
Fifty Shades of Grey instead of having sex with you? The series is at its most fascinating when contemplating how two people fall out of love with each other or obscure the love they have right in front of them. The fourth episode of the show has one of the most awkward and honest sex scenes between a couple trying to be intimate without either the desire or emotional connection to do so, even though they've been married for years.
► The Americans
When I was a kid, I thought grown-ups had all the answers. Hell, if they're always telling me what to do, they must know what's they're doing. One of the big shifts from childhood to adulthood is realizing most of us are just winging this one day at a time, relying on a certain amount of faith in the things we believe. The word "faith" is usually used in connection to religion and spirituality, but it can extend much further. People can have faith in their love, faith in the rightness of their political ideology, or faith in their parents. But if that faith is misplaced, sooner or later it will crumble when tested against the truth.
The recently finished third season of
The Americans has struggled in the ratings, but it has been a fascinating exercise in examining how that sort of faith erodes. For those unfamiliar, the series is set in the 1980s and follows Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple living in the northern Virginia suburbs with their unsuspecting children (Holly Taylor and Keidrich Sellati) and their neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI counterintelligence agent. While Ronald Reagan and the Cold War are backdrops of the show, it is ultimately about the dynamics of a marriage and family under extraordinary circumstances.
► Bloodline
"We're not bad people, but we did a bad thing." That line is spoken by Kyle Chandler's John Rayburn with all the regret he can muster as part of Netflix's original series Bloodline. I had someone describe this show to me as imagine if Bruce Wayne and the Joker were brothers, and their parents owned a hotel in the Florida Keys.
Created by Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman, the same team behind
Damages,
Bloodline has the same non-linear structure and is a slow, slow burn that demands patience. Anchored around the events that occur at the 45th anniversary of a Florida Keys hotel owned by Sally (Sissy Spacek) and Robert (Sam Shepard), the action begins with the rest of the family reuniting and splitting off into different alliances and factions. Meg (Linda Cardellini) is the smart one, Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is the son that's always ready to fight, John is level-headed and takes care of things, but things really get crazy when Danny (Ben Mendelsohn), the family's drug-addict son, shows up.
The gradual pacing allows the audience time to get to know each of these characters and how well they do or don't fit these stereotypes. There are twists and turns, but the slow reveal of motives works and makes for a restrained and gritty drama.
► The Good Wife
I'm a big fan of CBS' The Good Wife. Co-created by Robert and Michelle King, it's one of the best shows on television, and no other series turns politics and political issues into engrossing entertainment the way this one does. The current season has largely revolved around Alicia's (Julianna Margulies) campaign to become Cook County State's Attorney.
There are two very divergent ways Alicia can be seen within the show. On the one hand, this series is about the journey of a woman who builds something of her own and stops being the "good wife" that's defined by the men in her life. However, the other way of looking at it is the journey of Alicia's corruption and how she slowly becomes as manipulative as everyone else. And those two perceptions aren't necessarily contradictory.
This year's election storyline presented a situation where Alicia's opponent (David Hyde Pierce's Frank Prady) was arguably the better person. The reasons for Alicia's campaign were largely personal. Within the greater context of events within the series, the State's Attorney race was an election driven by a quest for status and affirmation on Alicia's side. It wasn't so much to clean up Chicago, or bring in a "change" to the way things are done. In fact, Alicia actually argues she's the better candidate because she's not an idealist and knows how things work in Chicago. And while Alicia might be a fantastic attorney, for the most part she's an awful politician. She is shown largely not having an ability to think on her feet in public situations and has no instincts for seeing the larger picture or finessing situations to a favorable outcome.
This led to an interesting dichotomy with her and Peter (Chris Noth). Peter is a very flawed man and not beyond impropriety, but he seems to want to do the right thing for the public and perform his job to get a good result. He is the very example of Alicia's argument for her candidacy. Peter may be a Son of a Bitch, but he's a Son of a Bitch that's effective, and the character has no delusions as to what he truly is or the game he's playing. On the other hand, Alicia, as she is now, is simultaneously lost in direction and ego driven that she sometimes comes off as believing her own "Saint Alicia" press clippings and can't reconcile the facts that don't fit with them.
► Space Battleship Yamato 2199
I'm not a big anime fan, but I have a friend who is always suggesting I write something about it. She loves Attack on Titan and One Piece, and we usually end up having a half-serious argument about which has a bigger, more respected fandom: anime or Star Trek.
However, there is one recent anime series I really do like and think is worth giving a try: 1974's Space Battleship Yamato, dubbed and renamed Star Blazers in the United States, is a classic of Japanese anime. It was the first anime series to win the Seiun Award (i.e., the Japanese equivalent to the Hugo Award) and in many ways it's Japan's Star Trek. A few years ago, the series was remade with modern production standards and a bigger budget as Space Battleship Yamato 2199. It retells the story of the series, but also changes some things around.
For those who've never heard of it, the story is set in the year 2199. An alien race called the Gamilons has spent eight years attacking Earth with bombs that have destroyed most of the planet's surface and unleashed deadly radiation. Earth is a desert and humanity has resorted to hiding underground to escape the increasing fallout.
All of Earth's attempts to resist the Gamilons have failed. Most of what's left of Earth's space fleet is destroyed in a failed attack against a Gamilon base on Pluto.
However, just before all hope is lost, a message from a planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud called Iscandar is received offering a way to save Earth. Using the information provided by the message, humanity builds an FTL drive and a powerful weapon called the Wave Motion Gun. The United Nations Cosmo Force raises the wreckage of the Japanese battleship Yamato and converts it into a starship. The Yamato has to make it to Iscandar, collect a machine that will restore Earth's environment, and return in one year, otherwise the damage will be too great to repair.
The original 1970s series is fascinating as a reflection of Japanese attitudes towards its past military adventurism. That the spaceship is a resurrected Yamato, a super-weapon of Imperial Japan, and that its crew's mission is to reverse the effect of enemy radiation bombardment, make the series take on attributes of cathartic wish-fulfillment. By positing a future in which the Japanese noble warrior tradition is an unambiguous good, and by portraying space Nazi aggressors as even more fascist and decadent than anything Earth can come up with,
Yamato is as close to a pop culture apologia to kamikaze credo as you can get. And yet both the original and
2199 have a lament at their core that sees the destructiveness of war as a tragedy to be endured with honor instead of a noble undertaking unto itself.