Apple TV+’s “Palm Royale” has unfortunate timing. It’s an earnest entry in the class-striving genre, here telling the tale of Kristen Wiig’s Maxine Simmons D'ellacourt as she tries to break into high society in Palm Beach in the 1960s. But the conventions of these tales recently took a high-profile battering with the breakout popularity of Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.” Love it or hate it, that squirm-inducing film did something new with the conniving rags-to-riches formula. “Palm Royale” does not. Adding insult to injury, it is overly long, clocking in at nearly ten hours in what could surely be done in half the time. Even “Saltburn’s” biggest fans were not clamoring for it to go on five times its run length.
Now, that’s not to say that “Palm Royale” is completely without charm. Its cast certainly goes a long way toward making it watchable. Wiig is fantastic—funny, likeable, and dynamic. As Maxine, she clearly proves her leading-lady chops with a role showcasing her Hollywood glamour (the '60s styling works for her) while also portraying a depth of emotion those primarily familiar with “Bridesmaids” and her SNL days may not know she has. Likewise, Allison Janney knocks it out of the park.Her Evelyn Rollins, as the type of striver who pulls up the ladder after her, should not be sympathetic. Her voice screeches, her actions are cruel, and her charm has faded with her age. And yet, under Janney’s careful stewardship, Evelyn is hard not to care about even though she gives no real reason why anyone should.
That said, the rest of the ensemble doesn’t sparkle quite as much. Ricky Martin does a serviceable job as Robert, the bartender at the women’s social club. He wears his costumes well and inhabits Robert’s darker moments with ease, but he flubs the comedy. Likewise, the usually reliable Laura Dern can’t make a person out of her bohemian character, who remains little more than a collection of slogans.
Still, the costumes and sets are a delight. As women of a certain age, the matrons of “Palm Royale” sport a copious amount of hairspray and beehives, harkening back to an area where a woman’s hair was her de facto helmet. “Palm Royale” also has a lot of fun with its clothes—the silhouettes, patterns, and colors all telegraphing wealth and the aesthetics of its period. It makes sense that there are several set pieces in the dress shop, where our wealthy women converge to gossip, make power moves, and fight over their next fits. The sets and props are fun too with antique guns and statutes, fanciful homes, and at least one of-the-era bookstore. It’s all a lovely time warp, sending us back to 1969 with its limitations and styling, reflecting Maxine’s obstacles and ambitions.
But style isn’t substance, and “Palm Royale” is lacking in the latter if not the former. For one, not much even happens for the first two-thirds of the season. Yes, Maxine gets a foothold in the rarefied society of Palm Beach but that’s never really in doubt. Instead, the first bit of the season seems to mostly exist to give its heroines opportunities to wear those amazing costumes and not much else. By the time some real action takes place, it’s hard to imagine too many people will still be watching. And then, after wasting so much time, it has the audacity to end on a cliffhanger when a tidier conclusion would have been a much wiser bet.
Due to its length and lack of substance, the whole enterprise is hard to care about. Does Maxine deserve to have the same amount of money as the rest of them? Sure! But that’s a very low bar. In “Palm Royale,” no one works, the wealth all seems to be inherited if not ill-begotten. And these are not particularly smart or talented people. They’re petty, easily manipulated lay-abouts. They don’t deserve Maxine’s idolization, a fact she doesn’t ever seem to realize.
Instead, we’re supposed to root for her ascent, despite her happiness probably lying elsewhere. Like “Saltburn,” “Palm Royale” seems unsure if it's trying to lampoon or celebrate the upper classes it’s depicting. But in Apple TV+’s series, “greed is good” is a given, a default for all humankind. And that’s a depressing worldview that no amount of talented actresses in fabulous clothes and makeup can cover up. In the end, “Palm Royale” is shallower than its protagonist and that’s saying something.
Whole season screened for review. It premieres on March 20th.
]]>Every musician needs to change record labels at one point or another. The lovable '90s pop girl group "Girls5eva"—Dawn (Sara Bareilles), Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry), Summer (Busy Philipps), and Gloria (Paula Pell)—have taken their comedic, lyrical services from Peacock to Netflix in a road-trip-centric third season. Unsurprisingly, the Meredith Scardino-created series hasn't lost its rhythm. However, its lesser episode count, and the too-frequent head-rearing of its new management, make it less charming than previous recording.
Dawn, Wickie, Summer, and Gloria have enacted their comeback venture, the Returnity Tour. Rather than being sponsored by a brand or put up by a label, it's all self-funded and impromptu. They go van driving and hotel hopping, getting gigs wherever the road takes them. Whether at a hoedown space in Fort Worth or a billionaire baby's nostalgia-themed birthday party in Florida, the girls will work forever to get their names on top again.
Their tour also finds each member continuing the next chapter in their personal life stages: Dawn's pregnant with her second kid, Gloria is in her ho phase—trying to hook up with as many women on the road to compensate for her lack of experience during the early 2000s—Wickie is still learning how to be selfless one destination at a time, and Summer is trying to find her own identity without a man or parents to influence her thoughts.
This long-awaited third season hasn't lost much of its charm and hilarity under the N-shaped banner as the talented cast is all as pitch-perfect as ever. Every episodic misadventure the girls embark on in the 6-episode season takes complete advantage of every stop the girls make without losing sight of character advancement. The season opener, titled "Fort Worth," is demonstrates this as it finds Girls5Eva relishing in the niche popularity of their catchy song "Tapping into Your Fort Worth" that they coast on it for far too long for their own good, forcing everyone to take different roles.
On the road, the writing staff never fails to come up with fresh, hilarious gags, continuing the upbeat, silly, and sometimes cleverly satirical "Josie and the Pussycats" meets "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" elements that made me fall in love with it in the first place. It deviates from inside-baseball industry jokes and leans more into the different venues, cities, and traits of people they come across, delivered with a charming buoyancy. One standout episode features Catherine Cohen as a nostalgia-heavy millennial billionaire throwing a party, who hires Girls5Eva to perform one of their most provocative songs from their past that puts Dawn on edge. There, the girls go off on their subplots, all equally funny.
Whereas the Peacock let the "Girls5eva" writers run free, season three bears an annoying mandate from Netflix for having many of its episodes feature in-universe jokes to their shows, as if it was the only condition for restarting the series. Taking a page out of "Black Mirror," literally with the "Streamberry" parody service where they poke fun at "The Crown" and often reference "Stranger Things"—calling the trend of an old song becoming renowned thanks to a series a "Kate Bush"—the constant in-your-faceness of every Netflix reference abruptly disrupts the pacing and joke streak.
As good as season three is at times, it feels partial. It could be this critic's exhaustion of the streaming model ecosystem where they have to change their brain chemistry into thinking that six to eight episodes for a half-hour lengthened comedy series constitute an entire season. Still, the season plays similarly to a network series continuing its season following a long winter break. I had to digest this series altogether, and for some reason, three continued all the threads and character arcs of two rather than building upon anything new. Maybe the six-episode count is a test run to what can be done for a season four, but for a show as consistently funny, charming, and full of undeniable bops, it deserves to have all the 5evasodes it wants.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.
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There are a lot of missing and dead women on TV. It’s not just zombie shows or procedurals, the prestige series has long been in on the game with feminine corpses powering entire series. In Peacock’s missing-woman mystery, “Apples Never Fall,” the beloved and powerful Annette Bening even potentially dons the trope.
As Joy Delaney, she’s the matriarch of a competitive tennis family with four adult children—none of whom went pro, much to the patriarch’s dismay. When she goes missing, the siblings confront a mix of explicit and implicit intergenerational trauma, grappling with the possibility that their father Stan, a perfectly difficult Sam Neill, may have had something to do with it.
What unfurls is Faulkernesque as we see Joy via her family’s flashbacks. She powers the plot but does so mostly in her absence as we see her from others’ points of view. Thanks to these perspectives, we do get a strong sense of who she was—the rock, the one who held it all together but somehow was invisible to those closest to her. More than once, one of her kids exclaims “She saved me.” But, when she was there, they largely took her for granted.
There’s a particularly devastating revelation that on the day she disappeared she called each of her four children, and none of them bothered to pick up their phones. In fact, we see her loneliness in her attachment to Savanah (Georgia Flood playing both warm and conniving to much effect). As we see, Savannah’s a lost soul who worms her way into the Delaney home, mostly by listening to Joy and helping her around the house (what a thought!)—things her own family has neglected for decades. There’s a scene where Joy tells Savanah, “No one breaks your heart like your own kids,” and that could very well be the moral of this story. “Apples Never Fall” becomes a treatise on the ways we fail women, big and small, which shouldn’t surprise as it’s based on a book by Liane Moriarty of “Big Little Lies” fame.
As the series moves about its plot—with a compelling mystery that remains open until the last episode—two tragedies compete in its framework. There’s Joy’s disappearance and potential violent death. And there’s the fact that despite “saving” her kids, despite loving them fiercely, taking care of them even when it meant sacrificing her own piece of mind, none of them truly value her. She’s done women’s work and despite it being literally lifesaving (not to mention creating), they refuse to see her. Even outside of the domestic sphere, she doesn’t get credit from her family until is perhaps too late—she was also a competitive tennis player in her own right and ran the club with her husband, but it’s Stan’s career that gets the kids’ and thus our attention.
The cast does the work to make this tension relatable and fraught. Allison Brie as elder daughter Amy inhabits her character’s woo-woo beliefs, building distinct mannerisms that telegraph her inner struggles. Under her thoughtful care, Amy isn’t a caricature or a wounded spirit, she’s a woman struggling to find her place when she’s so different from those who raised her. After his turn as the ever-petulant newlywed in “The White Lotus,” Jake Lacy is cornering the market for rich assholes with Troy Delaney. Troy makes his fair share of mistakes but seems more hurt this time around, someone with a festering father wound and no idea how to heal it. Likewise, younger siblings Brooke (Essie Randles) and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) are all big, scared eyes—except for when they aren’t. Sometimes, even the most innocent Delaneys are the ones who lash out, unable to follow their mother’s example as it looms so small in their imagination.
Adding to the show’s smart layering, the setting reflects the characters’ privileges and faults. Their Maimi is one of tennis courts and country clubs, boats, and fancy cars. The Delaney home isn’t quite Nancy Meyers nice—it’s lovely but it feels lived in and a bit cluttered (better to hide their secrets in). This aesthetic reeks of respectability and the rough-play sense of themselves the Joy Delaney sells when she talks about her family. Likewise, the siblings’ homes show their arrested development with Troy in spacious modern (he’s a jerk!), Amy in a shared bungalow (she’s a mess!), Logan in nautical practical (he’s a lay about), and Brooke in well-lit cozy (she has a good thing but is going to mess it up!).
These elements, combined with its smart script and editing, build upon each other so that “Apples Never Fall” avoids the problems of the missing-or-dead-woman-as-learning-device. Bening never lets Joy fade. She is powerful when she needs to be, vulnerable and pensive all at once. In her, we see a portrayal of a flawed and dynamic woman who’s happy with her choices if not her current stage in life. The recent Oscar nominee for "Nyad" is such an extraordinary star that here she’s able to portray a warmth that allows others to skip over her accomplishments and edge, even as it does them all a disservice. It’s an arresting portrayal that insists on Joy’s humanity even when her story is being told by those who would negate it.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson in “Apples Never Fall”: to respect the mothers, the women, the adults who protected us when we couldn’t protect ourselves. That work is hard and dangerous, and we should value it at the highest level. That we don’t is the tragic flaw of our social structure.
Now, go call your mother.
Whole series screened for review. Premieres on Peacock tomorrow, March 14th.
]]>If you’ve been missing the mind f*ck properties of HBO’s “Westworld,” Netflix has a show for you. You know that feeling that so many streaming shows sag due to having too few ideas for their episode order? What’s the opposite of that? “3 Body Problem,” based on the Liu Cixin sci-fi series of the same name, has so many things going on that it’s almost difficult to keep up with it. And yet right when it feels like it’s going to get dragged down by too much futuristic mumbo-jumbo, it grounds itself again with smart character work that conveys the micro stakes of, well, the most important events in recorded history. It’s a show that takes massive narrative swings, killing major characters, jumping in time, shifting focus, and changing direction. It defies the Netflix sag by being defiantly confident in its strange vision of interstellar communication and what that would do to foundational elements of humanity like science and religion.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss know a thing or two about wrestling a sprawling franchise into television form, having changed the medium with “Game of Thrones.” They’re joined by Alexander Woo (“True Blood”) in the creation of “3 Body Problem,” a show about what so much sci-fi has speculated on since its inception: contact. It starts with a series of deaths in the scientific community, which brings together a friend group of scientists that includes Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), Auggie Salazar (Elza Gonzalez), Jack Rooney (John Bradley), and Will Downing (Alex Sharp). Of course, there are relationship dynamics within this crew, including Will’s unrequited love for Jin, but there are more pressing concerns when Auggie starts seeing a literal countdown before her eyes. What’s it counting down to? And how is she seeing it? Things get weirder when she encounters a mysterious woman who can be scrubbed from all cameras. And then the stars blink. And everyone sees that.
To say that’s the tip of the weird iceberg would be an understatement. “3 Body Problem” also flashes back to the Cultural Revolution in China to introduce us to Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a young scientist who makes a universe-changing decision that ripples forward to the present-day protagonists. The great Benedict Wong plays an investigator trying to figure out exactly what is going on while Liam Cunningham and Jonathan Pryce do the mysterious figure thing that they do so well.
Without spoiling too much, “3 Body Problem” is essentially about future anxiety. The characters learn that something is going to happen hundreds of years from now and they better do something today to minimize its impact on humanity—the echo of climate change seems pretty obvious to this viewer in the concept of pending doom that may be far away, but not far enough to ignore. Like so much great interstellar sci-fi, “3 Body Problem” gets super interesting when it dissects the impact instead of the reality. What would knowledge that we are not alone do to religion? What would it do to science? When “3 Body Problem” pivots to the idea that science is the only thing that can save us from the pending doom the climate change parallel gets even stronger.
However, what works best about “3 Body Problem” is that you don’t really have to consider all of these deeper themes to enjoy it. It works on a superficial sci-fi level too with crazy character twists and solid performances throughout. Adepo, Sharp, Wong and Cunningham are particularly strong, and the craft is undeniable. Not only does it have the “GoT” team, directors like Andrew Stanton (“WALL-E”) and Minkie Spiro (“The Plot Against America”) know how to pace and design this kind of high-level science fiction. It’s been a while since Netflix had a show that felt like it might be interesting for multiple seasons other than “Love is Blind.” This one might have solved that problem.
“3 Body Problem” premieres on Netflix on March 21, 2024. Whole season screened for review.
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“I’m not a singer; I’m a dancer!” Bella Lewitzky defiantly refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee when they asked if she was a communist. As a result, she was blacklisted, and could no longer appear in the movies that were her primary source of income.
It was the first time she stood up against government interference with the arts, but not the last. As we see in “Bella,” the documentary that tells her story, Lewitsky was a dancer, choreographer, and passionate advocate for the arts. (Not to be confused with “Bella!,” the documentary about Congresswoman Bella Abzug that was released last year, though maybe there is something in the name that inspires Bellas to be outspoken.)
It is actually not accurate to say that the documentary tells Lewitzky’s story. The best thing about the film is that it allows her to tell her own story. Other than comments from some of her colleagues, director Bridget Murnane makes most of the film audio from Lewitzky’s many interviews and speeches over seven decades, skillfully matched with archival images and footage.
She was dismissive of the term applied to her work, “modern dance,” which she said, “describes nothing. It only tells you it is not ballet." Whatever category it was in, it was constantly evolving, constantly challenging expectations and traditions. She considered her lack of formal (traditional) dance training a gift because there were “no inhibitors to invention.” When asked how she would describe her dance, she says, “I wouldn’t.” Her point was that dance was its own expression that could not be translated through mere words.
That is why the footage of her as a dancer and with dancers are so compelling. She thought of dance as “taking gravity and letting it pull you through space.” Her dances expressed emotion and design, but she resisted narrative. She was not using movement to tell stories.
I was especially taken with her collaboration with one of the most influential fashion designers of the 1960s, Rudy Gernreich. His costume designs included long swaths of fabric that became a part of the dance by both extending and restricting motion and gesture. Her husband, Newell Taylor Reynolds, was a dancer turned architect whose ideas about space, form, and shape influenced her work, most strikingly when he pointed out the “unused space” above the heads of the dancers. He worked with her to add another platform, creating a second story to complement the dancers on stage. Lewitzky’s devoted partnership with Reynolds provides the film’s tenderest moments.
The National Endowment for the Arts, following the controversy over some of the highly provocative art it funded (called “obscene” or even blasphemous by some people), asked all grant recipients to sign a “non-obscenity” pledge. Lewitzky had no plans to present anything remotely obscene or offensive. And without the $72,000 grant, her dance troupe was unlikely to continue to exist. But it recalled her experience of being blacklisted after refusing to answer the questions of the Congressional committee. So, she held a press conference refusing to sign and turning down the grant. Seven years later, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Bill Clinton.
The film is bookended with a quote from Lewitzky, first as text on the screen, then in her own clear voice. Recalling the ballet dancer in the classic “The Red Shoes,” who responds to the question, “Why do you want to dance?” with “Why do you want to live?,” Lewitzky says “There is such a thing as to live, and that is food, shelter, clothing ... And then there is such a thing as why do you live, and that is art.” Lewitzky made art, her own distinctive expression of it, her life’s work, its foundation, its meaning. For her, it was not a job but “a method in which I view life.” Her dedication to her artistic vision is inspiring, but this film shows us that it is her life, one of purpose and integrity, that is her most important lesson.
Streaming on PBS now.
In 1983, Phillip Brophy coined the term “body horror” in his article “The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film” in order to address what he saw as a “golden period” of contemporary horror films that distinguished itself from previous eras. One of the things he noted was a prolific trend about “the destruction of the Body. The contemporary Horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.”
This type of horror revolves around the transformation or mutation of the human body through disease, virus, infection, parasites, medical experimentation, or through some supernatural or extraterrestrial force. It is about change generated from within the body rather than a monster or serial killer committing violence to a body.
In film, body horror has a very male lineage starting in the 1930s with Universal Monsters’ “Frankenstein” and “The Mummy,” continuing with the science-gone-wrong films of the 1950s such as “The Fly” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” And then peaking in the 1980s with David Cronenberg’s “Scanners” and “Videodrome,” Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator,” and Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser.”
But you could say the genre of body horror was mothered by Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein novel back in 1818. Although the story was about a man and a male monster he creates from dead parts, it is also driven by a very female sensibility about creating life. Shelley wrote the story when she was 18 years old; two years after giving birth to a baby she did not name because it died. Her grief prompted fevered dreams that she described in her diary: “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby.”
Last year’s Prime Video series “Dead Ringers” taps into both this female origin of body horror as well as into Cronenberg’s 1988 classic.
Actress Rachel Weisz was a fan of Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers.” She looked at the material—a story of twin brother gynecologists—and thought it was ripe for a gender flip. She then enlisted Alice Birch as the series creator, writer, and executive producer. Birch credits Weisz with getting the ball rolling on this reimagining of Cronenberg’s film.
“There’s so much about the tone that’s so interesting, and it looks so amazing, and there was lots that I felt we could really steal from,” Birch said.
And steal they did, but from an inspired new point of view that was distinctly female on multiple levels.
The series is based on both Cronenberg’s 1988 film and the 1977 book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The book was inspired by the real-life twin brothers Stewart and Cyril Marcus, gynecologists found dead together under mysterious circumstances in Cyril’s Manhattan apartment in 1975.
In the series, the Mantle twins are now sisters played by Weisz. They are also obstetricians as well as gynecologists, with Beverly dedicated to the idea of creating a new kind of birthing center for women, and Elliot focused on radical and potentially unethical research in the areas of treating infertility. This allows the show to give the body horror a fresh female spin. Not only are there key women behind the camera but the show focused on lead (and deliciously flawed) female characters who have agency in a story focused on women’s bodies.
And because they are OB-GYNs, they get to focus very specifically on pregnancy and birth. On a certain level, pregnancy is a kind of body horror since it involves a physical transformation that is out of one’s control because a woman cannot dictate the gender or health of the fetus inside her. It also involves a new being living inside a woman’s body, which when you think about it is kind of weird and creepy. Most of the time this is a welcomed and joyous experience but it is also something that can be terrifying when something goes wrong.
One of the clever things the show does early on is it presents women’s bodies in ways that we do not usually see—pregnant, giving birth, cut open for C-sections—because such images can make people uncomfortable. And discomfort is a key aspect of body horror. Men, and even many women, don’t want to see a bloody birth canal or a baby being pulled out of a vagina. We are used to seeing women’s bodies as sexy—not in this medically graphic way. None of these images are sexy, especially when presented in a montage of screaming women and exhausted doctors covered in blood. If movies do show births, they tend to favor freshly scrubbed, cherubic babies. Rarely do we see intimate shots of babies crowning and emerging bloody from the womb or graphic C-sections.
But that was important to Birch: “It was there from the scripts, from the very beginning. As soon as we knew that they [the Mantle twins] would work in obstetrics, then I think we knew that we were going to be depicting childbirth. And it was just about what was interesting to us. Like you said, I’ve never really seen that on screen, and so I felt interested. We see violence all the time. We see death all the time on screen. [Childbirth] is how we all arrived into the world and we never, ever see it. And I find that very interesting.”
It is also interesting how the show explores women’s bodies in terms of how they are viewed and treated within health care. While body horror is usually about a physical change generated from within, “Dead Ringers” suggests there’s a level of horror involved in how little control a woman may have over her own body within the health care industry.
The series explores what it is like to be a pair of women doctors advocating for bold new ideas about women’s health care. It places them within a medical profession designed mostly by men, and having to pitch wealthy, profit-driven investors to get funding for a new birthing and research center. This broader context allows the series to tackle ideas about women’s health and challenge how we perceive those issues. It finds a new kind of horror in what the Mantle twins face in challenging the status quo and trying to get the health care industry to recognize the particular needs of a woman’s body.
Beverly likes to point out that “pregnancy is not a disease,” and the kind of medical attention pregnant people receive should reflect that. So on one level the show comes off as a feminist challenge to stereotypical ideas about women’s health and reproductive freedom. Elliot is as eager to try and help a woman conceive as she is to abort an unwanted fetus, and in light of the recent overturning of Roe V. Wade, that may be considered radical.
Cronenberg’s film culminates with Beverly designing and commissioning a set of “Instruments for Operating on Mutant Women”—bizarre and ominously biomechanical tools (think H.R. Giger) that frighten and hurt his patients. Beverly dismisses complaints by saying, “there’s nothing the matter with the instrument… it’s the women’s bodies that are all wrong.”
The series ditches this idea, which worked brilliantly in the context of Cronenberg’s male-centric film, to reflect Beverly’s mental deterioration. But it preserves the horrific idea of men operating on women in a manner than is oblivious to the harm they may be causing.
The most chillingly disturbing episode involves some real medical history. The Mantles are introduced to a beloved Southern doctor who is presented as a champion of women’s health. Dr. Marion James (played by the immensely likable Michael McKean of TV’s “Laverne and Shirley”) brags about one of his ancestors who “partnered” with a patient to discover new means of surgery for women.
The episode, directed by the talented Karyn Kusama, draws on historical fact. Dr. Marion James takes his name from Dr. James Marion Sims, credited as the “father of modern gynecology.” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques for women’s reproductive health, but his research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia because racist thinking at the time was that the Black women did not feel pain the way white women did.
The episode never shows the surgery but has Dr. James describe it in a very matter-of-fact manner that makes the woman seem a willing participant. He sees absolutely nothing wrong with how the medical advances were achieved. The end justifies the means for him.
But later in the episode, Beverly imagines seeing a young Black woman who repeats the story with an emphasis on how a 17-year-old enslaved Black woman “was operated on 30 times without anesthesia.” The repetition of this information makes it impossible to ignore and each time we hear the phrase the horror becomes more vivid. The body horror takes on a very visceral and angry tone as we are made aware of a chapter in medical history that may not be widely known.
The show also provides a more visual sense of body horror as it moves from showing women’s bodies as life giving to something more sinister. We see Elliot in the laboratory creating life in a test tube and growing fetuses outside of the womb. It is clandestine work that society has deemed unethical, and Elliot’s success endows her with an arrogance that starts to slip into sci-fi horror. She is like Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein—a scientist who sees herself as above society’s laws and like a god creating life from nothing. Her character also harkens back to the body horror of the 1950s science-gone-wrong films but with a distinctly feminine bent.
Birch explained, “We begin in a place that’s really grounded and recognizable. Then we end up in somewhere that’s really quite heightened and strange and operatic. People are doing things that I think, had we started in that place, it would have felt far-fetched, but hopefully the time that we had means that we can get there in a way that feels kind of natural.”
Elliot’s experiments and the female body horror eventually extend to the twins themselves. Beverly’s multiple attempts to conceive result in multiple tiny, bloody fetuses being rejected from her body. And in the end, there is a surgery/mutilation that provides the logical conclusion to this twisted tale.
There is also an interesting side plot involving the Mantles’ assistant Greta (played by Poppy Liu). Throughout the series Greta is seen collecting weird things (like used tampons) from the twins and especially from Beverly’s failed pregnancies. It is all very mysterious until the final episode where we discover she is an artist using the items collected to create an installation piece about her own birth, which caused the death of her mother. It shows how art can be a way to deal with trauma, and this particular trauma relates to the body horror of pregnancy. Greta is traumatized by her mother’s death in childbirth whereas Shelley was traumatized by her child’s death.
“Dead Ringers” reveals how to do both a remake and a gender flip right. Both must be fueled by a vision to reimagine something from a fresh new perspective to say something original. This “Dead Ringers” gives us flawed female characters who give birth to a newly invigorated and femme-centric body horror.
]]>The shots are unreal. We fly behind and next to a bee in the jungle. We see lust on a young bonobo’s face. We watch lions and hyenas fight over a carcass in the middle of the night. National Geographic’s “Queens” delivers the nature documentary goods, and while watching it, I couldn’t stop wondering how they’d captured so much stunning footage.
Thankfully the seven-part series ends with a behind-the-scenes look at the Angela Bassett–narrated and executive-produced series. In it, we learn that women directed all of the episodes of “Queens,” capturing footage across four years. The production paired experienced filmmakers with their rising peers, recruiting directors in the countries in which they filmed.
The result is an intimate portrayal of creatures ranging in size from ants to elephants. We learn about their social structures, familial bonds, mating habits, gender dynamics, and more.
As such, “Queens” hits all the regular beats of its genre. Climate change is threatening these unique and captivating animals’ very existence. Ditto for development that is shrinking their habitats. And of course, the natural world is unforgiving if not cruel. Outside of the handful of animals who get eaten, we see many species kill their own, usually with a male destroying the offspring of a rival, despite the mother’s best efforts to stop him. Lions, bears, orcas, monkeys, they all do this, with bee and hyena matriarchs getting in on the infanticide. It’s a reminder that humans aren’t the only ones who kill our own kind.
The show doesn’t draw that particular conclusion, but it does seem to imply that animal mothers offer us meaningful models of feminine leadership—and that idea doesn’t work. The selected animals’ matriarchal societies aren’t “new” like the opening monologue insists. Elephants and the rest have been led by the female of their species since time immemorial.
Moreover, these female animals do not offer a kinder or different model of leadership than species with male leaders. We literally watch a hyena kill a pup—her niece no less—in her bid to take leadership of the pack! Animals can be ruthless, female or not. The only possible exception here is the bonobos. “Queens” notes that they are the least violent and most playful of all primates—and the only ones led by females. They also don’t have to fight for food, living in a jungle where there’s plenty for everyone. But the show doesn’t investigate what came first—their peaceful way of life, their feminine leadership, or their relative prosperity.
Instead, “Queens” is more interested in amping up the drama in ways that pander to a feminist-light, girlboss type of sensibility. For example, the show features a variety of over-the-top musical cues that had me laughing at rather than with “Queens.” Do we need countless songs playing on the word “queens” and applying our pop culture understanding of that word (and “mother” in the very cool Gen Z sense) to be fascinated by the natural world? No, we do not. Also, throwing in tracks like a remake of Destiny Child’s “Survivor” as a wolf learns to make it without her pack is so on the nose as to be silly.
“Queens” also puts human value judgments on its animal subjects in a way that feels false. Would it be terrible for a human mother to eat her daughter’s eggs and replace them with her own? Yes—although it’s hard to imagine how that’d work. But is it morally wrong for a queen bee to do? I’m not so sure. Also, tearing off a limb to survive is a big deal when you’re a homo sapien, but maybe when you’re a queen ant, it’s just part of life.
I know they need to construct plot arcs out of years of material, but laying tense or joyous music behind the footage and pairing it with a silly script, that Basset does her best with, doesn’t do it. It would have been better to present some of the animals’ ways as biological curiosities or fascinating animal behaviors rather than morality plays.
Still, it is worth remembering that science has largely ignored the female of the species—and that has real-world effects, particularly in medicine. So there is value in this project's focus on female animals, and its approach of recruiting women directors, and local ones at that, further underscores the point. Our modern human society is still lacking in feminine perspectives behind and in front of the camera, the microscope, and the park ranger badge—all points that “Queens” makes well.
I wish “Queens” had focused on those points rather than asking me to relate to the inexperience of a first-time elephant mother or the tough love of a fox matriarch, assuming I have more in common with her than her male counterpart because of our respective sex organs. It’s a bit of gender essentialism that undercuts the beautiful artistry and important science in this otherwise highly enjoyable series.
On Disney+ now.
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Not all mediums work the same way. Say what you will about the overall quality, Guy Ritchie’s best work has a rhythm that fits film, whether it’s the zippy pace of something like “Snatch” or the gut punch of his underrated “Wrath of Man.” From the minute I heard that his “The Gentlemen” was going to be loosely adapted into a TV series for Netflix, I was concerned that his rhythm couldn’t really be adapted to episodic television. By and large, I was right.
To be fair, “The Gentlemen” isn’t a complete disaster as much as a stumle—there are some fun supporting performances and clever sequences, but they’re surrounded by scenes that just feel way too long, as if you can sense Ritchie and his team treading water before they can get back to the fun stuff. The episodic nature of the show sometimes works in its favor because it allows those kind of quick, Ritchie-esque creative choices, but the overall season-long narrative sags and drags in a way that makes it difficult to care about what happens to anyone involved.
Eddie Horniman (Theo James) plays a suave gentleman who gets sucked into a criminal empire that he’s consistently trying to avoid. When his wealthy father passes away, Eddie discovers that dad had a few cohorts who operated on the other side of the law, which quickly results in the heir having to help manage various criminal operations out of the massive Horniman estate. It actually starts when Eddie’s dumb brother (Daniel Ings) struggles to pay back a boatload of cash to some drug dealers, leading to an extended scene in the premiere in which he dresses like a chicken for maximum embarrassment. Where this scene will end is obvious to anyone who has seen a Ritchie movie, which is part of the overall problem with “The Gentlemen” in that it’s clear that every negotiation is going to go poorly, there will likely be some highly-edited hand-to-hand combat, and probably a needle drop or two. The playbook is too familiar.
If you’re wondering when Matthew McConaughey and Hugh Grant are going to show up, be warned that this is not that show of your dreams. This is a spin-off really in tone and theme only, capturing the world of wealthy criminals in the U.K. and dropping an occasional reference to the film without being directly related to it. It’s a spiritual sibling, another tale of aristocrats who happen to operate criminal empires under the pomp and circumstance. It also has a bunch of Ritchie style to tie it to the film, including scribbled captions that further detail the criminal happenings or overwritten dialogue.
The truth is it’s hard to try and be the coolest cat in the room for eight hours. Eddie himself gets particularly lost in the action, partly due to an underwritten role but also a flat performance from James that creates a black hole at the center of the show. Kaya Scodelario fares much better as the co-lead, the woman who basically serves as Eddie’s liaison to the criminal world, and who gets her own rich arc in the back half of the season. When the show threatens to fall apart, she often brings it back, giving a confident, nuanced performance.
Like a lot of Ritchie projects, there’s fun to be had to on the fringe too, including a subdued turn from Ritchie BFF Vinnie Jones and guest spots from crime genre heavyweights Giancarlo Esposito and Ray Winstone. Some of the supporters feel unbalanced—Joely Richardson’s role is underwritten while the sweet stoner played by Michael Vu wears out his goofy welcome—and that feels indicative of the overall unpolished nature of the show on a narrative level. Subplots come and go, characters pop in and out, and none of it adds up to much at all (at least until Scodelario gets to do her work to ground it). And it’s all actually surprisingly tame for a Ritchie project, almost as if maybe it was once set-up at a network like TNT before getting the Netflix gig. Ritchie’s penchant for shock value has gotten him in hot water before, but it’s more interesting than this lukewarm stew.
By the end of the season, when Eddie has finally realized what the show made clear all along—that he’s pretty good at this criminal empire thing—viewers will be asking themselves if what unfolded over the previous eight hours wouldn’t have just worked better as a traditional film sequel or spin-off. Eddie may learn that he fits in his new home. Too bad the show about him never really does.
Whole season screened for review. On Netflix March 7th.
]]>Call it the “Drunk History” effect—from Hulu’s “The Great” to Max’s “Our Flag Means Death,” television has been smack dab in the middle of an irreverent historical renaissance the last few years. Slap a frock or two on a few highbrow actors, give them decidedly contemporary, conversational dialogue, and juxtapose such postmodern naturalism against the medieval misery of the time, and in the words of the late, great Carl Weathers, you’ve got a stew going.
That said, Apple TV+’s new historical sitcom “The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin” shares more than a little DNA with “Blackadder,” another jagged tale of British history that painted the nation’s royal lineage with no small amount of modern jaundice. No one likes to lampoon its own history quite like the Brits, and “Dick Turpin” leaves plenty of opportunity to send up the frippery and pomp of its 18th-century past. Too bad, then, that it can’t offer a whole lot more than six episodes of repetitive, shrugging casualness—it’s a show with one joke about its upside-down take on history and legend, which it bashes over its audience’s head like a loose cartwheel.
Creators Claire Downes, Ian Jarvis, and Stuart Lane took clear inspiration from the tall-tale nature of the real-life Turpin’s legend: a famed highwayman whose exploits were recounted with romantic detail after his untimely hanging at 33—first by tabloid pamphlets, then by author William Harrison Ainsworth in his 1834 novel “Rookwood.” “Dick Turpin” mines the gap between legend and reality for maximum silliness, crafting a giddy, semi-magical version of 18th-century England populated with warlocks, witches, and all manner of colorful characters.
And all of it centers on Turpin (Noel Fielding), a butcher’s failson whose flights of fancy find purchase when he’s inadvertently roped into joining, then accidentally killing the leader of, a gang of highwayman. You keep what you kill, of course, so now the gang belongs to Turpin, a highwayman who’s never so much as held a pistol. “So I just push that button and it comes out that tube?” he asks.
Even so, Turpin’s wild-eyed excitement and off-kilter imagination helps him and his Essex Gang build a reputation for themselves—aided, of course, by Eliza Bean (Dolly Wells), whose pamphlets of his exploits turn him from rogue to legend. (Insert anachronistic gag about the public’s zeal for true crime here.) But that same fame also earns them the ire of “thief-taker general” Jonathan Wild (Hugh Bonneville), a fellow criminal who styles himself as a lawmaker, determined to bring in Turpin for disrupting his lucrative grift.
Fans of “Our Flag Means Death” will find particular comfort in the show’s tone: a series of cock-and-bull stories told with an exceedingly laidback and conversational breath, bouncy and jaunty and very, very fuzzy. (One major side character is a giggly little magician named Craig the Warlock (Asim Chaudhry), whose name is kinda the whole joke.)
One of the show’s biggest hurdles, sadly, is Fielding, a comedian who’s made a name for himself on shows like “The Mighty Boosh” and “The IT Crowd” before settling nicely into a presenter role as the cuddly, aging-goth mascot of “The Great British Bake-Off.” Fielding’s absurdist appeal has always come from his soft, velvety purr and uncanny appearance—pale, rounded mug grinning impishly under a mop of wavy, stringy black hair. He’s like the world’s friendliest vampire, or if someone dipped Russell Brand in toffee and made him nice.
In some ways, that works for the character of Turpin, here styled like a reluctant criminal mastermind in over his head, confident his exuberance will make up for a lack of skill or experience. But Fielding’s not a natural actor, so there’s little for him to play except what’s on the page—there’s a feeling of waiting to say his line and shutting down while waiting to say his next joke. Most scenes with him read like the opening skit to any given episode of “Bake Off.”
As such, the rest of the cast have to work overtime to keep up with his stand-there-and-smirk antics while also using them as a bellwether for their own performances. That’s especially true of Turpin’s gang: Ellie White’s Nell is the standout, the hypercompetent woman who holds the team aloft and is nonetheless reluctantly charmed by her idiot boss’ antics. The other two boys, Duayne Boachie’s Honesty and Marc Wootton’s Moose, are interchangeably goofy in ways that serve their performers ill. Bonneville, and perhaps Tamsin Greig’s criminal mastermind Lady Helen, are the few who break that mold; Connor Swindells also delights as a foppish competitor to Turpin for the marker of England’s swishiest outlaw.
That’s a symptom of the show as a whole, sadly; the show lands on its absurd tone early on, but rarely deviates from it. Quite a few bits are wonderful fun—take an extended Bloody Mary-esque gag where Turpin and gang try their best not to utter a dreaded witch’s name 27 times, to predictable results. But unlike “Our Flag Means Death,” or another show that does this kind of historical camp better, TBS’s “Miracle Workers,” there’s little pathos to balance out the sugar. It’s just one-note silly all the way through, which can get repetitive even in a brisk six-episode season.
This is not to say that “Dick Turpin” isn’t lighthearted fun: it’s a frothy and inconsequential comedy, and the snappy, jaunty score by Oli Parker and Nate Jackson is an anachronistic plus. But it’s hard not to crave more from your historical comedies, especially in an environment with such clever, inventive examples that also happen to make you care about its characters. Apple’s latest hero may have stolen loads of gold, and maybe even a cursed emerald or two, but it hasn’t quite captured my heart yet.
Entire six-episode season screened for review. “Dick Turpin” airs March 1st on Apple TV+.
]]>The first season of “The Tourist” was a clever little thriller over on Max, but that company continued its cavalcade of confusing choices and dumped the second outing, allowing the show to travel to Netflix, where it has been consistently in the top ten for the entirety of February as audiences caught up with year one. That fun season is now followed by a very twisted second one, a 6-episode outing that moves the action from Australia to Ireland—switching the title character if you think about it from one protagonist to the other—and upping the surreal, unpredictable sense of dark humor. It’s a bit of a rockier road in terms of quality, but there’s an admirable lunacy to the storytelling here that holds it together, throwing in new twists and memorable characters in a manner that’s reminiscent of prime Coen brothers, wherein one never knew what was going to happen next, and it was all darkly humorous at the same time. While Danielle Macdonald gets a little lost in the late-season emotion of this year, Jamie Dornan really holds it all together with a deceptively natural, engaging performance. It’s insane Max ever let him go.
The first season of “The Tourist” has a beautiful simplicity in its story of a man who wakes up after a car accident in the Outback with no idea of who he is or how he got there, only to discover that he may not like the guy he used to be. With so many questions answered in what could have been a self-contained season, one might wonder how they could do it again—amnesia a second time? The writers smartly move the action back to Elliot’s (Dornan) homeland in season two as he and Helen (Macdonald) travel there to learn more details about his dark past after receiving a mysterious photo. Before they even really get a pint in them, Elliot is kidnapped and thrown into the middle of a generation-spanning turf war between the families of the Cassidys and the McDonnells. The latter is led by the vicious Frank (Francis Magee) and the former by none other than our hero’s mother, Niamh (the excellent Olwen Fouéré).
A season that opens by separating its heroes and sending one to a remote island where he’s kept prisoner has about a dozen other twists up its sleeve that I wouldn't dare spoil here, as that's the joy of watching the show. Everyone on “The Tourist” hides an odd secret or two, even the seemingly ordinary detective (Conor MacNeill), who has something insane going on in his basement. When Helen sees her potential mother-in-law commit murder in the premiere it’s just the beginning of a series of narrative turns that stress that classic suspension of disbelief. “The Tourist” is like those page-turning novels you read on a beach, wherein each chapter ends with an insane new revelation that forces you to read the next before you question if it actually makes any sense at all. It’s really the show’s strength: A sense of breakneck plotting in an era when everyone feels like every show is a few episodes too long for its threadbare plot.
If the plotting is the strength, the emotions of the second season feel a bit like a weakness at times. The love story between Helen and Elliot takes center stage in rather intense ways, and it leads to a number of heartwrenching scenes, especially in the back half, that feel overly melodramatic. “The Tourist” is at its best when it’s not taking itself very seriously, having fun with its characters. Every time it diverts to really define Helen and Elliot’s eternal love, the seams in the writing start to show, and Macdonald gets lost a few times this season in overwrought melodrama that feels unearned. Luckily, she’s balanced by a truly great Dornan performance, one that seems to be honestly responding to every loony twist thrown his way. It’s more subdued that season one, allowing him to be the center as the chaotic world spins around him.
No one really understands what the heck is going on over at Max that they keep canceling movies and dropping content—an underreported recent head scratcher was allowing “Band of Brothers” to be on Netflix while “Masters of the Air” was dropping on Apple, which surely reignited interest in the original Playtone production in a manner that one would think would have sent people back to Max, but whatever. Letting “The Tourist” slide over to Netflix may be low on the list of their insane decisions of late, but it’s been funny to watch it slay for the competition, and it's hard to believe that the second season won’t do exactly the same. It’s funny to consider the executives who made the decision to let “The Tourist” go watching this effective second season on Netflix themselves, probably wondering why there aren’t more shows like it on Max.
Whole season screened for review. On Netflix February 29th.
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