Category: TV Features

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The Decameron

Leila Farzad, Douggie McMeekin, Zosia Mamet, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, and Tony Hale try to get along in The Decameron. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)

One strange thing about the pandemic is the effect it had on art. Economically, it weakened and destroyed arts organizations of all stripes. It’s even harder to make a living as a musician or actor today than it was in 2019 — and it’s not like it was easy in the Before Time. It’s also interesting that there is not a lot of great art that came from enduring the worldwide trauma. 

It’s not like artists weren’t doing anything during the pandemic. Trapped in their homes for months at a time, working through anxiety, artists made a lot of art. Some of it, like Bo Burnham’s Inside, was pretty good. But once the pandemic was over, audiences were also over it. Nobody wants to think about the dark, scary days of the pandemic, so nobody wants to see movies or listen to music which brings those feelings back. Turns out, this is not a new phenomenon. Very little memorable art came out of the 1918 flu pandemic. After the mass death, people just wanted to party. 

But there is at least one great work of art which happened as a result of a pandemic. The Decameron was written by Giovanni Boccaccio after the Black Death swept through Italy in 1348. In it, a group of young people flee the pestilence in Florence to hole up in a secluded country villa. There, they pass the time by spinning stories, some real, some made up. The 100 short stories Boccaccio wrote were revolutionary, both for the beauty of his prose and the positively liberated way he viewed women. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes bawdy, and sometimes tragic. Chaucer was inspired by The Decameron to make his own loosely connected tome of short stories in English, The Canterbury Tales. 

Producer Kathleen Jordan responded to Covid lockdown by revisiting The Decameron. The book’s episodic nature makes it perfect for television adaptation. In the pilot episode, “The Beautiful, Not-Infected Countryside,” the young nobles of Florence are invited to ride out the wave of infection at Villa Santa, the estate of the Visconte Leonardo. Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) is Leonardo’s arranged fiancé, but she has never actually met the guy. She sets off to the villa with her impressive dowry and loyal servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson). Unbeknownst to Pampinea, Misia has stowed her commoner lover Parmena (Tazmyn-May Gebbett) in a barrel for the trip. It’s a dangerous gambit because not only is lesbianism frowned upon in heavily Catholic medieval Italy, but also because Parmena is showing signs of the plague. 

Filomena (Jessica Plummer) desperately wants to get out of Florence and maybe meet some marriageable men at the villa, but she and her servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) are stuck tending to her elderly father, who is infected with plague. When he finally passes, their trip to the villa has scarcely begun before the pandemic tensions boil over, and Licisca pushes Filomena over a bridge. When she arrives at the villa, Licisca assumes her mistress’ identity. 

Panfilo (Karan Gill) and Neifile (Lou Gala) present as an extremely pious couple. But the secret to their chaste lifestyle is that Panfilio is gay. Once at the villa, they both become infatuated with Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel), a himbo doctor in the employ of Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), who is as wealthy as he is arrogant. 

The visitors to the villa are greeted by Sirisco (Tony Hale), the steward of the villa, and Stratilia (Leila Farzad), the cook, who have a dark secret: Leonardo, the master of the house, died of the plague after he issued his invitation. As long as no one finds out, the servants can continue to be master of their own fates. The ensuing struggle for control of Leonardo’s property provides much of The Decameron’s overarching plot. The ensemble cast doesn’t tell stories as much as they live them, in the awkward and socially charged interactions that make up the series’ humor. 

What keeps you off-balance in The Decameron is that anyone can die at any time. And they do, in various states of indignity and hilarity. The series’ casting is outstanding, and each of the ensemble gets a turn in at least one great scene. Neifile gets stuck in a well and won’t come out until God himself rescues her. The militaristic Tindaro is also a hypochondriac, and his doctor is milking the delusion for all its worth. As the social order breaks down, a group of mercenaries show up, and the nobles discover their claim to privilege disappears in the absence of guys with swords who will obey their commands. 

As you might expect from such an episodic format, The Decameron is ultimately uneven. Some of the situations fall flat. But when the combination of talented comic actors and absurd situations click, it’s a morbidly good time. 

The Decameron is streaming on Netflix.

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Scavengers Reign

The world of Vesta is endlessly complex. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)

In writing class, they teach about the different kinds of conflicts a story can center around. Person vs. person is the most common, but there’s also person vs. self, person vs. fate, and person vs. society. Person vs. nature (formerly known as “man vs. nature”) is not nearly as common as it was a hundred years ago, back in the days of frontier and jungle adventure magazines. That’s one of the reasons the sci-fi animated series Scavengers Reign is so refreshing. Its take on the classic story of a shipwrecked crew struggling to survive in a hostile wilderness is simple at first, but becomes more fascinating as complexities emerge. In fact, “emerging complexity” is one of the overarching themes of the 12-episode story. Creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are fascinated with the interplay of life-forms, both cooperation and conflict, which create a functioning ecosystem. The world they have created is unlike anything you’ve seen.

Scavengers Reign begins with its castaways, survivors from the crew of the cargo ship Demeter 227, already stranded on the planet Vesta. Azi (voiced by Wunmi Mosaku), the capable quartermaster, is paired with her robot Levi (Alia Shawkat). Their escape pod landed safely on open ground, and Azi uses an omniwheel motorcycle to scout the surrounding terrain. When Levi starts acting odd, Azi discovers that a fungus-like alien life-form has been growing on the robot’s circuitry — and the robot likes it.

Photo: Courtesy Netflix

Ursula (Sunita Mani), a biologist, was in the escape pod with Sam (Bob Stephenson), the captain of the Demeter. Their landing was a little rougher, but they have managed to salvage enough gear to communicate with the fatally damaged ship still in orbit. In the pilot episode, “The Signal,” the pair travel to retrieve a battery from another crashed escape pod. Once they get there, they see that the crew have all been killed by some unknown environmental hazard, which they then have to face. But that’s business as usual on this planet.

The occupant of the third escape pod has it the worst. It landed in a tree-like plant hundreds of feet tall, and Kamen (Ted Travelstead) has been trapped inside for weeks. He is finally rescued (if you want to call it that) by a creature he names Hollow. Imagine a cross between a platypus and a koala bear with psychic powers which it uses to dominate other life-forms. Instead of making little green tripod-thingies bring them yummy berry-like spheres, Hollow latches onto the human and demands Kamen hunt for him. In Kamen’s mind, it speaks to him in the form of Fiona (also voiced by Alia Shawkat), Demeter’s robotics engineer. Hollow uses Kamen’s guilt over their dysfunctional relationship against him, and his already fragile psyche slowly crumbles.

Sam and Ursula succeed in contacting the ship, and they manage to activate the automatic landing sequence. At first, they’re worried it might land on top of them. Then they discover they didn’t get that lucky. The Demeter lands many kilometers away from all three parties. The first half of the story is taken up with their increasingly frantic and costly attempts to make it to the ship. Once there, they will find that this world has even more surprises in store. As the show progresses, flashbacks start to fill in the details of how they got here, and who they were before they were lost in space and written off by their employers.

Anime’s dominant visual style has become so pervasive that I hear stories from art teachers about begging their young students to try to draw something else. Scavengers Reign owes a debt to Miyazaki’s sense of grandeur and deliberate pacing, and Akira’s pervasive body horror. But Bennett and Huettner’s aesthetic is more like the French illustrator Moebius. The world of Vesta is endlessly complex, with many animals and plants living in such close symbiosis that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Our heroes are constantly dodging predators, both animals and plants. But many of their interactions with the native flora and fauna aren’t so cut and dried. When Ursula is trapped inside a living wall of thorns, Sam freaks out. But Ursula insists she was never in danger, and in fact might have even been communicating with the giant plant-like organism. What were they saying? She doesn’t know. But as the story progresses, the survivors slowly learn to stop trying to conquer nature, and start trying to live in harmony with it. That’s what makes this beautiful and thought-provoking show such a treasure.

Scavengers Reign is streaming on Netflix.

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Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)

Jamila Wignot was nervous. It was Friday night, May 17, 2024, at Crosstown Theater in Midtown Memphis, and she was about to premiere the first episode of her latest HBO documentary series Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. to a hometown crowd. The sold-out house was full of Memphis music royalty: David Porter, Al Bell, Deanie Parker, Eddie Floyd, the list goes on.

“It’s like somebody was just saying to me, ‘Didn’t Janis Joplin get booed in Memphis?’ And I was like, ‘Exactly!’ That’s why I was nervous,” Wignot says on a Zoom interview a few days later.

Turns out, she needn’t have worried. The crowd responded to “Chapter One: ’Cause I Love You” with a Cannes-level standing ovation. During the Q&A after the screening, Deanie Parker, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music’s first CEO, seemed taken aback. “This really has been an emotional experience for me,” she says. “I think it’s because, while we achieved a lot, we did it in about a decade — which is astounding! We made a mark globally.”

Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, David Porter, Al Jackson Jr., Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, Isaac Hayes, and Steve Cropper (Photo: Courtesy Don Nix 
Collection/OKPOP)

Wignot says her involvement with the Stax story started as she was finishing up her last documentary, a portrait of modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. “I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking, particularly historical documentary filmmaking, for a long time. But I came out of a kind of PBS model of documentaries that were narrated by a kind of ‘Voice of God’ narrator. They used archival [film and stills], but there were very specific ways that you had to use it at that time. With Ailey, I finally got to do the kind of documentary filmmaking that I like to do, which is first-person, kind of witness-driven documentary filmmaking. As a kid, I saw Eyes on the Prize and thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ When you are hearing from somebody who was there on the front lines, and then you’re seeing them in the archival footage, it all just feels very immersive and alive and urgent.

“On the heels of that, I was then approached first by Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow who made O.J.: Made in America. We’d all been friends for a very long time. Ezra said, ‘I’m working with this company, White Horse Pictures, and we’re looking for somebody who wants to direct a series on Stax Records, and do you think you’d be into it?’ And I was just immediately like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’”

Bruce Talamon and Isaac Hayes at the 1972 Wattstax concert (Photo: Howard Bingham)

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. skillfully blends interviews with the surviving players and extensively researched archival footage from the label’s heyday. “I don’t bother to interview RZA, who’s a diehard fan of the label. There’s no Justin Timberlake, there’s no Elton John, there’s no Paul McCartney. I was not interested in having the kind of secondary fan in there, just appreciating it. I wanted to understand how the label came together, the experiences of the people on the ground, and then let the music do the work of generating enthusiasm.”

The story is one of triumphant highs, stunning reversals of fortune, and missed opportunities, such as the time The Beatles tried and failed to schedule a recording session at the Stax studio on McLemore Avenue. (“Had that happened, for sure Ringo and Paul would’ve been up in this documentary!” says Wignot.)

Wignot’s approach is immediate and visceral. In one priceless take, shot in Booker T. Jones’ Nevada home, the Stax organist and arranger walks us through the creation of the timeless instrumental “Green Onions,” explaining how the song works from a music theory standpoint. It’s a little like watching Albert Einstein sketch out the equations for general relativity on a cocktail napkin.

“The thing that’s so incredible about Booker T. Jones is, he’s quite a quiet guy. Put him in front of a crowd and he’s like, ‘I’m ready!’ But then put him in a more intimate setting, and that’s not his milieu, which I love about performers. So he walked in and he said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little bit nervous and shy.’ He looked amazing, that blue suit and the hat, everything styled to perfection. And he said, ‘I’m going to sit at the piano and just start playing. It helps me settle down.’ As we were finishing up our setup, Booker T. Jones — Booker T. Jones! — is giving us a private concert. You’re trying to act like it’s very normal and not to go full fan-girl on him, just like, ‘How is this happening?’ The cameraman is like, ‘The light’s going to go here?’ And we’re like, ‘The guy is doing his thing RIGHT NOW.’

“Finally, I said, ‘[‘Green Onions’], it’s such a classic, that song. Since the process of working in Stax was so spontaneous, it could feel like things just kind of emerged out of nothing, give it to me. What’s the thought process? How do you get to this song?’ He was already at the piano, and he just started explaining it. It’s hands down one of my favorite scenes in the whole series. … Once you understand how ‘Green Onions’ came about, do you really need a famous person to talk about how much they love that song?”

The fact that Stax soul was chronically underappreciated by both the music industry and music press is a recurring theme in the series. In the intro, Parker promises to tell uncomfortable truths about how the powers-that-be never really wanted the company to succeed. The racial discrimination of the Jim Crow-era South is never far from the surface of the story, such as the time the label’s first breakout star, Carla Thomas, had to ride the service elevator to get to a meeting with the head of Atlantic Records.

It wasn’t until the Stax/Volt Revue toured Europe in the spring of 1967 that the Black musicians realized what it was like to be respected for their music, and not judged for the color of their skin. The segment of “’Cause I Love You” documenting the tour is powerful, says David Porter. “You could see a little bit of it, as an artist looking at the film, but to be there and to see that energy and that spirit was all over that space. There were people who were enjoying that music just breaking down and crying, getting tremendously emotional when they looked at Otis Redding, or Sam & Dave, or Eddie Floyd. It was something to see.”

Sam Moore acts as an informal narrator for the story of the tour, as you see his younger version hyping up a crowd of Norwegian teens. “There’s so many different films that have been able to make use of this material,” says Wignot. “Thank God it exists, but I was thinking, how do you take something that’s been often seen and give it a new life, a new kind of vitality? … When Sam Moore started talking about his love of the church, I wanted to get that in there, but not the way it is often told, up front. That’s the story of how R&B came together, in a way. It’s so central to what moves him as an artist. We have him talking about the power of the preacher to communicate. I just love in documentaries when you see somebody thinking. Then he says, ‘I would do anything to get that crowd to do a show with me.’ And that is so powerful because he’s not just trying to ‘turn them on.’ Even there, there’s a collective exchange, ‘Come with me, let’s do this together. …’

“The challenge of scenes like that, is how do you do it so that the music gets to live, so that we experience it as viewers as if we were there in the concert? But you’re adding just enough commentary that you’re not speaking on top of the scene, and you’re communicating what was going on emotionally for the performer. So there’s a real balance of too much dialogue versus too little dialogue, and understanding that the material is incredible in and of itself.”

“Chapter One” ends on the high note of the tour, says Wignot. “Episode one builds the way that ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ builds as a song. It was informed by Jim Stewart saying he thinks that that’s the song that best sums up the kind of spirit of Stax. It’s collaboration. It starts with one thing and then another thing gets laid on top and another. It just kind of builds over time and then becomes this big, explosive powerhouse climax of a song.”

“As you go forward with each of these segments, you’re gonna find that it is gonna get heavy. It’s gonna get fun, it’s gonna get powerful because it is alive,” says Porter. “The camaraderie that was between us, enjoying it, was shown in this film. It was a different time, and not a sweet time. We applauded what Jim [Stewart] was doing, giving us the freedom to go into the studio and do that. Everybody worked together in such a cohesive way, and there was a love and magic that happened in a continual way from day to day, hour to hour, all the way to the midnight hour. All that we would do, we’d have fun doing it. Because music is never good unless you can feel the joy inside of doing it.”

Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. is now streaming on Max.

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Kevin McDonald: Superstar

Kevin McDonald grew up in the suburbs outside Toronto, Canada. When he was a teenager, he started making the 45-minute trek into the city to take an improv comedy class at the legendary Second City theater which had produced some of the most significant comedy talent of the last 50 years. “It was a bus, a subway, and a bus to get there,” he says. “I remember for the whole 45 minutes before my first class. I was so nervous, I did a thing that you don’t do in improv: I started writing jokes so I could try to use them when I was at an improv. Of course, it never worked out. It never goes that way.

“I went to Second City workshops, and everybody was over 30. There were only two teenagers in the class. It was me and another teenager named Mike Myers.”

Myers would go on to fame as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, then as the star of the Austin Powers film series. McDonald teamed up with another friend he met at Second City, Dave Foley, to found The Kids in the Hall. The comedy troupe, though born in improv, started concentrating more on writing sketches as they gained a cult following by performing at the Toronto punk rock club The Rivoli in the mid-1980s. SNL producer Lorne Michaels discovered them and developed a sketch comedy show, which debuted on CBC and HBO in 1988. Over five seasons, The Kids in the Hall would go on to become a big influence on all kinds of comedy in the 1990s and beyond. As documented in the 2022 film The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, success definitely went to their heads, and after the harrowing production of their 1996 movie Brain Candy, the Kids wouldn’t work together again for more than a decade. They eventually reunited for an excellent sixth season on Amazon Prime in 2022.

McDonald has appeared in numerous films and TV shows, from Lilo & Stitch to Arrested Development. He’s also forayed into stand-up comedy, which the self-described shy guy says was a difficult transition. “You stop being afraid when you find your own voice,” he says. “I found that my voice was telling stories — I can tell a funny story. In fact, the rock opera was a story I was going to do in stand-up. Then I thought it was too big for stand-up, too operatic.”

When McDonald appears at Memphis’ Black Lodge on Saturday, April 13th, he will be performing Kevin McDonald: Superstar. “I’m doing a rock opera with the gang — I don’t use that word enough, I should use the word ‘gang’ more often — the gang from Bluff City Liars. I wrote it, even though I can’t write songs, and I sing the lead, even though I can’t really sing.”

As you might expect from the title, McDonald says the first song in the cycle is about his Jesus Christ Superstar fandom. “I was a Catholic as a kid, and the only thing I liked at Catholic school was when one of the teachers showed us Jesus Christ Superstar. I was in grade seven and I fell in love with it. I’ve seen it, I’m guessing, between 40 and 50 times.”

As for the rest of the rock opera, McDonald says it is “based on a true story me and Dave Foley from The Kids in the Hall are involved in.”

Backing McDonald will be Memphis folk punkers HEELS. “Brennan [Whalen] and I are both huge Kids in the Hall marks,” says drummer (and comedian in his own right) Josh McLane. “The fact that Brennan is the musical accompaniment and I’m the narrator is a dream come true to say the least!”

“We’ve had a blast working on this show,” says the Liars’ Amber Schalch. “It’s been an excellent way to stretch out our comedy muscles, and we couldn’t be more honored that he’s coming to Memphis to perform and do workshops with us.”

Before the show on Saturday, and then again on Sunday, McDonald will be teaching two comedy workshops with the Bluff City Liars. “Kevin McDonald is such a skilled comedian that he almost makes you think you’re not funny yourself, but then he’s such a good teacher that he alleviates that fear with as much ease as cracking a joke,” says Zephyr McAninch, who was with the Liars when they brought McDonald to Memphis before the pandemic.

Bluff City Liars’ Michael Degnan says the show is not to be missed. “Growing up, The Kids in the Hall were incredibly important and influential on my developing sense of humor. Getting to learn from and perform improv with Kevin when he last came to town was a dream come true. Now getting to help bring his work to life takes that dream to a new level, and I’m ecstatic that we’ll get to do so alongside HEELS and Savannah Bearden who have both been responsible for so much great entertainment in Memphis for the last decade.”

See Kevin McDonald Superstar at Black Lodge on Saturday, April 13, 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at tinyurl.com/2bhjpy2z.

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True Detective: Night Country

Kali Reis and Jodi Foster star in True Detective: Night Country (Courtesy HBO)

Since its debut on HBO in 2014, True Detective has been a galvanizing show. Showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s first season featured Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives searching for an occultic serial killer in Louisiana over the course of two decades. It was unique in television, in that Pizzolatto wrote all eight episodes himself, and Cary Joji Fukunaga was the sole credited director. (Normally, TV shows have several writers who collaborate on scripts. The mandatory minimum size of these writer’s rooms was a major issue in last year’s Writer’s Guild of America strike.) 

Each subsequent season of the anthology show has featured a different pair of detectives who can barely stand each other solving weird crimes. For season 2 in 2015, it was Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams; season 3 featured Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo in 2019. Pizzolatto started to develop season 4, but then left HBO in favor of a new deal at FX. Barry Jenkins and Issa López took over as executive producers, and took the show in a new direction — or least to a new locale. 

Season four carries the subtitle Night Country because it is set in the fictional Alaskan town of Ennis, located above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn’t rise at all during the depths of winter. Jodi Foster stars as Liz Danvers, Ennis’ chief of police. It’s a major casting coup, since Foster hasn’t been a regular in a TV series since the mid-1970s. And it pays off. Foster is one of the best actors of her or any other generation, and the greatest pleasure of Night Country is getting to spend six episodes watching her construct and tear down a complex character.

If I had to describe Capt. Danvers in one word, it would be “harsh.”  She’s hard on everyone, from her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc) to protege Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), to her off-and-on lover of twenty years, Capt. Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston). But Danver’s harshest of all to her former partner, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis, a former professional women’s boxing champion.) Navarro and Danvers split after their response to a murder-suicide case fell under scrutiny from their superiors, and led to both being reassigned to the backwater (or should I say “back-ice”) of Ennis. 

Navarro sees ghosts, but that’s apparently not unusual in this town, where the veil between worlds seems thin. The former partners are forced back together when the entire crew of an arctic research station is found dead on the ice, frozen together in what Danvers calls a “corpsicle.” One of the few clues is a severed human tongue left behind in the station which belonged to a Native American woman named Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen), whose murder Navarro has been obsessively investigating for years. How are the two crimes connected, and what do they have to do with the mining company that is polluting the community’s water? 

Foster’s virtuosic performance brings it all together, even as some of the subplots spiral off into the arctic darkness. She’s a manic ball of snarling energy, hinting at the secret pain that causes her to lash out at everyone around her. 

Lopez’s direction on all six episodes is exceptional. She brings elements of Lynchian surrealism (quiet northern town exists in uneasy proximity to an ancient supernatural force) and the John Carpenter horror classic The Thing. She knows how to produce a good jump scare, and how to hint at unknowable horrors lurking just offscreen. Like True Detective’s first season, Night Country benefits greatly from being the product of a singular artistic vision. 

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Shōgun on FX

Hiroyuki Sanada as Lord Yoshii Toranaga in Shogun.

Long before the days of prestige TV, the miniseries was the closest network television came to the kind of serialized storytelling now familiar from The Sopranos and Game of Thrones. The greatest of all the miniseries was Shōgun, which attracted 30 million viewers per night over the course of five episodes in 1980. Shōgun was adapted from a 1,200-page doorstop of a novel by James Clavell, and starred bearded heartthrob Richard Chamberlain and legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Clavell’s hero John Blackthorne’s story was loosely based on the life of William Adams, who, in 1600, became the first Englishman to reach Japan. 

With networks searching for the next Game of Thrones, Shōgun seems to fit the bill nicely for FX. It’s a period costume drama with lots of political intrigue, violence, and sex. While the Japan of the feudal Edo period didn’t have actual dragons, it’s been a source of fascination for anime and live action stories alike for decades. Plus, it’s got ninjas! What’s not to love? 

The action starts onboard the Erasmus, a Dutch trading ship that is the last survivor of what was once a fleet of five. Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) is the pilot and navigator whose job it is to find Japan, but things have gotten so out of hand on this two-year voyage that the captain kills himself in the first scene. The Erasmus does eventually find Japan, but instead of sailing triumphantly into port, it kind of washes up on the beach. The crew who haven’t starved to death are so weak with scurvy they barely even notice when a squad of samurai board the vessel. The Erasmus is full of South American silver, various trade goods, and most importantly, hundreds of muskets and twenty heavy cannon. 

The cache weapons are of great interest to the five competing daimyo, lords who were left in charge of Japan after the death of the former ruler. They are to share power until the crown prince comes of age — unless one of them can maneuver the others out of the way and install himself as shogun, or military dictator. At first, the scheming Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) tries to quietly confiscate the ship’s cargo so he can expand his coastal fiefdom. But his machinations are easily detected by Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), the old ruler’s former confidante who swoops in and brings Blackthorne to Osaka Castle, where he is attending a meeting of the five houses called by Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira). It’s an open secret that Ishido intends to use this meeting to turn the other regents against Toranaga, so the old warrior plays for time while trying to find a way to wiggle out of his bind and keep his word to his dead emperor. 

Meanwhile, Blackthorn quickly comes to realize that while he’s the first Englishman to reach Japan, other Europeans have been there for a while. Namely, Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who are building churches in the major cities and converting the Japanese to Christianity. Among the converts is Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), the cultured courtier of Toranga who serves as translator between her master and the European barbarians. 

The language barrier is the source of much confusion for Blackstone, and humor for the viewers. By 1600, the Portuguese Catholics and English Protestants had been at war on and off for decades. But the Jesuits have conveniently neglected to tell their Japanese hosts that there is more than one country in Europe and more than one flavor of Christianity. As long as the European money keeps flowing in from the church, the daimyo tolerate the annoying missionaries —until Blackthorne tells Toranaga that the Portuguese intend to colonize Japan and install a Christian ruler of their own. 

If nothing else, Shōgun is well cast. Jarvis has Richard Chamberlain’s look down pat, and lends scenes an expressive and often baffled presence. This is in contrast to the outstanding Japanese cast, led by the stoic Sandara, who excel at expressing complex emotion with subtlety. Yoriko Doguchi is particularly great as Lady Kiri No Kata, Toranga’s sharp-tongued consort. 

Showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks retool the tone of the original, which tended towards Orientalist exoticism, by exploring the complexities of Japanese society and making it clear that Blackthorn, while a quick learner, is mostly bluffing his way through things. The first two episodes are tight plotting engines in the Game of Thrones tradition, but it gets fuzzier in the third, when an elaborate naval battle and chase scene falls flat. But thanks to the excellent cast, if you’re looking for a post-GoT, castle-drama fix, you could do a lot worse.

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Film Features Film/TV TV Features

No One Will Save You

The 1970s were the decade where horror came of age. William Friedkin (RIP) made the genre respectable with The Exorcist, Dario Argento brought it to the art house with Suspiria, and John Carpenter revolutionized it with Halloween. But one of the most frightening single scenes of the decade was from Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

Spielberg can do anything, of course, but I have long thought that he is a horror director at heart. In Close Encounters, single mom Jillian (Melinda Dillon) is in bed with the flu in her rural Indiana farmhouse when she notices one of her son Barry’s (Cary Guffey) toys moving by itself. Barry is in the kitchen, where he meets something — we only see his reactions, and the spilt milk that the unseen visitor dropped from the fridge. By the time Jillian makes it downstairs, Barry is chasing his new “friend” outside, where an ominous cloud formation overhead adds to the tense atmosphere. Jillian manages to get her son inside, but the alien visitors, represented by blinding klieg lights, will not be deterred. They try various points of entry, like the chimney, with Barry cheering them on. “Come in through the door!” 

The scene’s climax comes when the aliens slowly unscrew the HVAC vent covers, a moment writer/director Brian Duffield emulates in his new alien invasion flick No One Will Save You. In place of the Melinda Dillon (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for CE3K) is Kaitlyn Dever as Brynn, who lives alone in her rural farmhouse, surrounded by her crafts and pictures of her deceased parents and BFF Maude (Dari Lynn Griffin). 

One of the things Spielberg understands is how much horror depends on great sound design. In the recent hit A Quiet Place, the sound design takes center stage because the invading aliens are blind, so everyone has to be real quiet all the time. In No One Will Save You, it’s quiet because no one in Brynn’s small town will talk to her, because they hate her, for reasons that the story slowly reveals. There are only about five words of dialogue spoken in the film’s 93 minutes, which makes A Quiet Place seem positively chatty by comparison. Sound designer James Miller fills the space with spooky creaks, far-off groaning, and unintelligible murmurs. 

Kaitlyn Dever stars in Hulu’s No One Will Save You. 

Brynn seems lonely and sad, but fairly resigned to her fate as the town pariah, as long as she is left alone to run her Etsy business selling handmade birdhouses. One morning, on her way to the post office, she notices a burned ring in her yard. That night, she gets her first visitor. Duffield uses deep staging and sleight of hand to avoid revealing his antagonists as long as possible. The aliens appear in bokeh or obscured by lens flares — until they’re right up in Brynn’s face, probing her mind. 

Doing No One Will Save You as a semi-silent film is operating with the difficulty setting on high, and it would not work without an actress as talented and disciplined as Dever. Her endlessly expressive eyes sell Brynn’s resigned despair, her creeping terror, her determination to survive, and, when the alien’s mind probe takes her back to the traumatic incident that made her an outcast, her searing regret. 

Like all good horror films, No One Will Save You plays with your existing fears by mapping them onto some external threat. In this case, it’s fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, social anxiety, and, as University of Memphis film professor Marina Levina is fond of saying, “all horror is body horror.”

The list of Duffield’s influence — Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Under The Skin, Close Encounters, Poltergeist — is solid, but the real test of an artist is how well they synthesize and transcend their influences. The synergy between director and actor elevates No One Will Save You to something greater than the sum of its parts. 

No One Will Save You is now streaming on Hulu. 

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Film/TV TV Features

Ahsoka

Rosario Dawson plays Star Wars fan favorite Ahsoka Tano.

Ahsoka Tano was the best new Star Wars character introduced during the prequel era of 1999-2013. She was introduced in The Clone Wars animated series as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan apprentice. Ashley Eckstein voiced the head-tailed Togruta hero as she grew up on-screen during the show’s seven seasons. As the war, the contradictory demands of the Jedi Council, his secret romance with Padmé, and the malign influence of Senator Palpatine slowly changed Anakin from gung ho Jedi to genocidal Sith Lord Darth Vader, it was his relationship with Ahsoka that kept him balanced. But Ahsoka could see what Anakin could not, and she became disillusioned with both the war and Jedi idealism. When she was falsely framed for war crimes in season 5, she became one of the few Jedi to ever resign from the order — as it turned out, just in time to avoid Order 66.

When The Clone Wars returned after cancellation in 2017, showrunner David Filoni spent most of his time wrapping up Ahsoka’s story. But then she returned, 20 years older and much wiser, as Fulcrum, the nascent Rebellion’s most valuable intelligence asset, in Rebels. The character makes her live action debut in the limited series Ahsoka, now portrayed by Rosario Dawson. Filoni, who has been integral to The Mandalorian and other Disney+ live action Star Wars series, returns to oversee the fate of his most beloved creation.

Ahsoka is set in the same era as The Mandalorian. The Empire has been defeated, and the New Republic is struggling to rebuild as much of the galaxy slips into warlordism. Ahsoka and her comrades Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) survived the war. But nascent Jedi Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) is missing, having apparently sacrificed himself in the final operation which sent Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) into exile in a galaxy far, far away. Sabine, who had previously been training with Ahsoka, feels heartbroken and betrayed in the aftermath of the war, while Hera, an ace pilot who fought with the Rebellion, is now a New Republic general. Ahsoka travels with Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), a thousand-year-old droid rescued from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, but her own attitude towards the Jedi remains ambivalent. But she does suspect that a group of defeated Imperials is trying to rescue Thrawn from exile, which is confirmed when Jedi-turned-mercenary Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) rescues Nightsister Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) from New Republic captivity. Meanwhile, Sabine is convinced that tracking the Force witch’s movements are the best way to get Ezra back, if he is still alive. Hera is unable to convince the war-weary New Republic to commit assets to the search, so she, Ahsoka, and Sabine set out alone to track down a star map to the distant space whale graveyard where they suspect Thrawn and Ezra have gone.

If all that sounds confusing (Space whales? Yes, they’re a thing.), then you’ve identified the first problem with Ahsoka. After 40 years of movies, comics, novels, and TV series, Star Wars is currently suffering from a bad case of Marvel-itis, where the needs of maintaining the increasingly convoluted continuity take up all available narrative time between the wham-bam space battles and lightsaber duels. Much of the charm of The Mandalorian was that it positioned itself as a monster-of-the-week series apart from the main story. In later seasons, when Luke Skywalker showed up, things went downhill fast.

Ahsoka and Thrawn are both genuinely great characters, but the series gets bogged down in Easter eggs and barely comprehensible lore. Dawson, a legend in her own right, gives an uncharacteristically reserved performance as Ahsoka. (In flashbacks, Ariana Greenblatt portrays young Ahsoka and nails the mischievous spirit Eckstein brought to the role.) Winstead is, as usual, the best thing on-screen, while Stevenson (in his last role before dying in May) understands the level of camp required of a serial villain.

But the biggest problem with Ahsoka is the direction. ILM’s special effects and production design are, as usual, absolutely top-notch, and with the level of acting firepower at his fingertips, Filoni should be able to craft some quality space opera. Yet the bread resolutely fails to rise. The patient, indie-film-inspired editing that works in the political thriller Andor sucks the life out of Ahsoka. The dialogue has been bad even by Star Wars standards. Things liven up when Thrawn arrives in episode 6, but with only two episodes left, it might be too little, too late. Maybe Ahsoka is right, and the Jedi are the problem.

Ahsoka is streaming on Disney+.

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Film/TV TV Features

Young Rock

Young Rock traverses the decades of The Rock’s life, with Uli Latukefu as the young adult Rock

There’s one thing you can say about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — he’s big. Yes, the former Miami Hurricanes defensive tackle turned professional wrestler is physically large — officially, he’s a 6-foot-5, 260-pound pile of muscle and tattoos — but his personality and ambitions are also cartoonishly outsized.

When he was in his wrestling prime around the turn of the century, he attracted the biggest audiences WWE ever saw. But for the last 20 years or so, Johnson has been a movie star. After making his debut as a supporting actor in 2001 with The Mummy Returns, he immediately booked his first lead role in that film’s prequel, 2002’s The Scorpion King. In 2011’s Fast Five, he gave the struggling Fast & Furious series a shot in the arm, introducing a new character and transforming the car-chase franchise into the weird semi-spy thriller thing that is scheduled to clock its 10th installment in 2023.

Notice I called Johnson a “movie star” instead of an “actor.” That’s because actors transform themselves for each new role, while movie stars transform each role into a conduit for the persona they’re selling. John Wayne, for example, always played John Wayne, even when he was ostensibly playing Genghis Khan. Next year, people won’t go to see what Luke Hobbs is up to in Fast X, they’ll go to see The Rock drive cars real fast.

Johnson’s larger-than-life persona, and how it got to be so dang big, is the subject of Young Rock, which is probably the first ever biographical comedy series about someone who is not a comedian — or even very funny. It’s 2032, and Johnson is running for president. He appears on a chat show hosted by Randall Park (playing himself, as several people, including Johnson, do in the future-now world of 2032), where he starts telling stories about his life. As each story unfolds we flash back to the appropriate period of Rock lore: Adrian Groulx plays him at age 10, Bradley Constant at 15, and Uli Latukefu as the young adult Rock.

Johnson’s had a pretty interesting life to provide fodder for the show. He was a third-generation wrestler — his father was Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson, the first Black champion in WWE history, and his mother Ata was the daughter of Samoan wrestling legend Peter Maivia. There’s also a colorful cast of characters, including André the Giant (Matthew Willig), The Iron Sheik (Brett Azar), and “Macho Man” Randy Savage (Kevin Makely), just to name a few.

Both Soul Man and The Rock went through the famously wild Memphis wrestling market on their way to stardom. Rocky was a rival of Jerry “The King” Lawler. Later, Johnson would introduce memories of his stint in the Mid-South with the words, “I was working in Memphis, and it was a grind.”

We know the feeling, Rock.

But it must not have been too bad because after two seasons filming in Queensland, Australia, Young Rock moved company to Memphis. The first episode filmed in the Bluff City, “The People Need You,” premiered last Friday. At the end of season 2, Johnson had just lost the 2032 election to Senator Brayden Taft (Michael Torpey). As season 3 dawns, Park, who functions as the audience surrogate who listens to The Rock’s tall tales, has a new show with a co-host he hates. Johnson has gone into seclusion following his election loss, but after a viral video surfaces of The Rock signing a kid’s autograph, Park goes to visit his old friend, who is spending his time puttering around his farm quoting Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech.

Becky Lynch guest stars as Cyndi Lauper.

The episode’s time jumps and wacky portrayals of real people show that Young Rock didn’t lose a step when it leapt continents. The production values are first-rate — at one point, Downtown’s Front Street is transformed into Saudi Arabia. Johnson recalls the events which led to the downfall of his father’s career, which included an international contract dispute with Vince McMahon (Adam Ray) and a visit to a music video release party for Cyndi Lauper’s (Irish wrestler Becky Lynch) theme song for The Goonies.

Johnson has been pretty open about his ambitions to enter politics, and Young Rock seems designed to burnish his image as a saintly everyman while getting people used to seeing the wrestler/actor as a political candidate. It’s a strategy that has worked before, first with Donald Trump’s stint on another NBC show, The Apprentice. The second time was TV comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was elected president of Ukraine in April 2019 and was then promptly extorted by Trump, who attempted to get him to lie about Hunter Biden in exchange for American military assistance. The incident led to Trump’s first impeachment. Now, Zelenskyy is a hero of democracy, leading his people against the genocidal Russian invasion. Let’s hope The Rock takes after him.

Young Rock is airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock.

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Film/TV TV Features

The Sandman

Tom Sturridge plays DC’s Dream, who, to repair his kingdom, journeys across different worlds.

Here’s a question: Does Morpheus the Lord of Dreams look like Neil Gaiman, or does Neil Gaiman look like Morpheus?

Back in the late 1980s, Gaiman was a budding young writer for hire, having penned a fan-focused biography of Douglas Adams and some comic scripts for DC. It was a period when the comic book industry was in flux. The “Wham!” and “Zing!” era of superhero stories had gone stale, and new writers were elevating the form by ignoring what had come before. Much like Alan Moore had done with Watchmen, Gaiman picked an obscure character from the DC archives and started from a blank slate. Thus, The Sandman, a guy named Wesley Dodds who wore a gas mask and hunted evildoers with the aid of a sleeping gas gun, became Dream of the Endless, an anthropomorphic representation of what happens when you go to sleep.

The Sandman comics, which ran from 1989 to 1996, helped usher in the “graphic novel” era, where readers and critics recognized comics’ potential to tell more serious stories. Gaiman rejected superhero tropes — crossovers with other DC characters (besides the sorcerer John Constantine) were rare — and used Dream as a catalyst for more psychologically complex stories, usually based in his deep knowledge of mythology from many cultures. The Sandman became a cult hit, with Dream’s sister Death, whose look was based on Cinamon Hadly, an American goth girl who was friends with artist Mike Dringenberg, was a breakout character, especially among college-aged women who were picking up comic books for the first time.

As for Dream, he was a pale, skinny guy in a black overcoat who, as drawn by Dave McKean, had a face that kinda looked like the author’s. Soon, Gaiman started wearing all black and adopted the same flyaway haircut. It was partly a branding exercise and partly just a goth living their best life.

After years in development hell, The Sandman finally got a screen adaptation from Netflix in the form of a 10-episode series. It begins, as the comics did, with Dream (Tom Sturridge) imprisoned in a glass sphere by Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance), a 19th century English occultist known as the Magus, whom Morpheus contemptuously calls “an amateur.” He and his son John Dee (played as an adult by David Thewlis) steal Dream’s three magical totems — his gas-mask-like helmet, a bag of magic sand, and a ruby that makes dreams come true — and keep the Lord of Dreams in their basement for more than a century. When he finally escapes, he returns to find his kingdom The Dreaming in tatters, and the humans whose dreams are his charge in not much better shape. Recovering the emblems of his office means a visit to actual, non-development Hell, where he must face off against Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), and a trip to a small-town diner, where John Dee tries to use stolen dream magic to create a world without lies.

The 10-episode series is devoted to rendering the original stories and art as faithfully as possible. That’s always a tricky proposition because what works in the comics or on the page may not always work on the screen. In this case, the strengths and weaknesses of the series largely flow from the source material. Pains have been taken to recreate frames designed by artists McKean, Dringenberg, and Sam Keith — I have only a passing familiarity with the originals, but I still caught chills from several hauntingly familiar images — but this comes at the expense of expressive camera movement. Some casting choices are inspired, such as Thewlis, who steals the episode “24/7” as the emotionally stunted son of an abusive wizard, and Christie, who plays the devil as a vain and envious fallen angel to absolute perfection. I found Sturridge’s taciturn Morpheus a little off-putting at first, but he grew on me as the show progressed. The only big miss is Patton Oswalt, whose instant recognizability gets in the way of voicing Dream’s sidekick Matthew the Raven.

The Sandman’s deliberate pacing and philosophical tone may not be for everyone, but this faithful adaptation will satisfy legions of Neil Gaiman readers and those fantasy fans who are ready for a new Dream.

The Sandman is streaming on Netflix.