rtcpndxw Reviews

Fargo (2014–2024)

The tiger is free

[9/10 · 18 January 2024]

I am a fan of Fargo who was a bit bored by S04 and hopeful for a return to form with S05.

I just finished ep 10 and I am truly grateful to have been given such a richly layered, moving and thought-provoking work of art. This season in particular will hold up to multiple re-watches with new dimensions to be discovered each time.

The acting is terrific and the cinematography is beautiful. The action scenes in the early episodes are among the best choreographed in recent memory. The comedy hits the right notes and the character development is engrossing. All top notch.

But what makes this season really stand out, IMO, is the philosophical, moral and spiritual depths it plumbs. On the one hand this is about power & domination and the material and psychological impact of the crimes committed against the weak by the strong (via systems of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.). It is, at this level, also about the inexorable order of karma and justice that must be respected. We must, after all, account for ourselves and our sins. On the other hand, though, it is equally about something miraculous that transcends the grim fatalism of mechanistic karmic consequence- nothing less than the liberation from the (literally) blinding law of Hammurabi's code. In the midst of our enslaved agony, we are reminded, freedom and grace are always as close as a bite of Bisquick properly savored.

Bravo. This is beautiful stuff.

The Idol: Daybreak (2023) Season 1, Episode 3

my view 3 eps in: Levinson is the real Jocelyn

[1/10 · 19 June 2023]

On the surface the The Idol is about a beautiful young pop star who falls so hard for the Weeknd that she eagerly turns her creative life over to him.

But the real drama we're watching is about Sam Levinson himself- the Hollywood figure who *really* fell into such a creative infatuation with the Weeknd that he pushed out his original directing partner, Amy Seimetz, in order invite in HIS new 'idol' to take total control of their work. Exactly as Jocelyn cedes all decisions about her album in the fictional version, the real-life Levinson let Tesfaye take their almost-completed show and entirely remake it in his own grandiose self-image.

I don't know whether there were any hair brushes involved, or whether the Weeknd told Levinson he was moving in quite that fast, but by all appearances the dynamics of submission and dominance between the two of them (in the show running realm, I mean...), was no less total that the dime store 50 shades relationship we witness between the two main characters on screen.

Down side: unfortunately, just as the Tedros character is no musician, Tesfaye is no creator, writer, or - least of all - actor. So the end result, as we've seen all too painfully, turns out to be absolutely awful. I guess that's what happens to artists and their work when they join a cult. Hopefully it's a lesson learned.

So in the end, I guess it's true that the Idol is meta- just not in the way that it thought it was going to be: it's really the tragic, unintentionally autobiographical tale of what happens when a 38 year old creator/director falls under the sway of a cult of personality he just doesn't have the strength to resist.

Come to think of it, maybe Sam should have played the part of Jocelyn himself. He and the Weeknd could've made their acting debuts together and instead of being all cringey and awkward and amateurish at every moment, the whole thing would've felt super "real," just like they wanted.

The Idol (2023)

From Euphoria to dysphoria... The Idol is an ugly creative crash

[2/10 · 16 June 2023]

Euphoria wasn't perfect, but its first season was often very good and sometimes -- like the covid inter-season eps -- it approached greatness. With this dismal effort, sadly, Sam Levinson has really lost his way.

At its best, Euphoria was provocative in the best sense: it was challenging and it made you think. Sometimes, in the process, it made you uncomfortable. But when it worked well, it had a reason for pushing the envelope.

The overall effect of watching the The Idol, on the other hand, is like listening to a pretentious Hollywood narcissist drone on about themselves while you desperately look for an exit...

The show is wincingly self-indulgent and can't resist checking out its own chicness in the mirror at every opportunity. It never asks its audience a single thoughtful question, but it's absolutely in love with its own efforts at clever references and pretentious displays of supposed sophistication. It (oh so seriously) wants to be seen as transgressive, high art - erotically captivating, shockingly edgy, darkly hilarious, brooding and brilliant - when in fact it's just transparently superficial, repetitive, garishly hyper-sexualized, and ultimately vacuous.

(In keeping with the show's own self-absorption, The Idol's creators and its small squad of ardent defenders now place the blame for its terrible critical reception on the audience itself, which clearly wasn't prepared for this level of subversive, satirical genius and layered cultural commentary on their screens: if you don't validate the show's self-image of boundary-pushing sexiness, humor, charm or erudition, the only possible explanation is that you're a prude, a hater or a philistine. Also, you probably have childish illusions about a benevolent music industry full of happy, well-adjusted pop stars looked after by caring, trustworthy management, so naive you, you just can't handle this daring and bold work of art that *finally* has the courage and raw honesty to blow the lid off all the debauchery going on behind the scenes in - you'll never believe this! - rich and famous people's mansions. OK, right... Um, where's that exit, again?)

It has to be noted that the writing is absolutely dreadful (a brutally jarring experience for anyone who had been spoiled by Succession in that time slot) and the Weeknd's acting is comically horrendous... but no need to say more here. These topics have been adequately covered many times over by reviewers around the world.

The Idol is just plain terrible. An outright disaster. Let's hope it quickly gets put out of its misery- and let's also hope that Sam Levinson returns to form and turns out to be the creator with the kind of talent he has seemed, at least at times, to genuinely have.

The Idol: Double Fantasy (2023) Season 1, Episode 2

Hard to believe, but ep 2 got even worse. This is 100% a lost cause

[2/10 · 12 June 2023]

The Idol is a show that tries desperately to be a provocative and edgy drama about the dark side of fame, but ends up being a laughably, painfully cringey mess.

The show takes itself ultra seriously when from top to bottom it's actually an atrociously pretentious piece of garbage that would have been at home at 3AM on Cinemax in 1995.

The show stars Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, an aspiring pop star who has a nervous breakdown and falls under the influence of Tedros, a self-help guru and cult leader played by The Weeknd, who delivers perhaps the worst performance on any show that ever aspired to "prestige" TV status.

The Weeknd is so flat, boring, un-charming, wooden and monotone that he makes Keanu Reeves look like Daniel Day-Lewis. He has zero charisma or presence, and his attempts at being mysterious and seductive are laughable. He delivers his lines with such a lack of emotion and conviction that they seem to be coming from a teleprompter. His character is supposed to be a charismatic manipulator who lures Jocelyn into his cult, but he comes across as a boring, creepy utterly unattractive weirdo who spouts nonsensical platitudes like some clownish Rasputin parody.

Lily-Rose Depp is not much better as Jocelyn, the naive and troubled pop star who falls for Tedros. She has the acting range of a cardboard cutout, and her character is so bland and unlikable that it's hard to care about her fate. She spends most of the show either crying, pouting, or having sex with Tedros in graphic and gratuitous scenes that serve no purpose other than to attempt to titillate an audience that the show runners seem to have forgotten has effortless access (it's 2023, folks!) to *actual* pornography at all times and will find it odd, not shocking, to witness B-grade schlocky softcore fare in the once-hallowed hour of Succession and the Sopranos.

Depp's character is supposed to be a complex and sympathetic victim of the music industry, but she comes across as a spoiled and stupid brat who makes inexplicably terrible decisions entirely lacks a personality.

The rest of the cast is made up of some very strong actors who been terribly served by the writers. Jane Adams as Jocelyn's cynical manager does nothing but smoke and swear; Dan Levy as Jocelyn's flamboyant stylist does nothing but make semi-lame jokes and wear outrageous outfits; Hank Azaria does nothing but play an ambiguously exploitative father-ish figure with a terrible and pointless 'Israeli' accent and persona... and on and on.

The writing of the show is atrocious, with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a teenager who watched Euphoria and sat down to write, like, a really HOT script about the music industry, dude. The show thus far shows no signs of knowing what it wants to be-- a critical commentary on the perils and damage of pop fame or a cheap pop-sploitation series that simply commercializes those exact 'sins' under the ultra-thin guise of critiquing them.

The tone is inconsistent, with moments that are supposed to be dramatic or tragic being unintentionally hilarious or absurd. The themes are shallow, with messages that are either obvious or contradictory. The show appears poised to *try* (ugh) to tackle issues such as mental health, fame, sexuality, identity, artistry, creativity, morality, spirituality, etc., but will, with total certainty, fail miserably at exploring them in any meaningful or original way.

The Idol is self-indulgent and pretentious, with gratuitous references to pop culture, philosophy, religion, literature, art, music, etc., that are either irrelevant or inaccurate. It tries to be meta and clever by using intertextuality or symbolism or irony or satire or parody or homage or pastiche or whatever else it can think of to impress the audience... but instead of being smart and creative, it all just ends up being transparent, annoying and confusing.

The show is a huge disappointment and embarrassment by creator and director Sam Levinson. Levinson, who previously created the critically acclaimed and popular show Euphoria, appears to have completely lost his touch and and vision whatsoever with The Idol. He has wasted his talent and his potential on a show that is a complete disaster and an utter waste of time. It is baffling how he could possibly have made something this execrable.

The Idol is a show that deserves to be canceled and forgotten as quickly as possible. It would be a mercy for all involved.

Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell (2016)

forgotten people

[8/10 · 11 April 2023]

It's hard to know how to come up with 600 words to say about this truly compassionate and honest work.

Life is pain. Pain is passed from one generation to the next.

We love and we are selfish. We are chained by the past and, sometimes, we struggle nobly against it, despite all of our flaws and limitations.

Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell should be used, in tandem, as a introduction to the complexities of social work and of human behavior more broadly. The two films tell the whole tale.

Are we entirely products of our conditioning (i.e. Without responsibility or culpability)?

No.

Do we have genuine free will-- and can we defy our conditioning opt out of intergenerational trauma?

Also, no.

Is this an irreconcilable paradox? Maybe. But what more can we say?

Blessings to Erin, her family, the filmmakers, and everyone involved in the making of these films.

Belfast (2021)

Navel-gazing sentimental snooze fest in the midst of real tragedy

[5/10 · 5 January 2023]

Kenneth Branagh does not claim that his family actively opposed vigilante violence or that they took risks to defend Catholic neighbors-- which would have made for a compelling narrative of valor and self-sacrifice. Instead, we see that his father didn't want his family conscripted into a Protestant mob (good on him) and sought a better life for all of them 'across the water.' Sincere congrats to them, but I'm not sure I detect either heroism or a valid movie premise here, and I certainly don't detect any sophisticated or nuanced political/social commentary about the troubles. Times got rough. The family bailed, as I probably would've done in the circumstances. Baby Branagh had to leave his hometown and his wee sweetheart, and then he had to learn the received pronunciation to adapt (and eventually thrive and succeed at an enormous level). Sad? I guess, maybe, at the time.... Am I judging them? Absolutely not. But am I shedding tears for them or especially moved by their story or their moral example? Definitely not. They did what they had to do for *themselves* in a bad situation. No more, no less. I fail to see what I was supposed to get invested in or care about here.

Billions (2016–2023)

5 stars overall due to early seasons. Current season:1 star.

[5/10 · 29 April 2022]

I hope Giamatti is ashamed of himself for continuing to cash fat checks to put his name on this garbage.

Nobody talks like this-- except, apparently, in the fantasy world cooked up of the old dudes from the Billions writers' room. That's what passes for a Showtime script in 2022: an endless string of inane, rapid-fire film references that are immediately understood by all parties involved, no matter the context or the age/background of the characters in question. If any of it were the slightest bit funny it could pass for a parody.

Taylor is written as a smug, one-dimensional robot. Any potential the actor might have to portray an actual human being with genuine psychological depth will never be known on this show.

Wendy is just a glorified combo of Tony Robbins and Ricken from Severance who we're still supposed to believe in as some kind of corporate Svengali. In reality, her hack cliches wouldn't motivate a cat to jump from a burning bag, much less a bevy of narcissists and sociopaths to rethink their core "values."

Prince is boring and not at all credible in his drive. The storyline with his kids and his ex feels phony and stupid at every step.

Billions is on Showtime, so it's always been drek. But it used to be fun drek. Now it's just a show without any decent characters, terrible writing, and a story that's trying desperately to accommodate social themes that we all know the uber-rich could't care less about, beyond the crudest interest in PR and image management.

Too bad. At this point, it's just too, too bad. I held on for a while, but I'm out.

All My Friends Hate Me (2021)

Confused by critical response

[8/10 · 29 April 2022]

Yes, this movie played in fun ways with genre-mixing -- horror, comedy, social commentary, etc -- and I guess it's fine to take issue with that. But I don't believe it ended with a "twist" at all, and I find it more than a little unsettling to see it interpreted as primarily a depiction of social anxiety and the inability to take a joke rather than as a dramatic exposure of the intensely corrosive and toxic nature of covert, disavowed aggression and hostility that so often predominates among purported friends.

To me, this was a story about a genuinely likable guy, trying to do some good in the world, who was subjected to a scary (horror-level) degree of gaslighting and cruelty by a bunch of sickos living in an an exaggerated, primitive, posh, adolescent time warp. Whatever confusion and distorted perception he showed at the end of the film -- and the act of violence he commits -- were entirely induced by a campaign (coordinated intentionally or not) to drive him mad.

To say, as star and writer Tom Stourton has in interviews, that he finds Archie a more sympathetic figure than Pete because Archie "owns" his upper-class heritage rather than trying, in however flawed a way, to reckon with it meaningfully like Pete... seems bizarre to me. Sure, Pete is struggling to figure out the implications of his privilege and the onus it puts on him to live responsibly in this unjust world. Sure, this is awkward and difficult. But his response is also the ONLY humane and decent reaction to being born into such privilege, even if it puts you in awkward situations in which it isn't obvious how to abide by an actual moral code while also knowing how to 'be yourself.' Authenticity and virtue are not synonymous in a world of injustice. Pete is flawed, but he is trying. Archie is an "authentic" POS. I'll take Pete, any day.

For all those reasons, I never stopped liking him or identifying with Pete and don't think he was 'revealed' by the last part of the movie to be a different person from the one we had been led to believe he was -- and certainly not that he turned out to be paranoid, deluded, selfish, or a narcissistic jerk. I was genuinely surprised and disappointed to see the two 'Toms' who wrote it -- including Stourton, the star -- semi-endorse this anti-Pete reading of the film, as if he was caught in some kind of self-imposed hell-hole of his own making, rather than as an imperfect but sincere and well-meaning guy doing his best to navigate an environment in which, for whatever mysterious reasons, his companions were behaving monstrously and making him the scapegoat and target of their sustained, covert attack.

Sure, Pete did something really awful as a teenage boy, but he had clearly been living with an appropriate and painful level of remorse for his actions for all the intervening years. My sense was that his humanitarian work, in fact, was probably motivated in some way (probably unconsciously) by a sincere effort to atone for the harm he had done. I am really baffled by the majority of reactions to and judgments of him as a character, and by people's apparent willingness to accept the "it was all in good fun" insistence of his malevolent "friends."

To me, Pete is someone who simply needs some work with a good therapist to learn that let go of his need to be accepted by people who don't deserve to have such a fundamentally decent human being in their lives. His story is a cleverly over-the-top version of the ordinary, garden variety sadistic gaslighting to which a great many decent people are subjected to every day. I hope those who can most identify with him don't read critical responses to this movie in which they are further gaslighted by the suggestion that all of the toxic provocation to which Pete was very clearly subjected were in fact just figments of his own (and by implication, their own) head. If that's the ultimately message and impact of the movie, then, as comedy or horror or social commentary, it will have done more harm than good and deserves to disappear into the realm of the forgotten.

Top Boy (2011–2023)

Season by season, restoring my faith in TV

[9/10 · 29 April 2022]

This show is just so, so good. On par with Peaky Blinders for highest quality work in the anglophone world right now, IMO. The writing, the direction, the quality of acting -- including the adult main characters, but also, most remarkably, the incredibly talented kids -- and the writing... all just top notch in every regard. The show is suspenseful, moving, psychologically and morally complex, and true to universal human aspirations, struggles, triumphs and tragedies, at the level that differentiates genuine art from even the best mere 'dramatic entertainment.'

It's easy, on the western side of the pond, to believe that the 'Golden Age' of TV is a distant memory. (HBO once gave us the Sistine Chapel in the Sopranos; now we get the occasional good episode of Euphoria or Raised by Wolves here and there, but mostly glorified Lifetime moves like Mare of Easttown or derivative, fourth-rate wallpaper like the Gilded Age.)

But thankfully, with every episode of Top Boy, I have thanked my lucky stars to be reminded that there are still people working in this medium with the dedication and genius to tackle difficult, painful, politically charged subjects, with respect and dignity, but without being didactic, phony, or serving the cynical corporate cooptation of the vital social justice movements of the past several years.

Long live art. Long live Top Boy. Much respect and gratitude to all those responsible for it.

Inventing Anna (2022)

Passable trash for 2x speed while doing dishes

[5/10 · 8 March 2022]

Three main problems, from my perspective: (1) it's inexcusably, ridiculously long. There just wasn't enough story there to fill even half of the 9 hours. (2) Shonda Rhimes transparently tag-teamed with Jessica Pressler to paint Pressler's journalistic (and financial) rival, Rachel Williams, in the worst possible light. Williams is painted as dumb, vain, venal opportunist in contrast to Pressler, our stalwart hero of women, journalism, and the dogged pursuit of the truth against all odds. Puh-lease. (3) Netflix paid Sorokin $300k for the rights to her story. They, Pressler, and Rhimes essentially joined forces with Sorokin, a sociopath leaving an ongoing trail of ruin in her wake, and they all profited quite handsomely from this partnership- in which (surprise!) they actually have the temerity to ask the audience to empathize with the straight-up villain they actually jumped in bed with just for the cold, hard $$. The whole thing is as sanctimonious and dishonest as it is just plain gross.

The Gilded Age (2022– )

19C versions of Zuckerberg and Bezos are my "heroes" of American progress, HBO?

[3/10 · 23 February 2022]

Sure, Downton Abbey shamelessly romanticized and whitewashed the horrendously unjust, hereditary class hierarchy of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in England. But at least the show had a lot of charm, good acting and writing... and addressed the fact that the forces that would demolish once and for all those last, dying remnants of feudalism -- the social order typified by D Abbey and it's extended world -- was arguably just as bad: World War I, with its unspeakable and senseless brutality, and, along with it, the co-emergence of the merciless destructive juggernaut of modern capitalism. No period of change could be more ambiguous in its lack of anything to really root for; it was the death of one, terrible old social order and the birth and triumph of a monster system that was even more terrifying in its capacity for violence and dehumanization. So even though 90% of Downton was a love story to a fairly tale version of medieval patriarchal hierarchy, it was at least possible to sift below the surface-level romance to find some elements of the tragedy at the heart of this bleak period in which there was real beauty to be lost and nothing really good that could come as a result of all the upheaval the show depicts.

The Gilded Age, on the other hand, offers us no such subtly and absolutely zero sense of the tragedy of this period of relentless, revolutionary, change that destabilized the entire social and economic order of the industrializing western world. Instead, it presents itself as a sweet, innocent paean to those great, unsung American heroes... the plucky, self-made made men (yes, the mf'ing ROBBER BARRONS!) who, poor guys and gals, could just never catch a break from NYC's crusty, snobby, bitter, envious old money... those cranky, stuffy, lazy, wanna-be 'aristocrats' who were trying in vain, by hook or by crook, to hold onto their diminishing turf in a world being devoured by the massive unregulated monopolistic trusts that faced no serous, organized opposition -- either from public officials or from the labor class that they so ruthlessly exploited to build their empires. Pity those industrious Russels, with whom we are undeniably supposed to identify, cruelly turned away from countless social occasions, spoken to with terrible snideness about their guache customs, and even denied attendance to the symphony in proper box seating. Oh, the humanity! However did those poor souls persevere through all that indignity?

Have we ever really stopped to acknowledge, the show wants us to ask, our nation's profound debt of gratitude to the likes of saintly figures like JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or the Russels for their immense contributions to culture, growth, egalitarianism -- and even our world renowned institutions of charity?

Oh, boy....

As ludicrous as that premise sounds, and despite the show's occasional nods to the utter amorality, corruption, and rapacious greed of the new-money moguls, the bottom line is that that that's *really* the basic frame of the narrative: the 'nouveau riche', as the robber barons are delicately referred to, are somehow proposed as the heroes of our story! They're actually presented as the unjustly treated forces of *progress* we're supposed to rooting for in this self-aggrandizing, revisionist soap opera piece of trash of a show.

Yeah, the writing is crap, the characters are stilted, boring and two-dimensional, and the plot lines are cingingly soap-opera level drek. Alas, that's unfortunately what you get with most dramas on TV, including (tragically, IMO, given the glorious golden-age history of unparalleled works of TV art like the Sopranos), on 'premium' cable like HBO. But what makes this show so offensively bad is its basic moral/historical premise: that some of the most virulently sociopathic monsters in the history of the country are the characters we're supposed to like and root for in their quest for "acceptance" by the old-guard NYC elite.

The terrible quality of all the basic elements of quality TV in the Gilded Age are no big surprise, sadly enough. But excuse me while I puke and cry through my grimacing laughter at the very audacity the most core concept of the show itself.

In Treatment: Laila - Week 3 (2021) Season 4, Episode 11

Season 4 motto: Tell, don't show

[1/10 · 8 June 2021]

Good writing and good therapy have at least one thing in common: they promote the kind of open-ended thinking and reflection that (sometimes) lead to real insight. Bad writing, like bad therapy, mistakes the views and expertise of the writer/therapist for what matters in the process of personal or social change. It tells you in no uncertain terms *what* to think- much like this hyper-artificial "teenage" social critic transparently mouthing a lecture by the author who created her.

Mare of Easttown (2021)

Meh at best

[4/10 · 6 June 2021]

Desperately wants to be Fargo meets Forbrydelsen; in reality, just a glorified Lifetime movie that wouldn't be worth watching at 1.5 hrs, to say nothing of 7. The fact that this self-important mediocrity is what now counts for premium drama on US TV is just sad. The 'golden age' is long, long gone.

In Treatment: Eladio - Week 2 (2021) Season 4, Episode 5

Nobody takes lithium to "take the edge off"

[1/10 · 5 June 2021]

The way meds are handled in this episode is so inaccurate it's bizarre... First of all, you can't get any kind of high whatsoever from lithium, so no one has ever engaged in 'med-seeking' behavior to get it (as Brooke seems to be concerned Eladio is). The meds people sometimes scheme to get illegitimately are opiates, or stimulants like adderall, or benzos like klonipin or ativan. The problem with lithium, on the other hand, is is typically exactly the opposite: patients often *don't* want to take it because people with bipolar disorder can be reluctant to lose the high of being manic, which lithium takes away when it's working well. So for a therapist in Brooke's position to knowingly cause any delay or or put any obstacle in the way of her bipolar patient who is asking for a potentially life-saving medication - as opposed to praising him for his insight and immediately making a psychiatric referral for him - would constitute wildly irresponsible behavior and outright malpractice.

In Treatment: Colin - Week 2 (2021) Season 4, Episode 6

HBO lets hack writers kill once-great show

[1/10 · 1 June 2021]

Each show's agenda is painfully transparent; the narrratives are superficial, implausible and tedious; the tone is grandiose and patronizing - yet the writers of season 4 seem blissfully unaware of any of this, pontificating away through their paper-thin characters. They may not know anything about what therapy is or how to create lifelike people, but one thing's for sure: they are totally certain of their relentlessly didactic mission and that HBO has given them free reign to carry it out.

In Treatment: Laila - Week 1 (2021) Season 4, Episode 3

Where have all the writers gone?

[1/10 · 25 May 2021]

Reading critics' reviews of this terrible season is more discouraging even than watching the show itself. Have our standards dropped so low for "premium" TV that we don't expect even basic plausibility from a show's major characters?

All of the patients this season, Laila included, fall embarrassingly short of being full, convincing, actual human beings. These are lazily, pretentiously, badly written types, not people - walking, talking billboards about (big! American! 2021!) "issues" instead of real suffering souls with plain old... issues. That's a glaring deficit for any show; for one about therapy, it's fatal.

In Treatment: Eladio - Week 1 (2021) Season 4, Episode 1

Dreadful

[1/10 · 25 May 2021]

Contrived, completely devoid of psychological realism, and with characters designed to represent social issues rather than to depict relational complexity and the unfolding of unconscious conflicts that actually make therapy meaningful and alive. In other words, utterly lacking in the subtlety, depth or mystery that animated the first versions of this show (to varying degrees of success) in Israel, the US, and elsewhere. Two-dimensional, predictable Hollywood garbage written at the level of the average network procedural. Really, HBO? This is what it's come to in 2021? How terribly sad.