Category Archives: TV

(Some spoilers for Manifest).

When MANIFEST launched in 2018 it looked promising. Five years after Flight 828 vanished on its return from the Caribbean, it arrives in New York with nobody on board aware how long they’ve been gone. What happened? Why do they have these mysterious impulses that steer them to help people in need? While the cast was good, the show lost me as it went through the next two seasons (as I discussed in my review of S2). Apparently I wasn’t alone as NBC axed the show after S3. Netflix picked it up and I slowly worked my way through the final season.

Certainly I can’t fault their ambition. Having established in S3 that flight 828 is somehow connected with Noah’s ark, they go full-on cosmic/religious in S4: the passengers time is running out and when they die it will bring on an apocalypse. The murderous Angelina (Holly Taylor) believes she’s been chosen as a messiah who will save a small, elect crew; others hope that working together they can save the world entire. Volcanoes erupt under New York. In the final episode one of them coughs up the supposedly destroyed plane the passengers vanished on, everyone boards and while some (most notably Angelina) die, the rest survive to land … five years earlier, exactly when they were supposed to. God has tested them and now they get their lives back as a reward for …. well, I’ve no idea. As with Doonby, I have no idea why God’s supposed to have done this shit; the ending narration specifically says they’ll never understand it themselves. I could rationalize something if I cared but I don’t care that much. “There is no point trying to stop a volcano if the divine doesn’t want it stopped.” My friend Ross sent me the second season of THE TICK a while back but I only just finished it up. If anything, loonier than the first season, a complete loonie fest in which the Tick battles alongside Leonardo da Vinci, faces the world’s comfiest chair, deals with supervillain family dynamics and helps save Christmas. As with S1 this set misses one episode and S3 is nowhere to be found. But I’m grateful for what I do have because this is some gloriously funny stuff. “He’s acknowledged the decoration committee — and now he’s thanking his parents!”

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R.I.P.D. (2013) is the Filmed Comic Book in which slightly crooked cop Ryan Reynolds gets murdered by much more crooked partner Kevin Bacon, then gets assigned to work off his sins in the afterlife’s Rest In Peace Department, which means partnering with Old West sheriff Jeff Bridges to down the unclaimed dead wreaking havoc on Earth. This is a stock premise but the results were entertaining enough; Bridges’ sheriff is a role he could play in his sleep but he gets off some fun lines about shoot-outs (“Old West gunfights teach you to watch for the shooter behind the church steeple.”). ”If not for the RIPD, the world would have been overrun with dead people some time in 1954.”

The past few years I’ve tried and failed to make a local cinema’s Nevermore Film Festival spotlighting indie horror films. This year I did stream one of the offerings, THE HYPERBOREAN (2023). This felt very much like a horror take on Knives Out: the spoilt heirs of a whisky tycoon struggle to explain to investigators how their father’s plan to market 170 year old whisky from a ship lost in the Arctic (as if that wasn’t ominous enough, he had to steal it off Native American land, the fool!) released a mummified body from one of the casks that turns out to be not entirely human … The ingredients are there but this hovers awkwardly between a black comedy and horror and doesn’t quite succeed as either. “I assure you my asthma is 100 percent real.”

The British TV series THE FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES stars Sean Bean as Marlott, a 19th-century police inspector shocked that a body washed up on the banks of the Thames appears to be stitched together out of composite parts. Who’s behind this mutilation? Why did they do it? Marlott’s never heard of Frankenstein or seen the stage adaptations but he’s soon going to meet with the widow Mary Shelley and much will be revealed … Similar to The Hyperborean this hovers just below winning me over though Bean’s Marlott is a strong enough character I may be back for S2 (the ending twist is also pretty good). “Would we not defy the laws of god to bring back those we love?”

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As I mentioned back in December, Love, Actually is a terrific movie. Garry Marshall’s VALENTINE’S DAY (2010) has the same set-up — large cast, romantic story arcs, characters are all interwoven and connected — but while watchable it lacks the magic of the earlier movie (which I’m sure was an influence). Impressively cast, though, with Julia Roberts returning home to her man, Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner trying to get past bad love with (respectively) Jessica Alba and Patrick Dempsey, Jessica Biel celebrating loneliness, Topher Grace and phone-sex operator Anne Hathaway hooking up (the equivalent of the porn actors’ subplot in Love, Actually and the most fun story), Taylor Swift dancing (clearly George Soros already had the fix in!), Shirley Maclaine making a big reveal to spouse Hector Elizondo and Queen Latifah demonstrating discipline. Marshall went on to duplicate the formula with New Year’s Eve and Mother’s Day. “I’m 52 and wearing a bright blue shirt to work — please don’t make this day any harder than it already is.”

As I’m giving a talk on steampunk TV next month, I thought I’d finally watch all of Q.E.D., a 1982 steampunk series that lasted all of six episodes (I imagine it was doing theater that kept me from catching it). Sam Waterston plays Quentin E. Deverill, a brilliant but acerbic American scientist in 1912; when his colleagues laugh at his theory radio waves could someday transmit images, he sulks off to England. There he finds himself embroiled in a battle of wits with Scientist of Evil Kilkiss (Julian Glover), who’s latest plot is to provide the Kaiser with missiles that can be launched from Europe and blast London to kingdom come.

This, unfortunately, was the high-point for the science-fictional side of this. Deverill and his team subsequently deal with a deadly poison gas and a super-powerful automobile before things switch to the mundane for the last couple of episodes: no Kilkiss and stories involving a fake ghost and then drug-dealing in Limehouse. I don’t feel distraught we didn’t get more. “I hate doing this but Lombroso’s theory of the innate criminal type was wrong anyway.”

DISNEY’S TEACHER’S PET (2004) spun off from a one-season animated series in which Spot (Nathan Lane) attends school disguised as a boy because it’s the closest to being human he can get. In this film he gets closer when he discovers Florida Man and Mad Scientist Kelsey Grammer has developed a ray that can turn an animal into a human. Of course, things aren’t going to be that simple … Goofy, weird and very, very funny with Easter eggs referencing everything from Young Frankenstein to the Clark Gable/Doris Day Teacher’s Pet. The voice cast includes Debra Jo Rupp, Paul Reubens, Wallace Shawn and David Ogden Stiers. “This is no time to stand around screaming silently!”

GHOSTBUSTERS: Afterlife (2021) has Spengler’s long-estranged daughter (Carrie Coon) and her kids move out to Oklahoma where he retreated to a spooky old farm, taking most of the Ghostbuster tech with im (“He cleaned us out!”). His daughter assumed he was just a loonie who didn’t care for her or his grandkids but brainy Phoebe (McKenna Grace) discovers Spengler’s real agenda was to stop the second coming of Zuul — only he didn’t succeed …  A fun sequel that would double bill well with the next-gen Bill and Ted Face the Music. The living members of the original team return and Dana (Sigourney Weaver) and Venkman (Bill Murray) get a cute post-credits scene. “I command you under the National Invasive Species Act to depart this world immediately!”

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Perhaps it says something about how fast the cinema-to-streaming route moves that I have three 2023 movies in today’s post. Though I caught THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023) in the theater last month, as the one movie that fit my and TYG’s schedule that weekend. Fortunately this Hayao Miyazaki film was worth it.

It’s WW II and young Mahito and his widowed father have moved out of Tokyo to escape American bombing. Dad’s remarried so Mahito has to share the house with his pregnant stepmom — at which point I figured this would be a gentle, heartwarming fantasy on the lines of My Neighbor Tortoro but nope. Instead, a strange talking heron shows up, taking a spooky interest in the kid and eventually leads him into another world where Mom may still be alive. At this point it gets just as weird as Spirited Away, though not so strange visually (TYG and I discussed whether this film is equally weird for the Japanese audience or if it’s playing on tropes they’d recognize). With Christian Bale as the father, Gemma Chan as the stepmother, Dave Bautista voicing the King of Parakeets and Mark Hamill as a mysterious old man. Excellent. “Mahito has become a little budgie!”

While I like a lot of Wes Anderson’s work, ASTEROID CITY (2023) fell completely flat for me. The introduction informs us this is a 1955 TV play (live TV drama was a common thing in the medium’s early years — the much superior Vast of Night has a similar opening) about the eponymous science camp, the parents of the kids in attendance, government officials watching the young researchers and OMG men from outer space! The intentional artificiality of the set-up (reflected in the sets, which I admit are great) completely turned me off to this — after about 40 minutes I found I could go into the kitchen for a snack without any need to pause it. Despite having Ed Norton, Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Adrian Brody, Margot Robie and Liev Schrieber in the cast I could have done without it; The Drowsy Chaperone had much more fun being meta about its material. And minor language note, nobody was calling smart kids “brainiacs” in 1955. “I’ve got six and a half minutes before my next line and I have a question I need to ask — am I doing it right?”

Margot Robie is BARBIE (2023), or more precisely Stereotypical Barbie — not an astronaut, judge, doctor, IT professional, etc. — who’s blissfully happy in Barbieland until she finds herself haunted by thoughts of death. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) suggests it’s bleeding in from Robie’s real-world owner, which Robie finds bizarre — as Barbie dolls liberated all women to be anything they want, what could possibly be disturbing her? Still, Robie heads into the real world only to discovers that Barbies have not, in fact, accomplished gender equality; worse, Ken (Ryan Gosling) becomes fascinated by this construct called “patriarchy” and decides to import it back to Barbieland.

I did not expect this film to kick off with a parody of 2001 (you have to see it to believe it) but it does, and proceeds from there in a mix of Lego-movie type unreality, humor and sharply pointed feminism, particularly America Ferrera venting about the narrow path for women. Greta Gerwig delivers a great movie with Helen Mirren as narrator, Will Ferrell as head of Mattel (“We had a female CEO once, in the 1990s.”) and Michael Cera as Ken’s Friend Alan (one of several things I had to google, such as confirming yes, there was a canonical Barbie-line doll whose breasts could expand). A movie that deserves its rep and its box office. “This is like the 1500s when indigenous people were exposed to smallpox!”

The Netflix limited series BODIES (2023) adapts a graphic novel for a story about three London detectives — in the 1890s, the 1940s, and 2023 — discovering the same dead body, which embroils them in a century-spanning conspiracy to bring about a world dictatorship by 2043. This shifts from the initial mystery into a straight up War For Time — will the conspiracy bring about its dystopia? — for the last three or four episodes, something that sunk the series for several people I know. I still found it worth watching though. “What could you possibly know of love when your entire existence negates it?”

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Due to various schedule challenges, I didn’t watch as many old favorites as usual, but that should make them more fun next year. As to what I did watch …MR. MAGOO’S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1962) has a framing sequence that’s always puzzled me, the short-sighted Magoo (Jim Backus) appearing as Scrooge in a Broadway musical version of Dickens (according to the New York Times, the creators were afraid casting Magoo, an established cartoon character, as Scrooge would otherwise confuse people). But that’s a small problem compared to the excellent musical score, the loneliness of Young Ebenezer (“Where is the voice/To answer mine back?/Where is the click/to answer my clack?”), and all the usual highpoints of the story (except nephew Fred, who got cut to fit the limited running time). Well worth an annual visit. “We’re reprehensible/We’ll steal your pen/And pencible!”

2005’s THE FAMILY STONE isn’t one I normally watch but it’s one of my sister’s favorites so I picked it up when I found a copy at a local thrift store. This has Dermot Mulroney take tightly wound Sarah Jessica Parker home to his family for Christmas. Parker’s insecure enough to make this tricky in the best circumstances; it gets worse when Mulroney’s sis and mom (Rachel McAdams, Diane Keaton) take a dislike to her, then she puts her foot in it a couple of times confirming their take. Can Parker’s sister (Claire Danes) or Mulroney’s laid-back brother (Luke Wilson) set things to rights? Like Holiday in Handcuffs, Christmas is just an excuse to bring the family together, but the results are charming. I’m sure I’ll be watching this at a subsequent Christmas. “You’ve got a freak flag — you just don’t fly it.”

THE CLAUS FAMILY (2020) is a Belgian entry in the Santa’s Kids subgenre, as a teenager grieving his father’s death discovers who his grandfather is and that with Dad gone, it’s on the kid to inherit the mantle (Santa is passed down to the eldest child, boy or girl, much like Lee Falk’s Phantom). Can he step up or will his grief swallow him? Will Mom be able to keep the cookie maker she works at from going under? Could these two questions possibly turn out to have related answers? Decent enough. “Can someone explain what the cookie revolution is?”

Switching subgenres, 12 DATES OF CHRISTMAS (2011) is my favorite Christmas time-loop film, as Amy Smart starts looping her awful Christmas Eve and becomes convinced it’s so that she can reunite with her ex; therefore her blind date with Mark Paul Gosselar is nothing but a pointless distraction, right? A good Christmas rom-com. “The thing is, Phyliss is not coming. She is never coming.”

My goodness, judging by past blog posts it’s been a decade since I rewatched LOVE, ACTUALLY (2003) despite the fact it’s such an extraordinarily good movie. Liam Neeson helps his son deal with True Love, Emma Thompson discovers spouse Alan Rickman has a bit on the side, lobsters attend the birth of baby Jesus, Prime Minister Hugh Grant defends his secretary from lecherous American president Billy Bob Thornton, Laura Linney loses her shot at romance, Bill Nighy sings, Keira Knightley ends up torn between two lovers and Colin Firth falls in love with a woman who only speaks Portuguese. In a film with so many stories, it’s not surprising they’re a mixed bag — I don’t buy Knightley being torn with any indecision, for instance, and Thompson has a pretty miserable endpoint to her story. Then again, I don’t have the problem with Firth’s romance that some do — trying to marry someone you’ve never really communicated with is daft, but I’m willing to accept it in a rom-com. “We might want to have sex in every room — including yours.”

I loved SCROOGED (1988) when I caught it in the theater but it’s never been much fun to rewatch. For one thing, the topical jokes that made me chortle — Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, the Solid Gold Dancers — don’t have much punch 30 years later, even though I understand them (god knows what I’d think if I were Gen Z). For another it’s surprisingly soft for such a supposedly cynical movie: where Scrooge dies alone, Murray gets mourners! While it does have some fun with the mythos, such as Carol Kane’s bludgeoning Christmas Present, I’d pick Chasing Christmas or Karroll’s Christmas for an unconventional Dickens riff. “Tiny Tom doesn’t just throw away his crutches, he vaults over a lamppost!”

CHRISTMAS WITH THE CAMPBELLS (2022) is an uninspired low-key parody of Christmas rom-coms in which a recently dumped woman winds up spending Christmas with her ex’s family anyway. Most notable for a lot of raw sex talk but that doesn’t make it worth watching.

I’m surprised the excellent CLAYMATION CHRISTMAS SPECIAL is so hard to find streaming — I have it taped off the air but the quality’s poor — but as always it’s a great fun to watch as dinosaurs debate Christmas snacks, Quasimodo leads an orchestra and walrus Margo Pontoon ice-dances with Rudolph Nerves-on-Edge. “I don’t recognize that conductor but his name sure rings a bell.”

For me, THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SANTA CLAUS (1985) is the best of Rankin-Bass’ many stop-motion animated specials (also their last). Based on the novel by L. Frank Baum (the first of many, many origins for Santa and for Christmas traditions), it tells how an abandoned baby grows up under the care of a wood-elf and a lioness, then becomes the giver of Christmas toys despite the opposition of the grotesque Agwas that drive children to misbehave and see Klaus as a threat to their power. A remarkable piece of work.

ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY CHRISTMAS (2021) was a TV special wrapping up plotlines from Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, about a woman who acquires the power to see people’s innermost thoughts, but they’re expressed as musical numbers. Here she and her family are facing the first Christmas since Dad (Peter Gallagher) passed and most of the family are planning to go off solo — can Zoey convince them to stick around and celebrate as a family still? Pleasant enough but I have no regrets not catching the show. “Learn more about equine therapy!”

VIOLENT NIGHT (2022) is an oddball film in which a burned-out Santa stop for a nap along his Christmas Eve route. Wouldn’t you know, the place he picks is billionaire Beverly D’Angelo’s compound, where a gang of crooks seize her and her family with an eye to looting the $300 million slush fund from her vault. Not really Santa’s concern but there’s a little girl in the middle of all this and she’s definitely on the Nice list … I’m not sure I’ll watch this again “Okay, I changed my mind — shoot the alcoholic bitch first.”

As always, TYG and I watched A CHRISTMAS STORY (1984) after unwrapping presents. This year I found myself appreciating Melinda Dillon’s performance as Mom — as straight woman to the comic antics of Ralphie, his brother and the Old Man (Darren McGavin) she doesn’t get as showy a role but she does it well. I also thought about the visuals which do such a great job capturing an era gone by and wondering what viewers even further removed from that setting than I make of it. None of which musing stopped me enjoying the film, in case you were wondering. “You used up all the glue in the house — on purpose!”

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Yep, time for my usual immersion in Christmas treacle. And what could be sweeter than characters learning that Christmas is about more than the big pile of gifts under the tree (though I admit I kind of like that part too!).

THE BAD GUYS: A Very Bad Holiday (2023) is a Netflix short spinning off from an animated film in which the Bad Wolf and his gang of anthropomorphic crooks end up discovering they’re good guys after all. Here, however, they’re still criminals, plotting a Christmas Heistacular on the one day of the year even security guards stay home with family. When they screw up and accidentally wipe out the Big Apple’s Christmas spirit it looks like nobody will be staying home — unless they can turn things around by Christmas Day (“We have to do good, so we can do bad!”). Amusing enough. “Santa is a criminal hero — he’s broken into more homes than anyone else and deserves our respect!”

Then we have the poor schmuck visited by The Spirit of Christmas Presents Past in a commercial my friend Ross taped off the air for me years ago (I transferred it to DVD). The Spirit reminds the schmuck of every rotten gift he ever gave (“Motor oil on a rope — for your mother!”) and explains he can find the true meaning of the season by shopping at the Meijer department store

In THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS: X-Mas Marks the Spot, everyone on Earth needs to relearn the meaning of Christmas after a time-traveling encounter with Dickens’ three ghosts saves Scrooge from learning his lesson; his subsequent book A Christmas Humbug discredited belief in Christmas for all time. Can the team remake Scrooge’s Christmas Eve encounter without the ghosts? Will Peter learn that his own crappy childhood doesn’t mean Christmas has to suck forever? A perennial favorite. “As my brother the Ghost of Christmas Present would say, let’s take it from the top.”So is TWILIGHT ZONE: The Night of the Meek in which Art Carney’s drunken department-store Santa discovers a sack that gives everyone the gifts they want — even the officious store manager who just fired him. Shows Serling’s talent that this perfectly balances the bleak side of Christmas (kids going hungry, parents desperate for work) with hope that for just one night, the meek can inherit the Earth. “1910? That was a very good year.”

In WKRP IN CINCINNATI‘s Christmas episode, “Bah Humbug!” it’s station manager Mr. Carlson (Gordon Jump) who needs to learn Christmas is about more than stiffing the staff on bonuses so he can impress his mother (the station’s owner) with how well he’s managing the budget. Suddenly he’s stuck in “one of those Christmas Carol things” and forced to rethink his priorities. A classic, though it’ll never eclipse the legendary Thanksgiving episode. “I want those brownies — I’m going to put one in mother’s martini!”

And then we have that ultimate Scrooge the Grinch in HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (the original TV cartoon — I recognize no other adaptations). The dour Grinch is fed up with the Whos ruining his peace and quiet by their happy Christmas singing — but they wouldn’t be singing if he dressed up as Santa and stole every last present, would they? No way this plan can go wrong, right? With Boris Karloff narrating and Thurl Ravenscroft singing. “And then the true meaning of Christmas shone through/And the Grinch found the strength of ten grinches plus two!”

While down in Florida I watched KARROLL’S CHRISTMAS (2004) with my sister and our mutual bestie Cindy and they enjoyed it too. Karroll, a disgruntled greeting card writer who’s never gotten over his ex dumping him at Christmas, discovers a ganja-addled Jacob Marley has sent the Three Ghosts to his house instead of miserable, pissed–off neighbor Wallace Shawn. Which is ridiculous because Karroll certainly doesn’t need to learn the meaning of Christmas … right? One that deserves to be better known than it is. “The word ‘lunatic’ is very hurtful to me and to … you know, lunatics!”

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