Though it hasn’t gotten the same amount of publicity as some of the other contenders, Jockey is a film that many awards pundits have predicted could be an Oscar player. Much of the speculation centers around Clifton Collins, Jr., who is said to give a great performance in the lead role. Collins has been a dependable character actor for several decades now. A nomination for Jockey would be his first.
Here’s the trailer:
It’s as if Hulu somehow knows that I binged Baywatch earlier this year.
Pam & Tommy is scheduled to drop in February of 2022. Here’s the trailer!
I haven’t really been that excited about the MCU lately. Infinity War was such a big film that, to me, it felt like the proper ending point for the whole story. Everything that follows has been a bit anti-climatic. That said, I do like the Spider-Man films and I do hope that Marvel will eventually make a movie about the low-budget European version of Spider-Man, Night Monkey.
Here’s the trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home.
It’s a bit of a bare bones rundown this week. This was my birthday week and the celebrations lasted for …. a few days. Anyway, here’s what little I did watch and listen to this week!
Films I Watched:
Television Shows I Watched:
Music To Which I Listened:
Trailers:
News From Last Week:
Links From Last Week:
Links From The Site:
More From Us:
Last night, I finally watched The Mauritanian.
The Mauritanian is a film that was released earlier this year. The Golden Globes gave it some unexpected love. The Oscars ignored it. It won some awards in the UK. It’s based on the true story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who was detained at Gitmo without charge for 15 years. The U.S. government claimed that Salahi was one of the men responsible for recruiting the 9-11 hijackers. Salahi claimed innocence and wrote and published his memoirs while he was still a prisoner. Salahi was regularly tortured and sexually abused while detained. His interrogators regularly threatened to bring his mother to Gitmo, where she would be gang-raped, unless Salahi told them what they wanted to hear.
It’s a horrifying story and an important one, especially nowadays when so many people have forgotten that everyone is meant to have rights under the law. Unfortunately, The Mauritanian doesn’t really do the story justice. Instead of simply focusing on Salahi (played, in a charismatic performance, by Tahar Rahim) and what he went through after being detained, the film divides its time between Salahi, his lawyers, and the man assigned to prosecute his case. As the representatives of the legal system, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, and Benedict Cumberbatch all give one-note performances. Foster somehow won a Golden Globe for her role but there’s not much to the performance or the character, beyond the fact that she’s pissed off and she’s played by a respected performer who came out of semi-retirement because she agreed with the film’s message. Shailene Woodley is not particularly believable as someone who could have passed a bar exam. Meanwhile, the film uses Benedict Cumberbatch’s likable screen presence to try to disguise the fact that it tells its story with a counter-productively heavy hand. The film wants us to think its nuanced, just because the normally heroic Cumberbatch is playing one of the government’s representatives.
The Mauritanian is a film that wants to shock and outrage us. It’s also a film that wants to move us and make the audience celebrate the activism of the attorneys played by Foster and Woodley. Unfortunately, director Kevin Macdonald takes a rather generic approach to telling this story. There’s no complexity. There’s no surprises. One need only look at a film like The Report to see how a film like this could have been effective. Instead, The Mauritanian often threatens to become as self-congratulatory as The Trial of the Chicago 7. At its weakest, it’s like an Aaron Sorkin film, without the snappy dialogue. There is a harrowingly effective sequence in which Salahi is psychologically tortured but Macdonald lessens the impact by continually cutting to Foster and Cumberbatch reading a report about the torture. It takes a moment that should have been about what Salahi was put through and instead makes it about how his attorney reacts to it. It’s as if Macdonald didn’t have faith in his audience and felt that we would need two stars to let us know that the torture we’re viewing with our own eyes was wrong.
Though The Mauritanian was only released a few month ago, it already feel like a relic from another era. One gets the feeling that a flawed but politically outspoken film like this would have gotten a lot more attention from the Academy if it had been released in 2006 or 2007 or even during the first two years of the Obama administration, back when people still believed that Obama was serious about closing Gitmo. Today, however, we take the excesses of the war on terror for granted. People are no longer shocked by them. As I watched The Mauritanian, I found myself thinking about the fact that, just two-and-a-half months ago, the U.S. blew up an innocent aide worker and his family, bragged about it, and then tried to cover it up. At one time, this would have been a national scandal. In 2021, however, it’s the sort of thing that gets shrugged off. One gets the feeling that a movie will never be made about that man or his family.
This was my birthday week and I’m happy to say that I spent a lot more time celebrating than watching television. Here’s what little — I do mean very little — I did watch.
Allo Allo (Sunday Night, PBS)
With the colonels now free from the Communist Resistance, it was up to Rene and the café residents to figure out what to do with all of the stolen money. Of course, in typical Allo Allo fashion, it turned out that hiding money was much more complicated than stealing it, especially with Herr Flick determined to catch the culprits. Officer Crabtree showed up to show everyone a picture of the, “sispoocts,” which turned out to be his way of saying, “suspects.”
Dexter: New Blood (Sunday Night, Showtime)
I wrote about the first episode of Dexter: New Blood here!
Fear The Walking Dead (Sunday Night, AMC)
I reviewed the latest episode of Fear The Walking Dead here.
The Office (Comedy Central)
On Saturday morning, I watched the “Did I Stutter” episode of The Office, which features not only one of Steve Carrel’s best performances from Michael but also great work from Leslie David Baker as Stanley. I also related to Pam and her total blindness without her contacts or her glasses.
Survivor (Wednesday Night, CBS)
You can read my thoughts on the latest episode here!
The Walking Dead: World Beyond (Sunday Night, AMC)
Apparently, I was just not in a Walking Dead mood this week. I didn’t care much for Fear The Walking Dead‘s latest episode and the latest episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond was boring as well. I may just be bored with zombies, who knows?
When last we saw erstwhile serial killer Dexter Morgan, he had faked his death, fled Miami, and was apparently working as a lumberjack in Oregon.
That was how Showtime’s Dexter originally ended, back in 2013. It was not a popular ending and yet, I don’t think anyone was expecting to be satisfied by Dexter’s finale. In retrospect, the highpoint of Dexter came during season 4, during the arc involving John Lithgow at the Trinity Killer. The four seasons that came after the conclusion of that storyline could never quite escape the shadow of the battle of wills between Lithgow and Michael C. Hall. Seasons 5, 6, and 7 all felt somewhat superfluous while season 8 seemed to go off the rails entirely. As a result, I think everyone was mentally prepared to be let down by however the show ended but still, people were hoping for a little more than Dexter in Oregon.
Fortunately, Dexter Morgan is back! Dexter: New Blood, which premiered last Sunday on Sunday, picks up ten years after the conclusion of Dexter. Dexter (played by Michael C. Hall, of course) is no longer living in Oregon. In fact, in the first episode, Oregon was never even mentioned. Instead, Dexter is now living in upstate New York. He’s using the name Jim Lindsay. He works at a sporting goods store. He’s dating the local chief of police, Angela Bishop (Julia Jones). He’s a popular citizen. Everyone like Jim. Everyone thinks that they know Jim. Of course, what they don’t know is that Jim is actually Dexter, a serial killer who once specialized in killing other murderers. They also don’t know that Dexter spends a good deal of his spare time talking to the ghost of his dead stepsister, Deb (Jennifer Carpenter, taking on the mentor role that James Remar played in the original series). Deb continually tells Dexter that he can’t get close to anyone. Anyone to whom Dexter gets close dies. Of course, even in death, Deb doesn’t seem to understand that Dexter isn’t capable of being genuinely close with anyone.
When Cold Snap, the first episode, begins, it’s been ten years since Dexter killed anyone, though it’s obvious that he still has the urge. Dexter’s ten-year break comes to an end when he meets Matt Caldwell (Steve M. Robertson), a spoiled rich kid who, several years earlier, was involved in a boating accident that killed five people. When Dexter learns that Matt intentionally smashed into the other boat and then when Matt later shoots a rare albino stag that Dexter had spent days tracking, Dexter’s Dark Passenger returns. Interestingly enough, it turns out that, despite being inactive for ten years, Dexter still has a perfect murderer’s lair inside his cabin’s shed. Before Dexter ritualistically kills Matt, Matt says that his father is going to kill Dexter. Who is Matt’s father? I’m sure we’ll find out soon. A part of me suspects that it might be Edward Olsen (Fredric Lehne), a billionaire who is planning on doing business in the town. I also suspect that Olsen is probably connected to the disappearances of several young women in the area. Wealthy businessmen often turned out to be serial killers on Dexter.
Speaking of fathers, Dexter is also a father. He abandoned his son, Harrison, in Miami ten years ago. Now, the teenage Harrison (Jack Alcott) has tracked Dexter down. At first, Dexter pretended not to know who Harrison was and he gave Harrison money to buy a ticket on the next bus out of town. However, at the end of the episode, Dexter, fresh from murdering Matt, showed up at the bus station, sat down next to Harrison, and said, “I am Dexter Morgan.”
It was an interesting ending and a bit frightening considering everything that we know about Dexter. Ghost Deb is right. People who get close to Dexter do end up dying. That said, we really don’t know much about Harrison. In the books, Dexter was often concerned that Rita’s stepchildren, Cody and Astor, had their own dark passengers. To the best of my memory, that wasn’t really explored on the television show with Harrison but what if Harrison does turn out to be a serial killer? Even worse, what if Harrison turns out to be a serial killer who, like his father, only targets other serial killers? Would Dexter have to kill Harrison or would Harrison have to kill Dexter? But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. As of the first episode, the only thing we know for sure is that Harrison managed to track his father down.
I was intrigued by the first episode of Dexter: New Blood, though I have to admit that most of that was due to the hints of what could happen in the future as opposed to what actually did happen in the episode. As I said at the start of this review, the first four seasons of Dexter were brilliant. The final four seasons were increasingly uneven. Just as it’s hard for Dexter to run the risk of getting close to anyone, it’s also hard for us viewers to run the risk of fully embracing this revival because we’ve all seen first hand that there are limits to how far Dexter‘s concept can be taken without things falling apart. It’s probably not surprising that the reviews for this episode were mixed. Variety liked it. The AV Club and Rolling Stone complained that it was too violent. The generic online reviewer of today often seems more concerned with hitting the right talking points and satisfying the online mob than with actually giving thought to such quaint considerations at to whether or not a show is entertaining or if it actually holds your interest. Dexter: New Blood held my interest and it was entertaining enough for me to set the DVR to record next week’s episode. To me, that qualifies as a successful episode.
So far, Dexter: New Blood feels like it could be a return to the Dexter of those first four seasons. Michael C. Hall remains a compelling presence. I’m interested to see how things develop with Harrison. I’m glad Dexter got the Hell out of Oregon. I’ll be watching.
The latest episode of Fear The Walking Dead really didn’t do much for me.
That’s not necessarily the show’s fault, or at least not entirely. As I’ve said from my first review, I didn’t start regularly watching this show until the start of the current (and final) season. As a result, I’m still learning who many of these characters are. Perhaps if I had watched the earlier seasons, I would have been more emotionally connected to Sarah’s search for her brother, Wendell. And perhaps I would have been more concerned with Josiah’s need to get revenge on Morgan.
But, even with all that in mind, last Sunday’s episode was punishingly slow. It felt like a throwback to one of those old episodes of The Walking Dead where some minor character would randomly run into someone and then we’d have to spend 40 minutes listening to them have a conversation about nothing before some random Walkers finally showed up. For lack of a better term, it was kind of boring. For all of the trouble that the episode put the viewer through, it needed a better pay off than “Wendell’s here but I’m not going to let you see him.”
Josiah carrying around his brother’s disembodied heard was visually interesting but, from a narrative point of view, it was pretty stupid and it kind of made me wonder how someone who could be dumb enough to carry around a zombie head could possibly manage to survive in the world of the walking dead. The fact that it all led to Josiah having to euthanize an adorable dog did not help matters. I get that the whole idea behind The Walking Dead and its spin-offs is that the world is a terrible place where terrible things happen but honestly, Josiah was just an idiot. He was probably an idiot before the zombie apocalypse and he’s apparently still an idiot afterwards. My hope is that we’ve seen the last of Josiah because I really don’t want to have to spend another episode listening to him whine about his dead brother. Instead, I hope future episodes will take us back into The Tower and the world of Strand. Colman Domingo only appeared for a few minutes in the latest episode but he owned every one of them.
Finally, it appears that there are still some atomic warheads that were not set off during the previous season. And I guess the Stalkers now have one of them. That’s probably not a good thing.
Cyrus?
He’s the one and only.
From 1979’s The Warriors (which I watched earlier tonight as a part of the #FridayNightFlix live tweet), here’s a scene that I love. Playing the role of Cyrus, the man who could bring all of the gangs of New York together, is Roger Hill. Playing the role of his assassin is the great David Patrick Kelly.
Cyrus knew what he was talking about but the world wasn’t ready for him.
Can you dig it?
I’m still struggling to get back into my non-Halloween routine of regular posting. If I remember correctly, I think I’ve had to deal with post-Horrorthon exhaustion every year since we first started the Shattered Lens. It’s worth it, though!
Fortunately, a trailer a film like Fortress can only encourage me to get back in the swing of things! Bruce Willis, Shannen Doherty, and Chad Michael Murray!? Hell yeah!
Anyway, here’s the trailer:
Through the Shattered Lens 