Tag Archives: Hulu

TV Review: The Dropout 1.4 “Old White Men” (dir by Michael Showalter)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If the first three episodes of Hulu’s The Dropout occasionally seemed as if they might be a bit too sympathetic to Elizabeth Holmes (played, brilliantly so far, by Amanda Seyfried), the fourth episode presented us with Elizabeth in full supervillian mode.

Gone was the socially awkward but well-meaning Elizabeth.  Now speaking with her trademark deep voice, wearing her black turtlenecks, and possessing the wide-eyed stare of someone who rarely blinks, Elizabeth spent the fourth episode conning Walgreens into investing in her worthless blood testing machine.  When she wasn’t manipulating the Walgreens execs, she was coldly firing poor Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) and only bringing him back after the rest of the lab team threatened to quit in protest.  Of course, it wasn’t Elizabeth who placed the call to Ian and asked him to return.  It was Sunny (Naveen Andrews) and, when Ian returned, he was taken out of the lab and given a desk job.

Yes, it quickly became obvious that Theranos had changed a lot since the previous episode.  Security was everywhere, befitting a company that claimed to have come up with revolutionary technology.  People in different departments were not allowed to talk to each other.  The earnest and free-wheeling atmosphere had been replaced by a slick but curiously impersonal office.  Even the quote from Yoda now felt out of place.  Yoda would have been fired for asking too many questions.

Of course, the majority of the episode dealt with Elizabeth and Sunny’s attempts to sell their “wellness center” concept to Walgreens.  It was an obvious con but the Walgreens execs eventually fell for it.  One of them, Jay Rosen (Alan Ruck), fell victim to Elizabeth’s flattery and a belief that Elizabeth represented the future.  (In a rather endearing scene, Jay compared Elizabeth to a Katy Perry song.)  Another exec, Wade Miquelon (Josh Pais), initially understood that Theranos’s claims were too good to be true but, ultimately, he set aside his concerns when it appeared that Theranos might make a profitable deal with CVS instead.  Only Kevin Hunter (Rich Sommer) was able to see through Theranos and, ultimately, his concerns were ignored.  Ruck, Pais, and Sommer were all wonderfully cast and they all did a good job of showing how Elizabeth, Sunny, and Theranos were able to con so many people who should have known better.  By the end of the episode, Elizabeth has tricked former Secretary of State George Shultz (Sam Waterston, radiating gravitas as only he can) into joining the Board of Directors.  While the Walgreens corporate leaders performed an endearingly dorky version of What I Like About You, Kevin Hunter curiously looked at the Edison blood testing machine and Elizabeth coldly looked at him.

After being so disappointed with both Inventing Anna and Pam & Tommy, I resolved to be a little bit more cautious when it comes to overpraising the early episodes of The Dropout.  And I do think you could probably make the argument that devoting an entire episode to Walgreens is an example of how a miniseries will occasionally drag a story out and will devote an entire episode to something that could have been handled with just one five-to-ten minute scene.  But, when you’ve got a cast this good and writing this sharp, it almost doesn’t matter.  Director Michael Showalter did a wonderful job of balancing the cringey humor of the Walgreens plotline with the more emotional moments in which Ian Gibbons dealt with his frustrations over the direction in which Sunny and Elizabeth took Theranos.  Even if you don’t already know the details about what ultimately happened to Ian Gibbons, Stephen Fry’s performance will still break you heart.  Fry plays Gibbons as a man who, despite advancing age and poor health, refuses to surrender his idealism.  That makes him a good scientist but also the perfect victim for Elizabeth and Sunny’s syle of manipulation.

Old White Men was a well-done episode, perhaps one of the best that I’ve seen so far this year.  I look forward to seeing where the show takes us next week.

TV Review: The Dropout Episodes 1, 2, and 3 (dir by Michael Showalter)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On Thursday, I binged the first three episodes of Hulu’s The Dropout.

The Dropout is Hulu’s miniseries about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried), the enigmatic Stanford dropout who founded Theranos and became a billionaire before she turned 30. She promised that Theranos would revolutionize both the way that blood was tested and the world of health care in general. She was known for black turtlenecks, her deep (and possibly fake) voice, and her habit of not blinking. Of course, as common sense should have made obvious to just about anyone, it turned out that Elizabeth Holmes was lying about the blood testing machinery that her company was marketing. She and her business partner and former lover, Sunny Balwani (played, in The Dropout, by Lost‘s Naveen Andrews) were eventually charged with defrauding their investors. At trial, Holmes argues that her intentions were good and that she was trapped in an abusive relationship with Balwani. While Balwani’s trial is scheduled to being later this month, Elizabeth had already been convicted and currently await sentencing. Theranos, of course, no longer exists.

After the first three episodes, I would say that I’m cautiously optimistic. Seyfried and Andrews seem to be perfectly cast as Elizabeth and Sunny and the story itself is an interesting one. The miniseries format seems like a good one for director Michael Showalter’s trademark mix of dark comedy and drama. Much as with Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, there were a few moments that felt a bit too cartoonish, most of which involved William H. Macy as Elizabeth’s former neighbor and eventual business rival but, for the most part, the first three episodes managed to establish and maintain a consistent tone. Before she lowers her voice and dons her black turtleneck, Elizabeth comes across as being socially awkward but likable. It’s only towards the end of the 3rd episode that we really start to see her as being the villainous figure that she eventually began. The first 3 episodes are like an origin story.

Of course, the fact that it took 3 hours to tell her origin story is one reason why I’m cautious in my optimism. Streaming services are currently full of miniseries that all take stories that should be interesting but then drag them out to such a length that it’s hard not to eventually lose interest. (If you need an example of what I’m talking about, go check out Netflix’s Inventing Anna.) The Dropout‘s first three episodes were well-done but it’s still hard not to feel that the story told in those three hours could have just as easily been told in 20 minutes, without denying the viewer anything that they needed to know to understand Elizabeth and Sunny. There are five more episodes to go. Can the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos remain interesting for 8 hours? I’m hopeful but I’m not totally sure.

With all that in mind, I’m recommending The Dropout, on the basis of the first three episodes. But remember …. I was originally pretty enthusiastic about Pam & Tommy as well.

Film Review: No Exit (dir by Damien Power)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

After she learns that her mother is in the hospital and possibly on the verge of death, Darby (Hannah Rose Liu) breaks out of drug rehab, steals a car, and starts driving to Salt Lake City.  However, what Darby doesn’t know is that she’s also driving straight into a blizzard.  Soon, Darby is forced to take shelter at a nearby state park visitors center.

Darby isn’t the only person seeking shelter that night.  There’s a married couple, Ed (Dennis Haysbert) and Sandi (Dale Dickey).  Ed is a veteran of the Marine Corp while Sandi is a nurse.  There’s Ash (Danny Ramirez), who has the friendliest smile to ever be seen in the middle of a blizzard.  And then there’s Lars (David Rysdahl), who is distinguished by his long hair and his nervous mannerisms.  When Darby first enters the visitors center, Lars is curled up in a corner and loudly snoring.

And then there’s Jay (Mila Harris).  Jay is a child who happens to be bound and gagged in one of the vehicles parked outside.  When Darby discovers her, she has to not only save the child’s life but also figure out which one of the people in the visitors center is responsible for kidnapping her.

Clocking in at a brisk 90 minutes, No Exit is full of twists and turns.  I’ll do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum in this review.  Not all of the film’s twists work, of course.  There’s a few moments that, in hindsight, didn’t exactly make sense.  After watching the film, you could spend hours debating why certain characters did the things that they did, assuming that you were so inclined and that you could actually find anyone else willing to sit through your analysis.  However, the film itself is so quickly paced and well-directed that it doesn’t matter that the story itself is occasionally a bit implausible.  From the minute Darcy breaks out of that rehab, the film captures the viewer’s attention and it doesn’t let go until the final credits start to roll up the screen.  This is an entertaining B-movie, one that makes good use of its isolated location and its talented cast.  Havana Rose Liu especially deserves a lot of credit for her sympathetic lead performance as Darby.  Darby is a cynic and a survivor but she still has enough humanity inside of her to risk her life for a stranger.

The film looks great, with its scenes of cars driving through the raging snow storm and the film’s cast gathered in the somewhat tacky visitors center.  All of the snow falling reminded me of i’m thinking of ending things and I have to admit that a part of me kept expecting there to be some sort of a metaphysical twist towards the end of the film.  I found myself wondering if the visitors center would be revealed to be Hell, which wasn’t a totally outlandish idea when one considers that the film shares the same name as Sartre’s famous play.  But no, No Exit is a thriller that deals with concerns that are very much earthbound.  It’s an well-executed thriller and an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes.  It can currently be viewed on Hulu.

TV Review: Pam & Tommy 1.5 “Uncle Jim & Aunt Susie in Duluth” (dir by Gwyneth Horder-Payton)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week’s episode of Pam & Tommy was a definite improvement on last week’s, largely because it didn’t feature Seth Rogen wandering around with a “poor me” expression on his face.  Last week, far too much time was devoted to Rogen’s sad sack portrayal of Reed Gauthier, who the show insists on trying to make a sympathetic character even though he was essentially just a thief who tried to make a lot of money by stealing and then selling someone else’s private sex tape.

Reed was nowhere to be found in this week’s episode.  Instead, the narrative focused on how Pam and Tommy’s sex tape became a national story.  Not surprisingly, it all turned out to be Tommy Lee’s fault.  When the show opens, Jay Leno won’t make jokes about the sex tape because it’s not something that Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth have heard about.  The LA Times won’t run a story on it because the editor says that it’s not real news.  With Pam preparing for the opening of Barb Wire and Tommy working on his new album (and very much aware that his label no longer views him or the band as being a top priority), it appears that there’s a chance that Pam and Tommy can ride this out.

But then Bob Guccione the publisher of Penthouse, gets his hands on the tape and Tommy and a bunch of lawyers decide to file a lawsuit to keep him for publishing stills.  Pam has her doubts but Tommy and the lawyers do what they want.  Guccione responds by saying that he had a first amendment right to publish pictures from the sex tape.  The L.A. Times discovers, from the court filings, that the sex tape was stolen from Pam and Tommy and that it’s being sold without their permission.  With the story going national, Jay Leno realizes that Duluth now know all about it.  On top of all that, Pam learns how to use a search engine!

It was a busy episode.  And, in contrast to the nearly hour-long episodes that proceeded it, it was only 32 minutes long.  A half hour is the perfect amount of time to spend with Pam & Tommy.  Spending more than half an hour with them means dealing with the fact that Tommy’s a moron and Pam really does seem to think that she’s going to win an Oscar for Barb Wire.  Spending just 30 minute with them means that both characters get a chance to present their cases without wearing out their welcome.  Sebastian Stan and Lily James both gave good performances in this week’s episode, with Stan portraying Tommy as being a manchild who is in deep denial about the fact that the 80s are over while Lily James captured Pam’s need to try to keep everyone happy.  It’s Pam who instinctively knows the right way to deal with Guccione but she’s ignored by Tommy and his team of lawyers.  As Pam’s publicist puts it, women are taught from an early age to always say yes and to agree with men, even when they know that the men doesn’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about.

That said, Pam & Tommy is still definitely a flawed vehicle.  For every moment that works, there’s a moment or a line of dialogue that just tries too hard.  Particularly in the scenes with Jay Leno, Pam & Tommy felt like it was one Nathan Lane cameo away from turning into a Ryan Murphy production.  Five episodes in and the main problem remains that Pam & Tommy continues to struggle to convince the audience that it’s telling a story that needs to be stretched out of over 8 episodes.  If ever a true story was meant to a 90-minute TBS production, this is it.

 

Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck take some deep breaths in the Deep Water Teaser

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

On the surface, Deep Water just looks like “The movie Ben and Ana did during Lockdown”, but with Adrian Lyne’s name attached to this, I’ve had a double take. Lyne is responsible for Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful. I’m curious about where this one is going. Judging from the heavy breathing, it seems this couple is good at giving tummy tickles.

Deep Water premieres on Hulu on March 18th.

TV Review: Pam & Tommy 1.4 “The Master Beta” (dir by Lake Bell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

That was my thought after I published my review of the first three episodes of Pam & Tommy.  Don’t get me wrong.  I stand by everything that I wrote in that review.  The first three episodes were relatively well-made and they captured as specific point in time and Lily James was likably earnest as Pam.

Instead, my concern came from the fact that, by reviewing the first three episodes, I had now committed myself to watching and reviewing the entire series.  And, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was no way that Pam & Tommy could remain interesting for a total of 8 hours, not unless the show abandoned its Ryan Murphy-lite approach and did something really unexpected with its recreation of the story.  There’s just not enough there.  This is a good 2-hour story but Pam & Tommy is an 8-epiosde miniseries.  That’s 8-plus hours of Pam getting upset, Tommy acting like a dumbass, and Rand being every creepy guy who has ever approached you in a bar and started asking you about the book you’re reading.  (It would, of course, never occur to him that the main reason you’re reading the book is to avoid talking to guys like him.)

Having now watched the fourth episode, it’s hard not to feel that I was very much correct in my concerns.  Don’t get me wrong.  The fourth episode had its moments.  It featured an enjoyably intense performance from Don Harvey as the legendary Hollywood private investigator, Anthony Pellicano.  Once Tommy finally discovers that his safe has been stolen and Pam reminds him about the videotape, Pellicano is the man who they approach to track down the perpetrator.  This leads to a scene of Pellicano beating the crap out of Rand and it’s fun to watch.  Some of that is because Don Harvey is a master of portraying urbane menace.  But I have to admit that a lot of it is because Rand himself is such an annoying character.  This episode opened with Seth Rogen, as Rand, wandering around a porn set and trying to reconnect with his estranged wife (Taylor Schilling), who significantly was just trying to read Anne Rice’s latest book when he approached her.  Just the sight of Rand, with his mullet and his sad-sack facial expression, was so annoying that it was actually cathartic to see him get tossed around his apartment.

The problem is that the show wants us to feel some sympathy for Rand but there’s nothing sympathetic about him.  He’s a loser and the fact that he still loves his wife and still wants to take care of her doesn’t make him any less of a loser.  He’s a thief, a guy who accidentally stole a sex tape and then decided to put it online.  The fact that he later feels guilty doesn’t change the fact that he did it.  There’s as scene in the fourth episode where Rand is upset to see someone else selling bootleg copies of the tape.  On the one hand, it’s not a bad scene.  There’s an enjoyable irony to Rand discovering that someone has essentially stolen the tape from him after Rand went through so much trouble to steal the tape from Tommy.  But the show doesn’t seem to be sure whether it wants us to laugh at Rand’s misfortune or to sympathize with him as he realizes that the consequences of his actions are out of his control.  As a character, Rand is not compelling enough for both to be an option.

As for the title characters, both Sebastian Stan and Lily James do their best but I get the feeling that we’ve already learned all the we need to know about them.  There was one good moment that examined Pam and Tommy’s different reactions to the release of the sex tape but otherwise, neither Tommy nor Pam are really that interesting as characters.  I ended the fourth hour of Pam & Tommy very much aware that there were still four more hours to go.  What else, I found myself wondering, could be left to be said?

TV Review: Pam & Tommy Episode 1-3 (dir by Craig Gillipsie)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Currently (and, presumably, forever) available on Hulu, Pam & Tommy is a miniseries about …. well, it’s about many things.

It’s about the mid-90s, a time when people still used terms like “World Wide Web” and where no one thought twice about having to wait two or three minutes for one lousy web site to finish loading.  It’s about a time when dial-up internet was still considered to be something of an exotic luxury.  It’s about a time when the number one show in the entire world was the critically derided Baywatch and the show’s star, Pamela Anderson, was trying to make the jump from television to film.

It’s also about the early days of online porn and how it was first discovered that people would pay money to watch celebrity sex tapes.  It may seem strange to consider that this was something that needed to be discovered but, if you believe Pam & Tommy, apparently no one thought there was an audience for celebrity sex tapes before 1996.  Today, of course, celebrity sex tapes are so common place that they’re often leaked by the celebrity themselves.  Where would the Kardashians be if not for the celebrity sex tape industry?  Could it be that Kim owes as much of her success to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee as she does to O.J. Simpson?  Perhaps, which is a polite way of saying yes.

Pam & Tommy is also about the brief marriage of Pamela Anderson (Lily James) and Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan).  When Pam & Tommy begins, Pam, as mentioned above, is the star of the number one show in the world.  Despite being a star, she’s not respected as an actress.  Instead, she’s usually treated as just being a body.  The show’s producers and directors have no trouble cutting her big monologue on a whim but they spend several minutes discussing just how tight her red swimsuit should be.  (After cutting her monologue, they condescendingly thank her for being a team player.)  Pam has a very earnest and somewhat heart-breaking desire to be taken seriously as an actress.  She describes Jane Fonda as being her role model.  Meanwhile, Tommy Lee is, for lack of a better term, an idiot.  He’s also a drummer for a band that used to be big.  He travels with an entourage.  His body is covered with tattoos, the majority of which have no meaning to him beyond, “I just thought it looked cool.”  Tommy is usually an arrogant bully, the epitome of the spoiled rock star.  Occasionally, with Pam, he’s sweet but if this miniseries stays true to what actually happened during Pam and Tommy’s marriage, that sweetness is not going to last.

Finally, Pam & Tommy is the story of Rand Gautheir (Seth Rogen).  Much like Tommy, Rand is a moron.  However, Rand has neither Tommy’s looks nor his swagger.  Instead, he’s just a schlub who works as a carpenter and tries way too hard to present himself as being an intellectual.  After Tommy humiliates Rand by firing him from a remodeling job, Rand retaliates by stealing a safe from Tommy’s garage.  (Tommy doesn’t even notice that it’s missing.)  Inside the safe, Rand finds a sex tape that Tommy and Pam made on their honeymoon.  With the help of gangster Butchie Periano (Andrew Dice Clay) and adult film veteran “Uncle” Miltie (Nick Offerman), Rand puts the video on the internet and plans to make a fortune.  Rand tells himself that he’s doing it because Tommy didn’t pay him for his work but it’s clear that Rand’s main motivation is jealousy.  Why should Tommy get a huge house and a beautiful wife while Rand is stuck in his little apartment?  Rand is at least as smart as Tommy.  Of course, the same could probably be said of the dog that Pam purchases when she and Tommy return from their honeymoon.

In other words, Pam & Tommy is about a very specific cultural moment.  So far, the series is taking a stylized approach to the material, mixing occasionally broad comedy with more dramatic moments.  Needless to say, it’s a bit uneven.  During the second episode, Tommy actually has a conversation with his penis about whether or not he should marry Pam.  It’s a funny idea but the scene itself goes on forever and, ultimately, the whole thing says more about the importance of generating twitter buzz than it does about why Tommy and Pam ended up getting married after knowing each other for only a handful of days.  The first three episodes were directed by Craig Gillipsie, who also directed I, Tonya.  Much like that film, Pam & Tommy is occasionally insightful but it also sometimes seems to get bogged down in its own condescending attitude towards the people who are at the center of its story.

And yet, there are also enough moments that work in Pam & Tommy that I’ll definitely watch the rest of the show.  So far, this is a series that is largely saved by its cast.  Seth Rogen has recently been so intent on presenting himself as being the only man in Hollywood with integrity that it’s easy to forget that he’s always been at his most entertaining (and sympathetic) whenever he’s been cast as a complete loser and it’s hard to think of anyone who could be a bigger loser than the character he plays in Pam & Tommy.  Sebastian Stan plays Tommy as being a destructive manchild and, for the first two episodes, he’s pretty obnoxious.  By the third episode, though, Stan is given a few quieter scenes and he manages to suggest that there’s something more to Tommy than just rock star bravado.  And finally, Lily James gives a wonderfully empathetic performance as Pamela Anderson, capturing her earnest desire to be something more than just a sex symbol.

The first three episodes of Pam & Tommy dropped on Hulu this week.  The remaining five episodes will be released on a weekly basis.  I don’t really know how you get 8 episodes out of this particular story but I guess I’ll find out soon.  Hopefully, the show will continue to focus on the best thing that it has going for it, its cast.

MeNA, Short Film Review, By Case Wright

Posted on by casewright

Hulu….Why? I have to educate Hulu or stop them; it takes a Village or The Village. A short needs a Beginning, A Middle, and an End. It should NOT be a teaser for a longer film that you could not get a budget for or a story that you couldn’t figure out. I’m not watching any more of Hulu’s garbage trash. They should stick to being the depository of re-runs. Yes, I’m mad.

Me.N.A features, Jeff, an office-worker-drone who really wants to be special, but isn’t. I’ve worked with these office workers: their cubicles are bare or their cubicles are overly ornate. They are desperate to be noticed. *Sigh* I remember one lady who had all these figurines; she liked to make fun of deaf people and when I called her out, she just glared at me…for months. Well, she ate a lot of fast food; so, maybe she’s had a coronary by now? *I look up to the skies to an indifferent God who doesn’t know my name.*

Jeff decides that the best way to be special is to get his DNA tested. This isn’t the worst idea. I mean, a DNA test confirmed the family rumors that we were Italian and that was an awesome day! Maybe the lifechanging moment for Jeff could be located in his GATC. Who knows? This short was getting kinda good. Then, the rails came off. Fencers, I guess, show up and cart Jeff off to a large …. I guess … gerbil cage. Anyway, that’s it. No conclusion. No ending. Matthew Epstein, the writer/director, didn’t know what a short was. I wish that he had called me first.

The short is NOT a teaser. It’s a brief self-contained story and anything else is a total cheat and garbage because anyone can leave something unfinished. Now, we have a story without an ending like a shitty version of Quantum Leap. Hulu, you are dead to me.

Here’s The Trailer For Nine Perfect Strangers!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If you’re in the States, this David E. Kelley-produced miniseries will be premiering on Hulu on August 21st. If you’re outside of the States, it’ll be premiering on Prime at some point.

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqqFJjvOh74