Originally published on 15 April 2024.
Last updated on 4 November 2024.
Every quarter I briefly the discuss the movies and TV series I watch. The length of each entry doesn’t reflect my esteem for it: just the fact that some movies or series are easier to say something about.
The complete list of all the movies, series and documentaries I have seen is here.
2024 Q1
Dune: Part Two (2024)
Euphoria (2019, Season 2)
Lady Snowblood (1973, Shurayukihime)
Napoleon (2023)
Succession (2018, Season 1)
The Wheel of Time (2021, Season 2)
Tokyo Vice (2022, Season 1)
True Detective (2014, Season 4)
Entries are more-or-less in the order that I watched them.
Euphoria:
Last time I gave Euphoria the benefit of the doubt, partially based on the strength of the Special episodes. Unfortunately, the second season can’t really reach that level, let alone reach it consistently. That leaves us with very pretty shots, great acting, and stories that are sometimes all over the place. The season’s final two episodes are strong though, and leave our protagonist Rue in a better place. Her road to get there was excruciating to watch — as in, hard to watch because of her actions, as Zendaya’s acting is again stellar.
Napoleon:
More like NOPE-oleon, amirite? (My apologies but I waited for almost 3 months to drop this lame joke on you.)
Amazing cinematography, good performances (Vanessa Kirby as Josephine), Ridley Scott helming a historical epic. This could’ve been good, maybe even great. Unfortunately Ridley Scott delivers a 2,5+ hour version of “and then, and then, and then”, without a clear reason why we should care about these people or the activities they’re engaged in. As one IMDb comment puts it, the movie “feels like the highlight reel of a lengthy miniseries.”
Succession:
This HBO series came highly recommended by my colleagues, and I can see why. The premise is simple: the elderly patriarch of a super-wealthy family (Brian Cox) is supposed to hand over the reins to one of his offspring, except he doesn’t. Cue scheming by the ultra-wealthy extended family.
After an uneven start, it finds its feet around the fifth episode. Not sure what exactly changes there: maybe it’s mainly about tone. Succession is very much a satire, but in the first half it doesn’t quite hit its mark? It’s a thin line between “this is ridiculous” and “this is ridiculous, but it tracks” I guess?
I’ve added this to my list of “(very) well made but no sympathetic characters so no further viewing” TV series, joining House of Cards and Homeland.
True Detective (2014) on
Re-watch: True Detective, Season 1:
10 years after it first aired, the original season hasn’t dimmed its brilliance. Rarely, if ever, was a pulpy detective story so vibe-y, so ingrained in its environment and so beautifully shot. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are excellently matched. Sure, McConaughey steals the show with his drawling, hypnotic delivery of nihilistic philosophy, but Harrelson delivers a tour de force in his portrayal of toxic masculinity.
Re-watch: The Newsroom, Season 1:
This Aaron Sorkin-penned show didn’t age as well as True Detective, or The West Wing. It’s still fun and certainly has its heart-warming moments, but its shortcomings are very apparent, too. The very competent characters that suddenly become dumb as bricks when around their love interests, the righteous soapboxing, the grumpy-but-heart-of-gold protagonists who probably would be insufferable to work with in real life.
Lady Snowblood:
Based on a manga by Kazuo Koike, this bloody Japanese revenge story was a big inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and is still very watchable. It boasts an intense lead, beautiful cinematography and brutal, bloody fight scenes.
True Detective, Season 4:
10 years after the original, this is the first season not written by Nic Pizzolatto. Indeed, I read that this season was not originally written for True Detective, but was retooled to make it work as a season. This could explain the gratuitous and redundant callbacks to Season 1.
Instead of the sweaty, sun-drenched earlier seasons we’re now in Alaska, during the winter where the sun never rises. This makes everything feel claustrophobic and messes with our sense of time.
It still has a lot of the elements we’ve come to expect, though, like the capable detectives that have their own history (Jodie Foster, Kali Reis), a current case that’s somehow connected to an old case. It leans heavily into the supernatural. However, where the previous seasons said “these events seem supernatural, but are just coincidence”, Night Country says “yep, the supernatural exists” — or it’s just a bunch of unresolved and unexplained threads.
Dune: Part Two:
A few weeks have passed since I saw Part Two in the cinema, and I’m not sure how to rate it. It was undoubtedly good, but personally I didn’t feel the hype as much as some of my friends and colleagues felt.
Partially this is because there are many more deviations from the source material than for the first part. Again, most of them make sense and take care of the differences between the mediums — what works in a book is different from what works in a movie.
For example, in the book the Fremen are unaware of the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit in their religion, and Stilgar is a capable leader who believes in his religion.
In the movie, there’s suddenly a divide between the northern and southern tribes of Fremen, with the southerners suddenly being religious fanatics, and at least Chani is aware of the Bene Gesserit’s manipulation. I like the greater focus on Chani (Zendaya), her agency and her duality: she loves Paul, but doesn’t see him as a messiah. Unfortunately, Stilgar is now a deluded fanatic who is also used as comic relief.
If you liked Part One, you’ll probably still like Part Two, too, though. The basics (characters, worldbuilding, plots) are already in place so the movie can move quickly. The cinematography is still mesmerising, and the cast is still an embarrassment of riches.
The Wheel of Time:
At this point there are so many deviations from the book, I won’t even try to list them. And I’m not even mad, because Season 2 is a briskly-paced fantasy yarn which, although diverging from the source material, still delivers a lot of the same plot and characters and beats. Great casting, good special effects, amazing production design and costuming. Yep, I’m here for it, please continue. I still have no idea how you’re going to distil 14 books into however many seasons of prestige TV, and I’m looking forward to being surprised.
Tokyo Vice (2022) on Tokyo Vice:
This neon-drenched crime thriller is based on the memoirs of Jake Adelstein, “the first non-Japanese reporter working for one of Japan’s largest newspapers” in the 1990’s. He starts at the bottom of the ladder, makes some rookie mistakes, but slowly his peers and superiors warm up to him. He befriends fellow expat Samantha, a hostess in a yakuza-controlled night club; Sato, a member of the same yakuza gang; and the cops Miyamota and Katagiri. We follow Jake as he quickly becomes entangled in their affairs in the shadowy underworld of Tokyo.
I never really watched Miami Vice, but I imagine it looked much like this: very stylish and deliberate, with a cool but oppressive atmosphere pervading every shot. Michael Mann was executive producer on both Miami and Tokyo Vice, and directed the latter’s pilot, setting the tone for the rest of the series.
Most of the cast is splendid (Ken Watanabe is a powerhouse as the gruff father figure Katagiri), but I’m afraid I have to ding it some points for Ansel Elgort as the lead. He plays the initial wide-eyed, enthusiastic and driven reporter with verve, but the turn towards the more experienced and cynical version of himself is less convincing.
Entries are more-or-less in the order that I watched them.
Re-watch: Carnivàle, (2003, Season 1):
Many, many years ago I watched this moody drama, I think on actual television? Which explains why I remembered so little of it: it was set in the United States’ Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, it had supernatural elements, and I liked it.
Come 2024, and I still like it. It’s a sloooow burner, and certainly a “vibe” series: very little seems to happen, and a lot of time is spent just hanging out with the people in the titular carnival. Which is perfectly cool because that’s an interesting bunch — more interesting than the protagonist Ben Hawkins, who goes a bit too hard into the whole reluctant hero spiel. His counterpart is Brother Justin, a preacher who desperately wants to do good — so much so that the end justifies the means. Clancy Brown does a lot of work here depicting the tormented soul of a man of God who is tempted by power.
As the season progresses the background story leisurely unfolds, as does the world’s cosmology and rules.
Poor Things (2023) on Poor Things: Recommended by colleagues (and the press), this is a weird movie — to absolutely nobody’s surprise as that is what director Yorgos Lanthimos does. It’s a riff on Frankenstein but with a twist. Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, a woman whose body is that of a pregnant woman who committed suicide, but whose mind is that of the fetus. The juxtaposition of an adult woman whose mind isn’t fully formed while her body is, creates an interesting juxtaposition as she navigates a steampunk Victorian world. Her character’s soul is as a child ’s in a woman’s body who navigates a steampunk Victorian world. Along the way we are treated to beautiful shots, charming acting, a scenery-chewing Willem Dafoe (the best kind of Dafoe), references to feminism and socialism, and a lot of sex and comedy. Often at the same time. (Seriously though, there are a lot of sex scenes.)
The Wire: Last winter I watched the first season, and I mentioned that it was good, but not in contention for best TV series ever. With only season 5 left to watch, I can now safely say: The Wire is great television and you should watch it, and it might be among the best TV series ever. I’m still not sure why the first season didn’t really click with me, but I get it now. In no small measure, this is because I’ve found these great recaps by Alan Sepinwall, which provide me with insights in the intentions of the creators and remarks about all the little things that I missed.
The Wire (2002) on
Apparently, The Wire is not about police versus drugs (which I thought), nor even about a bigger picture of corruption in institutions. Nope, “[i]t was a Greek tragedy done in a modernist urban way, with the city as the main character”, according to creator David Simon. To elaborate: “According to Simon, the best way to understand The Wire is to think Greek [...] the storytelling tradition of the ancient Greek tragedies, where the heroes and anti-heroes always face a dramatic downfall, usually as a result of their own hubris.”
With this in mind, the first season retroactively gains importance and gravitas. Simon and his crew expand the setting from “the projects” to the harbour, city hall and the school system. Drawing on his experiences as a reporter working with Baltimore police (as captured in his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets), Simon paints Baltimore and its inhabitants with vivid strokes. There are few outright “heroes” or “villains”. For example, the character we’re spending most time with in Season 1, Detective Jimmy McNulty, is both a brilliant police officer, and an adulterous, self-destructive and obnoxious drunk who will screw over his colleagues just to prove he’s right. Hubris indeed.
As the setting is expanded, so is the dramatis personae. Key characters get rotated out, or are diminished in importance, while bit players become pivotal in the proceedings. This makes the series sometimes hard to follow, but ultimately very rewarding.
Un chien andalou: I watched this silent short film in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Luis Buñuel (on a screenplay co-written by Dalí) created a super weird surrealist movie, with dream logic, confusing chronology and mesmerising editing. It packs a lot in its 21-minute runtime.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: Even though Anya Taylor-Joy is featured big in the advertising, she only appears about halfway through the movie. To be fair, she’s charismatic and compelling in a deliberately sparse role. Furiosa works as the origin story to Fury Road’s character, and much like it, the movie is focused on beautiful vistas and kinetic action sequences. The characters are either thin caricatures or unreadable enigmas, the plot very straightforward. In other words: if you liked Fury Road you’ll probably like Furiosa.
2024 Q3
Carnivàle (2003, Season 2)
Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party (2023)
Stopping the Steal (2024)
The Wire (2002, Season 5)
Tokyo Vice (2022, Season 2)
Entries are in the order that I watched them.
Tokyo Vice, Season 2:
After Season 1 left us with unresolved plotlines and a taste for more, Season 2 delivers the goods. The various protagonists (rookie reporter, determined madam, seasoned cop, duty-bound yakuza) drift apart and get together while fighting a formidable common foe.
There are some predictable (and hard to watch) plot lines (in which the wildcard snake second-in-command does snake-y things) and frankly unbelievable decisions along the way. Case in point: the reporter has an affair with the mob boss’s girlfriend. Not that I don’t believe that love or lust can make people do irrational stuff — it’s just that in this case there’s absolutely zero chemistry between the two.
All in all, good stuff with plenty of great vibes and steadily increasing tension.
Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party:
Interesting documentary about the niche topic of The Birthday Party, an Australian post-punk band, also known as “the band that Nick Cave was part of before he founded the Bad Seeds”. It’s edited together from original ancient material, later interviews with the band and crew, and stylish animation. The movie tells the story of a band that struggled to find their spot — and when they did and subsequently achieved success, it succumbed to drugs, excess and other challenges.
It never really paints a clear picture about how “big” (well-known) the band actually became. It seems to me that they never really broke through beyond the punk scene, but I might be mistaken. Also, the interminable droning and screaming in the soundtrack, however authentic and appropriate, makes it hard to stomach for its full runtime.
The West Wing (1999) on
Re-watch: The West Wing, Season 2: In the sophomore season the show finds a steady rhythm of great episodes. With binge-watching and having watched more of Sorkin’s work, his habits and tricks become very apparent. Fortunately, the personable and capable cast carry the material beyond those flaws.
As the presidential elections in the USA are heating up in the real world, some of Sorkin’s unsubtle soapboxing can be very “he was right all along” and “it only got worse”. Case in point, episode 11, “The Leadership Breakfast”, which brings us the following dialogue:
Leo McGarry: “Alexander Hamilton didn’t think we should have political parties. Neither did John Adams. They both thought political parties led to divisiveness.”
Toby Ziegler: “They do. They should. We have honest disagreements, arguments are good.”
Leo McGarry: “Only if they lead to statesmanship. Or it’s... just... theater.”
Oh and in the next episode Sam supports the acknowledgement of global warming.
Anyway, the season finale “Two Cathedrals” is one of the best hours of television every created that manages to further define a main character, resolve season-long plot threads and drive the plot forward — all buoyed by a surgically precise use of Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”.
The Wire, Season 5:
Watching The Wire has been a great ride. Back when I watched Season 1, I wondered “how is this consistently named as one of the greatest TV series ever?” That question was answered, and then some, during Season 2 to 4. Would Season 5 live up to it?
Unfortunately, not quite. With only 10 episodes instead of 13, it felt rushed and uneven — even more so because the season tries to wrap up the vast majority of the running storylines. Even in a “regularly sized” season, that was always going to be a tall order for a sprawling narrative such as The Wire
That makes some of the character developments feel out of character or unearned, and some of the proceedings unrealistic.
That doesn’t make this bad television — it’s only by comparing it to the previous seasons that the final season disappoints. “Rushed The Wire” is still better than 95% of what you ever saw on television.
Stopping the Steal: After The West Wing, I picked up the thread of “presidential elections” with this HBO documentary about the 2020 elections and the lead-up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol Building. Nothing here is entirely new, but it’s interesting to see this from an American perspective. We had our own worries during fall and winter 2020, and I didn’t have much bandwidth or need to dive into this trainwreck at the time. The documentary gave me a fresh insight and set some things straight. Even taking away the obvious partisanship, the story it tells is frightening. The timing of its release makes it very clearly a warning against voting for Trump, but I’m pretty sure that Trump’s supporters won’t watch it, and if they do, they won’t believe it. (As is evidenced in the reviews on IMDb.)
The closing quote drives its message home:
Greg Jacobs, counsel to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence: “Character matters. The President of the United States is the most powerful office under our Constitution, and that is where character is most important of all. And you should never put somebody into that office that you don't have trust and confidence will follow the Constitution and the law. Because that could be the end of the Republic.”
Let’s hope that the US's citizens don’t elect a fascist tomorrow. They’ve been warned.
Carnivàle, Season 2:
The first season of this Depression-era supernatural series was mostly about vibes and set-up. We slowly got to know the main characters, the titular carnival, the backstory and the rules under which the supernatural elements operate.
The second (and final) season then delivers the rapid escalation. Our reluctant protagonist is jolted into action, our antagonist quickly intensifies his methods, and a lot of people are caught in the crossfire.
