#streaming reviews

[filmnoirfoundation]

Check out our newly updated NOW PLAYING page at http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/now-playing.html featuring Sean Axmaker's reviews of the six-part TV-miniseries I AM THE NIGHT and Andreas Prochaska's eight episode series DAS BOOT.

[filmnoirfoundation]

Check out our newly updated NOW PLAYING page at http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/now-playing.html featuring Sean Axmaker’s review of the revival/4th season of VERONICA MARS: http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/now-playing.html

Veronica Mars is available now for streaming at Hulu,

[litcityblues]

'Paradise' By The Creepy Billionaire Bunker Cave Light

I hadn't intended to watch this show, but (yet again) it began flooding onto my TikTok feed at such volume that I got tired of seeing it in bits and pieces and just sat down and watched the damn thing. Don't get me wrong: there is a lot to like about this show. It scratches one of my favorite things: what happens after the end of the world!

Seriously: 2012 is a shit movie to me*, for many reasons, but a far more interesting film would be 2013. I understand that doomsday looks pretty awesome on the big screen, but the day after doomsday is a far more interesting story to me, and Paradise delivers on that. At this point, I'm assuming you (like me) have seen enough on the internet to know that it's set in a city-sized underground bunker in Colorado, three years after a doomsday event.

(If you didn't know that, apologies for the inevitable spoilers. But also, this is one of those shows that the internet really ruins in some ways. If you go into this cold, the reveal at the end of the first episode must have hit like a ton of bricks. I (thanks to the internet/TikTok) knew that it was coming, but after that, I made a concerted effort to lean away from learning anything more, and it paid off, to some degree.)

Sterling K. Brown stars as Xavier Collins, who starts his morning routine as usual and then heads to his job as a Secret Service Agent guarding the President of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden), whom he finds has been murdered by an unknown assailant overnight. Collins frantically tries to put together as much as he can before calling it in: the President's safe has been raided. The security cameras have been frozen for a few hours after his last contact with Bradford the night before. One of the last people to see him was high-ranking Secret Service Agent Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall), who was having an affair with the President. We find out (via flashbacks-- there are a lot of those in this show) that Collins was promoted to the President's detail after taking a bullet for him and that the relationship between the two has broken down: Collins tells Bradford that he'll forgive Bradford when he sleeps again and he'll sleep again when Bradford is dead.

And just like that, we're off and running with the mystery. Paradise weaves in flashbacks-- so little by little, we learn what has happened to the rest of the world. Turns out, they had been planning for an event of some kind for quite some time-- one of the Chief Billionaires in the Bunker, Samantha Redmond, codename Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson) helped to excavate and build the bunker. After the death of her son, Dylan, she finds a grief therapist, Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), who helps put her back together again and winds up in the bunker as well, helping to manage the trauma and grief that people are (inevitably) feeling.

We find out more: it's a supervolcano eruption under Antarctica that fractures the ice sheet and sends a gigantic tsunami racing across the world. Collins was briefed and put on the list as a reward for saving the President's life, but when the eruption happens sooner than they thought, his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), is stranded in Atlanta, and despite President Bradford's promise to retrieve her, they don't make it in time.

Collins eventually figures out who is actually calling the shots in the bunker, and unsurprisingly, it's not the former Vice President, now President Henry Baines (Matt Malloy); it's Sinatra. Sinatra who covered up what really happened when they sent out an expedition to investigate conditions on the surface. Sinatra, who ordered the death of Agent Billy Pace (Jon Beavers), who was about to reveal to Collins that the surface, in fact, was more habitable than they thought, and more importantly, there are survivors.

Look, I've already spoiled the big hook about this show (the post-apocalyptic bunker thing), so I kind of have to lean away from the other spoilers as best I can. Needless to say, Collins does figure out what happened to President Bradford. Do they set up a second season of this show in a very interesting way? Yes, they do. Will I be watching the second season of this show? In all likelihood, yes. I'm onboard, and it gets a lot more interesting in the finale.

But let's just say that I have... questions. And it's not to say that the show won't get around to answering these questions at some point, but... I'm still left with questions. How does the Bunker work? How do they get food? Consistent, stable food supply for 25,000 people? How do they get fresh water? How does their fake sunlight compare to the real thing? Would it be enough? Would they see deleterious effects from not being exposed to actual sunlight?

Also, why is there a President of the United States still? Bradford is trying to be all hush-hush about his affair with Robinson so he can serve out his term and get a divorce-- at this point, who cares? Just get the damn divorce if that's what you want? Not to mention that he's under the thumb of his old man (Gerald McRaney) who pretty much tells him (in a flashback) that he's gonna be a politician if he's not going to be an oilman and doesn't give his grown ass son a choice in the matter and Bradford (again, a grown ass man) just sort of takes it and goes along with it. He's a complex fellow, but doesn't exactly seem the type to lead the 25,000 survivors into a post-apocalyptic future. He seems like he wants to be an English Teacher and drink a lot.

And while, yes, I assume that if the government knew of an actual extinction-level event, there would be a bunker somewhere, let's be real: I doubt it would be this cool. This show places an awful lot of faith in the competence of billionaires (because let's be real: the current crop today ain't Andrew Carnegie. They're not sending their best) and just glosses over the other 24,000 or so people. Who are they? What do they do? Does anybody get paid? How does this place actually work? (Even more so when you realize that the show appears to be strongly suggesting that Sinatra is a couple of French fries short of a happy meal as well.)

Overall: I am intrigued enough that I will tune in for another season of this show. The cast is excellent, the mystery is well constructed, and the reveal is unexpected, and in a fun bonus, Collins' son, James, is played by Percy Daggs IV, and that name seems familiar, it's because his Dad, Percy Daggs III played Wallace Fennel in Veronica Mars. My Grade: *** out of ****

[litcityblues]

Take Notes, Marvel.

The Batman was the best Batman movie I had seen in years. Colin Farrell was outstanding as The Penguin, so when I saw that they were spinning off his character into a series for HBO Max, I was intrigued. Then I sat down and watched it and I'm going to deliver what might be a sizzling hot take here, but I'll put the marker down now and we can see if I'm right down the road.

This is the most interesting thing a superhero franchise has done in years. You can argue it's the most interesting thing the Batman franchise has done, ever. And while Marvel may be a Box Office juggernaut, the bloom is definitely off the rose of late and DC might, just maybe... be figuring things out? If they are, Marvel should take notes, because The Penguin is the kind of thing they should be doing but aren't. (This is why quality matters more than quantity. Turn down the firehouse and take your time, Marvel could be hitting home runs again in short order, IMO.)

What's the one thing we, as viewers never really get to see when it comes to all these superhero movies? The villain's rise to power. These villains just show up and we get hints of their backstory and their reasoning. We see Selina Kyle get thrown out the window in Batman Returns. We see Jack Napier go down into the vat of chemicals and emerge as The Joker in Batman-- but we don't get to see how they get to the top of proverbial heap. We just get to see how Batman deals with them.

Does this make The Penguin a villain origin story? Yes and no-- Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell) is a scheming opportunist when this show starts, but hardly a criminal mastermind. The show opens more or less on the heels of where the movie left off. The seawall has been breached. The Crown Point neighborhood is destroyed. Everything is a mess and Carmine Falcone is dead, leaving a power vacuum in the Underworld that Oz tries to exploit.

He learns that Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen) has a plan to revolutionize their drug operations with a new drug called Bliss. Oz kills Alberto and when his sister Sofia (Cristin Milioti) is released from Arkham, fighting her reputation as a killer and a psychopath (she's been given the nickname The Hangman) she wants answers. Unfortunately, the rest of the Falcone family doesn't like her, doesn't trust her, and has no intention of giving her any actual control.

Oz, sensing even more opportunities decides to sow discord among the Falcones and between them and the other major crime family in the city, the Maronis. He- along with a low-level gangster, Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) that he recruits touches off a war between the two families, but it backfires on Oz. He is forced underground and Sofia murders her entire family (with the exception of her little cousin Gia) and assumes control of the Falcone empire, rejecting the name and taking her mother's maiden name of Gigante instead. Cooperating with the last surviving Maroni (Clancy Brown) they hunt for Oz.

Oz rallies the other medium to small-time gangs/criminal organizations and decides to center himself in Crown Point. Still damaged, the neighborhood still doesn't have power until Oz squeezes a local politician to get the job done. That wins Oz some loyalty but unfortunately doesn't buy him enough time. Sofia figures out his location and blows up his lab. She kidnaps his Mom and tries to force him to admit the truth about what happened to his brothers to her but the seeds Oz planted pay off. The deputies of all the small-time gangs kill their leaders and take over. He out-maneuvers Sofia and gets her sent back to Arkham and as he dances in his shiny new penthouse, the Bat Signal lights up in the sky.

Cristin Millioti comes very close to stealing the entire show straight out from under Colin Farrell. His portrayal of Oz makes him seem like a scheming opportunist more than anything else and not a monster, but by the end, you see him for what he is: obsessed with power at all costs and absolutely a monster. Millioti's portrayal of Sofia Falcone/Gigante reveals so many levels to the character. She wants acceptance from her family, but she also wants revenge on those people in her family who locked her up. She wants power and control in Gotham, but she also wants to get away from the life she has and just leave. Her menace isn't as loud as Oz's, but it's quieter and comes across as infinitely more deadly. She becomes a force to be reckoned with over the course of the show and that's what's so fascinating about this. We see the birth of a criminal mastermind unfolding before us and it's able to explore nuances of that journey than a simple Batman movie cannot, due to time constraints.

Overall: I loved this. Batman as a franchise seems to vacillate between hyper-realism and camp so it's refreshing to find a new twist: Hardcore Ever-So-Slightly Old School Noir. (Because Batman is, of course, the World's Greatest Detective. It says so right on the comic book.) The Penguin slides right into that milleu without missing a beat. I don't know if there's more of this planned- and I almost hope this is it, because it would be hard to top this, but I do know that even if this strand of the Batman-verse doesn't fit in with whatever plans James Gunn is cooking for the DCU, I am absolutely going to watch the sequel to The Batman. Especially if The Penguin is involved. My Grade: **** out of ****

[cimmarian]

Streamlabs OBS

[guiltyfilm]

A GuiltyFilm first: jjday10 picks a film that the entire panel enjoyed! The brilliantly written and acted film is this week's written review.

Read Jen's review at the GuiltyFilm website and then check out Short Term 12 on Netflix!

[jjday10]

What am I even watching?!

Is ddubyak making us watch Creator as some kind of punishment for all the movies we've had him watch so far for guiltyfilm that he didn't like? This is absolutely terrible.

[theramblingmango2-blog]

The Blob (1958)

The Blob. Kevin Smith recommended this. Lol. The movies back in this time are just strange. You can tell a lot about the times based on way people acted and talked. The effects are classic, cut shots to show the blob, and even to narrate the story flow. This film was made in 1958 but I think it still holds up. I suggest you go watch it! If anything...ha...make fun of the movie. Example: I pretty sure theses kids are suppose to be in high school - When the cop calls the parents, the girls dad is the principle. That means that these kids age very fast!...or the other funny thing is that fact that nobody decided to take a fire extinguisher to it and try and freeze it?...geez, my logic is strange. Funny, the cops start noticing that people are missing and don't really do anything...(guess that was small town life). The best part is that movies were 80 cents!!!  Check it out @hulu: http://hulu.com/w/6irj