Month: June 2023

What can one add about “Succession,” in the wake of its final season? A sublime show of thirty-nine flawless episodes (check my reviews of Season 2 and Season 3), it was a must-see-right-now as soon as it was dumped, ten weeks in a row. Once more I sank into a ferocious world of billionaires and corporate executives (the latter providing particular enjoyment for me, reminding me as it did of my three decades of corporate life … the joys the terrors, the repulsion). A stunning plot twist early in the season wrenches the narrative into a headlong plunge to a heart-stopping finale. Once more the four lead roles of father and brood are played with stunning authenticity and emotional heft. In the end I found it hard to choose between Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sara Snook, and Kieran Culkin for my most admired and my best loved. Because that is the singular feat of those actors, aligned with Jesse Armstrong’s stellar script: it allows us to love the unlovable. In the final season, Matthew Macfadyen comes into his own with an amazing performance, and Nicholas Braun is not far behind. As ever, the glossy sets and locales add to the excitement of the show. After the emotional rush of Season 4 has abated, do I think we need a tale of a rapacious media overlord and his rabid children? Indeed we do, when it is told so thrillingly and intelligently and deeply, indeed we do.

Anyone I know who has played the computer game The Last of Us is, it seems, a rabid, fan, so “The Last of Us,” a nine-part screen series, is a gamble. Brought to HBO by the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, in partnership with Craig Mazin, the genius behind Chernobyl, and co-rewritten by the pair of them, the resultant show is a triumph. Calling it a zombie flick demeans it, for even though it is set in a dystopian world almost destroyed by zombies infected by a fungus, it is primarily a tale of adventure and hope. When fourteen-year-old, perky orphan Ellie is handed to tough guy Joel to be transported across a blighted, fraught America, it is not clear whether either will survive a single episode, nor what the eventual destination might deliver. Battling zombies, militias, the military, cults, and other horrors, the two of them become epic symbols of hope for humanity, even though both are flawed and reluctant. Pedro Pascal is brilliant as Joel and Bella Ramsey is unforgettable as Ellie, and the rest of the cast is pitch-perfect. The movie’s sets and scenery are spellbinding in their detail and imaginativeness. The action scenes could be watched again and again, so stirring are they. That the blighted world of The Last of Us is the result of a pandemic underscores the resonant depth of the storyline plotted out by triumphant Mazin. A highlight of 2023, without a doubt.

Such an ambitious project! The eight episodes of “Extrapolations” are literally points on the IPCC’s predictions of climate crisis woe over half a century from today: floods, species extinctions, overheating, wildfires, agricultural failure, etc., etc. Each episode is a standalone tale with its own plot and character arc, all linked by story continuity and character recurrences. A star-studded cast is one of the calling cards of the series, yet the episodes featuring Ed Norton, Meryl Streep, and Forest Whitaker are weighed down by dialed-in performances and sagging storylines. The series’ through line of evil capitalist Nicholas Bilton (played woodenly by Kit Harrington), heading up the Alpha corporation reaping a fortune from climate change, seems cartoonish at several points. But two features of Extrapolations save it from the bin and indeed make it rather memorable. Firstly, several standalone stories sizzle with wonderful acting: Tahar Rahim is superb as a futuristic “companion” with “summer heart” (bodily distress from too-high temperatures) and Adarsh Gourav plus Gaz Choudry are brilliant as smugglers in heat-wracked India. And secondly, even if the series can seem didactic, the fact is that its portrayals of the future are stark pictures IPCC can never give us, for which I am grateful.

As one of the few souls on this planet who never deigned to play Tetris, the computer and console game that swept the world from the late 80s, I came to the “based on a true story” movie “Tetris” expecting clunky boredom. Not so. From the opening scene, when failing American salesman Henk Rogers tries Tetris at a convention and launches a campaign to gain commercial rights from the Russian founder, this movie sparkles with energy, wit, and perceptiveness. Taron Egerton is unforgettable as the effervescent, driven, yet humane Henk, and the rest of the cast, including Nikita Efremov as the original inventor, is pitch perfect. Interspersed with cheesy but most effective Tetris-style cartoons, we gyrate between coruscating scenes of Robert Maxwell and his son, the video game world in America, the cowboy country of last-days-before-the-collapse-of-the-
Soviet-Union business in Moscow, and Henk’s fairytale home life in Japan. Not a frame is wasted, not a word fails to make a mark. Nothing profound is revealed in Tetris but as unabashed corporate history entertainment, it is one of my favorite viewings of 2023.

Perhaps as one ages and as achievement becomes fraught and freighted with time anxiety, one heads back into childhood entertainment. For me, cowboy stories, those tales of uncomplicated struggle and bravery (ignoring what we now about their fuckery), still resonate, and so I’ve found myself turning to “The Mandalorian.” Despite rejecting the entire Star Wars oeuvre after the source movie, I loved the first two seasons that presented Din Djarin, an outcast from the shattered Mandalorians, armored, shooting, flying warriors with a warrior code to match. Cast as a future space Shane, he is stolid, fierce, undaunted, just as he should be for an old fan of the simplistic ethos of cowboy despair and victory. Add in his initially reluctant oversight of Grogu, clearly “Baby Yoda,” and “Mando” offers episodes of fun and blasting and whooshing. And what of Season 3? Well, half the episodes indicate an approaching “use-by” point, being complex Empire-versus-Rebel plotlines into which the Mandalorian is shoehorned, and several “en masse” battle scenes with many Mandalorians are somehow hokey, and don’t get me started about the passe orchestral music. Yet half the episodes, the ones of simple encounter and battle are as pleasing as those in Season 1, with battle scenes worthy of the Star Wars franchise. And I cannot resist Pedro Pascal’s deep, echoing defiance with “This is the way.” So I, for one, shall be back for Season 4.

A bold arthouse movie that alienates many from the first scene (I know, having seen the film in a party of ten), “Aftersun” covers a few days in a seedy Portugese beach resort. Calum, a young Irishman, is treating Sophie, his eleven-year-old daughter to a holiday, and it is immediately clear that Sophie lives with her mother and Calum is desperate to reestablish a relationship with her. Sophie, played with immersive brilliance by Frankie Corio takes jerky home movies that form part of her adult memories, as we see from a few flash-forwards. Calum is sweet (another wonderful performance from Paul Mescal) but we begin to see hidden despair behind his clumsy efforts at loving fatherhood. Willfully oblique in cinematography and narrative direction, Aftersun mixes brief cryptic images and scenes with drawn-out episodes of what seems to be banality, but behind every moment, it becomes clear hidden emotions swirl. This is a film to give you a headache from concentrating but the emotional depth is astounding.