The Chaircase

I just watched the season finale of The Chair Company and I think I’m more confused by what I’ve seen than anything else I’ve ever seen.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  It all starts out very simple.  Ron Trosper is on the up.  He recently got promoted at work and he’s heading up a huge project, the design and construction of a new luxury shopping mall.  And after giving a rousing speech at one of those corporate hype up meetings office workers are often subjected to, he goes to sit back down in his chair.  And it breaks.  He falls to the floor, a little embarrassed, but very much none the worse for wear.  He even makes a little self-deprecating joke as he gets up and they move on.

It’s an embarrassing little moment of course, one I’m sure many of us have had.  I, for one, remember once getting off the bus on the way to a final exam in undergrad and wiping out as soon as I put my foot on the icy curb.  I got up, I made a little joke, and I limped to my exam.  That was the end of it.  Well, I did limp for a few days after that and I had come a day early for the exam, misreading the schedule, but overall, it was just a blip.  For any other person, it’s a bad day at work at the most.  These things happen, but life goes on.

Not for Ron Trosper, though.  For Ron, his chair breaking is the start of a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a chair company that does not exist.

Ron is played by creator and writer of the show Tim Robinson (Friendship, I Think You Should Leave), and while I don’t think I’ve always gelled with his comedic styling, I can’t imagine this role working with anyone else.  There is a level of commitment that it takes to play a character like Ron so well that can only come from the mind of the person who created him.  That’s my theory, anyway.  Because I don’t think there was a single moment in the series that I could point to where it felt like Tim Robinson was acting.  And that speaks both to the strength of his performance and the strength of the writing.

This is a hard one to talk about because I feel like trying to relay the story to you much further would not only rob you of experiencing it yourself, but also, it would feel a bit like I’m lying to you by pretending I understood everything I just witnessed over the 8 episode season of The Chair Company.  This was by far the wildest, weirdest, strangest, and most confounding show that I can remember watching.  This is the kind of thing that maybe I really appreciate because of the amount of media I consume, it gets harder and harder for things to stand out.  So when something does, I really become engrossed in it.  Even if I don’t strictly like it right away, I tend to stick with it because I enjoy being immersed in the fringes of creativity when we’re often in a sea of same feeling shows and movies.  Much like Pluribus, The Chair Company is unpredictable from scene to scene and I love it for that.  Every time I think I know where something is going, it takes me in a completely different direction.  And not just opposite to what I thought would happen, no, some wildly unforeseen option that keeps me completely on my toes.   

Nothing about this show is pretty.  Everything is unpleasant.  The people are unpleasant, the way they communicate is unpleasant, the abnormal amount of screaming is unpleasant—you get the idea.  Even the drab Ohio suburb that could exist in any place across the United States feels like it drains the color out of your life when you see it (Ohio is really having a moment; Columbus and its surrounding cities here and Toledo in The Paper).  I scarcely believe what I’m about to say about what is ostensibly a comedy, but it’s gritty.  People get into fights and it’s ungainly and that makes sense.  Why would Ron, who works in real estate development and has never shown any proclivity towards any sort of martial art, be an accomplished fighter?  His punches are floppy, his form is unbalanced, and he spits and drools in feral rage.  And when things start to get out of hand, no one is averse to just yelling loudly and nonsensically until the altercation simply stops.  It feels so uncomfortably realistic, but I also have to imagine that’s the point.

Of course, the people you meet along the way through this chair conspiracy rabbit hole are just as important as the plot itself because it’s the characters that sell this simultaneously mundane and fantastical premise.  Ron’s wife Barb, played by Lake Bell (Childrens Hospital, Bless This Mess), has quit her job to spearhead a new startup, which is a time-intensive project, so she has her nose to the grindstone as Ron spirals.  Ron’s son Seth, played by relative newcomer Will Price, is struggling with his own teenage dilemmas and, frankly, it’s not a child’s job to keep tabs on their parents anyway.  So a lot of this goes unnoticed except by the always excellent Sophia Lillis (Dungeons & Dragons, It), who plays Ron’s older daughter Natalie.  In the midst of planning her wedding to her girlfriend Tara, Natalie is pretty much the only one who starts to see that Ron is unraveling as he gets deeper into the conspiracy about the chair company.  Her role smaller than I expected for an actress of her caliber, but I get the feeling we’re going get more of her as the show continues.  Along the way, he meets Mike, played by journeyman Joseph Tudisco (he was definitely in one episode of a network show you might have seen), an unstable strongman who acts as a private eye and becomes Ron’s only confidant and ally in his hunt.  And then there’s Jeff Levjman, played by the always reliable Lou Diamond Phillips, who seems to pop up in shows like this more often now, later in his career (some memorable appearances for me include Psych, Search Party, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine).  Jeff is Ron’s obscenely wealthy, self-obsessed boss and CEO.  His role in the show grows as the season goes on and I’m so, so excited to see how it changes.

Like I said, this show is a little hard to explain.  Even Lake Bell struggled to explain the series to her own mother, sort of settling on a version of “it’s about a guy who sits on a chair that breaks and he tries to find out why it broke”.  And I think this is where much of the brilliance of the show lies.  Tim Robinson exhibits this mastery of the mundane being taken to the absolute breaking point of absurdity.  On the surface, it feels a lot like cringe comedy, especially as you see him at a family dinner at a restaurant arguing with the waitress about the continued existence of malls and how almost anything can be a mall, including that restaurant.  But what starts feeling like a dated cringe bit turns into a wildly escalating scenario that snowballs out of control almost every time.  Robinson subjects the audience to high levels of absurdity in almost every corner of the show—little things like the custodian at his office being highly protective of his wheelbarrow or a clerk at a shirt store pulling out all the stops to get people to sign up for their membership program.  I can’t wholeheartedly tell you that all this works because I’m not entirely sure it does, but it grabbed me in a way that really surprised me.

The conspiracy starts out as a pretty normal kind of thing in the facade-focused world in which we live.  He wants to reach out to the company that makes the chairs, Tecca, and lodge a formal complaint and get an apology over what happened to him.  But he gets the customer service runaround, even more so than normal, when he reaches out to Tecca, finding them to be incredibly circuitous and secretive.  I’ve had some bad customer service experiences in my time, including four hours on the phone over a TV installation that never happened, so it’s really relatable.  At first.  Before the spiral.  Oh, but the spiral.  The spiral is this show.  As he peers through the looking glass into the world of Tecca, we as the audience get to question so many things.  Has Ron stumbled upon a vast conspiracy?  Is something going on with the chair company?  Is he in danger?  Is his family in danger?  Or has he just gone down the Charlie Day cork board route and is blowing everything out of proportion?  Are the people staring at him menacingly really staring at him menacingly?  Or are they just having a bad day?  Are those people talking about Ron and tracking his every move?  Or are they just having a quiet chat?  Not only does the show string you along this journey of Ron’s as he goes through layer after artichoke layer through shell companies and whispers and lies, but it also puts you in Ron’s mindset.  The show itself is part of the conspiracy, I’ve stopped trusting what I see.  Are the reveals really reveals?  Are they happening?  Is Ron completely misreading everything?  Are we watching the show through the lens of an unreliable narrator?  I just don’t know.  And the show doesn’t want you to know.  And that’s what I find so captivating about The Chair Company.

Still, as much as I liked the first season of this show, it’s hard to recommend.  I would wager that if you’re a fan of Tim Robinson, you’ll like it a lot.  I haven’t seen that much of his work other than a few sketches here and there, and while it’s been a little hit or miss for me (as sketch comedy tends to be), this feels like a very Tim Robinson experience.  If you’re into that, you’re probably going to love it.  But as someone fairly lukewarm to Robinson, I found myself reaching for the remote every time I got the little notification on my phone that a new episode was available and watching it immediately.  So it very well could have wider appeal than just Tim Robinson fans.  I think the hardest part of this show is how you decide to engage with it.  As you know, I’m a huge whodunnit fan and I’m from the era of Lost conspiracy theories and the subsequent bevy of JJ Abrams-like mystery box shows that followed, so I’m always looking for a mystery to solve.   But I think the best way to experience this show is far more hands-off.  Let Ron do the detective work for you and just sit back and enjoy the spectacle of a relatively normal man thrust into what could be the highest stakes or lowest stakes thing in his life. 

It’s weird and unpleasant and strange and oddly wonderful.  There are some nice moments throughout the series, especially towards the end of the first season, where you get to see glimpses of Ron as a good father and good husband.  And while they seem a bit abrupt compared to the other moments of the show, they manage to not feel unearned; rather they seem a bit like a parting in the storm clouds of Ron’s fervor and they can be quite touching if you let your guard down for the rare genuine moments in the show.  Which can be hard to do because the show really puts you on edge.  As I said, it’s billed as a comedy, but it’s also called a thriller.  The blend of comedy and horror mechanics, often leveraging the score to put real tension and a sense of dread in some scenes.  It’s unsettling at times.  Because the nature of the show is so amorphous, it leaves you feeling that truly terrible things are on the table because you just don’t know where it’s going to go.  Again, the throughline here is unpleasantness and The Chair Company is as unpleasant as it is engaging and entrancing.  The entire first season is out on HBO Max now and it’s already been renewed for a second season, thank goodness.

The Beetle Has Landed

Growing up is hard, growing up in an immigrant family is harder.  You keep your head down, get through school, go to college, come home with six figures of debt and another three years of law school and a doubling of your debt on the docket.  And in the meantime, you work at a resort because your father had a heart attack and can’t work and your rent is being tripled because your neighborhood is being gentrified.  And then you get fired because you stuck up for a billionaire heiress who was being accosted by her billionaire aunt and the billionaire heiress tells you to come by the office the next day and then she gives you a beetle shaped alien artifact that bonds with you on a molecular level and the billionaire aunt wants to rip it out of you to turn it into a militarized exoskeleton.  Fairly universal experience, I know.  I certainly remember when I bonded with my alien exoskeleton.  But even something as mundane as that can be a superhero origin story.

Now, it might be a bit of an odd one to talk about Blue Beetle in 2025, considering it’s dead franchise after the fall of the Snyderverse and the rise of the Gunnmosphere.  But I still think there’s something worth talking about here and a movie worth watching.  Because while the story itself may no longer be canon to DC’s cinematic universe and it’s a fairly derivative story, it’s told with the heart and enough relevance that make this a worthy reference point for the character moving forward.

Let’s start with the good.  The eventual Blue Beetle is Jaime Reyes (that’s pronounced “hi me”, which will come up), played by Xolo Maridueña of Cobra Kai fame, and he’s surrounded by his family, most notably his sister Milagro, played by Belissa Escobedo (Happy’s Place, Hocus Pocus 2) and his crazy, conspiracy theorist uncle Rudy, played by George Lopez (George Lopez).  Maridueña is just so likable; he’s optimistic, naive, he’s Miguel Diaz, Johnny Lawrence’s star student.  You can’t not like him, so it doesn’t really matter that he’s wrapped up in all that Tom Holland Spider-Man energy.  Rudy provides a lot of the comedy, even though it does at times feel like George Lopez is doing a character written for Jack Black, he manages the right level of kook and quirk to make Rudy a good addition to this movie.  His conspiracy theories are off the wall and he does pipe in with lore dumps now and then, but it’s largely a pleasant experience.  And his sister Milagro brings the snark and the social commentary (which can be a little heavy handed, especially in the first act, but it’s still effective enough at getting its point across).  The rest of Jaime’s family is also great, but since they often act as a family unit, until the end of the movie they don’t really stand out from each other (but when they do, it’s pretty worth it).  They feel like a fairly typical family too, stepping on each other’s sentences and generally being just annoying enough for you to believe that they’re really related, but not so much that you can’t stand them.  It’s a tightrope walk, but Blue Beetle pulls it off pretty well, but just like real family members, sometimes you just want them to take a breath.  Just for a moment.  Maybe that’s just me? 

They get to be real people too; perhaps not fully realized because it’s too many characters to focus on in one movie, but they feel real and “lived-in” when you see them interact with each other.  The Reyes are a convincing family unit that shows off their generosity, even thought they’re in the middle of losing their home in the Edge Keys of the fictional Palmera City, Texas.  And they face real issues, like hesitating to call the police because they don’t know what could happen when they show up.  The characters are what drive this movie; if you don’t like them, then the flaws of this movie will easily overwhelm the things they did right.  But, I think a lot of people will see themselves in the Reyes family and it really was very nice to see this kind of representation in a film of this magnitude.  It didn’t just have a lot of Latin stars; the director, Angel Manuel Soto, is Puerto Rican and the writer, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer is from Mexico.  That’s that level of vertical integration that makes a movie feel authentic and keeps it from feeling like it’s pandering to an audience.  You know, like the difference between BlacKkKlansman and Green Book.

It’s also refreshing to see a superhero who isn’t just another billionaire white dude.  Look, I love Batman and Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark made me care about Iron Man for the first time in my life, but there’s more to being a hero than not having any of the normal struggles that people whose bank accounts have fewer than nine zeroes go through.  It’s said that when Stan Lee was creating Spider-Man and Iron Man, he wanted to make the most relatable hero in our boy Pete and the least relatable hero in Stark, and, well, Iron Man’s still around so it’s proven to be a successful archetype.  Jaime Reyes is very much more like Peter Parker and I think that will resonate with a lot of people even if they’re not in that early-20s age range.  And, well, he’s just so damn likable, I mentioned that already.    

Maridueña is star material and it’s kind of a shame that he has the indignity of being in a movie that was the worst box office premiere in the DCEU for a decade before it released in 2023.  The movie was hit hard by superhero fatigue; people were already tired of the overstuffed genre and by the time the meant-for-streaming Blue Beetle came to theaters, no one really cared.  The reviews were mostly positive, garnering a 78% RT score.  It’s not a number that’s going to light the world on fire and I’ve mentioned the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes before, but it also managed a 90% audience score.  And while I generally side more with critics, I think that speaks to the crowd-pleasing nature of the film.  So while the movie seriously underperformed, none of that was down to Maridueña’s performance.  He’s so good on screen; Jaime is charismatic, genuine, humble, everything you want in a protagonist and in a superhero.  The kind of traits a symbiotic alien exoskeleton would look for when choosing a host—I just wish the movie touched on why it chose him instead of just that it chose him.  The kid has qualities, that’s easy enough to see.  But the movie strangely has no curiosity about why Jaime gets to bond with the Blue Beetle scarab over anyone else the scarab didn’t choose including the original Blue Beetle hero.  It’s an odd choice to not even address it, to have no one even ask the question why.  So while Maridueña puts in an admirable performance, the character doesn’t stand out enough to make him truly memorable.  I have to imagine there’s a scene somewhere on the cutting room floor that for some reason just didn’t make it into the movie that would explain this a little.  I saw Blue Beetle when it first hit streamers a year or so ago, but even that recently I couldn’t remember many salient details of the film.  I had the tangible memory of having a fun time watching it, but no lines or scenes really embedded themselves into my brain the way, say, Captain America casually saying “On your left” to Sam Wilson in Winter Soldier or Michael Peña confirming with Paul Rudd that they’re the good guys in Ant-Man has.  And of course nothing here can touch the “I am Iron Man” moment, which took years of building to get to, so it’s not like I expected that; but not one of the fights comes close to Cap v. Batroc.  It’s actually a shame to have as physically gifted an actor as Maridueña and not let him show off some of those martial arts skills that makes the action in Cobra Kai so convincing.  It doesn’t help that CGI is heavily relied on and more than a bit suspect in places, making it sometimes look like a big budget movie done cheaply, which perhaps betrays its made-for-streaming origins.

And now we really get to the not so good of Blue Beetle.  Unfortunately, even more than most origin story films, there’s very, very little here that’s original.  The movie skates by on the strength of the characters because some much of this film is cribbed from other movies, mostly MCU films.  And I’m not just talking about story beats either, it’s full gags.  When the scarab first bonds with Jaime, he flies up into the atmosphere and then comes back down through the roof, just like in Iron Man.  The scarab itself bonds to Jaime very similarly to the Venom symbiote (except it also burns off all his clothes and shoes, making it the least practical suiting up I’ve ever seen; hard to pop out, do some life-saving, and then come back to work or whatever completely stark naked, not to mention the clothes budget skyrocketing).  Then it wants to kill and talks to Jaime the way the Stark suit talks to Peter in Spider-Man: Homeward Bound (whichever the first one was) and it even has the ability to take total control of Jaime’s body like in Upgrade.  Except this time it’s pop star Becky G (Power Rangers) as Khaji-da, the scarab, instead of Jennifer Connolly as Suit Lady Karen.  The evil CEO wants to build a more evil version of the good thing, just like in Iron Man and Ant-Man.  Almost scene to scene, you’ll recognize things you’ve seen in other superhero films.  And there’s such an insistence on family togetherness and family is mentioned so many times that I expected Dominic Toretto to pop up just for a cameo.  Like I said before, the fights aren’t all that memorable either; the scarab can create anything Jaime can imagine to fight with, like Green Lantern’s power ring. 

But a lot of that turns out to be blaster arms and a Buster Sword; this isn’t to say that the writer isn’t imaginative, but rather it feels like the studio isn’t.  I don’t mind that he conjured up a Buster Sword, I’d probably want one too because I spent all video game time as a kid trying to beat Sephiroth before homework time, but there’s nothing establishes Jaime as these interests.  In fact, as endearing as he is, there isn’t a lot of character development.  Jenny Kord, the good billionaire, played by Brazilian actress Bruna Marquezine, immediately trusts Jaime after one failed act of chivalry, entrusting him to secret away the scarab out of nowhere.  Her aunt, Victoria Kord, played by Oscar winner and five time nominee Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking), is so cartoonishly evil it’s hardly believable and on top of that, she really goes out of her way to be slightly racist a lot.  I mean, we probably all know people like that, but it just feels like too much.  Yes, there are moments of unintended hilarity as an actress of her caliber says some of the lines she has to say, but that’s not enough to keep me from feeling like Victoria needs to be taken back to the drawing board.  She already wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machine super soldiers, but she’s also a racist?  And so is her receptionist?  What was that interview process like?  She’s so over the top, she’s one of the weakest parts of this film.  The pacing is also a bit of an issue; at 2 hours and 7 minutes, it’s hardly a short movie, but because of the pacing, just a few too many things felt rushed, like the scarab handoff or the burgeoning romance between Jaime and Jenny, while many things that needed to be developed weren’t.

So what we end up with is a seriously flawed movie that has enough redeeming qualities to be both good enough fun to watch and serve as a strong character foundation for the Blue Beetle going forward, should James Gunn and DC decide the revisit the character—which I believe they should.  With Gunn’s focus on heartfelt, joyful superheroing, Jaime Reyes and Xolo Maridueña deserve another shot.  His whole family does, really.  There are real characters here, real love being shown, real stories being told.  They just need more time to tell them and more time to develop these characters who are instantly endearing, but largely unexplored.  And there’s value here, both artistic and social; in 2025, the sight of a terrified Latin family being terrorized at gunpoint by masked paramilitary operatives with questionable legal authority and depraved morality isn’t just fiction anymore, it’s a reality all over the country.  Blue Beetle intentionally tells the story of immigrants in America, documented and undocumented, and their struggle, in a real way despite the absolutely fantastical setting of having an alien beetle fuse itself to your spine.  This kind of representation is getting harder to find and we need art that reflects society.  And that includes big budget family films like Blue Beetle.  James Gunn, Jake Schreier, and Matt Shakman proved with Superman, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps that just two years after superhero fatigue was at its peak, it’s not superheroes we were tired of.  No, certainly not; we need heroes now more than ever, on-screen and off.  We were tired of paint by numbers universe builders that didn’t differentiate themselves from what came before and only served to set up what comes next.  Blue Beetle was a start for DC, and now James Gunn has taken the ball and run with it in earnest.  But until we get to see Gunn’s take on the cerulean superhero, we can still go back and enjoy this flawed and fun film, streaming on Netflix and HBO Max.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!  If you do like I do and use a movie to push through that turkey-borne post-meal malaise, Blue Beetle isn’t a bad choice for families with older kids, but I would once again remind you that The Paper Tigers, which I covered last week, is kind of a perfect family film.  And because I believe in the rule of threes and linking to you to previous blog posts, I will once again offer Superman for your viewing pleasure.  And remember, if you are celebrating this holiday, please do it safely.  And save me a piece of pie.

The Karate Midlife Crisis

We’ve had cozy mysteries, that’s a tried and true genre.  We’ve even had cozy horror now, in a way, with Little Evil.  And now I’d like to share with you a 2020 indie film on Netflix that may well be a truly cozy martial arts movie.  So let’s get into writer-director Quoc Bao Tran’s feature film debut, The Paper Tigers.

We open on an older man stumbling into an alley as a mysterious assailant fights him.  Poor old guy doesn’t stand a chance; he never makes it out of that alleyway.  It’s at this point we flashback to when that old guy was younger.  He was Master Cheung, a Sifu (also called Shifu), a teacher of Chinese gung fu (also known as kung fu, depending on what Romanization of the word you use), and he has only ever taken on three students.  Jim, Hing, and the best student, Danny, aka Danny Eight Hands because he was so good, it seemed like he had eight hands.  Together they called themselves the Three Tigers and they fought to defend their clan’s honor against other schools.  Honor was a big part of their training, but being kids growing into teenagers who have never lost a fight, it’s hard not to let arrogance creep in.  Over the years, though, a rift has driven them apart and the realities of middle age have set in.

Danny, played by Alain Uy (Helstrom), is a divorced dad, running late to pick up his kid.  And when he does have him, he’s so busy that he has to cancel their fun day together to go get work done.  On the way home, though, he’s jumped in front of his house—not to worry, it’s more of a vibe check than anything else.  It’s his old friend Hing, played by Ron Yuan (Mulan, The Accountant), in town because of their Sifu’s death.  He’s the one who has to break the news to Danny.  At the funeral, still without Jim, they run into Danny’s old nemesis Carter, played by Matthew Page (Enter the Dojo, Odd Thomas), who is in charge of a different school now.  There’s a lot of banter here between the Tigers and Carter, some of it quite juvenile, with a lot of cultural appropriation on the part of Carter.  It’s played for laughs and it mostly works, but there’s a deeper story behind that which we’ll touch on later.  But it’s Carter who drops the penny—the police believe that Sifu Cheung died of a heart attack, but Carter doesn’t buy it.  He believes, as the audience knows, that the Sifu was murdered.  This sets the three distant disciples on a path to reunite and find Sifu Cheung’s murderer.

Danny is skeptical, but Hing starts to go full Poirot, trying to connect the dots.  But 25 years changes a lot of things.  Hing walks with a limp now, permanently in knee brace, after getting injured on the job.  Danny’s trying to prove he can do 50/50 custody and he has become a total pacifist now; after years of proving himself in fight after fight, he hasn’t thrown a punch or made a fist in two and a half decades.  He tells his son never to fight, not even when being bullied.  The better man walks away, he tells him.  The better man finds a solution that isn’t fighting.  Danny Eight Hands now works in insurance and drives a minivan.  It’s not even one of the fancy new ones with all the gadgets I secretly enjoy getting as an Uber (I admit, I’m still a child, and remotely operated sliding doors makes me feel like I’m on the Enterprise) or even a Honda Odyssey, it’s an aging Toyota Sienna.  The only one of them who has kept up with martial arts in any form is Jim, played by Mykel Shannon Jenkins (The Gods, Undisputed 3), who now has integrated other disciplines, such as Brazilian jujitsu, into his life.  Gung fu is no longer a big part of it.

Three men, separated by 25 years and a rift that split them apart seemingly irrevocably, are brought back together to find justice for the man who taught them everything they knew.  When they were old enough, Sifu Cheung had them take an oath to honor their Sifu, to be loyal to their brothers, and to defend the weak.  Because that was always the point of any sort of violence to Sifu Cheung.  Gung fu without honor is just fighting, he taught them; a lesson they didn’t always take to heart as much as they should have.  But now as they find themselves reunited because of that man’s death, the idea of honor and defending the weak comes to the forefront of their minds.

The Paper Tigers has a lot going for it.  I mentioned that some of the banter could be juvenile at times, especially between Carter and Hing, with Carter body shaming Hing and Hing making allusions to the side effects of the steroids he is certain Carter took.  But where the comedy in this movie really works is the physicality.  I have rarely seen a film that marries excellent fight choreography with great physical comedy in the way that The Paper Tigers does.  Seeing these middle aged men try to go toe to toe with younger gung fu practitioners is full of funny moments injected into the very convincing fight scenes.  It adds a layer of levity to the situation that is crucial to making this a cozy film.  While it deals with serious subjects, the film always keeps just enough humor for things not to get too heavy.  Well, most of the time.  There were definitely moments that left me feeling very emotional, especially as the film draws to a close and they have to face the totality of their lives.  They reminisce and trade regrets, each of them feeling still the weight of decisions they made when they were teenagers and now with the loss of Sifu Cheung, some doors are simply closed to them for reconciliation.  Memory lane is a bittersweet road to drive down when you’re there because of someone who is no longer around.  You may not have heard of many of these actors (I know I haven’t, despite the fact that I have seen some of them in other projects, including the awful live action Mulan), but they are able to convey so much emotion through just their facial expressions alone that you’d expect them all to be stars.  Alain Uy especially does a great job as Danny, the clear star character of the film and Sifu Cheung’s senior student.

It’s hard sometimes to discuss films like this that are supposed to exist in the real world (there are some fantastical elements here, though, with ancient Chinese medicine and mythical moves; fairly standard martial arts movie tropes, but pulled off lovingly and with care) and yet advocate violence at times.  A lot of the fighting in The Paper Tigers happens in a world of rules; when you fight, you fight with honor, and at the end of the fight, you walk away respecting the other party.  Kind of like the secret assassin underworld of John Wick, people don’t break the rules without consequence.  And the movie really stresses the need for honor when fighting and the need to stick up for those who are unable to defend themselves.  Might isn’t right without a guiding hand; otherwise it’s just bullying.  And The Paper Tigers is very clear about that.  We live in a world where the defenseless are more than bullied, with extreme violence being used against them, and there aren’t enough people who are able to stand up to protect them.  These bullies are in positions of power and acting without consequence.  So to see a film like this, a film where three normal guys who have problems and have walked away from a life of discipline and honor find a way to stand back up and do the right thing really got me.  The film has a lot to say about bullying, toxic masculinity, racism, and cultural appropriation and it does it all quite well.  When Danny’s son confronts him about gung fu after defending a friend who was being bullied at school for who he is, Danny is forced to reconcile a life of pacifism with the life he used to lead, where his training was meant to defend the defenseless.  He struggles with what the right thing to do is, both as a father and as a disciple of the slain master.  I know I’m on record as being pretty down on fathers and, frankly, the only way Danny is getting a Father of the Year mug is if he buys one himself from Spencer’s Gifts, but seeing him try to be a better father to his son was truly touching.

As fun as this movie is, there’s proper depth to it, thanks to the excellent characters.  While Danny is the main protagonist, Hing and Jim both have emotional weight and character journeys to go through as well.  It’s them, their experiences, their genuine affection for each other and their Sifu, though strained at the time, that makes this movie more than just a fun action-comedy romp.  It’s not trying to be Rush Hour, which is a fun movie in its own right, because it chooses to do more by telling personal stories that are very real.  Regret is real.  We live with the weight of our choices and once done, our actions can’t be reversed.  We can do our best to make up for them, to atone, but there’s nothing that can actually undo the things you’ve done.  Time may be a flat circle after all, but as we experience it, time only flows one way.  Everything done is done forever.  And these characters have to come to terms with their pasts if they’re going to have a future and make recompense for their choices.  So it’s one part action-comedy, one part character drama and it comes together in a film that is likely to make you laugh and cry in equal, satisfying measure.    

Sometimes the story of a movie’s production is almost as interesting as the movie itself.  When trying to secure funding for the film, Quoc Bao Tran was told by studios that they wanted Bruce Willis to star and a role to be written for Nicolas Cage.  As much as it might have been humorous to watch his nouveau shamanic acting in a film like this, it would have been a completely different movie and lost a lot of authenticity that makes it so special.  Carter insists on being called Sifu now, a request that none of the Tigers will comply with, and he speaks in ancient Chinese proverbs when the Tigers have wait for him to repeat what he said in English.  Carter’s cultural appropriation feels like a response to the pressures from Hollywood studios to whitewash a movie written and directed by an Asian-American who drew upon his experiences as a child growing up loving martial arts.  Tran insisted on a minority cast, with all three leads being Asian or Black.  And that goes so far to make this film not a corny, campy, inauthentic martial arts film where big Hollywood names dominate, but rather a love letter to martial arts films like The Karate Kid (with a very fun cameo from an actor from the film series and Cobra Kai) and Enter the Dragon that addresses real life problems.  Tran turned to Kickstarter and eventually private investors to deliver the film as he wanted it to be.  And not only is that admirable, he pulled it off with great success.

Even though it’s just 1 hour and 48 minutes, The Paper Tigers isn’t exactly breezy, because it does take its time to sit with the characters and slow the action down, but without the scenes where these three men reminisce and try to figure out what it means to be good men the movie just wouldn’t have worked.  One of the most successful things about this PG-13 film is that it’s the kind of film that has a moral and is written in a way to accessible to people of all ages.  It’s not often I get to watch a movie that is truly a family film.  I cover kids’ media quite a bit and I love when they are able to get adults in on the fun as well, but this feels like a movie written for adults, but with kids in mind.  You could gather the family around the television this coming Thanksgiving and watch this one with people of all ages and it will entertain them and more.  The Paper Tigers is exactly the kind of film that I love to feature on this blog because it needs and deserves a bigger audience.  It’s a textbook, Attack the Block level of hidden gem that I absolutely adore bringing to you.  It’s not just a fun film that’s cozy; it has weight, it has meaning, and it’s the kind of movie that makes your life enriched for having watched it.  That’s what art is supposed to do; enrich your lives, not just studio executives.  With a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% audience score, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by opening up Netflix and joining the audience.  I love this film and I think you will too.

The Contrast of Us

Chaos all around you.  Confusion everywhere you look.  Pandemonium at the laundromat.  Bedlam at the bar.  Panic at the disco. All around the world, something is spreading quickly from person to person, causing them to violently seize up and then attack everyone around them.  There is nowhere to run.  Nowhere to hide.  They will find you.  And there’s no way to stop them.  Welcome to Apple TV’s new series Pluribus, by Vince Gilligan.  What starts in a lab and gets out spreads violently across America and the world, causing millions upon millions of death.  And the ones who survive, well, they don’t come back the same.  Only a handful of people are immune.

I know this sounds like the plot to the next tired The Walking Dead spin-off, but it’s not.  While there are a lot of similarities to the common opening gambit of zombie apocalypse films, and the pilot episode will evoke those feelings of sudden, cataclysmic dread and confusion, Gilligan takes his show in a completely different direction.  After Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul showed us the depths of depravity and organized crime in Albuquerque, we’re going all the way back to Albuquerque again (hopefully this isn’t becoming his coastal Maine) with this unique end of the world show.  Pluribus also marks Gilligan’s return to his other roots, science fiction; he wrote 30 episodes and produced 127 of The X-Files.  So this isn’t a wild turn for him, he’s as pedigreed as they come.  He’s also an acclaimed VHS game actor.

I should say that at the time of writing this, only two episodes have aired so far, so this is going to be closer to a Lone Wolf and Stub installment than a full series analysis, I just don’t have a punny name for watching a TV show on my sofa that came out recently.  So I will be avoiding as many spoilers as possible, because if you don’t know the premise already, this show is a wild ride from jump.  For me, all I needed to hear was Rhea Seehorn and Vince Gilligan and I was in; I shut off the trailer midway through and went back to watching old episodes of Taskmaster.  And if Pluribus turns out to be as good as I think it’s going to be based on the promise that it shows in these first two episodes, it will most definitely warrant a follow-up once the season wraps.  Because I was that engrossed by the story we’ve seen so far and I cannot wait to see more.

Now it’s time to meet Carol Sturka, played by Better Call Saul alum Rhea Seehorn, an author in the middle of a reading and book signing at Barnes and Noble (glad to see that these things still exist).  Her audience is absolutely captivated and is almost entirely comprised of middle aged white women.  She writes that kind of romantasy novel that you see in airports and train stations; the ones that leave the author wealthy, but unfulfilled.  At least that’s the case for Carol, as she even refers to her work as mindless crap.  It also appears that because the key demographic of her novels is a particular kind of person, she seems to hide her sexuality; her manager Helen is also her romantic partner (I’ve seen some outlets refer to her as Carol’s wife, but that doesn’t make much sense if she’s hiding that information publicly and not using a pen name).  Seehorn continues to be the most underrated actress working in television today.  She deserved every Emmy for playing Kim Wexler and was completely snubbed.  And I mean every Emmy.  Lead Actress in a Drama Series, Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Reality Competition Program, I don’t care; if it’s an Emmy, she deserved it.  It doesn’t take long for her to show off those incredible acting skills either, with the pilot giving her very strong material to work with and showcase her range as an actress; levying both comedic timing and dramatic skill to portray a very real feeling person in an extraordinary situation.  A situation in which she carries the extreme weight of responsibility, struggles with grief and isolation, and has to figure out how to survive in a world where she is nearly a singular phenomenon.

This is one of the most striking shows of the year.  Vince Gillian’s visual style is plastered all over this show; the shot framing, the angles, the shot composition, and I’m sure as the series continues, I’ll develop a better understanding of the color theory here.  Because it’s Vince Gilligan and there’s always a color theory in his work, but without knowing where the season goes, it’s hard to comment on it.  But it’s something you feel instinctually as you watch the show.  Every color is there for a reason, I’m sure of it.  I’m also picking up on some religious imagery, but I’m not well-versed enough in Catholicism to pick up on all of it (Gilligan was raised Catholic), but the number 12 does come up a few times and I know what that means.  Even the name itself is charged with social commentary.  Pluribus, Latin for “of many”, adorns the back of every piece of American currency, which, in the real world is the endless pursuit of a few and the grudging necessity of most, but in Pluribus, it is suddenly utterly meaningless.  There are also a lot of interesting things being said here already; this show mirrors our world.  Without going into too much detail, I will say that is very much in conversation with the post-pandemic society we have now.  Gilligan touches on ego fragility, echo chambers, digital isolation, and themes of happiness, misery, and generative AI as well.

There are other concepts that I don’t even want to bring up because you should go into Pluribus as fresh as possible.  It’s a great thing, not having expectations for a piece of media and an even better thing when that media keeps surprising you at every turn.  Which is what Pluribus does; every time I think it’s going in one direction, it goes in another.  And not the complete opposite, often it’s an outcome I never even considered.  So refreshing.  And it asks a lot of questions about what our society is now and what it could become.  And more than that, more than anything else that really struck me about Pluribus’s commentary on today’s society, is the biggest question so far.  What are you supposed to do if the world is ending and the few people still remaining in it are fine with that?  Carol so desperately wants to save humanity—she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t know anything—but she’s finding that help is hard to find because people are simply unwilling to even entertain that they should be doing anything.  Because who really cares if it’s an apocalypse as long as it’s a comfortable one?

The show is absolutely captivating.  Each episode so far has been about an hour long and it was the first two hour block in recent memory that I didn’t even think about picking up my phone.  I couldn’t look away.  Even through the 12 minute wordless sequence at the beginning of the second episode, I was glued to the screen in a way I haven’t been in a long time.  And as the events unfolded, I found myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the show.  It could well be Apple TV’s next big hit, along the lines of Severance, Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking, (although Apple also gave us Fountain of Youth) and with Vince Gilligan at the helm, I have a pretty high degree of confidence that he will stick the landing.  Now, it’s no secret that I found Breaking Bad to be overrated, but I thought Better Call Saul was one of the most brilliant pieces of television I’ve ever seen, from start to finish.  So many times when someone asks me about a show, I say things like “Oh yeah, those first few seasons were great” or “It had a lot of promise”, but Better Call Saul is one I can wholeheartedly say was fantastic from start to finish.  Even Breaking Bad, which, again, I did not like, had one of the best series wrap-ups out there; it was the kind of series finale JJ Abrams could never even dream of.  So I am pretty hopeful that Pluribus will continue to be as strong as it started.  Pluribus is streaming exclusively on Apple TV, releasing weekly on Fridays.