The Penguin with the Mad, Bad Scar

You can put away the shovels; there’s no digging necessary, the lede will not be buried.  The Penguin is one of the best shows HBO (and streaming on Max) has made in years and definitely the best show they’ve made since Succession ended.  If you’re looking to fill a Logan Roy-shaped hole or you’re wondering why House of the Dragon isn’t satisfying your need for Game of Thrones content and you’re hoping to find what will, look no further than The Penguin.  You can stop searching for a replacement for prime GOT, you can stop waiting for the next Succession-level show, you can even stop reading right here (but don’t, please).  The Penguin is simply that good.  Is it as good as Succession?  No, I don’t think so.  Not quite.  Is it better than Game of Thrones when you look at the entire series as a whole?  Absolutely.

If you don’t know the Penguin as a character, he’s Oswald Cobblepot, a deformed Gotham City criminal with delusions of standing; he lives in a sewer, drives a distinct limousine, eats live fish, and has a crazy array of trick umbrellas that have more gadgets than a Swiss Army knife—everything but the carousel reversal spray—but this time, he’s a bit different.  He goes simply by Oz to those who know him well and the last name is shortened to Cobb.  And while he doesn’t live in the sewers, he certainly has permanent residency in the Gotham underworld.  Gone are the tux and tails, gone is the limousine, gone is the living sushi.  Replacing them is a series of clothes normal people wear, a purple Maserati with gold wheels that’s so ugly it looks like something that even Jared Leto’s Joker would reject and was left on a dealer lot gathering dust, and, you know, cooked food.  Oz’s nickname—the Penguin—is a sore spot, born from his distinctive waddle due to a deformed leg.  Colin Farrell picks up the role from the conclusion of Matt Reeves’s The Batman, as Gotham reels from tragedy that changes the city forever.

But The Penguin isn’t interested in Batman.  As much as he remains a looming specter over the city, The Penguin can stand on its own as a story and doesn’t rely on name dropping constantly like HotD. Rather, the show is interested in telling its own story, getting deep into the seedy underbelly of their fair city, telling Oz’s tale as a man who gambles more than Oceans 11, 12, and 13 combined and shucks and jives more than the Duke boys.  He’s always looking for an angle, doing his best to walk into very dangerous rooms and walk out somehow still alive.  I promise you, no big top has ever had a more precarious tightrope act, nor one nearly this impressive.  Farrell completely disappears into the role of Oz Cobb, thanks in part to his extremely convincing make-up job, but also his performance.  If you remember Farrell solely from his early 00s heartthrob roles, it may come as a surprise, but his acting ability has always been there.  In Bruges and, more recently, The Banshees of Inisherin cemented him as a great actor in my mind (and yes, even Fright Night); hell, even in the terrible second season of True Detective, his performance was possibly the only redeeming quality.  Farrell is on top of his game here.  And the best part is that he’s not alone.

To call The Penguin a star turn for Cristin Milioti is to understate how much she should be a household name already.  If you only know her as the mother who got in the way of Ted and Robin in the awful How I Met Your Mother, you have been sleeping on one of the most talented actresses to grace the silver screen in years.  After her role in Fargo season two, I watched and waited for her to get her due and start to pop up everywhere.  Yes, she did the wonderful Groundhog Day-like Palm Springs that released during the pandemic and her episode of Mythic Quest was the best in the entire series, but that didn’t do as much to make her stock rise as it should have.  I’m hoping that’s not the case with The Penguin, because Milioti deserves all the praise I can heap on her and more.  Here, she plays Sofia Falcone, daughter of the recently deceased mob boss Carmine Falcone, released from Arkham Asylum after 10 years of incarceration.  And if you know anything about Batman lore, even if you go into Arkham sane, that much time there leaves indelible marks on mind and body.  Her performance as Sofia Falcone manages to outshine even Farrell’s as she navigates life on the outside in a family hostile to her and a city even more hostile, where she’s known as a serial killer called The Hangman.  I can’t go much into the details of her character arc because that would rob you of the true delight of watching her masterclass, but trust me when I say that whenever she is on screen, she will command your attention like little else in television does today.

And rounding out these powerhouse performances is a young actor I’ve never seen before, but, again, to tell you more about him, even naming the character here would take something from the experience for you, and you deserve to be as delightfully surprised and as on the edge of your seat as I was.  Suffice it to say, there’s no one in this show that doesn’t deliver.  Even the casting change from Jon Turturro to Mark Strong for Carmine Falcone (in flashbacks, obviously) works out just fine.  It’s a top notch cast working with a top notch script and great directors.  You’re in for a true treat.

Everything about this show is satisfying.  Every single little thread that is started is woven in and comes to an excellent conclusion; nothing is simple, nothing is convenient, nothing is unearned.  Everything about The Penguin is expertly crafted.  From wardrobe to cinematography to each and every line, this is peak television.  So many times, a scene would start one way and I thought I knew how it was going to end—just a side effect of consuming and studying media as much as I do—but then I would be delighted that it didn’t play out the way I thought it would.  More than just subverting expectations for the shock value, The Penguin puts together coherent and original storytelling where not everything goes to plan.  As Oswald Cobb does his best to say the things that need to be said to save his skin, the show manifests itself as a true accomplishment in a time when I feared that originality is only met with cancellation and the collective shrugging as we head off to the next by-the-numbers superhero movie or derivative procedural.  Yes, The Penguin is part of a huge IP, but it doesn’t need to be to work.   

Perhaps the most surprising and enjoyable part of this show is the incredible depth of storytelling.  This isn’t just a criminal story, it isn’t just Succession with guns, it’s a truly deep and rewarding narrative that will have you feeling things that you never expected to feel when watching a show about a character that was once fed a fish by Michelle Pfeiffer like a dolphin in a tank.  I’ve often said that villain-centric stories don’t interest me because villains are only interesting as foils for their heroes.  A great villain is nothing without a great hero with whom to battle.  Without a protagonist to root for, a villain story is just, well, a lone idiot dancing on a staircase to a song written by a child predator.  But even though the protagonist here is a villain, even though he is perhaps the monster people think he is, there are far worse in Gotham.  And the show doesn’t shy away from the things that make a villain, that build them, that turn normal people into those wrongdoers they eventually become; much like every good iteration of Batman has, including the venerable Batman: The Animated Series.  Nothing happens in a vacuum and The Penguin is keen to show you that.  While we’re all trying to battle not with monsters lest we become one, Oz’s battle is not just with the mobs and gangs of Gotham City, but with the city itself; with a broken system that allows people—all once innocent children at some point in their lives, just like Oswald was—to go down a path where crime and criminality are not only the sole option, but also aspirational.  It is through violence that those with no options find a way to make something of themselves, to be loved, to be adored, to snuff out their humanity and replace it with material success and power.  And in telling this story, The Penguin does what Joker utterly failed to do—present a compelling story with human characters who are at the mercy of an unforgiving world and respond in the only way they know how.  The Penguin is quite simply a must watch.

Bore-nado Alley

Twister was not a masterpiece.  In fact, I missed it the first time around and only saw it a few years ago.  It may seem strange now, considering the massive amount of content that’s available digitally, but when I was a kid, it was physical media. So you had to get people to agree to watch a movie and then go to a place and rent it.  My crush on Helen Hunt was never enough to win the argument as to what to rent, so I didn’t see it.

And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, my experience of Twisters.  Twister itself was a fairly ridiculous movie, but it did have a certain charm about it and it felt like a 90s disaster movie and lived up to that billing fairly well enough.  Twisters has more expectation coming with it because, whatever my opinion of the original movie is, a lot of people hold great affection for it, and decades later, there are some fairly big shoes to fill for Twisters.  Sure, they’re not Star Wars big, but I know lots of people who loved Twister.  And I am an unabashed fan of Glen Powell.  Ever since saw him grace my screen as the purposefully douchey Chad Radwell in Scream Queens, I thought he was the best thing about that show and I’ve been following his career ever since.  I even watched Anyone But You and enjoyed it.  He’s got a way of playing a character that you probably shouldn’t like, but do for some reason, and, well, I have to admire that.  His role in Top Gun: Maverick was just about the only thing I liked about that lazy rehash of the 80s classic mixed with a Death Star Trench Run against a nameless enemy.  So despite the tepid reviews (the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes continues, with this movie scoring a 75% and a whopping 91% audience score), I had relatively medium-high expectations for the film when I saw it come across my Peacock feed.

I’ll start with the good.  The majority of actors in the film do a really good job with what they’re given.  Glen Powell does not disappoint, despite the fact that everyone else was in a movie and his character was shot like he was in a Wrangler Jeans commercial.  Daisy Edgar-Jones was a true delight, never underselling her character and doing her best to bring emotional weight to the film.  Anthony Ramos, yes, John Laurens himself from the original cast of Hamilton, once again brings his immense talent to a blockbuster popcorn flick for which he is overqualified and, again, convincingly plays his character with the talent and aplomb that you’d expect from someone who broke out as an original Hamilton cast member.  I am really excited to see where his career goes.  And the same goes for Daisy Edgar-Jones, because if she can put in the shift she did in Twisters, I cannot wait to see what she can do with a really hefty, weighty role.  Now, to be fair, I believe her miniseries Normal People was well received, I’ve never seen Where the Crawdads Sing (which was not, at least critically), and I’ve only seen her in Under the Banner of Heaven, which was much more of an ensemble cast than a vehicle for her talent.

Even with the compression that happens with streaming media, the audio was fairly well mixed and the visuals came through with good fidelity.  I knew I was looking at CGI a lot, but it wasn’t so bad that it took me out of the moment, nor did I ever have trouble hearing the characters’ dialogue over the roar of the multiple tornados.  On the technical side, the movie was certainly successful.

But from a writing standpoint, it was very rough.  It doesn’t really matter how good or talented your cast is if your script feels like it was written by an 8th grader.  That’s harsh, I know, but after having watched so many good movies last month with you all, I had a hard time not contrasting it Late Night with the Devil, a movie in which not a single word, nor even a single frame of video was wasted; with Twisters, so much of it felt like filler to hit a minimum two hour runtime (the extra 2 minutes were icing on the cake, I suppose).  It starts with a flashback, which came with the painfully obvious immediate conclusion that it was about to turn into a bloodbath, because none of the characters were in a single trailer I saw for the film.  And that’s fine, it’s fine to spoon feed your audience trauma when you’ve got a film centered on a traumatized character; I’m not always against flashbacks.  But when you then rehash the opening 10 minutes of the film to explain what happened to another character, it sometimes feels like a clip show in the middle of the movie, a “previously on” segment that shouldn’t really be necessary because I just saw that scene an hour ago.  Adding insult to this, in that scene where she explains what happened, Edgar-Jones gives such an excellent performance selling her character’s emotions that it showcased what a good actress she is.  If there had been enough trust in the character and in the audience, that whole first scene could have been cut, because Edgar-Jones is a clearly a strong enough actress to convey what her character is going through, explain her reluctance to join Ramos’s team, and do it without zipping the spoon around like an airplane and telling the audience to open wide for the mashed pea purée landing.  I didn’t expect this film to blow me away, pardon the pun, but it could have been so much better and paced so much tighter with just a few tweaks.  Because the talent is there; in the rare moments that the script allows the actors to shine, they do.  This is not a low budget movie trying to punch above its weight class as a blockbuster, these are talented people playing roles very well, despite the writing.  It should have been better.

The structure of the movie, after the initial flashback scene, follows a terribly boring formula.  It goes storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, and so on and so forth.  There’s no real buildup of the story, there’s nothing it works towards, and it just feels like the time between storms is there to take up space between monster attacks, except in this case, the monster is CGI wind.  The movie has no flow, it has subplots that go nowhere, and a shoehorned romance between two characters that are so wildly not into each that it’s almost Jurassic World-level insulting.  Add to that a generic country music soundtrack in the talking scenes, all that rural noun, simple adjective, good ol’ boy bullshit, makes for a movie that’s a fairly unpleasant experience unless you’re just there for the spectacle of carnage.  Everything just happens and the climax occurs out of nowhere; the same as the tornadoes that occur in the other storm scenes.  I know these are storm-chasers and meteorologists and researchers, but they have Jack Bauer levels of bad luck when it comes to being in the path of funnel-shaped terror.  The movie flirts with the idea that climate change is causing strife for people and that there are those who are willing and happy to take advantage of that strife for their own personal gain, but it never comes close to actually having anything to say.  And somehow, that’s worse than not even trying, not even paying the half-assed lip service to what’s going on in the real world in which this movie is supposedly set.

How 91% of people enjoyed this, I’ll never know.  I worked very hard to enjoy myself while watching Twisters, and I just about did, until I sat down at my desk, starting thinking about it, and opened up this document.  It just makes me so disappointed to see what could have been a just fine summer blockbuster end up being such a huge waste of great actors because the studio and the writing just didn’t trust the audience to do some real storytelling.  It’s difficult to think of a movie that was so simultaneously overstuffed and yet so boring, but still with very good acting performances.  And maybe Twisters is worth watching just for that.  And maybe you’ll think I’m wrong and you’ll have just a lovely time with it.  Clearly, I’m in the minority here.  And baffled as to why. 

Disgrace Invaders

A few years ago, I wrote about how much it hurt to lose the ability to go to movie theaters and how it felt like it isolated me from both a social experience that I really enjoyed and a solitary one that felt like stolen time.  For me, going to the movies alone was like taking time back from everyone and everything else that demanded it from me.  It was two hours or so where I could turn my ringer off, put my phone in my pocket, and train my eyes on something other than the crushing weight of endless connectivity.  I praised trash TV like Tiger King for its ability to help us cope with the outside world that kept us on edge and, at the time, in fear of spreading a deadly disease to our friends and loved ones.  In times like that (and times like these), I still find merit in watching something with no real artistic value, something that doesn’t make you feel…anything, really.

And now I’ve found something else to replace that Tiger King feeling at a time when reality no longer makes sense to me.  If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know that I am a gamer.  I hesitate to call myself that because it’s become a loaded term these days, but I enjoy TTRPGs, board games, chess, and, especially, video games.  Video game media kind of sucks, though.  Until Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, game-based media was pretty poor.  What tends to be worse than video game-based movies are movies about gaming and gamers.  Sure, Grandma’s Boy had its moments here and there and was generally watchable, and Max Reload and the Nether Blasters had its own sort of low budget charm, but a lot of is very bad.  Leave aside films like Wreck-It Ralph and WarGames, which are quite good; that’s a different feel altogether than the kinds of films I’m talking about.  Record stores and movie rental places certainly drew the longer straw in that particular game.

So that brings me to the trash I’m talking about today: Pixels, a rightly forgotten film from 2015 with a robust 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% audience score.  Now, mind you, I’m not here to defend this movie as a misunderstood film that should actually be well regarded, like Be Kind Rewind or 2 Fast 2 Furious, because Pixels is truly, truly bad.  From the uninspired Suicide Squad-esque soundtrack (substituting 80s pop for the schizophrenic classic rock radio station that scored that film) to the by the numbers plot, pretty much everything about Pixels is bad storytelling.  And I knew this going in, after all, it is an Adam Sandler movie, which has been a hallmark for really terrible films for the past couple of decades now.  Sandler on the movie poster generally equals a bad movie.

And yet, somehow, this movie made an impression on me.  A world in which Kevin James is the President and Adam Sandler and Josh Gad are the only hopes for humanity against an alien invasion that modeled itself after an arcade tournament from 1982 that NASA sent to space for some reason manages to make more sense than the one we live in now.  And for that reason alone, it became some comforting piece of fast food that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards, but still, satisfied, in a strange and inexplicable way.  The amount of talent in this film that doesn’t show is truly stupefying.  Josh Gad, we know is a multitalented individual who can act, sing, and voice almost unbearably sweet cartoon characters; yet here, he’s a one dimensional stereotype that makes the characters in The Big Bang Theory seem deep.  Michelle Monaghan plays the obligatory romantic interest for Sandler, with the predictable lack of chemistry not keeping them from getting together for no reason at all other than the fact they’re both there, and I believe I’ve made it clear that I hold her in the highest regard.  She’s one of my favorite actresses of all time and one of the most talented, in my opinion.  But, that doesn’t really matter in a movie like this.  Peter Dinklage, at the time still riding high on the success of Game of Thrones, comes in with a fairly bog standard jerk character that really doesn’t strain his acting abilities.  Brian Cox, years before he dominated the screen in Succession, plays one of the Joint Chiefs whose main role is to insult Adam Sandler (which, well, I’d take that job too).  Sean Bean, Boromir himself, has a small part, but I guess after Fellowship, he has nothing left to prove, so why not get the paycheck?  Even Dan Akroyd, comedy royalty, has a neat little cameo.  But none of that really matters, by design.  It’s a bad movie and was always meant to be.

There is some novelty to seeing Pac-Man marauding down the streets like some giant yellow menace and I’m sure if I ever actually played Caterpillar, I would have had an opinion on how faithfully it was rendered on screen as an alien attack, but that was before even my time.  The production value of the film is quite good, certainly befitting of its $88 million budget.  But other than the fact that it looks good in HD there isn’t a whole lot to praise here. I mean, I guess I enjoyed it more than Ready Player One, which is a bar set so low an actual caterpillar could hurdle it.

However, it did something for me that I sorely needed at the time; it allowed me to turn my brain off.  And I mean all the way off.  Everything about it that was stupid, for some reason, didn’t bother me and its failure to engage my emotions in any way was a welcome reprieve from the world at large.  So now, in a way that I cannot possibly explain, I have a strange level of affection for a movie that is bad, that I know is bad, and that I couldn’t defend in just about any way.  I could say that I got three genuine laughs during its rather unnecessarily long 1 hour, 46 minute run time (the first 40 minutes or so really drag, with way too much setup), which is a better hit rate than some sitcoms.  It’s three more laughs than I got in the entire 16 episode first season of the Night Court reboot, but that’s not what matters to me when it comes to Pixels (also, don’t watch the Night Court reboot, it’s bad in a way that’s not good at all; I suffered through that so you don’t have to).

This isn’t really a review of Pixels, I couldn’t in good conscience tell you to watch it just because I found some comfort in it.  It’s more of a song of praise for finding the right kind of trash in the moment you need it.  And, dear readers, you know I try to be honest with you; I tell you when things make me cry, I tell you when they make me laugh, when they make me question my own existence, and when a guilty pleasure shouldn’t be guilty at all.  Because we are all so hard on ourselves in a world that’s really hard on us too, so if you like something that’s bad, or even if you don’t like it and it makes you feel good or even just feel nothing at all, that deserves to celebrated and you don’t deserve to feel bad about it.  So, I leave you with this final thought: remember to be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and if you can, watch Be Kind Rewind; it’s really a hidden gem.

Satanic Panic at the Disco

As Halloween season comes to a close, I want to give you one last look at the spooky stuff I’ve been watching in case you’re like me and your ideal Halloween night is spent with the lights off, hiding from trick-or-treaters, and watching something on your iPad with your headphones in.  But hey, I at least put a bowl out with some candy.  Well, I put a bowl out with a sign that says “Please take one” and everyone just assumes some kid dumped it into their sack before they got there.  It’s not very sporting, but what can you do? (I don’t actually do this; don’t do this, it’s not nice)

This probably won’t shock you, but I watch a lot of TV and movies, of all sorts of genres, and throughout the history of the medium. It’s to the point that, like rappers who can tell what their freestyle opponents are going to say before they finish their lines, I can usually tell what’s coming next.  I know the punchlines to jokes before they’re delivered, I usually have a good idea what the twists are going to be, so sometimes things just feel rote and predictable.  I value being surprised—which is different from being tricked, but that’s a topic for a different day.

The new Peacock original series Hysteria! is one of those surprising shows.  I settled in thinking it would be a fairly entertaining horror-comedy, something to akin to Totally Killer, Amazon’s retro time travel slasher comedy flick from 2023, in which Julie Bowen also stars.  But Hysteria! threw me for a loop.  I mean, it has Bruce Campbell in it, and four episodes in (halfway through the season), he seems to be the only character keeping his head on straight, which is not what you expect from a Bruce Campbell character.  I really appreciate that he’s playing against type here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The cast here is really good, with the more notable names like Campbell and Bowen giving way to the young actors and letting them showcase their performances.  But, I have to give a special shoutout to Nolan North as Bowen’s husband, the voice of Nathan Drake himself, the main character of my all time favorite video game series Uncharted and Allison Scagliotti, who played Claudia in Warehouse 13, a positively delightful sci-fi show whose time was, like many, far too short.

We start off as B horror movie as you can get.  It’s a small town called Happy Hollow in 1989 and two teens are getting hot and heavy while her mom is away and it does not take long before tragedy strikes.  Odd noises, an impending sense of doom; at first just, it was just that they were going to be caught by the girl’s pious mother, but then real fear sets in.  Two men in cloaks and masks burst through the door and drag the teens away.  Smash cut to the awkward Dylan at school, pining after the pretty, popular girl Judith, all the while ignored by everyone but his heavy metal bandmates.  Set firmly in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, Dylan decides to take advantage of the tragedy to create a hook for his band, because it’s all anyone can talk about now—you see, the missing boy, captain of the football team, of course, had a pentagram painted in red on his house.  So, he crafts new personas for himself and the band and leans into it.  Word of the concert spreads, the pretty, popular girl seems interested, and Dylan unwittingly puts himself at the center of mass panic.

And this is where things get precarious.  The first episode set up a fair amount of expectation for what was to come next, but I wasn’t hooked quite yet; I’d enjoyed what I’d seen, I had a few questions that needed answers—and you know how I love a mystery—so I was willing to stick around.  After all, shows need some time to gain their footing and while patience is much thinner these days than it used to be, I usually like to give a show three episodes if I think it has a chance of being good.  The pilot is a long one that does drag a little bit towards the end, as you blow past the usual 42 minute runtime of an hour long drama and to the full hour mark, there were many scenes that felt like the end of the episode, but then it kept going.  I wasn’t convinced yet, not fully, but I really wanted to know why all the news coverage was about the missing boy and not the missing girl and why the pentagram was painted on the boy’s house when they were taken from the girl’s home.  These are some of the questions that had me eager to watch the next episode.

The tone and focus change in the second episode, sort of eviscerating the expectations of it being a horror spoof, and while it still brings a few moments of levity and comic relief, the darkness at the center of the story starts to unfold.  I was so pleasantly surprised by how the show subtly diverted into a slightly more serious tone and started to thread its way through the different interconnected stories.  But what could easily feel like a JJ Abrams-esque mystery box that is going to present a great number of questions only to ignore or hand wave them away, Hysteria!, despite the comical punctuation in its name, presents itself as a serious show.  And by serious, I mean well-made, well thought out, and frankly, interestingly put together.  Rather than relying on big, dramatic reveals, Hysteria! metes out the information little by little, leaving you often learning something new about the mystery gripping the town and leaving you in the dark enough to remain in anticipation for what’s going to come next.  After four episodes, I’m pretty well hooked on this and I can’t wait to see if they can pull it off.

While Hysteria! doesn’t appear to have the depth or scares of Stranger Things, it’s hard not to draw parallels, especially with the fourth season, which relies heavily on Satanic Panic to scapegoat heavy metal fan Eddie Munson as the cause of the mysterious deaths in Hawkins.  Much like Eddie, Dylan becomes a bit of a pariah, but also a bit of a folk hero to the kids at school who have otherwise felt ignored—and that includes a surprisingly diverse cross section of the social scale.  However, Hysteria! doesn’t feel quite like it’s trying to be big, dumb fun, nor does it feel like it’s trying to be Stranger Things either.  It’s almost unfair to compare the two despite the surface level similarities, but it is inevitable.  Halfway in, the scares haven’t really ramped up—there are creepy rituals, a lot of metal music, a lot of makeup, and a lot of impassioned speeches about the lack of god in schools and community, given by Anna Camp’s suspicious-in-more-ways-than-one Tracy (you may remember her from Pitch Perfect, but to me she’ll always be Pam Beesly’s sister), but it doesn’t feel invested in making you jump out of your seat, which may disappoint diehard horror fans, but is just fine by me.  It feels like Hysteria! is building to something, perhaps a tale about the dangers of false narratives spreading like a virus, but it’s impossible to say just yet.  Because at the moment, it’s keeping me guessing as to where it’s going to go next.

Whether what’s happening in Happy Hollow is truly supernatural and demonic or just unreasonable fear gripping a panicked populace is yet to be seen.  But I’m definitely on board to see how it all pans out.