Reviews

I watch two (TWO!) episodes a night, out of loyalty to my wife, who enjoys The Resident a lot.

Its virtues, to me, are that--as many noted here--it shows the human costs of the drive for profit in US medicine. Also that some of the cast is very good. I especially enjoy Shaunette Renée Wilson, Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Much respect to Bruce Greenwood and Morris Chestnut in bringing life to difficult, unlikable characters.

It is unarguably a big, glossy machine of a show, winning and keeping viewers by being so. It has plenty of high-stakes drama, but some flashes of warmth and humor too. It barrels from one high-stakes storyline to another as efficiently as its ER doctors deal with incoming ambulance loads. Logic is given a back seat to emotional punch, when the two conflict, though.

The effect of this accelerated pacing on the writing can be awful at times. Dialogue has a condensed, shorthand feel that comfortably accommodates cliché and sometimes doesn't give the actors room to show much beyond the top layers of their characters. The Resident's many directors serve the headlong momentum better than they do nuance. Mixed or conflicting emotions get short shrift, even though I suspect they they within the abilities of many in the cast.

It's nice to see Indian characters and their stories front and center--still rare.

Twinkly-eyed Matt Czuchry is likable, though his character, Conrad--an infalible, touchy-feely former Marine--seems more a calculated writer's concoction than a person.

Other knocks:

People complete each others' sentences A LOT, which feels phony.

A lot of scenes have characters explaining to each other things they would already know. Granted, that's necessary in a show where many characters have highly specialized knowledge, but I wish there were subtitles to explain the terminology, so I could understand what they were talking about.

Despite having a charismatic lead in Samuel Adewunmi and despite being well made visually, this series is a mess. It's wildly repetitive, padded-feeling and has an audience-bashing disaster of an ending. It's shot through with flashbacks which pile up bewilderingly until we're being shunted back and forth in time A LOT--as in much current tv and films, for sure, but not to good effect.

The makers' uncertainty wreaks particular havoc with the character of the female lead. She has no core, because--rather than choosing which direction to take the character--the makers choose to keep all options open. In retaining the right to surprise us with her, they rob her of her essence. She remains a pretty cipher, one who risks coming off as a cliche embodiment of what men fear in women. Ugh.

The decision to make the defendant's closing argument in his trial serve as the entire substance of the story? Bold, but it flops. The idea that a judge would indulge someone a feelings-centered, repetitive, frequently off-point monologue in his or her courtroom--literally FOR DAYS is preposterous.

Kudos, though, to the actor who plays Curt, who gives a likable and commanding performance.

Couldn't make it past the pilot. Laughably lazy and weak in direction, script and research. May seem credible to anyone who thinks TV was better in the 70s.

Rachel LeFevre makes a fairly unsympathetic lead. Though her character Maggie displays bursts of strength, audacity and canniness, even kindness, her default mode is a chilly, humorless, self-involved one. Situation-appropriate expressions pass across her attractive face, but a complete Maggie, with hints of an inner life, never emerges. She may nonetheless function as a blank into which viewers can project their own grievances, resentments and dissatisfactions. Maggie is surely in a bad spot, but her personality may not engage you steadily enough to enlist in her struggle.

The writing team, led by Sarah-Kate Lyons, has absorbed, maybe too well, key principles of current serial TV writing:

1. Selectively withholding information creates mystery, intrigue and interest. (In the most egregious instance of withholding, one character takes an action which shapes the overall story hugely, yet we never find out why. It's unclear if this is intentional.)

2. Viewers' likely questions are to be answered incrementally, vaguely or not at all.

3. Likewise, characters who ask onscreen questions are to be answered glibly or indirectly, with a minimum of words and information, and sometimes not before the cut to the next scene.

One vital trick the team hasn't mastered is what we could call "The Netflix Episode Ender"-a juicy shocker that takes the story in a new direction. A number of episode endings end instead with the tail end dribbling out just ahead of the titles, minus any revelation.

The Sounds as a whole has a thorny relationship with plot advancement. For example, there are two main threads, one replete and one thin. This imbalance was redressed with padding, repetitiveness and plenty of those rightly praised, breathtaking outdoor shots being added to the more spindly thread.

The impression I get is that of a project marshaled by clever, controlling creators who somehow don't have a full grasp of the dimensions of the whole, nor the whys and whens of its characters' deeds. That sounds implausible, but somehow a lot fell through the cracks on this one. I felt sorry for the actors, many of whom do breathe life into their characters, despite the script's repetition and apparently willful obscurantism.

Is clarity really such a vice?

I love films that on paper shouldn't work, but just DO, often by dint of directorial genius. Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, is a big chase that turns around and chases back the other way. Sounds like 200-proof stupidity, but you find me an action film that's as inspired, gripping and affecting. Once Upon the Time in the West should by rights be a bloated bore, but it holds your attention and rewards it.

The Farewell is not one of these movies. It has an interesting setup, one that might have yielded powerful drama or even black comedy. But to do either, it would need something it doesn't have.

Call it incident, complication, pay-off, a twist--whatever, this film no have. Most of the cast is exceptional. But a setup doth not a story make. This is a bloated bore that shrinks from multiple opportunities to turn the tale in a direction, ANY direction, let alone a dramatically fruitful one.

Further demerits for:

• Grating score
• Scenes that make you say, "Hmm: Supposed to be funny?"
• Oldsters dispensing pat advice, from time-worn and tone-deaf to wise, none of which affects another character in any way
• Overlength
• Creating the comedy-ish premise of a fake wedding and then, unforgivably, not letting it fully play out. In Simpsons terms, they never got to the fireworks factory!
• Dull, complacent cinematography
• Being content with itself just for superficially presenting a recognizably Chinese family, but not testing or challenging it.
• Not fleshing out the main character Billi's difficult relation to her mother.

One of the few parts of The Farewell that both felt lived-in and interesting was that mother-daughter story. But it was largely treated largely in one beautifully-acted, under-written, almost-powerful scene. Cruelly, the scene suggested the story's beating heart existed, somewhere near, but not entirely connected to the proceedings.

The Netflix series The Umbrella Academy is an X-Men ripoff, violent... yet hip and cute... It's adapted from a comic written by a rock musician!

In it, there is a vast underground evil organization. They accomplish their ends by sending out a pair of crack assassins who wear huge spherical cartoon animal masks and spray bullets wildly. Are you laughing yet? Maybe a smug, knowing chuckle?

What if I told you the story is told all out of order? Sounds cool, right? I mean what goes better with time-travel stories than frequent jumps backward and forward in the narrative? As a viewer, nothing earns my gratitude like a parsimonious doling-out of bits of story that were earlier withheld. Thanks, chums!)

Don't answer yet, because it's about get crazy cool: The characters mostly operate on two settings: wildly verbally abusive and talkily self-pitying! Neither setting incorporates any ability to examine one's actions other than through the emotions of the moment. Writing this kind of scene is probably where being a rock musician came in handiest.

There is a third setting for some of the characters: empathetic. In the scenes that result, the earnest dialog resembles that of a soap opera, honestly.

You know, re the Umbrella Academy, you could just save yourself the trouble and skip it. Three of the actors are very good, but bear in mind it IS the X-Men: There are a LOT of actors.

Patrick Jane is an unusually contradictory character, and despite the loss of his wife and kid, not very sympathetic. After all, he isn't helping the police in order to atone for his past chicanery; he wants revenge and has said as much a few times (yet still keeps his job!). Before this show and House, it would have been almost unthinkable to have a lead character be so manipulative, deceitful, closed-off, show-offy, selectively charming and arrogant. He's a sociopath or nearly.

In most whodunit shows--the various, vacuous CSIs, Criminal Minds, etc.--the team members are less interesting than Jane and cohorts. They function as proxies for the audience, getting disgusted and darned mad about what the bad guys have done, and just itching to get into that interrogation room and fire off a contemptuous zinger or two! As if murder cases were made by sharp-tongued schoolmarms.

The individual characters on such shows have, I suppose, their biographies, abilities, and quirks. But dialog can reveal character, and reveals that these teams are composed of people who all have exactly the same Dwight Schultzy personality. Not one is blase, or cynical or burned out or coy or indirect --they're all seething, mouthy, self-righteous scolds. All the more-so when there are child victims and they must channel the millions of agitated moms watching.

By contrast, the interrogation scenes with Cho in the Mentalist actually follow the real-world practice of the officer's establishing a feeling of sympathy with the suspects' way of thinking. Tim Kang's deadpan says a lot with very, very little. He can be really funny too.

I wish the show didn't play it so fast and loose with suggesting how it is Jane accomplishes the innumerable seemingly impossible things he does well. I certainly am not asking that the show to be all explanation and exposition, like in Criminal Minds and CSI, where teammates are always telling each other things they both already know. But just a few more hints here and there!

This is in the end, a normal network series, albeit with a unique spin, well-worked out character dynamics and an intriguing, difficult lead character. It isn't TV art on the level of Mad Men, The Sopranos, or even the original Law and Order. But like all those shows, there is high percentage of vivid performances by guest actors. Some showy and pungent, some understated and non-actory--victories of naturalism and tonal control. Semi-regular Gregory Itzin is profoundly entertaining in the first couple seasons. Great actor.

I was surprised to learn that this film was by the director of the engaging "Easy A." In "Friends with Benefits," he elicits so-so performances from a wonderful cast as if it was his central purpose.

The script was written by three men, but sounds as if written by a middle-aged-plus lady a la the horrible Nancy Meyers, straining to seem "daringly" dirty, up-to-the-minute hip and fitfully "meta." There are plenty of references to movies and digital culture, but few laughs, and I never felt any human connection with the characters. The dialog is delivered in a pressured way, with each new line beginning at the instant the previous speaker finishes, with never a pause or overlap. The editor would usually cut at that instant, giving some scenes a very clunky rhythm, with consequent injury to any flow or naturalism.

FWB's scattered references to standard romcom memes don't seem so witty finally, given the script's failure to subvert or transcend them. Its would-be feel-good conclusion is unearned and false.

Seen from a distance of over 50 years, the once-daring "Picnic" barely emerges from the background of stage drama and silent movies that came before it. It is, in the way of most '50s Hollywood films, deliriously artificial in manner, though the settings look real, and are. Its only excellent performance is by the grain-belt town where the exteriors were filmed.

Picnic asks us to accept a mid-30s and facially haggard (but tanned and very fit) William Holden as a post-collegiate. That could work in a play, where acting, body language and makeup could make us believe. But here he looks a lot older than his college chum Cliff Robertson. Holden is game and fearless, but is directed to a performance that is hammy, frantic, almost awkward. He moves big and impulsive, like Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls."

Holden generally just doesn't seem right for a likable if show-offy lummox with a disreputable side. He's intrinsically a man's man, a Don Draper prototype, a wordly cynic, not someone who's going to mask his insecurities and shame with puppy-ish fratboy physicality. That much of this energy is directed at tiny, under-age Susan Strasberg, his "date" for the big picnic (before his real love interest is revealed), seems creepy to 21st century sensibilities.

Other apparent age anomalies include Kim Novak and her mom looking to be about 12 years apart.

The director gives his actors stagy bits of physical business that make the most normal gestures--hanging onto the ropes of a swing or the columns of a porch while speaking--look forced.

This is the corny kind of a movie where when a character thinks of the whole wide world outside of Kansas, then their eyes have to loft achingly upward of the horizon.

To me the film's loud, broad and energized acting and brisk editing suggest a sort of terror of the bucolic setting and overtly prosaic title as being threats to the searing, sexed-up realism that was being attempted. The performances play to the back rows, lobbing one uninflected emotion at a time, and the characters fairly frequently blurt out just how they feel, even before the bottle gets passed around. Seems among these salt-of-the-earth Midwestern types, only the stuffy schoolmarm has any use for any pretense or posturing. Rosalind Russell's Romemarie still just about beats her head with her own limbs like a Tex Avery wolf when Holden takes his shirt off. Subtle. Scenes like this make this wide screen Technicolor epic feel like it was directed for the iPod.

There are bits that work. Arthur O'Connell escaped with his dignity and an Oscar. By being authentically good, he excels here. The actress who played Kim Novak's mom, while generally acting as if in a silent melodrama, does manage to beautifully project mingled worry and sympathetic excitement for her daughter near the end. One key scene between O'Connell and Russell is done in one long take and as the scene goes on, they seem to emerge from the cloud of recently whispered dunderheaded directorial instructions, escaping to something authentic and touching.

A vastly over-celebrated film.

After viewing this, I was surprised to see on the DVD box that it had won some glowing blurbs and prizes at various festivals.

The script was OK, the situations potentially involving. But the unfocused, often amateurish, performances and occasional jarring attempts at comedy repeatedly broke the reality and brought to mind that old maxim, "There are no bad actors, only bad directors." The performances were mainly incoherent, unnatural. Director Georgia Lee seemed unable to help her actors communicate any steady undercurrent of withheld feelings, in a story that was largely about such. Key characters, mostly men, passed across the screen as unknowable entities.

I watched Red Doors convinced that most of the leads were capable of much better work, even though I'd only seen one, Tzi Ma, in anything else. Glowingly beautiful Mia Riverton, playing an actress, was hammy and false, killing any chemistry in her romantic scenes.

Secondary characters were worse. As the oldest Wong sister, Sam, Jacqueline Kim had the largest part and gave the most coherent, recognizably human performance. But the acting of the men playing her love interests was awful. Her old crush, a whispery-voiced high-school music teacher--an intended dreamboat--was wretchedly portrayed by a kid with suspiciously plucked eyebrows who looked about half her age and didn't sing well.

Extra points off for being set in and around New York City, ostensibly, yet establishing no NYC ambiance or locales.

So directing movies, it turns out, is like conducting a symphony, or performing rap, or brain surgery--it only takes one bad practitioner to prove that skill makes a difference.