pauls4thoughts

[pauls4thoughts]

From Platoon to Coming Home and Deer Hunter: 10 of the best Vietnam war films

Spike Lee’s 'Da 5 Bloods', which is released on Netflix, is the newest entry in cinema’s decades-long fascination with the trauma experienced by US soldiers during the Vietnam war. But which is the best ever Vietnam movie? 

Here is my Top Ten, in no particular order:

1. Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is still the big one: a widescreen vision of chaos, a nightmare from which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard is trying to awake.

2. Little Girl of Hanoi. Not, perhaps, the most objective of perspectives – the intro reads: “Honouring the heroes of Hanoi who defeated the American imperialists” – but this is the North Vietnamese answer to Rome Open City, a 1974 study of life under bombardment (the mass “Christmas bombings” of 1972) filmed in the city where they happened.

3. Winter Soldier. This 1972 documentary focuses on a part of the war that its later fictional counterparts would try to finesse and explain away: the atrocities carried out by US forces against civilians in Vietnam. Based on the series of testimonies by former soldiers in the Winter Soldier Investigation (backed by Vietnam Veterans Against the War), this remains a radical film document.

4. Full Metal Jacket. Platoon (and to a lesser extent, 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II) unlocked a flood of Hollywood films about the war: Hamburger Hill, Good Morning Vietnam, In Country; the focus rarely deviating from the US servicemen’s traumatic experiences. Stanley Kubrick’s contribution from 1987 is probably the best of the bunch, a still-lacerating fable of desensitisation and sacrifice.

5. The Deer Hunter. A classic of the Hollywood new wave and a personal favourite, just pre-dating Apocalypse Now but more incisive on the moral damage the war inflicted on American society. Defiantly anti-heroic in tone, Michael Cimino’s 1978 film also indicated the future path of US cinema through casting the Vietnamese as an implacably brutal enemy. I remember that this film blew me away when it was released and launched the careers of Meryl Streep, Chris Walken and John Savage.

6. Hearts and Minds. The Vietnam war was, of course, the focus for much anti-government protest in the 60s and 70s, and this then-controversial documentary – which won an Oscar in 1975 – encapsulated the mood. The “hearts and minds” are those of the Vietnamese people; director Peter Davis’s focus is on the dehumanising racism of the US military and government as the conflict developed.

7. The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone. The Vietnamese cinematic voice has been largely drowned out by US movie bombast but there are a few to look out for, such as this 1979 film, set largely in a rice field where one family holds off US military assaults. Restricted in resources (the Americans are played by Vietnamese actors), this is nonetheless a fascinating watch.

8. Platoon. Crystallising America’s inward-looking take on the war experience, as the fighting itself retreated into the past, Oliver Stone’s harrowing 1986 account of US soldiers under fire won best picture and director Oscars. By focusing so intensely on the moral quagmire, this set the tone for the self-pity that came to define the nation’s perceptions of the conflict.

9. Little Dieter Needs to Fly. One of Werner Herzog’s great documentaries from the 90s: German-born airman Dieter Dengler recreates his trek through the jungle after getting shot down during the Vietnam war; he escaped after being tortured by the NVA. Herzog later remade the story as Rescue Dawn (2007), starring Christian Bale as Dieter, but this meditative doc is much better.

10. Coming Home. Hal Ashby's extraordinarily moving film. Considers a great many subjects, but its heart lies with that fundamental change within Sally Hyde, played by Jane Fonda and her relationship with paraplegic Vietnam vet Jon Voight.

[pauls4thoughts]

Film Review: ‘Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll’

The coastal New Jersey enclave of Asbury Park was pinned firmly to the pop-cultural map upon the release of Bruce Springsteen’s debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, in 1973. 

Frontloaded with testimony from Springsteen himself, in his role as rock’s plain-spoken elder statesman, ‘Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock 'N' Roll' is a documentary from director Tom Jones. who does a haphazard job of digging around the region in a bid to uncover how his sound – and a wider Asbury scene – emerged. 

Trailing some distance behind Bruce's 2016 autobiography Born to Run and the stage show Springsteen on Broadway, there’s little doubt that what much of the audience will be hoping for from this documentary is Bruce, the whole Bruce and nothing but the Bruce. 

The film satisfies a good portion of that craving with its illumination of the club scene that formed the star’s early musical life, but Springsteen gradually becomes less of the focus in a doc that nobly aims to tell the story of a New Jersey seaside town’s rise, instant fall and very gradual comeback through the prism of music.

The middle portion of the film could be subtitled “Born to Be Run Down,” or maybe “Blinded by the Blight.” Ironically enough, Asbury Park’s trajectory became pretty much the exact opposite of Springsteen’s, right about the time he made both of them jointly famous. 

The film’s most useful feature is its opening history of an area that served as a genuine East Coast melting pot: the only spot along the Jersey shore where African Americans could bathe in public – partly, it transpires, as the sea met the county’s sewage output there. 

That laissez-faire party-town air has traditionally accounted for the utopian mix of white and black musicians within Springsteen’s E Street Band, yet, as many of those performers testify here, their early recordings were born out of the July 1970 unrest that turned neighbours against one another, and were aimed at restoring unity to a divided community. 

I left “Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock ‘N Roll” wishing there was just a bit more of Springsteen’s own latter-day relationship with the area incorporated into the film. 

But you’ve got to admit that, as story arcs go, between Bruce and Asbury Park, the town has the more dramatic one.Springsteen once had an instrumental track called “Paradise by the C,” and whether or not he had Asbury Park in mind when he came up with it, the city certainly is made to sound paradisiacal for much of its existence, at least for anyone with a fondness for the intermingling of black and white music forms. 

Asbury Park literally had a right and wrong side of the railroad tracks, with the end of town closer to its seaside attractions being the privileged one. Yet, as Springsteen and several past and present members of the E Street Band tell it on camera, white kids felt fine going to see jazz greats like Kenny Burrell and Grant Green at the Orchid Lounge on the predominantly black west side in the ’60s, and black kids went east to join the rock bands playing original music in the all-ages Upstage club. 

Director Tom Jones has done such a good job of painting Asbury Park as a rock-meets-soul heaven on earth that it comes as perhaps more of a jolt than it should when the film gets to Asbury Park’s nationally news-making riots in 1970. 

A lot of the city’s residents who hadn’t taken up instruments apparently never got the all-is-harmonious memo, and fostering resentments resulted in burning businesses, with the poorer west side being hit hardest — the film says 75 percent of the retail space on Springwood Ave. burned or closed down and never came back. 

The movie isn’t quite sure how to treat this imbalance of fates. However, it can’t just be false hopes fueling a sound as warm as the E Street Band’s or Joe Grushecky’s or “I Don’t Wanna Go Home,” the Steven Van Zandt-written, Southside Johnny-performed anthem that inevitably plays out in full over the closing credits.

Without any footage of Bruce's original band Steel Mill to work with, director Jones intercuts all these expert witnesses in a way that does a surprisingly effective job of making you get the gist anyway. 

And it doesn’t hurt that Springsteen is being interviewed in the dilapidated remnants of the Upstage, vacant for 48 years now. The movie’s last post-credits shot is a poignant one of the star coming down the creaky stairs, saying, “Last man out. … Time for something new.”

[pauls4thoughts]

Bruce Springsteen – ‘Letter To You’ review: a powerful synthesis of past and present

I have now had Bruce's new album for two days and played it on repeat for several hours. 'Letter To You' finds Bruce Springsteen full of wisdom yet still young at heart. Fast and live, the The Boss and the E Street Band rescue lost tunes and toast lost brothers. 

Bruce Springsteen’s twentieth studio album, was the sort of cinematic end-scene it sounds like, it’d feature our hero gazing up at a neon sign reading ‘Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas’, having an unspoken inner epiphany, climbing back on his motorbike and roaring away in the direction of New Jersey. 

Last year’s Western Stars saw him single-handedly piece together a plush, orchestral masterstroke of a record, summoning the 60s spirits of Gene Pitney and Burt Bacharach to tell tales of Hollywood has-beens in the sort of retro Californian pop styles that suggested he was preparing himself for a pre-retirement residency on the Vegas Strip.

Instead, recoiling once more from the stench of slickness, he got the E Street Band together in his New Jersey home studio for four days, let the tape run and let rip.

There is not a weak track on the album. Personal favourites, 'Letter To You' title track, 'Ghosts', 'Rainmaker', 'If I Was The Priest', 'Last Man Standing' and 'Burnin' Train. 

Recorded completely live, right down to the vocals, the result is the E Street energy bottled. The 71-year-old Springsteen’s concerns – grief, nostalgia, reactionary anger – might reflect his years, but this is a band that can make the act of writing out a lifetime’s worth of wisdoms in the title track sound as wild and noble as any last chance power drive. Another great album from the main 

[pauls4thoughts]

Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You review – a sledgehammer of succour

Recorded live with his seven-piece band, Bruce Springsteen's 'Letter to You' is a passionate, brilliant and unashamedly old fashioned and stirring album. It is full of Springsteen bingo: trains, rivers, the edges of towns and women called Janey; a number of things are on fire.Things start out with Springsteen in intimate, solo acoustic mood on the beautiful "One Minute You’re Here". 

Picking his guitar as a “big black train” comes “down the track”; rueful in the face of death. It’s scuffed, tough and soft: equal parts blue-collar Jersey boy and stadium-filling rock star. The lyrical theme - which runs through the entire record - is mortality. Three songs are old – one, the excellent "If I Was the Priest", so vintage that Springsteen played it at his 1972 audition for Columbia’s A&R John Hammond. Another, "Janey Needs a Shooter" nearly made it on to several Springsteen 70s albums. This update turns a nuanced portrait of a love hexagon into a mid-paced thumper, sacrificing the song’s sexual intimacy for a piano and harmonica-laced singalong.It’s the new material that really catches fire. 

The band blaze through “Ghosts” and “House of a Thousand Guitars” which soars  above the lot. Driven by the supple rise and fall of a hymnal piano melody, the song is a commentary on songwriting. It’s an album about dead comrades and pulls generously from his blue-collared dreamworlds - trains, rivers and the act of going down to them; panegyrics to small towns, to New Jersey, to Mama and the sheriff and the car and the gun - and looks backward at his legacy with all the mist, glory and dew of memoriam.

Down two members of his canonical E Street Band - saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboard player Danny Federici - as well as surviving every other bandmate of his first boyhood act, the Castiles, questions of erosion and preservation seem to be top of mind. 

While Bruce Springsteen was performing Springsteen on Broadway,  his former teenage bandmate, George Theiss, was dying of cancer. Well before the E Street Band, there were the Castiles, an incubator where Springsteen first played guitar, then sang, from 1965 to 1968.

As the end neared, Springsteen held a vigil at the North Carolina bedside of his former musical sparring partner. When Theiss died, Springsteen became the only surviving Castile, a realisation that spawned a new song, "The Last Man Standing".“One minute you’re here, next minute you’re gone,” he breathes, as the various members of the band assemble like light-footed superheroes – the muted piano of Roy Bittan, the subdued thrum of drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Garry Tallent.

'Rainmaker' rips into Trump, but with a superb allegory about “unloading buckshot into low clouds” during a drought. The powerful title track distils the essence of Springsteen messaging down the ages. 

The album ends remembering the departed, dangling the prospect that they live on in our dreams. Dearly departed souls whose talents and presence and laughter and hard work played a part in something truly beautiful, but who are no longer around to carry the torch along with the rest. ‘Ghosts’ addresses this, and it does so in a typically Springsteen-ian way. That is to say: It reaches directly into my chest and it wrings my heart. That pain is evident throughout, yet it’s shot through with that signature life-affirming power - that huge, absolutely massive yet totally organic big band sound - that the best Springsteen songs have. 

It’s heart-breaking yet rousing, melancholy yet wonderfully joyful and defiant. It’s a beautiful tribute to friends departed, shared memories keeping them alive, and the feeling of still being here while others have passed.The album reflect a man confronting his own mortality and the life he’s led. Forty seven years after Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are still making vibrant, brilliant music, and "Letter to You” captures their undeniable artistry. 

[pauls4thoughts]

‘Enola Holmes’ Review: She’s Beyond Elementary, and Not Your Dear

In her indelible portrayal of the troubled Eleven on “Stranger Things,” Millie Bobby Brown was called upon to be wise beyond her years, solve puzzles that were both mentally and physically challenging, and provide a clear path forward in a world that was dark and confusing.As the title character in “Enola Holmes,” Brown must shoulder all those responsibilities again - only this time, she gets to have a complete blast doing it. Brown is nothing short of radiant here, displaying the same sort of mature presence and poise we’ve seen on the Netflix sci-fi series but also an engaging playful side and impeccable comic timing. It’s like discovering her for the first time all over again, and it’s a joy. 

And if the way “Enola Holmes” ends is any indication, this may be the start of a most welcome girl-powered franchise. Based on the Young Adult novel series by Nancy Springer, “Enola Holmes” finds Sherlock’s younger sister stirring up trouble, solving mysteries and carving out her own place in wealthy Victorian England. Despite having a famous sibling, she’s very much her own person in the way she goes about playing detective. Emmy winner Harry Bradbeer brings an infectious energy to this stuffy setting by having Enola break the fourth wall from the get-go with amusingly self-aware asides, a tactic he used frequently on the many episodes of “Fleabag” he directed. She looks straight into the camera and talks to us as she’s riding a bicycle over rolling hills and across vast fields of flowers - that is, until she bites it and lands face-first in the dirt. “Cycling is not one of my core strengths,” she explains matter-of-factly as she dusts herself off, and we’re hooked.In the script from Jack Thorne, Enola notes that her name is “alone” spelled backward. And she and her thoroughly unorthodox mother (a well-cast Helena Bonham Carter) are exactly that as they prowl about their expansive country mansion doing whatever they please: painting, reading, even playing tennis and archery indoors. (As the coolest homeschool teacher ever, Carter is an inspiration to all us struggling parents.) But then she disappears suddenly as Enola turns 16, leaving her daughter to fend for herself with a series of cryptic clues and a couple of disapproving older brothers who’ve returned to check on her.

When Enola travels by train to London to hunt down her mum, she ends up running into and inadvertently rescuing the Viscount Lord Tewksbury, Marquess of Basilwether (Louis Partridge), who happens to be an escaped teenager, just like her. And just like her, he doesn’t want to follow the posh path his family has laid out for him. With his dark, floppy hair and sly smile, the appealing Partridge has a young Mick Jagger vibe about him, and he and Brown share a sprightly, hyper-verbal chemistry.This film has a lot going for it: the costumes are gorgeous, the action scenes are breathtaking (there’s nothing more intense than a fight scene on a train, right?), the cast is packed full of stars, the feminist messaging is loud and proud, and the script is witty and fast-paced – albeit pretty predictable in places. Which, yeah, may prove off-putting to seasoned armchair detectives.Make no mistake about it, though, the main pull here is Millie Bobby Brown. The young actor has already proved her mettle in Eleven in Stranger Things, but this fun frolic of a film allows her to drop the serious act and show off her playful side. With just a widening of her eyes or a flicker of an eyebrow, she conveys a whole wealth of emotion. Whenever she breaks the fourth wall, she does so confidingly, truly engaging with viewers. And, while the precocious Enola may have proven irritating in a lesser actor’s hands, Brown keeps you rooting for her brave heroine throughout.

[pauls4thoughts]

The Alienist review – a 19th-century psychological thriller that's full of thrills

The long-gestating adaptation of Caleb Carr's 1994 novel The Alienist has come to life and it was worth the wait. Starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning as a team of sleuths seeking a serial killer in 1896 New York, the series is a melancholic mystery with just enough melodrama to make it addictive. 

The Alienist follows Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl), a quirky and curt early psychologist who forces himself into an investigation of the brutal murder of a young male prostitute, which may be related to other killings. He dragoons his friend and illustrator John Moore (Evans) into his investigation, and eventually Sara Howard (an all-grown-up Fanning), the police chief's secretary and the NYPD's first female employee. The team is filled out by investigative brothers Lucious and Marcus Isaacson (Matthew Shear and Douglas Smith). The series weaves in some real-world figures from the era, including J.P. Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt.As a serial-killer series, Alienist doesn't bring much novelty to the genre. Laszlo, John and Sara pore over files and sketches of the graphic crimes and guess at the mindset of the man who committed such heinous acts.

The series' focus on the early adoption of practices such as fingerprinting and psychological profiling makes it vaguely reminiscent of Netflix's Mindhunter. But the mystery it weaves is intriguingly lurid. The series revels in the macabre and grotesque, as the camera dwells on the victims' bodies and the sordid New York underworld. Its success stems mostly from Brühl. The wicked energy that served him so well as villains in films such as Captain America: Civil War bolsters his portrayal of Laszlo, a hero with darkness lurking just beneath his placid veneer. Although Alienist's tone is somber, Brühl giddily rips into every scene, and it's exhilarating to watch. Evans and Fanning impress in less flashy parts. 

Fanning's Sara takes on new relevance in the current climate,  as Sara is constantly harassed and abused as the only female employee at the police station. Some minor characters are disappointing, especially a feeble interpretation of young Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), then the city's police chief. There's no shortage of serial killer dramas, and if The Alienist feels familiar, it makes up for it by presenting its story in a striking package. And you won't want to look away.

[pauls4thoughts]

Review of Damien Jurdo’s new album ‘What’s New, Tomboy’

At the age of 47, Damien Jurado discovered a new new band ... the Beatles. He grew up listening to soul music (as a child) and hardcore (as a teenager), so the lovable moptops somehow passed Jurado by.

Does that mean his new album, 'What's New, Tomboy', is all Beatlesy? Not really. Someone has just given me this album so thanks for that.

Jurado sounds like the acoustic singer songwriter that he is, except for one clear Beatles influence - the bass. It's dry and punchy, like Paul McCartney's Hofner 'violin' bass sound, and it's mixed up high, so it's the main melodic element on many of the songs.

Combined with an old drum machine, it creates a distinctive backdrop for Jurado's vocals, which also sit high in the mix, so that when, on 'Ochoa', Jurado sings about his former collaborator Richard Swift (who died in 2018), his voice is uncomfortably yet wonderfully exposed as it threatens to break with the sadness.

This is unusually personal for Jurado, who elsewhere reverts to his approach of writing vignettes about characters, as on Alice Hyatt, with its zen-like chorus: "There are things/There are people/Walk on by."

[pauls4thoughts]

Mindhunter review – like Mad Men, with added serial killers

Adapted from the writings of a pioneering FBI serial killer profiler, 'Mindhunter', David Fincher’s poised and masterful series is glacial, aiming to reflect how slow change in law and policing can be as The Wire did before it.

'Mindhunter' details some of the most inventively nasty things humans have ever done to each other and yet never once turns to a flashback, preferring to have each killer interviewed blankly recount what happened, somehow making the murderers seem all the more upsetting and real.

When Season One wraps up, the pieces are only just on the chessboard and only a couple of moves have been made, setting us up for an intellectually intriguing battle of minds in future seasons.

'Mindhunter' is a different, more cerebral serial killer-focused series - one that raises questions both subtle and not-so-subtle about how masculinity and misogyny become intertwined.

Initially, this drama — created by Joe Penhall, based on a book by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, and executive-produced by David Fincher, who directed four of the ten episodes — seems like it’s going to be another gratuitous deep dive into sordid, ripped-from-the-headlines homicides. But within the first three episodes, it establishes that it has deeper concerns and a refreshing sense of restraint. To be clear: What happens to the always-female victims of the real-life-inspired murderers who appear onscreen — including Edmund Kemper (an intimidatingly matter-of-fact Cameron Britton), the so-called co-ed killer who murdered eight women in the early 1970s, including his own mother, is disgusting and depicted as such.

But save for a few flashes of nasty crime-scene photos and an opening sequence that ends in blunt, gruesome fashion, all of the details are presented in verbal form, as the convicted and the suspected tell their stories to the protagonists, FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany). Mindhunter could easily have staged reenactments of the heinous acts Ford and Tench investigate, but it is far more interested in demonstrating that words and thoughts can wield as much power as actions do.

Holden and Bill initially team up in 1977 as instructors in the FBI’s road school, a job that takes them to police departments across the country to share a then-novel approach to solving crimes, one that places as much weight on the psychology of the perpetrators as on the black-and-white evidence.

But 'Mindhunter' is as much about the psyches of Holden and Bill as it is about the internal circuitry of its serial killers. Aided by Groff’s handsome, trustworthy features, Holden initially comes across as an overly fastidious, buttoned-up G-man, a less quirky Agent Cooper type who has no idea how to function unless he’s dressed in a suit and tie. But the more he applies his obsessive nature to understanding and even empathizing with marginalized men who channel their resentment toward women into cold-blooded killing, the more his own sense of morality loosens.

Bill, on the other hand, tries to distance himself from the disturbed individuals his work forces him to confront. Unlike Holden, he’s loathe to share any personal information with their interview subjects and becomes deeply uncomfortable every time his partner ingratiates himself toward these men, even if it is as a means to get them to confess.

'Mindhunter' is compelling purely as a well-executed, smart, and suspenseful work of crime drama, but it is also necessary viewing

If you have the time and patience to sit back and discover the men behind the monsters of this slow-burn thriller, it may reward you in spades.

[pauls4thoughts]

Ricky Gervais brilliantly balances humor, melancholy in ‘After Life’

Those who bristle at Ricky Gervais’ curse-laden brand of comedy might well turn off 'After Life' season two in the first 10 minutes as it is still awash with his signature gut-punch insults and vulnerable underbelly.

But stick with it, Gervais has crafted a poignant portrait of loss, loneliness and despair while still delivering a high gag-rate, balancing the touching and the profane in equal measure.

The first season of 'After Life' dealt with Tony’s grief in stark, uncompromising detail, from his frank and open contemplations of suicide to quieter, more tender moments of growth and a genuine desire to be a better person.

Gervais plays Tony, a recently bereaved local newspaper journalist. By day, he goes through the motions at work, snapping at his colleagues, including Kath (Diane Morgan) and Lenny (Tony Way), and rolling his eyes at his interviewees, punishing the world for letting his wife die. At night, he drinks too much and watches the videos his wife made for him as she lay in hospital, in which she urges him to learn to live again and remember to feed the dog.

For round two, Gervais doesn’t stray far from this crowd-pleasing formula, ensuring that the glacial pace of Tambury (the show’s single setting) keeps ticking along while Tony battles to get from one day to the next, the memory of Lisa (Kerry Godliman) still heavy on his mind. Rather than expanding the world of the show, he draws his central band of misfits further into it. A budding relationship between sex worker Daphne (Roisin Conaty) and Pat the postman (Joe Wilkinson) is a charming development, but Paul Kaye’s toxic psychiatrist serves as little more than a potty-mouthed pantomime villain, who holds no real relevance to the story.

There are plot cores that provide running threads - the paper is under threat when the owner (Peter Egan) decides to sell - we just follow Tony as he takes the lesson he has learned - saying and doing what he likes feels better when it’s for good - and pays it forward with his friends and colleagues: helping his brother-in-law Matt (Tom Basden) through a rocky patch in his marriage, or helping bereaved Anne (Penelope Wilton, who finally gets off that bench) find company. The relationship with his father’s (David Bradley) carer Emma (Ashley Jensen) gets a complication with another suitor.

Tony’s reminiscences of Lisa (Kerry Godliman, affecting even on a computer screen) remain the beating heart of the show - his regrets that he didn’t dance with her every time she asked are touching - although Gervais moves things into different emotional areas as the series progresses. Episode five is a heartbreaker, and there is a brilliantly honest confession from Tony in episode 4 that was so painful I found it hard to watch. Both Ashley Jensen and Kerry Godliman are superb in it, displaying their subtle comic timing, both believable and rewarding characters.

Yet the warmth and vulnerability is offset by Gervais’ desire to push the PC comedy envelope. As with the first series, many of the laughs come from local-paper news stories, offering another take on the fragile absurdity of life; this time round we get a foul-mouthed 100-year-old pitched perfectly by Annette Crosbie, the woman who makes rice pudding out of breast milk, and the 50-year-old man who self-identifies as an eight-year-old girl.

I enjoyed the scene where the postman, Pat (Joe Wilkinson), asked if he could use Tony’s bathroom and then proceeded to have a bath, and an extended riff on what would have happened had Daphne (Roisin Conaty) seen Tony naked through his window.

It’s a show that manages to be insightful about the addictive qualities of grief (“I know who I am with it,” offers Tony) and still maintain a big, empathetic heart, its mixture of generosity, big, emotional beats and salty laughs chiming with these uncertain times.

A consistent delight and Tony’s most reliable source of support, Penelope Wilton is again a series highlight as widower Anne, matching Gervais’ sometimes disarmingly emotional performance as a solid, solemn presence. It’s in their shared scenes that we see the full capability of Gervais as a sophisticated non-comedic writer. He understands grief and its ability to whittle a person’s quality of life down to a booze-soaked, self-loathing stump.

After Life’s ending has managed to stay with me, for much longer than I expected. Stick with After Life to the end and the journey will have been worth it.

It’s some of his most moving work to date and his most rewarding, something of a quiet tour de force. It is a comedy with a heart, a touching exploration of grief, depression and the redemptive power of friendship.

#Afterlife @rickygervais​ @afterlife 

[pauls4thoughts]

Transparent review – the best thing on TV at the moment

Writer/director Jill Soloway’s stealth masterpiece 'Transparent,' is a different kind of seducer, a TV series that makes revolutionary art seem both irresistible and inevitable. Gender is a construct, sexuality is a fluid spectrum, and 'Transparent' is a real joy.

Let's be honest, 'Transparent' is the most original, daring and confident piece of American TV since Breaking Bad. Beyond sexuality, beyond identity, this is a great show about the many different ways there are to be a human being.

The story of Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a senior citizen coming out to her adult children as transgender, it was one of the first series to signal the rapid cultural shift toward transgender visibility. From there, the other Pfeffermans unpacked their own their sexual, spiritual and gender identities, as well as family baggage that stretched from present-day Los Angeles back to pre-Holocaust Germany.

The series stars and relies on Jeffrey Tambor, (remember him as Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, and George Bluth Sr. and Oscar Bluth on Arrested Development), who plays Mort Pfefferman. Mort was assigned male at birth but is finally transitioning and living as Maura - she just has to tell her adult children.

The first to find out is Sarah (Amy Landecker), the oldest, who herself is grappling with her sexual identity. She’s married to a man (Rob Huebel), but after bumping in to her college girlfriend (Melora Hardin), she’s questioning everything about her little-boxes-on-the-hillside L.A. life.

Next to find out is Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), whose failure to launch seems to be on everyone’s mind. Finally there’s Josh (Jay Duplass), a record producer who gets laid a lot but doesn’t really make genuine connections with people.

We see in flashbacks the desperation and anxiety she lived with while presenting as male, and we can see in everything about her the relief of living as who she really is.

Soloway’s previous work, particularly Six Feet Under (where she was an executive producer) and Afternoon Delight is very obviously part of Transparent’s DNA: The primacy and constancy of sibling relationships is an essential part of the series, as are frank and often funny conversations about sex and gender politics.

It is a big Jewish family argument of a show, passionate in its voice and striking in its grace. It was testament to life as a continuing education, a poem about the difficulty and the necessity of being honest with the world and one’s self.

The plot has a very small footprint - it’s just this family, really - but the ideas it covers are really huge. Stories about people who are trans feel newsy and timely, but the stories about not truly knowing your parents until you grow up, and even then just barely, are completely familiar.

But big picture: this is the best thing I’ve seen on TV this year. It’s a big-feeling, effusive, life-and-sex-filled show that wants to push your buttons and fight with you, and kiss and make-up. Totally brilliant.

[pauls4thoughts]

Review: ‘Casual’ Might Be The Ultimate Union of Indie Film and TV

'Casual' starts with a very smart piece of casting. It’s centred around Michaela Watkins, who belongs in that uniquely frustrating category of female comic actors who are sorely underused. Watkins, who was unfairly dumped from Saturday Night Live, has been relegated to small roles, in everything from TV’s Veep and New Girl to big screen turns in Afternoon Delight and Enough Said, and also almost stole the show in 'Transparent'.

But, despite her lack of screen time, she’s always managed to emerge as a scene-stealer. Casting her in the lead role of his show allows us to finally spend a far more satisfying time with her. She stars as Valerie, one month out of a marriage which saw her husband cheat on her, who is now living with her brother, and best friend, Alex as well as her teenage daughter Laura. The overarching theme is how the three search for love, and mainly sex, in the modern era. Valerie is re-entering the singles world without a clue of what to do, Alex is the creator of a dating site which boasts an algorithm that he designed to set him up with whomever he wants and Laura is developing a crush on her teacher while having rampant sex with her boyfriend.

'Casual' is an undeniably entertaining show. Watkins is a likeable lead and there’s a smattering of smart lines (“Going to the gym gives me PTSD”) but, given the growing number of equally funny and indie-filtered comedies both on TV and online, it needs more to stand out from the crowd. There are flashes, in the first two episodes that were shown, of something different.

As a character, Valerie begins as a refreshing antithesis to the overbearing mother trope we see often see in sitcoms. She has a sexually liberated view on her daughter’s lifestyle, boasting that she has had her on the pill since the age of 12 and still buys her condoms. But what’s somewhat disheartening is that by the end of the second episode she’s in a more familiar place of being the uptight regulator, as her brother and daughter both need bailing out of trouble. What we’ve seen of Alex suggests a familiar mixture of slacker and womaniser which is nothing new but Laura’s openness is an interesting addition, given the relative lack of female characters who enjoy sex without judgement.

Here’s the thing: I'm not sure I could adequately pinpoint why I enjoy Casual. But it is really well-acted, especially on the part of Watkins and Barr, who add so many layers to characters we’ve seen dozens of times.

The divorced woman approaching middle age and wondering if she’s wasted her life? It’s been done, but Watkins gives Valerie such nuance and edge that she’s rightly become the most acclaimed part of the show. She's one of the best comedic actresses working today, and on Casual, she gives a performance filled with soulfulness.

It's Barr, however, who has the much tougher part, and I would argue that whether or not you like Casual stems almost entirely from whether or not you find Laura intriguingly misguided or completely insufferable.

She seems terrified of forming connections to anyone, and the further season two progresses, the more it seems like she’s constantly finding new friendships but then bailing from them before they've even reached their cruising altitude. And that loops around to why I ultimately like Casual, even if the show never seems to strike the right balance when it comes to portraying its characters’ bubble of privilege: It’s really great at depicting loneliness.

[pauls4thoughts]

The Heartbreak Comedy of “One Mississippi”

The semi-autobiographical “One Mississippi” mines what creator Tig Notaro has described as her “worst year ever.” It’s about a cancer survivor, Tig Bavaro, who flies home to Bay St. Lucille, Mississippi, as her mother is dying, and then sticks around after the funeral, haunted by bad memories. Miraculously, the series goes down like a cocktail, crisp and sweet. It’s a romantic show as well as an angry one, sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully absurdist, and authentically Southern in a way that is rare for television. It floats and it flows. Moments of warmth rise up organically. Nothing feels forced.

On “One Mississippi,” Tig is a confessional radio host, not a comic. She’s also an unusual sort of sitcom protagonist. She’s not a narcissist, either, except insofar as anyone who wants you to hear her side of the story is a narcissist. Instead, she’s a watchful introvert, guarded and adult.

Tig’s family, with whom she’s intimate but not close, is equally original and sharply drawn. There’s her brother, Remy (the wonderful Noah Harpster, also of “Transparent”), who lives alone in the attic; and her stepfather, Bill, a stoical weirdo, movingly underplayed by John Rothman.

The stories are deceptively small: Bill loses his cat; Remy flirts with a woman he made fun of in high school; Tig gets crowned Queen of the Mardi Gras, in her mother’s place; she enters into a slow-burn courtship with her seemingly straight producer, Kate (played by Notaro’s wife, Stephanie Allynne). In Season 2, Remy tries out religion and Bill meets his soul mate, an African-American woman (Sheryl Lee Ralph) who shares his thermostat obsession.

It's both surprising and disappointing that Amazon cancelled the show after two seasons.

It feels like the perfect vehicle for Notaro. Her delivery, as seen in her standup, her talk show appearances and her much-missed podcast Professor Blastoff, is monotone and muted. This can work wonders when she’s telling an absurd shaggy dog story like her routine about the “No Moleste” signs on Mexican hotel room doors, but it’s an absolutely perfect fit for something as fiercely grief-stricken as 'One Mississippi'.

The themes it deals with are as big as they get. But the way they’re dealt with - all shot through with Notaro’s detached worldview - is beautifully small and human. It takes time to linger over details that other shows wouldn’t. 'One Mississippi' is a wonderful, tender show. Just don’t expect your sides to split. I just wish there was a third season.

[pauls4thoughts]

Crisis in Six Scenes: Woody Allen's TV show is proof he's finally lost the plot

It’s not entirely clear why Woody Allen’s new show for Amazon Studios is called 'Crisis In Six Scenes' but it’s especially disappointing that it feels instantly forgettable.

In recent years, Allen’s movies have swung wildly in quality, alternating real highs (“Midnight in Paris,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) with definite lows (“Hollywood Ending,” "Cafe Society", “Irrational Man”). 'Crisis' is closer to the low end, but for fans of a certain earlier strain of his work, its shambling, amiable vibe may seem comfortingly familiar.

But 'Crisis' also seems inconsequential, as if Allen, faced with filling not quite three hours of screen time, emptied his notebook and strung together a series of comic set pieces that don’t quite add up to a story.

A few of the scenes are funny in themselves, one in particular, a self-referential bit featuring Allen’s character pitching a TV series to a pair of stone-faced young executives, is close to vintage.

Most of them, however, have a ghost-like semblance of humour. You can see where the laughs are supposed to be, but he’s just going through the motions.

He plays Sidney J. Munsinger, a longtime advertising copywriter and sometime novelist who, late in life, has decided he wants to break into TV. The crisis of the title occurs when his comfortable suburban existence is disrupted by the arrival of Lennie (Miley Cyrus), a young, fugitive radical (she bombed a draft board) who’s connected to his wife, Kay, and needs a place to hide out.

There are plot complications involving Lennie’s plans to flee to Cuba, which require Sid and Kay (Elaine May) to go into New York and conduct some slapstick skulduggery reminiscent of 'Manhattan Murder Mystery.'

Unfortunately, if Allen’s ability to write a decent one-liner has endured into his 80s, his ability to deliver them has not. Tasked with breathing life into his own words, he lapses into shuffly mannerisms.

Ninety minutes of ideas are needlessly (and clumsily) spread across six half-hours. He’d have been better off making Crisis In One Sitting.

[pauls4thoughts]

Modern Love Has Nothing New to Say About Modern Love

The New York Times’ Modern Love column, a weekly first person essay about love and relationships has been turned into an eight episode series by Amazon Prime.

It follows lovestruck or lovelorn New Yorkers, and while it is mostly about romantic love, it has a healthy respect for the power of supportive friends and family, too.

One of the biggest draws is episode three - Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am - in which Anne Hathaway plays Lexi, a lawyer with bipolar disorder struggling to manage her highs and lows.

It is by far the most distinctive of the eight, and views mental illness through an ambitiously theatrical lens. When she is manic, Lexi is a Rita Hayworth-esque bombshell who craves peaches in the middle of the night and charms men in the supermarket into having breakfast with her.

When she is low, she can barely get out of bed and can only bring herself to eat muesli. It finds its emotional core in a scene in a diner, with two women deciding simply to become friends.

There are two episodes that prove exceptions to Modern Love’s mostly saccharine and straightforward worldview, and both have moments of honesty that feel authentic rather than stagey.

When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist sees Dev Patel play a tech mogul who invented a dating site, while Catherine Keener is a writer sent to profile him. She asks him if he has ever been in love; they end up swapping stories about the one who got away. It nails the romance perfectly, in part because they are a great platonic pairing, but also because it allows each story to take a different path. One is fairytale, the other stoic. It is the episode that packs in the elegance you suspect they were reaching for elsewhere, and its finale is a genuine tearjerker.

The other standout, Rallying to Keep the Game Alive, adds some much needed vinegar. Written and directed by Sharon Horgan, it stars Tina Fey and John Slattery as a long-married couple with two teenage children who are wondering why they’re still together.

They watch a film about penguins, and wonder what the point of long-term love is; they go to couples’ therapy, and bicker their way through it, grasping impatiently for some common ground.

Eventually, they settle on vicious, rule-breaking tennis. It is the least sentimental episode, and by far the best.

[pauls4thoughts]

Dark Waters review – Todd Haynes plumbs the depths of a poisoning scandal

'Dark Waters' is cut from the same cloth as 'All The President’s Men', 'Silkwood' and 'Spotlight' without having the wallop of any of them.

Corporate lawyer Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) takes on huge corporation DuPont for dumping chemical waste into rivers, creating environmental hazards including the death of livestock and turning kids’ teeth black.

This crusade leads him into conflict with his own law firm, who represent DuPont (Tim Robbins is the stern but fair boss), and the Parkersburg locals who resent his meddling as DuPont is the town’s chief source of employment.

This results in a kind of low-energy detective story (photocopying abounds) but still with the ability to scare. When Bilott discovers that the poisonous chemical perfluorooctanoic acid is in Teflon and thus in practically every home, you’ll want to throw away your non-stick pans immediately.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1998, lawyer Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) is brought a case about contaminated water by a farmer friend of his grandmother’s. He presents him with VHS tapes of sickly cows with blackened teeth, along with a swollen gallbladder wrapped in tin foil, and so the pair begin a wearying, years-long uphill battle against the self-regulated DuPont chemicals company.

The film fizzes with righteous fury right the way through to its bitter, unhappy ending. Director Todd Haynes emphasises the story’s toxicity with a poisoned palette of jaundiced yellows and sickly hospital greens.

With the help of cinematographer Edward Lachman, Haynes treats the movie with an absence of colour, focusing on airless board rooms, snowy, muddy exteriors, and a general sense of unhealthiness all around. It's as if the very air were toxic. As the movie continues, it becomes clear that there's no clear victor in this David and Goliath battle - and in fact, the war goes on.

Ruffalo is excellent as reluctant hero Bilott, muting his natural charisma to create a character who is both taciturn and generous, determined but socially ill at ease.

Bilott switched sides, to the initial horror of his colleagues and discomfiture of his family and wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway). The film shows that he was turned, or flipped, like a spy - using his knowledge of the big chemical firms against them.

The movie is closer to something like Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) about taking on big tobacco. It’s a procedural, and all the fascination is in the detail: the mounds of documents, the boardroom discussions, and the cunning courtroom strategies.

What it lacks in octane, 'Dark Waters' makes up for in both sturdiness and substance, helped by Ruffalo’s ability to imbue Bilott with dogged determination and commitment.

Yet the performance you’ll take away is Bill Camp as the farmer who barges into Billot’s office and calls out the DuPont wrongdoing with perfectly rendered indignation. This is Dark Waters’ strongest suit: a story that is 30 years old but feels prescient in its highlighting of environmental concerns.

[pauls4thoughts]

Fun and likeable: The Personal History of David Copperfield reviewed

Having found unexpected laughter in the historical horrors of The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci works comedic wonders with the labyrinthine twists and turns of Dickens’s endlessly reinterpretable Victorian narrative, with ‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’. Astutely amplifying the absurdist – and remarkably modernist – elements of his source, Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell conjure a surreal cinematic odyssey that is as accessible as it is intelligent and unexpected. At its heart lies a theatrical journey of self discovery, in which our narrator (superbly played by the endlessly versatile Dev Patel) sets out to determine whether he is “the hero of my own story”, struggling to make a name for himself (literally) as he strides through a vividly realised landscape of memory and invention.

Joining him on his journey are an astonishing array of players, cast with a colour-blind inclusivity that allows Iannucci to broaden the scope and reach of his film beyond that of many previous Dickens adaptations.

As Betsey Trotwood, a magnificent Tilda Swinton is introduced with her nose squished against a window, while Darren Boyd’s ghastly Murdstone is a sinister symphony of hair, eyebrows and teeth. Peter Capaldi plays Mr Micawber as a benevolent Fagin with terrible squeezebox skills while Nikki Amuka-Bird lends real steel to the stern figure of Mrs Steerforth.

Best of all is Ben Whishaw’s Uriah Heep, a pudding-bowled apparition who creeps through corridors, a volatile mix of subservience and defiance; a beaten dog ready to bite. As for Patel, he displays more than a touch of the divine pathos of Charlie Chaplin, whether wooing the hopelessly inappropriate Dora Spenlow (Morfydd Clark, who brilliantly doubles as David’s mother Clara) or carousing in a drunken speeded-up revelry with the posh students whose “gentlemanly” company he craves.

It really is a wonderfully entertaining film, managing to both respect and reinvent the novel from which it takes its lead, creating something new and exciting in the process.

Iannucci has taken the best bits from the novel and crafted a vital story for a brand new generation of Dickens-lovers, carving himself a new career path in the process. Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.

[pauls4thoughts]

Seberg review – flawed study of a star hounded by Hollywood

Few today may remember Jean Seberg, the all-American girl from Nowheresville, Iowa, who was catapulted to stardom after director Otto Preminger almost burnt her alive shooting his Saint Joan in 1957. After that, Seberg (played here by a compelling Kristen Stewart) and her gamine hairdo became icons of the French New Wave thanks to Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

But when Seberg returned to Hollywood in the 1960s she found America a changed place. Her public support of the civil rights movement, funding the Black Panthers and secretly sleeping with Malcolm X disciple Hakim Jamal led to a terrifying persecution by the FBI. I remember her as the wife of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in the musical Paint Your Wagon, and the musical that was made 10 years ago about her life. I had a huge crush on her.

Gorgeously shot by cinematopher Rachel Morrison, this could have been a timely tale about toxic fame, celebrity activism, and contemporary racial and gender intersectionality, as well as an illuminating character portrait. However, Stewart's magnetism can't compensate for the script's sketchiness. Seberg's story deserves to be told - what a tragedy that this biopic's finest feature as its frocks.