Sugar (Apple TV)
I’m a big Colin Farrell fan, especially after his fabulous performance in The Banshees of Inishirin, so I was excited to see that this series stars Farrell as LA detective John Sugar. The story starts with a movie mogul, Jonathan Siegal, played by James Cromwell, hiring Sugar to find his granddaughter. Sugar learns that the granddaughter, Olivia, has struggled with drugs, and has disappeared before, so his efforts to find her, especially when interviewing family members, often lead nowhere. But he eventually starts to feel as if this resistance is hiding something a little more sinister, especially once he meets Olivia’s Aunt Melanie, played by Amy Ryan.
These detective stories where it ends up being two people who have a shared investment in solving a case, and seem to be fighting everyone else in the story, can sometimes be a little hokey, but Ferrell and Ryan have such a terrific chemistry here, plus Collin Ferrell is fabulous, approaching the whole situation in a calm, calculated way until things get to the point where actual violence is necessary. Ferrell makes this series work, but the supporting cast is also great, especially Ryan and an actress known only as Kirby, who plays Ferrell’s superior.
Four fortune cookies
Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
Holy shit, this was not what I expected. This series is based on actual events that happened to Richard Gadd, the star. Jessica Gunning is absolutely amazing as a woman who shows up one day in the pub where Donny Dunn (Gadd) is tending bar, claiming to be a very successful lawyer, but somehow not having enough money for a cup of tea. Dunn offers her one on the house, and from that day forward, his life is never the same.
The most fascinating thing about this story is the nagging question that haunts the audience about why this young man continues to engage with a woman who is obviously trouble, and it’s the storylines behind the main storyline that take this series to a whole ‘nother level.
Gadd’s character is a struggling stand-up comedian, and the fact that he’s really not very good just adds another level of intrigue when he meets a famous actor in the UK who offers to help him with his career.
This series is about the complexity of human relationships, and how our past can inform our decisions and the way we respond to others in ways that are often very confusing even to ourselves. Gadd’s final scene where he finally comes to terms with what has happened is one of the best monologues I’ve seen in a long time.
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The Taste of Things (AMC+, Amazon Prime)
Well all you really need to say is that Juliette Binoche plays a chef, Eugénie and the first twenty minutes of this film is spent watching her and a small crew of sous chefs prepare an incredible multi-course meal. It’s an almost wordless sequence, other than instructions here and there, so you learn very little about the characters but the way they handle the food, and interact without conversation is absolutely riveting.
OF course there ends up being much more to the story than that, including a love story between Eugenie and Doudin Bouffant, played by Benoit Magimel, that is very sweet and painful. Plus Eugenie takes on an apprentice after the niece of her sous chef tastes her stew and identifies almost all of the dozen or so ingredients. It’s hard to talk about this story without giving too much away, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s a story that’s driven mostly by the power of love and passion for what you do, and Binoche is very good at conveying those things, and it filters out into the rest of the cast here in a beautiful way.
Five fortune cookies
Line of Duty, Season Four (this is available on a lot of streaming services)
I raved about this series before, so I felt compelled to warn people that this season doesn’t maintain the standard established in the first three. Thandie Newton is very good as a detective that is determined to correct the fact that she’s been overlooked for too many years for promotions, and takes a few too many risks to make sure she gets the recognition she deserves. But the series has fallen into a very predictable pattern of getting the main characters into hot water over their tactics of gathering information on the cops they’re investigating, then rallying to prepare a presentation that presents very detailed new evidence. The problem is that it always feels as if these presentations happen just hours after the complication arose, because meanwhile, the investigation is still going forward in a very real timeline. The task of gathering data, preparing a presentation and executing an investigation by the same three or four officers begins to stretch your ability to suspend disbelief in ways that are hard to overlook.
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Dark Matter (Apple TV)
I don’t talk about most of the series that I start watching and give up on here, because I don’t want to take up too much space, but also because this happens a lot. But the premise for this one was intriguing enough that I gave it several episodes. It’s one of those series that stars a bunch of actors that you maybe sort of recognize but can’t name, with the exception of Academy Award winner Jennifer Connolly. And I think because of that, the acting doesn’t quite measure up to the material here.
The main character is Jason Dessen, played by Joel Edgerton. He and Connolly (Daniela) play a fairly successful couple who are clearly struggling. Joel is a college professor teaching some kind of science, and when he gets a call one day from one of his best friends, Ryan telling him Ryan has just won a major award that includes a buttload of money, Jason doesn’t do a very good job of hiding his disappointment. When Daniela convinces him to go to the celebration, Jason is surprised when Ryan offers him a job working on the big project. He tells him he’ll have to think about it, but when he leaves to go home, he gets jumped, and suddenly finds himself in a parallel universe where Ryan and Daniela exist, but he has clearly made different choices. He’s not married to Daniela, and he is in fact the one who received the award.
Some of the graphics in this series are really cool, but the storyline is so predictably centered around just the kinds of themes you would expect from a ‘what if you made different choices’ plot that there aren’t any real surprises. Plus, like I mentioned, the acting is sometimes painfully bad. I found it especially odd that they picked Edgerton, who is actually kind of creepy, for the lead. He and Connolly as a couple doesn’t even seem believable. And the guy who plays Ryan isn’t much better. In case you can’t tell, I didn’t like this one much.
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The Sympathizer (HBO Max)
Although I have a copy, I have not read the novel, which was the debut of Vietnamese author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize. But this series certainly made me want to pick up the book.
Hoa Xuande plays ‘the Captain,’ an officer in the South Vietnamese army who assists one of the generals in determining who will be allowed to take part in the final evacuation from South Vietnam at the end of the war. The Captain at first refuses to go along, declaring that he can do more good for his people by staying behind. But what the audience also knows is that he’s not everything he seems to be.
The Captain is also a ‘half breed,’ meaning his father was white, so he has always been treated as an outsider in his own country. Despite his intentions of staying in South Vietnam, The Captain eventually ends up in America, where he is hired to serve as an interpreter for a film about the war.
Xuande is incredible in this series, but the man who steals the show is Robert Downey, Jr., who plays two major roles, one as the director of the film, and one as The Captain’s CIA contact. The two characters are so distinctly different, even in appearance, that it’s hard to imagine how Downey could inhabit both of them, but he completely nails the sense of self-importance, and dismissive while trying to act like he’s entertaining other peoples’ ideas of the film director. And he conveys just the right amount of smarmy secretiveness and threat as the CIA agent.
This series was completely different from what I expected, but it takes a deep dive into what its like to have your culture stripped from you, as well as the complicated issues of being mixed race in a time and place where the implications of that are not only unsettling, but sometimes threatening. Plus there’s Sandra Oh, who is always a positive.
Five fortune cookies
Thanks, Russell, I've noted Sugar, Banshees of Inishirin, Baby Reindeer and the Taste of Things. Did I ask you before if you ever watched the series Bally Kiss Angel (from around 1996). It was a debut for Ferrell (not the most interesting character but...). Loved that series up until the very last episode.
You are correct - Sugar is excellent. L.A. hasn’t looked this good since William Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” Colin Farrell is so good that it caused us to go back and watch Terrence Malick’s “New World”, a movie we had avoided because the casting seemed so off and we didn’t have the interest in what we thought would be another 3+ hour Malick experience of watching miscast actors in nature with leaves blowing in trees, water running in rivers, and salamanders crawling across rocks. But we were wrong; it was a good movie and he was excellent as John Smith, alongside the young Native American woman who played Pocahontas (also fantastic). Give it a look if you’ve not seen it.
Baby Reindeer was also a heck of a watch, very uncomfortable for us but we couldn’t look away from it.