First, a reminder that there’s less than a week left to pre-order a signed copy of the first edition of my next book, which you can do here:
BE A MAN: Raised in the Shadow of Cowboys
And now for the good stuff!
The Man Who Died (Acorn)
I don’t generally think of the Finns as producing great comedies, but this six-part series about a man who finds out early on that he’s been poisoned and only has a few weeks? months? days? to live is delightfully smart and funny.
Jussi Vatanen plays Jakko, who owns a thriving mushroom business in his small town in Finland. But a new group has recently moved into his territory with their own plans of creating a mushroom empire of their own. The first meeting between Jakko and his competitors is hilarious because it plays very much like the meeting between two rival mobster gangs in a major city, with the exception that Jakko definitely doesn’t fit the mob stereotype. He’s a mild-mannered, easy-going guy who doesn’t quite catch on that he’s being threatened.
In fact, he hasn’t caught on to quite a few things, as we find out soon after this meeting when he arrives home early from work to discover his wife in a passionate encounter with their delivery boy.
All if this happens right after the opening scene, when Jakko’s doctor gives him the bad news about being poisoned. So of course the rest of the series revolves around Jakko’s efforts to figure out who is poisoning him and why. The list of possibilities continues to grow and Jakko wakes up to the world around him with this newfound knowledge that he' doesn’t have much time left. The humor in this series is wonderfully understated, and of course there are several unexpected turns in the story, which keeps it interesting. I am always reminded of the Hitchcock quote that mystery is when you don’t know how a story is going to end, but suspense is when you know how it’s going to end but you’re completely engaged anyway. That describes this series very well.
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Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (Netflix)
I honestly didn’t expect to stick with this series. I tend to think most fictionalized versions of true crime stories are badly written, and difficult to trust in terms of accuracy. But this is really well done.
We all know the story…two wealthy, spoiled young men murdered their parents in their home, managed to get away with it for several weeks, until one of them couldn’t live with himself anymore and confessed to his therapist.
This series does a nice job of first presenting these two as heartless sociopaths who came up with this plan and carried it out with cold-blooded efficiency, then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with the expectation that their inheritance would cover it all.
But the deeper we get into the story, the more complicated it becomes, especially when we start to see the dynamic between the brothers and their father, played as only he can play it by Javier Bardem as a driven, macho, domineering bully.
I didn’t recognize either of the actors who play the brothers, but they are excellent, with Nicholas Alexander Chavez capturing Lyle’s false bravado and arrogance perfectly, while Cooper Koch shows how Erik was much more fragile, although he had his own brand of narcissism. It becomes apparent early on that the bond between these two is somehow unnatural, but also unbreakable, and that it was that dynamic…the commitment to each other…that not only kept them going but also led to this horrific crime.
Chloe Sevigny, who never seems to have a bad performance, is also terrific as their alcoholic mother whose devotion to her husband makes it difficult for her to show any support for the boys even when their father brutalizes them.
It’s a complicated story, well told. In a genre that can often feature really bad, unrealistic dialogue, I think the writing in this series is excellent.
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Doctor Foster (Britbox, Amazon Prime)
This ten-part series is almost ten years old, but I was drawn to it because I recently watched the series MaryLand with the lead actress, Suranne Jones, and I like her. She was also excellent in a buddy cop series called Scott & Bailey.
In Doctor Foster, we meet Gemma Foster when she seems to be at the peak of her career and personal life. We get the usual scenes of domestic bliss with Gemma and her husband Simon making love, bantering in the kitchen with their son Tom, and going off to work. Gemma is the head of her own practice, and from all early indications, everything is going well there too until one day she comes across a long blond hair clinging to Simon’s scarf.
She brushes off her initial thought, realizing the many possibilities, but as more and more small hints start to pile up, Gemma becomes obsessive about figuring out if and what is going on with her husband.
The transition from seemingly balanced professional woman to possessive, obsessive wife seemed a little abrupt to me, but of course eventually we learn the truth, and that’s when Gemma’s behavior really starts to go off the rails.
As much as I sympathized with Gemma and her situation, there are so many scenes in this series where she is completely irrational and actually mean to people, even those who are trying to help, that it became difficult to root for her after a while.
I also thought the casting for Simon was off. The woman he’s having an affair with is twenty years his junior, and maybe it was just me, but I didn’t find the actor playing Simon to be the kind of guy that a young woman that age would be attracted to. So you could say I had some issues with this series, although I watched it to the end. But I wouldn’t rank it among the top half of British series I’ve watched.
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Slow Horses Seasons Two and Three (Apple TV)
So as I confessed in my review of the first season of this series, it took me a while to warm up to this, but I’m pretty much all in now, and the main reason is more because of the supporting cast, although I will always be a Gary Oldman fan. But Oldman’s purposefully offensive character kind of wears on you after a while, especially when we almost never see him break away from it. I have become especially tired of his habit of breaking wind in public. I’m not normally prudish about just about anything, but this character is offensive enough that it just feels stupid to add one more juvenile thing to the list .
But back to the show. The main appeal here comes from characters like River Cartwright, played by Jack Lowden. Cartwright is the grandson of one of the more legendary figures in British crime history, so he’s always fighting to prove himself, especially after he committed a major fuck-up early in the series, which is why he’s been relegated to the Slow Horses, which is basically a band of fuck-ups.
There is also Catherine Standish, played with a quiet but steady intelligence by Saskia Reeves. She’s one of those characters who always seems to be off to the side until something important happens. Rosalind Eleazar is also a standout as Louisa Guy, who is on a mission after losing her love interest, a fellow officer. The storytelling is engaging, and the acting is terrific throughout the cast, plus there are always surprises. Well worth your time.
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OLDIE BUT GOODIE
Lonely Are the Brave (Amazon Prime)
Kirk Douglas often cited this as one of his favorite performances, and it’s easy to see why. The screenplay, written by one of the legends of the craft, Dalton Trumbo, was based on an Edward Abbey novel called Brave Cowboy, and the story is about an aging cowboy who is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that the world he is accustomed to is disappearing.
Douglas plays Jack Burns with all the cocky bravado of your average cowboy, and each time his attitude and behavior land him in trouble, he has a hard time understanding why the world doesn’t see things the same way he does.
It doesn’t hurt that Douglas is supported by performances by two of my all-time favorites, Walter Matthau as a sheriff who keeps trying to help Jack get his head around the fact that he needs to change his attitude, and the recently departed Gena Rowlands, whose dedication to Jack gets severely tested when he keeps making self-destructive decisions.
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