Something great, something awful, but most are merely good.

The Bear Season 2

It took me two tries to get into The Bear, Hulu’s biggest hit in quite some time. I get it takes place in a hectic restaurant kitchen, but all the shouting and rushing and “SOUTH SIDE!” warmed-over Shameless sentiment just turned me off and I only lasted three or four episodes. To be fair, I was down with Covid-19 at the time and I felt the show was making me sicker. Several months later I tried again and thank God for that, because I was able to see what a carefully observed, funny, honest and frequently touching show it was. Sure, it’s a bit too sentimental at times for my taste, especially when it’s the 19th time the restaurant staff finds something belonging to the dead brother and everyone takes a quiet, reflective moment and we pan in on Carmie’s sad blue eyes while an alternative rock ballad swells in the background, but for the most part these moments are earned, if a bit repetitive. That’s really the only negative feedback I have for this show, the rest of this review is going to be a total love letter.

The excellent Jeremy Allen White (Lip from Shameless) plays Carmie, an acclaimed chef who left his high-stress, high-paying Michelin star restaurant gig to save his family’s dying Italian Beef joint after his older brother (Jon Berenthal) dies by suicide. Carmie decides to fix the family restaurant with the help of his existing staff and a new young su chef he hires, Sidney (a fantastic Ayo Edebiri). The first season was great but Season 2 is even better, taking a page out of the old Louie/Atlanta playbook by having some episodes focus. on a single character and take place outside of the restaurant, or an elaborate flashback episode featuring a cavalcade of A-listers (Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Gillian Jacobs, John Mulaney) that serves as an act break in the middle of the season. We also get fantastic turns by Will Poulter as a chef and Olivia Colman as another chef. However, the real standout this season is Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who manages to find even more depth and layers to his tragic South Side loser/perpetual fuck-up, Richie.

This show is taking a lot of risks and most are paying off. It may not be as poignant or as clever as some of its predecessors, but it’s very rewarding television and one of the best shows of 2023. Grade: A- (Hulu)

Asteroid City

I’m not really the biggest Wes Anderson fan, especially his later work which often disregards rich character dynamics for elaborate production design. The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore were great because the characters, while certainly whacky, were grounded in reality which made it possible for an audience to understand and empathize with them. The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch all came across as obscure and pretentious, offering little more than absolutely to die for mise-en-scenes. Asteroid City isn’t a major pivot back to Anderson’s old ways, but it represents his first movie that is actually upfront about how hollow it is. It’s a play within a movie, one written by a total ding dong (Edward Norton), about a bunch of people who don’t matter, all convening at a roadside attraction that randomly gets visited by aliens. There’s a central romance between J Schwartzy and Scary Jo’s characters that I could take or leave, but besides that, characters don’t really talk with each other so much as at each other. Asteroid City is a rolodex of fifty or so one-dimensional caricatures who all have their unique brand of schtick, but never get truly affected by any of the other caricatures barking in their ears. Some are really entertaining, like Tom Hanks as a semi-cranky grandfather, Jeffrey Wright as a hilariously over-the-top general, Rupert Friend as an American Cowboy, and especially, Ethan Josh Lee as Ricky Cho, a boy genius who is gonna fight the system, man. The rest of the caricatures range from amusing to boring, with only a select few reading obnoxious. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time watching this, though. The color palette is totally serving rainbow sherbet fantasy and the quirkiness doesn’t seem as overbearing as a precocious twelve year old tugging on your pant leg while exclaiming “Look what I can do!” To me, that’s what the majority of post-2010 Wes Anderson movies feel like. There were only four moments I audibly groaned at in the theater, mostly when it gets super meta with scenes outside of the play within the movie, which surround the creation of said play. Hardly a glowing review from me, I know, but I actually liked this quite a bit more than I thought I would. It’s a good movie for the most part. Grade: B (In Theaters)

The Idol Season 1

HBO…errrrr I mean, “Max”, made a wise decision to dump this five-episode flop right after two of the network’s most beloved shows, Succession and Barry, ended. Everyone was exhausted from those brilliant but emotionally demanding “comedies”, so they could take a three-week breather before jumping into the third season of Righteous Gemstones. I don’t want to speak in hyperbole, but if there’s a more shallow, more clumsily executed, big budget HBO spectacle out there than The Idol, I surely haven’t seen it.

The premise surrounds a really sad young pop star, Jocelyn (Lily Rose-Depp), trying to stay relevant and on top of the game. Her abusive mom just died, and she’s going through serious emotional issues. Her team of publicists, managers and agents treat her like a giant money machine, and her “friends” exist only to kiss her ass. She needs another hit or she’s fucked, so in comes this weird perv sporting a rat tail named Tedros (horribly portrayed and also written/conceived by Canadian singer, The Weeknd). Instantly, he realizes what her problem is – she doesn’t know how to fuck. No worries, through a series of overlong and over-stylized sex montages (seriously almost half the running time of any given episode), Tedros takes her down a peg by treating her like a fleshlight, so she can gain the confidence necessary to churn out another #1 hit single. This maybe wouldn’t be all terrible if it had a point other than satisfying the morbid curiosity some asshole might have of seeing The Weeknd perform thoroughly degrading sex on Johnny Depp‘s daughter.

The nightmare doesn’t stop there, The Idol doesn’t just settle for being a sleazy Cinemax After Dark movie with a $75 Million budget. This show actually thinks it’s a The Player-level takedown of the industry, which is odd seeing as though it has absolutely nothing to say beyond “wow, abuse is bad but it can fuel creativity” or in some truly despicable instances “is it abuse if both people are awful and a hit gets made?” In order for The Idol to work it would need to be much funnier and precise with its satire, which as it stands, the show feels like it toggles between collecting low-hanging fruit and complete and total earnestness. Eli Roth‘s music executive at one point quips “I’m fucking shitting more blood than a kid at Epstein Island!” Wow, this show sure is edgy.

In terms of the acting, Lily Rose-Depp does what little she can with a flimsy and constantly contradictory character, but she’s far better than The Weeknd who barely makes it through any given line delivery. The supporting cast is superb – Hank Azaria, Dan Levy, Jane Adams, Shiva Baby‘s Rachel Sennott, Red Rocket‘s Suzanne Son, Da’Vine Joy Randolph – but totally wasted on one-dimensional roles.

Whittled down to only five one-hour episodes, and realistically featuring only one full episode of actual plot, this overstuffed, obnoxious and flat-out boring miniseries could have just been a bad 90-minute Tubi movie. In terms of Sam Levinson IP – look, I’m not a Euphoria fan by any means but at least that show had a well defined central character (played to the hilt by powerhouse Zendaya) balancing out its painfully obvious takes. With The Idol, there’s absolutely nothing to grab onto. Grade: D- (Max)

From Season 2

I had high hopes for the second season of From, my god, I bought an MGM+ subscription because of it. You know how much other stuff is on MGM+? Not much. Dungeons & Dragons and that Timothee Chalamet cannibal movie are basically it, they don’t even have an A-Z list of content to browse through. Anyway, the first season was solid for the most part but ultimately pretty frustrating. The set-up of From is so good and the monsters are so legitimately scary that it’s kind of a bummer that the majority of characters feel two-dimensional. From’s first season started really strong but ended in a very muddled and unspectacular way. Oddly enough, the second season has the opposite problem in that it begins painfully slow with the pace not being picked up until Episode 6 where the season really takes off all the way to a fantastic Episode 10 cliffhanger. Even though the pace skyrockets in those final five episodes, I’m still not entirely convinced From knows what’s it’s doing in a ‘big picture’ type of a way. I don’t think the creators really know how they are going to end this show or at least they don’t know exactly how they are going to arrive at their preferred ending. There’s a lot of tacked on mythologies emerging, including a ballerina music box that seems plucked from a 90s horror movie or this weird Nightmare on Elm Street dream logic, that distract from the central mystery of the show. The cast remains as good or bad as always with about half of them really excelling (Harold Perrineau, yay!) and the other half being pretty bad (Eion Bailey, nay!), and the production budget seems to have gone up a tad so that’s awesome when bodies start getting ripped apart. Grade: B (MGM+)

Showing Up

Easily one of the most authentic films I’ve ever seen about being a fringe artist, but certainly not one of the most entertaining. Showing Up is slow even for Kelly Reichardt standards, and the pay off seems too slight for the amount of time the movie puts into building a very low-key and passive aggressive feud between a struggling sculptor, Lizzy (a remarkable as always Michelle Williams) and a thriving one, Jo (the great Hong Chau), who just so happens to be Lizzy’s landlord. These two have so many wonderfully written subtle jabs at each other that it almost makes you wish the movie had just been about their relationship, versus all the amusing but ultimately kinda slight world-building of their artist community. Like any Reichardt picture, there are dozens of brilliant little moments scattered throughout, but this one in particular didn’t emotionally connect with me the way Wendy & Lucy or First Cow did, and it also doesn’t succeed in telling a bigger, more important story like Meek’s Cutoff did. Only when the stupidly underrated John Magaro (Past Lives, First Cow, young Silvio from The Many Saints of Newark) shows up as Lizzy’s schizophrenic brother do things begin to take off in the second half, but before you know it, the movie is over – and it doesn’t have an ending really, it just simply stops. Nothing that Showing Up does is bad, it’s superbly well written and executed but I wish its goals were aimed a little higher. Reichardt is one of the best auteurs working today, but this feels like a real minor work in her oeuvre. Grade: B (VOD)