captainsblog | Event-ually....

It’s something of a break from recent events that, for the past several days and nights, I’ve taken a break from events. All of our entertainment since my Wednesday night tripleheader has been at home in front of either the boob tube or the Android tablet. I could even start a running count:

Fitting, because one of the things we have finished in the past few nights had a scene featuring this image:

That particular photo of the sign in hell came from a webpage from almost four years ago, so it can’t have been taken directly from the live-action Good Omens series that only aired this month on Prime. That’s not surprising, though, because the six episodes contained more Easter eggs than one of those pop-up Niagara Candy outlets I see around here during Lent.

Neil Gaiman homages dozens of works- his own, his late collaborator Sir Pterry Pratchett's, those of the actors, those of his friends, those randoms and sundries from literature and film. We even found our own backward egg of sorts in the third episode, where the two lead characters are seen well over a century earlier in Edinburgh. Our Heroes, played by David Tennant and Michael Sheen, intervene in a transaction between an unlawful grave-digger-upper and a Scottish surgeon in need of cadavers to train his students. The surgeon insists on being called MISTER Dalrymple. This sets up the cheap laugh allowing Tennant to be called “The Doctor,” but the declination of Doctorship among surgeons was, and remains, a real distinction in British medicine. We recently read the explanation in one of Rob Delaney’s books, from his years of meeting lots of them in the UK when their third son was diagnosed with an eventually fatal brain tumor:

Plenty of other tributes to Doctor Who, to Sherlock, to numerous corners of Pratchett's Discworld and to a novel written by a friend of Gaiman's called The Crow Road. I'm fixing to pick it up in my travels today or tomorrow to explore its assorted thematic connections to what Gaiman and John Finnemore did with the post-Pratchett adaptation after completion of the original tale.

In short, they did a lot, Not quite as much as they crammed into the first six episode series, and cliffs were hung that will have to await a Series 3 if the Angels and Demons (aka the writers/actors and studios) settle their own Armageddon and the ratings for this one are good enough to greenlight another go. Still, it was marvelous fun, with the usual stable of Fab BBC/RSC mafiosi in service (including Maggie Service;) plus Jon Hamm playing an amnesiac Mad Man Archangel.

----

From Good Omens, we move to Good Person.

A few weekends ago, I stopped in my office sans laptop but with lunch, as I got in the habit of doing during writing group meetings back when we ::AHEM:: had those. Since I cannot sit and eat alone without something to engage eyeballs, I selected the only magazine on the waiting room table- a months-old Vogue, of all things, but with a quite nice piece about the British actress Florence Pugh. Once past the photoshoot portion of the article, it settled into a much more casual chat with and about this young actress who I'd just seen in a smallish but important role in Oppenheimer. It mentions Greta Gerwig's Little Women that we'd seen her in; mostly avoids any discussion of her turn with Harry Styles in Don't Worry Darling that I doubt we'll ever see; but I was most intriged by the description of another recent film largely driven by real-life events involving her recently-broken-up boyfriend Zach Braff and the COVID-related death of a friend who sheltered with them during the worst of it. That turned into Braff's first work as a writer-director, A Good Person, which Pugh co-produced as well as writing and performing much of the soundtrack pieces in. She turns her British self into a NEW Jersey girl with a perfect accent to match, for two difficult but powerful hours. When her co-star Morgan Fucking Freeman is only mentioned once in a discussion of a film, you know she's done something special. I cashed in a Redbox discount to save it for a streaming night, and that turned out to be Sunday. There were rough moments, especially for two people in recovery with some still-working-on family issues like the ones depicted, but in the end, after the tragic opening scene, everybody except [spoiler] lived- if not happily ever after, at least happier than they were at their worst moments, and sometimes that's the best you're gonna do.

The Vogue piece quotes Carol Morley, the director of a teenage Pugh in her debut film The Falling almost a decade ago, as saying of her, “I believe she’s a Meryl Streep. She will have a career for the rest of her life.” That closes the chapter of reading Vogue, still made visual to me by Streep playing its editor as a Devil in Pradas, and moves us to the next thing we've resumed watching, which also has a nice touch of Streep in it....

----

Yup, Only Murders in the Building is back, where she plays a bit-part actress in the play-within-the-play of the new season's material.

Eagle-eyed viewers of the series might notice Meryl’s mug. It first showed up in a teaser for the current series, where everybody thought the name of Oliver’s redeeming return to direction, shown in a cliffhanger scene at the end of season two, was going to be “Bye Bye Buffalo.“ The title turned out to be inaccurate- “Death Rattle“ is what they’re going with – but the mug lives on for whatever reason and will no doubt get the same kind of local attention as our local Evans Bank did when it showed up on the TV screen in a late episode of Succession. The third episode of Murders drops tonight, with all of the usual suspects from the building in play, plus the cast of the play, all vying for being the Whodunit to Paul Rudd’s character. Assuming, that is, he stays dead, which he refused to do initially, I presume so he could actually die “in the building.” He is still showing up, at least in flashbacks, and since the actor he is playing is a Knigge testicle asshole, pretty much everyone has a motive to want to see him dead.

(I’m just going to leave that weird Siri thing up there, partly because I have no idea what I actually said, but also, who knows? Maybe Knigge Testicle did it. My money is on Meryl otherwise, if only for the bad karma that comes from anything associated with Buffalo. Again, though, who knows? There's a post recirculating from a few years back- a Times of London identifying Buffalo as one of the coolest tourist places for Brits to go in the summer. They better book quickly, though. The Erie County Fair is close to finished, which for many marks the unofficial end of a Buffalo summer. Minor league baseball is also almost over- I'll make my first and only ballpark visit of the year to see the Bisons this weekend- the Mets were toast a month ago, and exhibition football is already under way. We’ve had the AC off the past three days, with just the slightest hint of fall in the air. August 15 is always my annual transitional looking-back day into the anniversary of moving into my first ever on-my-own apartment, now 45 August 15ths ago. You can go back to this date on any year via the archive link and read pretty much the same post about it.)

----

From the Building to the Starship we go....

Strange New Worlds has been quite a mission, for them as well as for the viewers. It's been a bit of everything: the first half of the ten-episode run doing courtroom drama, time travel, and a briefly de-Vulcanized Spock, but that was just a leadup into what the final five have brought us. An Uhura-centric piece about communication and her past, the Lower Decks crossover I've mentioned before, a VERY dark War Is Hell piece featuring Barry's Robert Wisdom as a Klingon ambaddador seeking forgiveness from a crew largely unwilling to, and then,....

a musical?

It was billed as the first-ever in the franchise's almost 60 year history. Which I guess it was, if you don't count this MAD rendition from the 1970s interregnum:

(That grab's from a 2008 blogger's recap of it; the full-size version of it and all of the pages are at its link.)

If you're talking about actual live action, though, yeah- Strange New Worlds got there first- before JL or JJA or any of the dozens of others who might have boldly broken out in song. They even came up with a moderately plausible explanation for why Our Heroes (and even the villains, for a few bars at the end ) were doing it! They called on good ol' Lieutenant Ex Machina to devise a quantum field that caused anyone in range to break into song and dance whenever their emotions were heightened. While Memory Alpha classifies it primarily as a "quantum uncertainty field," it also gets referenced several times as an "improbability field." That would likely make Douglas Adams very, very happy; I presume all you have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of Tea, Earl Grey, HOT… and turn it on! Perhaps unusually for a musical (or perhaps not- see Cats, Phantom, Les Miz, Ad Infinitum), it wasn't especially funny or heartwarming. At least not until the 11:00 number that ended the improbability and the episode. Props to all, though, for finding something new to do with a franchise that already has just about boldly (or boringly) gone everywhere there is to go.

Just one left in the current series. I only know who the Special Guest Villain is, one from the original series they've been teasing all season; and that it ends on a cliffhanger for the first time in parsecs. With the strikes on, who knows when they'll be able to extract their fingernails from that cliff.

----

On the smaller screen- as in really small, my Android tablet barely bigger than my phone, comes another Trek connection I've mentioned before: Howard Weinstein, East Meadow alum and longtime writer of Enterprise fiction, has finally released the second in his late 19th century western series following the Brothers Galloway across the country of that era.

If anybody could bridge all three of those categories, Howie's your man. I never read the first in the Galloway series, but I quickly signed on to the sequel, if only because our beloved-to-both physics mentor Albert Palazzo makes an appearance in it:

Set, at least initially, in and around 1870s San Francisco, it sets up the basic premise in its first chapter and then takes us through hotels and poker rooms and racetracks to get us to that point. The Galloways then recross the country to Howie's now-native Baltimore to bring the story to a thrilling conclusion at Pimlico. That's as far as I've gotten so far, but it's been quite a ride, by horse and train and even cable car.

----

And we end with one we're finishing and one yet to be scheduled: Barry and Barbie.

HBO's four-season comedy thriller Barry ended around the same time Succession did, but we've only been working through its story since then, now coming around the far turn of the final season to see how Barry, Sally, Gene, Fuches and NoHo Hank will end their tales in the not too distant future. Earlier seasons had presented dreamlike flashforwards into an idyllic future life of Bar and Sal, but episode 5 dropped those two into a much more real, much more dull and much more dark future. Alone, poor, and very scarily Fundie. By the time we ended episode 6 last night, the other main characters had also returned, interacted and set up a final two- with Barry back in LA, everybody hunting everybody, and a dark denouement seeming inevitable.

Also inevitable is I'm going to see this Barbie movie. My older sister (or, as she reminded me, my "OTHER older sister" from the doll "born" eight months before I was) caught it last week. I'm encouraged by the amount of hate it's received from MAGA-land; intrigued by what Gerwig did with the material after what we've seen of her prior Hollywood history; and curious to see how this fits into Margot Robbie's acting arc. It now completes this Aussie's cycle by her playing Barbie (a middle-American cultural icon), Harley Quinn (a shrink and former girlfriend of the Joker in Gotham City) and Tonya Harding (a trailer park ice skater who lives in Canada). Based on that, I'm expecting her to dump Ken, go crazy and then break out of the asylum, and finally kneecap Skipper with a tire iron.

Still not quite sure when I will experience it, but I'm pretty much decided on where:

That's one of the photos I took back in January when visiting the Little in Rochester to see friends playing a set in their cafe. I didn't work it into the entry here then, but it's timely now: that's the auditorium they're screening Barbie in. That it's playing at the Little at all gives it extra cred, on account of its rich recent history of screening important indie and arts films. But in this particular screen, even more so: I never met Jack, but knew his work well as the longtime movie reviewer for the Rochester D&C. His son Matt was the visual effects editor on this film;the paper's piece about it is paywalled, of course, but this available article gives some behind the scenes looks at the editing process of this Scorcese-like visual project (Garner's kid worked on Scorcese's The Irishman, so he knows).

That might be tomorrow, Thursday or Friday night. Then we'll start the count all over again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sturgeonslawyer

Never saw that musical, as it appears to have been after the days when MAD was a regular monthly purchase. I do, however, fondly remember the earlier parody from the '60s...