Fargo
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StudioFX Productions,
The crime drama returns to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and rediscovers its best storytelling self.
Throughout the six episodes of Fargo Season 5 screened for critics, the series isn’t exactly subtle. From opening the season with an on-screen graphic defining “Minnesota Nice” as neighbor attacks neighbor during a school board meeting to Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) staring up at a campaign billboard of himself, the show loudly states its theses at the viewer over and over.
However, it never feels like creator Noah Hawley has lost control of the storytelling. It’s methodically over-the-top. The audience is on a roller coaster, but they can feel the quality of the engineering keeping them on the tracks. In other hands, this approach can feel alienating or blunting. Fargo Season 5 benefits from meeting Hawley’s signature energy with a game cast and impressively insightful art direction. As a result, the series turns in its best offering since Season 2’s near-perfect effort. Continue Reading →
Mickey's Birthday Party
Friedkin’s second film is a bruising affair that finds the fledgling director wielding style to produce maximum psychological damage.
In the early days of his career, William Friedkin found himself playing second banana to his collaborators. For instance, one of his earliest biggest TV directing gigs was on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Then, when he made the leap to feature narrative films, his debut was in service of Cher and Sonny Bono’s cult of personality.
In The Birthday Party, Friedkin’s second film, more well know talent once again eclipses him. Playwright Harold Pinter, whose original stage play the film adapts, also contributed the film script. Even now, the cover of Blu-rays and DVDs, the only way to see it currently, bills it as “Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.” Continue Reading →
Stranger Things
The one thing that no one can deny is Stranger Things Season 4 remains aggressively itself right up to the end. Its final two episodes, feature-length films onto themselves, serve everything that one could enjoy about the first seven episodes with a side of everything that frustrates and annoys. The good news is that the bad bits remain a side dish, not the main course. The better news is that ratio tips even further in favor of what’s enjoyable. Continue Reading →
Spree
Eugene Kotlyarenko's satire about a rideshare driver who murders for online fame lacks the bite or nuance its premise deserves.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
It was just over six years ago when Sharkeisha went viral for assaulting her friend on camera. The World Star video became a meme goldmine and made headlines, and while it seemed shocking at the time, it obviously wasn’t the last. Six months later in the wake of the Isla Vista massacres, the shooter’s face spread like wildfire as he waged polemics against those he felt had polluted the earth. He sat in his car, camera on his dashboard, and tried to justify his misogyny and racism. Now he has his own Wikipedia page.
Of course, the 2010s didn’t birth this sort of infamy, but, like some sort of trickle-down economics, it helped normalize it. YouTube “comedians” like Sam Pepper churned out “prank” videos so he could justify groping women on camera. A few years later, Logan Paul went from Vine to CNN to apologize for a video in which he vlogged a dead body in a Japanese suicide forest. But what about the kids that aren’t famous, the ones that aren’t pulling pranks on the homeless? Continue Reading →