from AVClub.com
https://tv.avclub.com/fargo-the-rooster-prince-1798180221

Fargo S1 Ep 2: The Rooster Prince

Fargo: “The Rooster Prince”


Zack Handlen
and Emily Todd VanDerWerff
4/22/14 10:15PM

Todd: “There’s more than one right thing,” Gus Grimly tells his adolescent daughter, and she looks at him skeptically. This is exactly the sort of thing you can tell your child with the full weight of adulthood and all its compromises behind it, but it’s also the sort of thing that turns to dust in your mouth even as you’re saying it. More than one right thing? What the hell kind of philosophy is that? There’s just the one right thing, and just the one wrong thing, and that’s the way it is. Right? And yet when Gus tells his daughter that he’s got his priorities as a cop, sure, but also his priorities as a father, there’s a ring of truth to it. We’re all balancing multiple selves off of each other, and the older we get, the more versions of ourselves we invite onto the bus. Gus’ daughter has a dad because he didn’t go down a certain road with Malvo. But that doesn’t mean he won’t eventually.

“The Rooster Prince” is a bit of a step back from last week’s riveting first episode, but the reasoning for that is sound: It’s here that the show starts to truly differentiate itself from its cinematic forebear. “The Crocodile’s Dilemma” teases viewers with the idea that the series might be a remix of the movie before heading off on its own path by the end. “The Rooster Prince” is the episode where this thing settles both into being its own project and into being a TV show at all. With the conflicts established and the pieces all in place, Noah Hawley and Adam Bernstein can sit back and carefully watch as their characters begin to move around the board, seeing what happens when they poke certain slumbering bears. This means that “The Rooster Prince” is rather low on incident, all things considered, but it’s high on the kinds of things that made the back half of the first episode so enjoyable, like a kind of cockeyed philosophizing and scenes where the forces of Minnesota Nice and good police work do war within Molly Solverson and Allison Tolman conveys it all so very well using only her eyes.

The early reviews for Fargo singled out Tolman as an out-of-the-blue sensation—this year’s sudden, stunning find who seemingly arrived without any credits to deliver an amazingly assured performance. (Tolman comes out of the world of theater, which has a way of delivering such capable actors.) I didn’t see as much of that in the first episode—though I certainly found Molly an arresting presence—but “The Rooster Prince” begins setting up why Molly and Gus are going to be our heroes, even if they’ve each encountered setbacks. Gus let the bad guy slip through his fingers out of concern for his daughter, and he’s going to have to work through that before he gets on the trail again. But Molly is certain that Lester knows more than he’s saying, and she’s going to get him to ‘fess up to it, even if everybody else thinks she’s wrong to keep pursuing this lead. Bill—promoted to chief ahead of her, both because of seniority and genitalia—knew Lester in high school. He’s not the kind of guy who’s capable of that, right? Yet something keeps niggling at the back of Molly’s mind, pieces that won’t quite fit together, and I love the way that the exterior niceness slowly drops away until she’s openly accosting Lester at the drug store. If this is to be a cop story, then she’s going to have to be thrown off the case at some point—and she is by the end of this episode, making stunning time.

Yet “The Rooster Prince” is also an episode thick with grief. Zack, what do you make of Lester’s seeming sorrow over murdering his wife? And how do we figure Malvo’s adventures in Duluth are going to connect to all of this?




Zack: Lester’s a strange case, isn’t he? If I had to guess, I’d say that his brief breakdown over his wife’s sweater is the real deal; I wondered the first time I watched the episode if it was supposed to be some kind of rehearsal, and that still might be the case, but re-watching it for review, it struck me as legitimate, almost animalistic response. There’s something not quite right about him, and while I don’t think the show is trying to make us sympathize with the character (if they are, good luck with that), I do think there’s an effort to indicate that killing his wife wasn’t something that’s made him particularly happy. Like a lot of the plotting on the show, I can’t see exactly where things are headed, which can be both tremendously exciting, and a little nerve-wracking; it would be possible for this to implode pretty easily. But for right now, I liked that little moment a lot, because it reinforced the idea of Lester as, well, kind of an idiot, the sort of person who spends his time silently seething at the world, only to lash out when given an excuse in a way that far exceeds any abuse he might have received—and then immediately regret what he’s done, while still not really realizing his part in it.

He seems like a routine Malvo has run before, and that’s an idea the episode makes explicit with that really terrific scene with the tape recorder. If the previous episode suggested that the character, with his calm detachment and apparently motiveless desire to stir shit up, was a Mephistopheles figure, this week makes that even more explicit. There’s an awareness of that whole male anti-hero convention that helps to elevate this above just more of the same. Malvo isn’t a freelance self-help guru. He gets off on bringing out the worst in people, and Lester is getting a glimpse of just what it means to get stuck with the bill.

As for the blackmail plot, so far it’s more a curiosity than anything else, although I loved the set-up. Malvo’s trip to the post office was reminiscent of Anton Chigurh’s brief dealings with “normal” people in No Country For Old Men, although Malvo is less obviously insane than Chigurh was—there was still that alien-observing-human-conversation vibe throughout. And I’ll be honest: I find that delightful, especially when it doesn’t end in anyone getting murdered. This episode gives a clearer sense of Malvo’s actual job (he seems to be some kind of fixer), while still leaving him as largely a mystery. That tape recorder scene leads directly into Malvo’s confrontation with Stavros’ main thug, and again, there’s that sense of detachment; Malvo listening patiently to the guy’s threats before dropping trou and taking a dump in front of the guy reads like a scientist establishing dominance in front of a lesser primate.

All of which could turn this into a one-note excuse to get off on how stupid people can be; and while that can be fun, it’s a relief to have Molly and Gus on the other side of things. Especially Molly, whose straightforward determination and obvious intelligence make Bill’s behavior more frustrating (because he’s standing in the way of good police work) and actually tolerable (since there’s no sense that Molly is ever going to give up, or even significantly doubt herself, in the face of Bill’s befuddled disdain). So many other shows have told stories about men giving in to their worst impulses that it’s refreshing to have one in which the forces of law and order are at least as worthy of our time as the villains. I’m at least as invested in Molly and Gus as I am in Malvo and Lester, and the episode finds ways, with that lovely scene at the sheriff’s wake (which helped make his death more than just a brutal twist) and the conversation between Gus and his daughter, to deepen that investment.

Speaking of that scene with Gus—what did you make of the brief glimpse of the Neighbor Who Is Proud Of Her Underwear? And we haven’t even talked about the arrival of the two hitmen tasked with tracking down Sam Hess’s killer, so… let’s do that.

Todd: The strongest connection I see running between Fargo the film and Fargo the series is how both are about the careless disintegration of carefully built order. Midwestern small towns run on very strictly maintained senses of proper place and behavior, and both stories involve what happens when someone dares to pluck at that order just enough to see what it takes to make it fall apart. (It’s worth pointing out that much of the film takes place in Minneapolis, a large city but one with close enough ties to Midwestern small towns that I think I can still make this work.) The major difference is that the unwinding at the center of the film is almost an unconscious decision: Our “hero” believes that he can have his wife kidnapped without things going wrong, only to realize just how incorrect he is. Meanwhile, the unwinding at the center of the show is very consciously a choice by Malvo to sow the seeds of discontent wherever he can. And in so doing, he creates a situation that begins to tear at the fabric of the little town of Bemidji.

Because this is a TV show, that disintegration needs to have more forms than just Malvo and Lester’s misdeeds, which means that we get to see the consequences of what happens. If Sam Hess had ties to some sort of gun-running organization—as it seems he did—then that organization is almost certainly going to respond to his death with some kind of payback. What makes this Fargo and not some lesser show is that the two men sent to look into what happened are a deaf man played by Russell Harvard and an exasperated partner played by Adam Goldberg. There’s a sense throughout this show of most of the actors rising to the weird, challenging material and giving some of their best performances in some time, and I certainly felt that way about these two, who somehow hold the center of scenes both comedic and menacing. What I really like is the way they’re portrayed almost as work-a-day stiffs, just trying to get through this latest job, as opposed to Malvo, who seems to take real relish in spreading destruction. The final scene—in which they toss the poor guy who just happens to look like Malvo into a hole in an icy lake—reminded me, for all the world, of those Looney Tunes where the sheepdogs would clock in. “Morning, Sam.” “Morning, Ralph.” Just another day at the office.

Having the two around also contributes to something that makes Fargo such a treat to watch: It adds to the overall sense of weirdness that surrounds the show. There’s stuff in these two episodes that plays like little else on TV right now, and just having everything surrounded by snow gives everything that sense, too. (In its use of long landscape shots of barren nothingness, Fargo apes Breaking Bad magnificently.) The woman who likes to show off her underwear falls under this banner as well, I’d imagine, since it seems like one of those “only in the movies” things to have happen to Gus. As you mentioned, there are many, many encounters between normal folks and Malvo that feel like real life tilted about five degrees to the side, like that post office scene. (I love the idea of asking for a package addressed just to “Duluth.”) There are elements of weirdness that don’t work for me so far—like Glenn Howerton as an overly tanned personal trainer—but the vast majority of these sorts of touches feel like little tastes of some deeper strangeness that’s only beginning to seep out.

What do you think, Zack? Does the show earn its weird? And are there any little touches or riffs you don’t like as well?

Zack: Well, I’m with you on Howerton; I’m not sure if it’s how the character’s conceived, or the actor’s performance, but he just doesn’t quite pop the way he’s supposed to. I think it might be because Howerton’s just not as good at playing the kind of dippy cheeriness the role requires—there’s an ironic detachment to every line he delivers that makes it all seem too calculated, in a way that’s more distracting than suggestive of depth.

Other than that, though, I’m digging the weird. I especially like the music choices—the drumming that opened the episode, and the song (which I don’t think I’ve ever heard before) that ends it. At this point, juxtaposing calm or quirky music over on-screen violence isn’t anything new, but there’s something jarring about how the show uses its score, in a good way. Like those shots of all that wide open space, it establishes a certain tone. It remains to be seen if that tone will add up to anything, but for right now, I’m content to enjoy the ride.

Todd: I am, too, but the show works for me because it grounds all of those odd touches in something genuine, something human. I keep coming back to Lester weeping privately at the sight of what his wife has left behind, and then I look at the title of this episode: “The Rooster Prince.” The story of the rooster prince is a Jewish folktale in which a prince comes to believe he is a rooster and acts accordingly. To cure his condition, the wise men of the palace convince him that roosters eat at tables with utensils and so on, retraining him to be human by telling him that what roosters do is what humans do. That seems to me particularly evocative of Lester, but I’ll toss this one to you, commenters: Is Lester training himself to be human again? Or is he training himself to give in to evil?

Todd’s grade: B+
Zack’s grade: B+

Stray observations:
That song you liked so well, by the by, Zack, is called “Full Moon,” and it’s by eden ahbez (not so much for the capital letters was old eden). He was a major influence on California hippies, and he composed the standard “Nature Boy.” So now you know! [TV]
I love how show keeps finding ways to get that fish poster in Lester’s basement on screen. “What If Everyone Is Wrong But You” is one of those mottos that will probably change meanings as the show goes on; right now, it neatly sums up Molly’s problems, Malvo’s philosophy, and underlines Lester’s only (doomed) hope. [ZH]
Another nicely weird touch: the window on the butcher’s room in Stavros’s office. I wonder if that’s just symbolic, or if it’s Chekov’s slaughterhouse. [ZH]
Gus’s daughter is played by Joey King. King was great in both The Conjuring and White House Down, and she does the “a little exasperated but still loving my dad” thing quite well. [ZH]
The events differ considerably, but Molly’s account of the shooting of her father during a traffic stop certainly resonates with the highway patrolman who’s killed in the film Fargo, right down to the way that Molly uses the phrase “little guy.” I know it’s not the same thing (since, after all, the trooper dies in the movie), but there was just enough there to have me briefly wondering if this was going to connect to the movie directly somehow. [TV]
The conversations between Molly and her father (Keith Carradine) do a nice job of counter-balancing all the dark humor, and I especially like how unphased Molly is over her dad’s concern. It’s a way to both recognize the awfulness of what’s happened without getting buried under it. (And some of Pa Solverson’s comments have a definite No Country feel to them.) [ZH]

Your Coen brothers film of the week: This is such a predictable answer, since we’ve mentioned it a few times this week, but my favorite film by the brothers has always been No Country For Old Men, which struck me as the absolute perfect movie to resonate with the person I was in 2007 and continue to remind me of that person the further I get from it. There are so many wonderful sequences in this film, and I’m glad it vaulted the brothers to another level of success. [TV]

Star Wars #1-6: The Destiny Path

 THE DESTINY PATH

Written by Charles Soule
Penciled by Jesus Saiz
Published Jan-Sep 2020

   Following the events of the Empire Strikes Back, the Rebellion is forced to deal with what they assume is a traitor in Lando Calrissian. Meanwhile, Luke struggles with the news that Darth Vader is actually his father. Making sure to keep him close, Leia sends Chewbacca with Lando on a trip back to Cloud City. Luke tags along in an attempt to find his hand/lightsaber... Of course they're soon captured but Lando is the expert at being able to talk himself out of things.
   After continuing to see visions of a woman courting him to learn Jedi secrets, Luke is soon introduced to the mysterious Verla, who after some persuasions reluctantly gives the young Jedi some instruction. Oh, also - one cool thing that happens is Leia is quickly frozen in carbonite and we get reintroduced to the cyborg Lobot. All in all, some AWESOME writing form Charles Soule (which was never in doubt) and incredible illustration from Jesus Saiz. I love where this one is going.. I give this arc an easy 10/10. 

from AVClub.com 

https://www.avclub.com/a-muddled-magisterium-raises-doubts-about-his-dark-mate- 

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His Dark Materials S2 Ep 2: The Cave

A muddled Magisterium raises doubts about His Dark Materials’ commitment to its source material
by

Myles McNutt





All Photos: HBO


NOTE: While The A.V. Club’s coverage of His Dark Materials looked at the first season from both Expert and Newbie perspectives, we’ve moved to one review for the show’s second season. Be forewarned that there may be light spoilers for the books toward the end of the review and the potential for significant spoilers in the comments.




When Lyra asks the alethiometer how she’s to go about finding someone who can tell her about dust in Will’s Oxford, also known as “our” Oxford, it dispenses two important pieces of information. The first is the logistical pieces necessary—the name of the college, the photo on her door—for Lyra to figure out the location of the dark matter research lab and Mary Malone, the former nun who turned to science as a different way of understanding the universe. The second, though, is more critical: despite having built her reputation on being able to spin a web of lies (although the show did a bad job of articulating that compared to the books, if we’re being technical), she is to tell Mary Malone the absolute truth.



That truth sounds absurd to someone from “our” world, of course, but that’s the point. When Lyra finds Mary, she tells her she wants to know about dust, and alludes to another world, and none of it is making any sense at first. But the alethiometer’s advice to Lyra is central to the premise of His Dark Materials, as this is by nature a story of what people do with the unvarnished facts of the matter. Lyra later tells Will that the alethiometer is not concerned about good or bad: it only cares about an objective truth, and ultimately the fate of this world comes down to what the people of these worlds choose to do with it. Lyra’s world is run by a regime that runs away from the truth, seeking to destroy that which they don’t understand. The future of these shared universes depends on people like Lyra who are able to open themselves up to the unknown, and the alethiometer knows that Mary Malone is cut from the same cloth. She may not fully understand what Lyra is saying, but she immediately realizes that what she calls dust might be what she calls dark matter, and swiftly opens herself up to the possibility that this could be something bigger than herself even if she’s not yet packing up her I-Ching box for whatever journey dust wants to send her on.

“The Cave” is a testament to how Pullman’s fantasy world is rooted in this principle of belief: not spiritual belief, as it’s understood in the context of the Magisterium or in the convent where Mary once studied, but rather in some power that goes beyond ourselves. Lyra spends the first book becoming in tune with this principle, and she begins the second by somewhat unconsciously becoming a missionary for a secular truth that is using her as a vessel to bring others into the fold. Here, both Will and Mary eventually come to realize that the answers they’re searching for don’t rest where they might have expected. Will goes to lawyers and grandparents in search of his father, but eventually it’s the alethiometer that gives him the assurances he needs—that his mother will be okay, that his father is alive—to follow the path that awaits him in Cittàgazze and beyond. Mary isn’t quite a believer just yet, but she’s already speaking the language by asking her colleague to have faith, realizing that she means something different than she did before Lyra Silvertongue showed up at her office earlier that day.

I appreciated that “The Cave” captured the almost intoxicating feeling of certainty that comes from dust—whether through the alethiometer or the computer the episode is named after—even if the show is still struggling a bit to articulate the subversiveness of this message. Last week, I mostly felt that the expansion of the Magisterium story was a waste of time, but in this episode I thought some of their choices compromised the very premise of their existence in this world. When MacPhail spoke at the Cardinal’s funeral, there’s a point where he refers to “this Magisterium,” and I found that perplexing: isn’t it the Magisterium? Isn’t the whole point of this organization its absolute power within the Church? It’s a small rhetorical distinction, I admit, but semantics is one of the first things that triggers that nagging voice in the back of my brain as a book reader that those involved with the show have continued to distance themselves from Pullman’s critique of religion out of fear of public backlash. There’s no question that the Magisterium is being presented as an autocratic and ultimately evil organization, and that it retains a clear religiosity, but a lot of what we see in “The Cave” muddles the core message.

I realize what the show’s writers—this is the first episode on which Jack Thorne is not the only credited writer, with Francesca Gardiner co-writing—are trying to do with the conflict with the Witches. Lest we argue the show is unwilling to embrace the real-world implications of this story, the situation is shifting more toward a political allegory about the corruptive force of power. MacPhail is trying to become Cardinal, but he’s faced with a zealot drumming up support for his own candidacy, raging against the purported heresy of the witches in order to convince the Church to drop a whole lot of bombs on them. It’s a parable to the rise of modern fascism, as elected officials overlook extremist views within their party until they reach the point where they realize the only way they can stay in power is by openly validating them. Eventually, we find MacPhail knowingly atoning for his sin, burning his hand over a flame at his daemon’s request as though he knows what he did is wrong but he had to do it to wield power, only to immediately discover that Coulter has every intention of ignoring his authority and doing whatever she wants anyway.


The show’s message is clear if we take a broad view: “power corrupts, no need to tune in for more at 11!” But I disliked this notion that we’re drawing distinctions between members of the Magisterium in terms of their corruption, as though not all members of the Church are so bad. Perhaps it’s that the specifics of this political allegory feel too real in the current moment, but this notion of separating out those in power who act out of self-interest from those who truly hold fascistic beliefs is out-of-touch with the clarity of Pullman’s specific—not general—critique of the power organized religion holds in society, and shifted the Magisterium story from “mostly disinteresting” to “stuck in my craw” by the time we reached the end of the episode.

Ultimately, His Dark Materials is not solely about the Magisterium: in many ways, without spoiling anything, it’s about how what’s going on here is above them, and above the very notion of them, and so I don’t think this detour completely derails the rest of the work of the story. The stakes are still being established effectively, with Lord Boreal making first contact with Lyra as Charles Latrom (and hiding it from Coulter), and Coulter learning from Torvold that Lyra is not just missing in her world but missing somewhere else entirely. Will, meanwhile, is now fully at peace with what he’s left behind in his own Oxford, his mother safely in his teacher’s care and the police safely avoided after his close call with his no-good grandfather. The season is still successfully tapping into the driving force that comes from Pullman’s novel, that feeling like Lyra has awakened her full potential and is now driving all of the people in her orbit toward something bigger than she realizes. It’s just unfortunate that it continues to come with choices—some small, some larger—that build skepticism of whether the show will be able to awaken its full potential in the rest of this season and beyond.

Stray observations
This is my first time encountering Simone Kirby, who plays Mary Malone, but I quite liked her: an inauspicious character, but that’s sort of the point. We’re now entering the point where there’s no longer a movie cast to compare to, so I am admittedly curious what direction the feature film franchise would have gone given the clear desire to draw “big names” as compared to the more BBC-like approach we’ve seen with the extended cast here. Open to any suggestions of circa 2007 casting options.

Okay, so I realize that it’s horrifying when you see giant bombs dropping on something, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t really understand what they were bombing? Were the islands meant to be sacred to the Witches in some way? Were there actually witches who were on the islands? Children? Communities? What was meant to be at stake in that moment? Couldn’t the witches just smoke monster away? Why were Serafina and Ruda elsewhere to watch at a distance? I thought they did a very poor job signifying what we were supposed to be feeling in that moment, which has been a consistent issue with the witches that nothing here resolved.

Much as with the scene last week where Lyra told Pan to stay hidden but he emerged immediately, I feel like the writers are actively performing their newfound daemon budget: here they make a big deal about putting Pan into Lyra’s bag, but he pops up more often than you expect when they have such a convenient reason for him not to appear, and there was some nice comedy out of his disembodied voice emerging as well. Combine with seeing and hearing from MacPhail’s daemon and a brief sighting of Torvold’s, and Daemon sighting really is where the show has improved the most in the second season.
To my point last week about Will’s battery life, we do get an insert of him getting the 10% battery alert and he does buy a portable battery pack the second he gets back to his Oxford, and so while I remain skeptical his battery lasted that long I’m going to say the show has done enough legwork to satisfy my pedantry this time. I know, I’m shocked too.

“They don’t have cars that fast in my Oxford”—but they do have Zeppelins, Lyra, tell Will about the Zeppelins.

I know the show wants there to be this battle between Serafina and Ruda about the path forward for the Witches, but I’d wager it would be more interesting if the Cardinal had died from natural causes and MacPhail and Coulter simply blamed it on the Witches. Technically, the show is already doing half of that story given they could have saved his life and chose not to, so why not just let it all be a lie?
I realize that it’s necessary for Boreal to see the alethiometer in his interaction with Lyra, but her walking while alethiometering is just dangerous. There needs to be a PSA about that.
Seeing Lyra walking through the real Pitt Rivers Museum definitely made the early scenes in Cittàgazze feel more like a set, I think, but that still works to the story’s benefit to keep working toward blurring the lines between worlds slowly but surely.

I mentioned comedy earlier, but Lyra insisting on a cape and a hat for her trip to Will’s Oxford did make me chuckle, and I’m truly outraged that HBO doesn’t have a screenshot of Lyra in that enormous hat available for me to embed in this review.
Through The Amber Spyglass (Slightly More Spoilery Discussion of Future Books)

Okay, so it seems like the critical mass in the comments is either book readers or people who are at least moderately interested in hearing more about the books, so I’m going to keep this here (while admitting that this review was pretty heavily shaped by the books, which is not something I want to repeat every week but was the path that emerged here).

In last week’s comments, one point we were discussing is how Lyra is grieving Roger’s death, which returns here when she insists that the reason she needs to find out about dust is so that Roger’s death was meaningful. There’s no question that, compared to the book, Lyra’s grief is a more significant part of her character, whether in an effort to soften her edges or simply to acknowledge that audiences at home will feel his death more acutely when we saw him die, and also followed his side of the story in a way the books didn’t. I think what we’re responding to, though, is the fact that in the books it really feels like Lyra “outgrows” who she was in the first book in the second, diving forward with a sense of clarity that is a huge part of the character. And I do think that this is something the show has never entirely captured, and which I’m curious to see them maybe grow into as the season goes on. But I did want to re-up this conversation here, in terms of seeing how others felt about whether Lyra’s grief at all complicates her journey at this point in the narrative.

Venom #21-25: Venom Island

VENOM ISLAND

Written by Donny Cates
Penciled by Mark Bagley
Published Dec 2019-May 2020 

   Now that Absolute Carnage has wrapped, Eddie has to deal with the aftermath. Dylan is aware now that Eddie's his dad, however has elected to NOT tell his dad he has powers. Even so, Eddie has to find a way to separate all those symbiotes he ended up absorbing, to get back to just him and his regular other.
   After an attempt to electrocute the Carnage symbiote out of his system fails, he's asked to join the Avengers but instead, takes up their offer to go to good old Venom Island. There he fights an entire island of Carnage before Dylan and Sleeper show up care of a tiny chunk of the Knull symbiote. It ends with a little more information than they had before. Knull is still on his way, but at least father and son have some more time - and more secrets to share with each other, before they have to fight for the lives once again.

Justice League #1-7: The Totality

THE TOTALITY

Written by Scott Snyder

Penciled by Jim Cheung and Jorge Jimenez

Published June-Sep 2018

   Following the events of No Justice, the JL is in shambles but is trying top put the pieces back together again. With the Watchtower wrecked, they establish a brand spanking new Hall of Justice but they’re very soon teemed with a new challenge. Lex Luther is back, and with him a parade of familiar foes calling themselves the Legion of Doom. 

   I’d tell you more but it’s not super clear what’s going on. There’s Sinestro, who has channeled some kind of Lantern force to make all the Green Lanterns into huge assholes. That combined with some other weird alien heads that Superman and Martian Manhunter can only survive to investigate. They go there after shrinking Batman and Hawkgirl Innerspace style to fly around in their bodies. In the end... well, I don’t know what the fuck is going on. But I guess I’ll read more... I give this one a 9/10.

Murder on Middle Beach Ep 2

 From Meaww.com
https://meaww.com/murder-on-middle-beach-who-is-jill-platt-barbara-hamburg-great-aunt-gifting-tables-murder-hbo-crime

'Murder on Middle Beach' Episode 2: Who is Jill Platt? Barbara Hamburg's great aunt roped her into Gifting Tables

In the docuseries, Madison interviews Jill Platt, one of the two women who were charged and tried for defrauding the IRS and other Gifting Tables members

By Neetha K
Published on : 18:00 PST, Nov 22, 2020

     

Jill Platt (HBO)

HBO's latest four-part docuseries, 'Murder on Middle Beach' delves into the gruesome murder of Barbara Hamburg, a 48-year-old woman, who was found bludgeoned to death outside her home on Middle Beach Road. 'Murder on Middle Beach' is going to have a more personal look than most true-crime series because it is directed by Hamburg's son, Madison, who was just a teenager when his mother was killed. The docuseries is a chronicle of Madison's return to his home as he is determined to understand the life of the mother he had lost and to uncover the truth about her death. The family's troubled history is explored and Madison questions whether learning the truth will provide closure or just more grief.

On March 3, 2010, the day that Barbara Hamburg died, she was scheduled to appear in court to discuss ex-husband Jeffrey Hamburg's claim that he could not afford to pay child support and alimony. The pair had divorced in 2002. When Barbara failed to show up in court, her lawyer called the Madison police to check her address when they found her body in the yard. She was declared dead at the scene and the state police were called in to help the local department. An autopsy by the state medical examiner's office found that Hamburg died of blunt force trauma and multiple sharp force injuries.

One of the initial suspects was Madison's father, Jeffrey Hamburg. On the day that Barbara was found dead, she was scheduled to appear in court to discuss ex-husband Jeffrey Hamburg's claim that he could not afford to pay child support and alimony. The pair had divorced in 2002. When Barbara failed to show up in court, her lawyer called the Madison police to check her address when they found her body in the yard.

However, towards the end of the first episode, it is revealed that Barbara was a prominent partner in a pyramid scheme known as the "Gifting Tables." The scheme involved a group of women who would recruit more women. Each new member would have to pay $5,000 on joining and a gifting table would consist of eight women. Once all the women had paid, the top member in the table would leave with $40,000 and the two women at the next level would start their own gifting tables.

The second episode of 'Murder on Middle Beach' sheds light on how Barbara came to be a part of it and why she did so. Madison interviews Jill Platt, one of the two women who were charged and tried for defrauding the IRS and other Gifting Tables members. The other woman, Donna Bello is also featured in the documentary. Platt is the one who introduced Barbara to the scheme, believing that the latter needed it as she was struggling to make ends meet after her divorce from Jeffrey. Even Bello admits that the scheme was a "great thing," because it "raised money for so many people".

So, how does Platt know Barbara? She explains the relationship in the interview, saying that she married Barbara's uncle when Barbara was a child. The two got closer, however, when Barbara was an adult after she married Jeffrey and moved to Madison. After her divorce, Barbara began to have a drinking problem and took the help of her sister and her mother to get treatment.

'Murder on Middle Beach' airs on HBO on Sunday nights at 10/9c.

from Vulture.com
https://www.vulture.com/article/the-undoing-recap-episode-3-season-1-do-no-harm.html

The Undoing S1 Ep 3: Do No Harm

The Undoing Recap: A Truth Problem
By Roxana Hadadi


Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO/B)2019 www.nikotavernise.com

Let’s hear it for the boys! This episode belongs to Donald Sutherland’s growl, Édgar Ramírez’s expressive eyebrows, and Hugh Grant’s pathetic apologies. I don’t say this to diminish Nicole Kidman’s consistency, but to be honest, I really do not understand what Grace Fraser’s motivations are anymore. Suddenly she’s standing by Jonathan? And she’s doing it because she thinks … it would be good for Henry? What are you doing, Grace!

I would think protecting your son and shielding him from the husband you already know to be a cheater, a liar, and a thief (hello, he took $500,000 from your father, you’re not even curious where that money went?) would be more important than, I don’t know, creating an environment in which your son believes his father could be innocent of murder? That doesn’t seem like a great call. But is Grace doing anything right, now that we’re halfway through this miniseries? I do not mean to victim blame. I cannot imagine what Grace is living through. The speed, though, with which she went from “Jonathan sure is a jerk” to “Jonathan isn’t a monster” — even when more evidence is indicating the latter! — is giving me some whiplash. The Undoing is fantastic when it comes to out-of-nowhere cliffhangers and contentious exchanges, but building Grace as a consistent character? David E. Kelley has not done that so well.

“Do No Harm” begins moments after the events of preceding episode “The Missing,” with the NYPD arriving by helicopter to pick up Jonathan, who was being held by the Suffolk Police. “I didn’t do it,” Jonathan insists to his son — and I do think this relationship is one we need to watch for the remaining three episodes — but that doesn’t mean Jonathan is a good guy. Consider his actions: Detective Mendoza confirms to Grace that Jonathan is the father of Elena’s daughter. We see that he can be capable of surprisingly rage-filled violence; he bites that attacker’s finger nearly clean off in jail. And consider his words, after pleading not guilty to murder and rape and being sent to what I assume is Rikers: His meeting with Grace is Gaslighting 101, and his jokes at his own expense are a distraction, a diversion, a deflection. Jonathan knows he did a bad thing, but he was the victim! Elena was dangerous! She forced him! Doesn’t Grace know that he has a good heart? How could he be a doctor and also be guilty of such a terrible crime? (Jessie Buckley’s Nurse Oraetta Mayflower from the current fourth season of Fargo would like a word.) “My heart wouldn’t allow me, nor would my ego,” Jonathan says, and that — coupled with Henry’s breakdown in Grace’s arms over the accusations against his father, and Grace’s own memories of seeing Jonathan with young cancer patients — seems to convince her that standing by her husband is worth it.

This is, of course, going against everyone’s advice. She doesn’t do what Sylvia suggests, which is get her own attorney. She brushes off her father’s concerns, while taking his money. Instead, Grace basically goes on the offensive against everyone who ever said a bad word against Jonathan. When she meets with Jonathan’s former colleague for more information about what got him fired, she’s aghast at the idea that her husband could be a psychopath, instead focusing on whether Elena was “the obsessive-compulsive type.” She really uses the phrasing “according to Jonathan” when speaking to her father, and buys into the whole, “Elena had hero worship” thing. She is strangely unaffected by Franklin’s admission that Jonathan came to him, in secret, for $500,000 — shouldn’t she be worried about what he was using that money for? (Astonishingly good work from Sutherland here; the man has played creepy, authoritarian characters for so long that I was unnerved by, and then surprisingly sympathetic to, seeing him cry.) When meeting with the ultra-elite defense attorney Haley Fitzgerald (Noma Dumezweni) after Franklin secures her a meeting (and pays the fee), Grace seems struck by Haley’s very reasonable observation that Jonathan has “got a truth problem.” And finally, in an ill-advised meeting with Elena’s widower husband Fernando, she boldly says “I’m not taking shit from anyone,” and then accuses Elena of sleeping around and having psychological disorders. “I’ll make it my business,” Grace vows, and I’m sorry, but I hated her very much in this moment!

Who else is Jonathan’s act working on? Henry, of course. We see the kid pushing the boundaries during their jail meeting (His “You were fucking her” was a real “I’m going to curse because my parents have bigger problems than that right now!” power move), but he seems to soak in Jonathan’s obviously prepared statement about how Elena “became unsound” and “wanted to destroy us as a family.” Again, shouldn’t Grace as a trained therapist maybe know better than to accept Jonathan’s side of the story as absolute fact?

But, as we learn in the episode’s final moments, she might have something to hide, too. Ramírez is excellent here, really digging into Detective Mendoza’s smugness at having caught Grace — who keeps meddling in their investigation, and who basically just interfered with a witness by meeting with Fernando — in what appears to be a lie. The way he rests his face on his palm! The wiggling of those delightfully lush eyebrows! Grace sticks to her “20-plus years of psychological training” here, but how is she going to explain walking around in Harlem — right outside the building where Elena’s body was found — on the night of the murder? That’s a pretty big revelation to have hidden until now! Is Jonathan the only monster here?

Money Works Best

• Of course Franklin is the kind of old-money asshole to call an NYPD detective “boy.” Of course.

• The very declarative way that Dumezweni pronounces “muck” might have been my favorite thing about this episode.

• “You sound like me talking to my patients,” Grace says to Haley, but — is Grace still practicing? Don’t all her patients know her husband is embroiled in what seems to be the biggest murder investigation to hit Manhattan in a while? Take a leave of absence, Grace!

• Interested in Grace’s beach house? Variety has the details on the property, which unsurprisingly last sold in the millions.

• I have decided that Grace and Franklin playing piano together was a Road to Perdition homage, and I will hear no different.

• I’m not sure how much of a role Douglas Hodge’s public defender will have now that we’ve met Haley, but I liked both his scenes, and how ambivalent he was about the question of Jonathan’s innocence; he was very much in the mode of John Turturro from The Night Of. His blithe “Doctors tend to be assholes. The reason they tend to be assholes is they get to be. They’re doctors! My point is, you don’t get to be one anymore,” was a great puncturing of the cocoon of wealth the Frasers seem to be living in. Although I’m not sure he did Grace any favors when he told her he doubts Jonathan’s guilt.

• Jonathan’s bail is $2 million cash. Hm, I wonder who has that kind of money?

• The sculpting hammer that was probably used to kill Elena is missing from her studio. Seems like an important thing to remember for future episodes!

• “No touching!” was a real Arrested Development flashback, wasn’t it?

Doctor Strange #1-4

 

Written by Mark Waid
Penciled by Kev Walker
Published Dec 2019-Mar 2020

   Doctor Strange is back... and by back, I mean back to being a surgeon. Thanks to reaching an agreement with the local hospital, he gets to practice surgery but only for the most complex and hard to do procedures while still being able to practice his wizardry. From dealing with a newly powered up Wrecker to a demon that possesses his victims with tattoo ink, he also must deal with the hospital's newest administrator, former colleague Dr. Druid. Luckily he's able to call on his new boss to help with his newest patient... a demon with a magic trap in his brain powerful enough to destroy the hospital. They're able to operate and get past the mythical trap, but the question remains... who's trying to kill Stephen Strange? 
   So I knew when Mark Waid was still assigned to this book, it was going to be awesome. Right where the events of the last series left off, he's right back in the mix making a downright incredible Strange we luckily never had to miss for long. The series needs more Bats though. Because when can you ever have too much ghost dog. I give this one a 10/10 and I love where it's headed...

from Meaww.com
https://meaww.com/black-monday-season-2-episode-6-regina-hall-don-cheadle-dule-hill-showtime-427495

Black Monday S2 Ep 6: Arthur Ponzarelli

**************************

'Black Monday' Season 2 Episode 6 sees Dawn torn over taking African American Scholarship Fund money

While Dawn gravely needs the money, depriving and defrauding fellow African-Americans would go against what she stands for

By Pathikrit Sanyal
Published on : 17:00 PST, Apr 12, 2020

     

Regina Hall in 'Black Monday' (Screengrab/YouTube)

The last few minutes of the fifth episode of the second season of Showtime’s Wall Street dark comedy ‘Black Monday’ really took the show’s plot to a whole new level. Up until then, we had assumed Mo (Don Cheadle) had exacted his revenge upon Dawn (Regina Hall) and Blair (Andrew Rannells) by tarnishing the name of their company Amerisavings Bank. But things were much deeper than anyone could have guessed.

One of the survivors of the massacre at Amerisavings in Miami turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, who was there only to get closer to Mo. They wanted to catch the people responsible for the historic 1987 Wall Street crash known as Black Monday, and the officer behind the operation was an old acquaintance of Mo -- the same woman who had backstabbed him years ago, Connie (Xosha Roquemore). Connie convinced, nay, forced Mo to go back to the company so that the FBI could build its case better with Mo as a snitch working from within. 

And Mo introduced Connie to the group as a wealthy Nigerian heiress with $25 million to invest (that would solve all of Dawn and Blair’s problems). Spine-chilling stuff. 
So, what’s next for the rag-tag group of Wall Street brokers? Episode 6 is titled ‘Who Are You Supposed To Be?’ and that may as well be a question for everyone in the show, considering they all lead a kind of double life. Per the official synopsis of the episode, “A new client presents a moral quandary for Dawn. Mo, Blair, and Keith (Paul Scheer) chase down leads while Tiff has an identity crisis.”

The promo for the episode sees Blair wonder why Congressman Roger Harris (Tuc Watkins), his secret lover, was not responding to his calls. In episode 5, we saw things suddenly sour up in a meeting between Dawn, Blair and Pastor Newell (Michael Hitchcock), the notoriously-homophobic Christian televangelist and the father-in-law of Harris, after he found out that Blair and the Congressman were close friends. While Blair’s wife Till (Casey Wilson) tries to reassure him, his anxiety doesn’t seem to lessen.

And it’s an understandable one. The powerful pastor, should he suspect that his son-in-law was secretly gay, could destroy both of them, or worse, make sure they would never meet again. And while he was busy moping about his personal life, Dawn was busy worrying about the company. “Have you got your next big idea? Cause we are broke, Blair,” Dawn tells the supposed wizard of Wall Street. And broke they were.

Even with the money offered to them by Connie, they could only pay off the Lehman Brothers. They did not have enough to run the company. The aforementioned moral quandary comes in the form of Dulé Hill, who plays Mark, the head of the African American Scholarship Fund, who wants Dawn to invest his $30 million. While Dawn gravely needs the money, depriving and defrauding fellow African-Americans would go against what she stands for. But she does desperately need the money.

The promo lays to rest some of Blair’s worries because we see him and the Congressman meet and the latter asks him, “You wanna finance my campaign?” How Blair will find the money to finance the campaign is a separate conundrum altogether. At the same time, we see Mo telling Connie that Blair was using insider information. The promo ends with several shots of Dawn, for the lack of a better word, losing it, and a shot of her and Mark celebrating, perhaps implying that she did end up taking the money from him -- to “invest”, of course. 

‘Black Monday’ airs Sundays on Showtime at 10 pm ET.