Fantastic Four (2018) #40-42: Reckoning War

Fantastic Four (2018) #42

"Brother Against Brother" One of the most pivotal planets in the Marvel Universe faces imminent destruction. Jennifer Walters, the Sensational SHE-HULK, finally learns her part in this chaos.And in the middle of all of this carnage, two lifelong friends will have a battle to the death – prepare yourself for THE THING versus MISTER FANTASTIC!

Fantastic Four (2018) #43

THE RECKONING WAR CONTINUES!"Victor Von Doom: Hero of Earth" The last time the Cormorant appeared, he destroyed the Baxter Building and the Latverian Embassy, completely overpowered the Fantastic Four, and left without anyone laying a hand on him. Now, for the sake of the universe, Doctor Doom must face him alone. Hail Doom! Meanwhile, four of Earth's greatest heroes are trapped in the toxic wastelands of the Barrens...and there is no way for all of them to make it out alive. Guest-starring: The Silver Surfer, She-Hulk, and an army of Marvel's most cosmic champions!

Fantastic Four (2018) #43

THE RECKONING WAR HEATS UP IN THIS OVERSIZED ISSUE! "The End of Everything That Ever Was or Ever Will Be" This is the final battle of the Reckoning War. At the Apex of the All Reality, the fate of the Marvel Universe will be decided. And no matter who wins, nothing will ever be the same again. This is not hyperbole. This is happening. There will be consequences. If you care about the Fantastic Four, their extended family and the rest of the Marvel U...you will not want to miss this. Starring Reed, Sue, Ben, Johnny, Nick Fury, Victor Von Doom, Norrin Radd, Uatu and Jennifer Walters.

Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/movies/deadpool-and-wolverine-review.html

Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

By Alissa Wilkinson
Published July 23, 2024

“Disney’s so stupid,” Deadpool declares trollishly at the beginning of “Deadpool & Wolverine.” It’s the sort of jab — in this case, at the studio distributing the film we’re watching — that we’ve grown used to from this dude, a potty-mouthed exterminator in a face-obscuring suit vaguely reminiscent of Spider-Man. Not quite a hero, not quite anything else, Deadpool is an answer to the conflicted but upstanding superheroes of 21st-century Hollywood. He kills messily, he makes a lot of inappropriate jokes and, in an industry that practically decrees a profit-boosting PG-13 rating, his movies are always rated R.

Despite first appearing in Marvel comics, Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds), a.k.a. Wade Wilson, also used to stand slightly outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But in the six years since his last big-screen appearance in “Deadpool 2,” the Merc with the Mouth has been shoehorned into the M.C.U., along with the X-Men, for reasons involving Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox. (Which was promptly renamed 20th Century Studios, and you can be sure Deadpool will joke about that too.)

Deadpool explains all this very quickly at the beginning of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” just to catch us up. He has a lot of expositional ground to cover, since he also has to clarify how this movie will avoid desecrating the memory of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a.k.a. Logan, who was laid to rest in the excellent eponymous swan song from 2017. “We’re not,” Deadpool announces. Deal with it.

The first two Deadpool movies set out to skewer the conventions of superhero cinema, with “Deadpool” (2016) scrapping conventional opening credits for alternate text jabbing at tropes: “A British Villain,” “A Hot Chick,” “A Moody Teen,” “A C.G.I. Character” and also some words we can’t print here. Deadpool broke the fourth wall constantly, remarking to the audience about what was happening or about to happen, as well as the paltry budget of the film and the silliness of him, a minor and ridiculous character, being in a movie at all.

But times sure have changed, and not just because those movies made a whole lot of money. Yes, “Deadpool & Wolverine” still features quips about residuals and digs at characters in DC’s rival comics universe, and a bunch of them made me chuckle. It still features Reynolds making fun of himself; it has some fun set pieces, clever sight gags, amusing surprises, left-field references and adoring pauses to admire Jackman’s biceps and abs.
More on ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’


Now, though, Deadpool has been dragged into the M.C.U. With that comes all kinds of new opportunities for goofy mash-ups, cameos and plotlines, such as Deadpool’s fervent and futile desire to join the Avengers. Most important in this case, the M.C.U.’s turn toward the multiverse in recent years — a move providing dizzying latitude to remix, reboot and jack up profits — gives “Deadpool & Wolverine,” directed by Shawn Levy, some narrative room to work with.

This is not an unmotivated crossover event. Wolverine (or sometimes just Jackman himself) has been an offscreen object of fun since the first “Deadpool,” someone to serve as the butt of jokes and jealousy. Deadpool and Wolverine share some key origin trauma, and they sometimes feel like two sides of the same damaged coin, with Deadpool covering his trauma with jokes while Wolverine glowers. They’re also both middle-aged guys — Reynolds is 47, Jackman is 55 — and the film’s many ironic needle drops, from Avril Lavigne and ’N Sync to Goo Goo Dolls, AC/DC and Madonna, seem calculated to scratch some itch in brains of a certain age. It seems natural for the duo to be in a movie together, plus it’s a great opportunity to yank two high earners onto the same screen.

But now that this is an M.C.U. film, there are mandates. The stakes have to be absurdly high, having to do with the destruction or salvation of whole universes. More important, there must be corporate synergy. Now “Deadpool” needs to not just jab at but explicitly tie into other M.C.U. properties, weaving itself into the tangled web of movies and shows that function as much as advertisements for one another as a coherent plot.

In this case, that means maximizing the multiverse, pulling in references to so many properties I wouldn’t dare to note them all. (You might want to re-familiarize yourself with the broad strokes of the TV show “Loki,” though.) As Marvel’s cinematic universe has grown ever larger, the role of fan service has ballooned, counting on the pleasure of cheering for a cameo or a dozen to give the people what they came for. But you wouldn’t want me to spoil your fun.

I could tell you all about what happens in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” its many twists and turns, its various themes and villains, but that would not really explain it. “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a “Deadpool” movie, which means it’s rude and irreverent, funny and disgusting, weird and a little sweet. Reynolds and Jackman are fun to watch, in part because their onscreen characters contrast so violently with their nice-guy personas offscreen. So much of what the M.C.U. offers feels churned out of the same factory, which makes anything with a distinct personality feel like a relief.

But in the end, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a movie about corporate mergers, about intellectual property, about the ways that the business of Hollywood battles the creative process. It is a film about how anything that was ever successful in Hollywood is made to repeat that same song and dance endlessly, how a bloated and risk-averse industry can’t let well enough alone, how nobody is ever really dead anymore, how the world is always ending but the story is never allowed to finish.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” devilishly plays on this, of course. It is watchable because it’s self-reflective. But now that the jabs are coming from inside the house, it hits different. On the one hand, “Disney’s so stupid.” On the other hand, Disney paid for this movie, and we pay them to watch it. This business makes suckers of us all.

from Roger Ebert: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/free-time-movie-review-2024

Free Time (2024)

Brian Tallerico March 22, 2024

Colin Burgess is having a bit of a moment with the buzzy success of the micro-indie “Dad & Step-Dad” and this week’s release of the truly funny and clever “Free Time,” a movie that uses Burgess’ on-screen energy perfectly. Ryan Martin Brown’s film jumps into the oft-visited waters of the quarter-life crisis but it does so with its own comic voice, one that produces laughs in the very first scene and doesn’t really let up for this film’s tight 78-minute runtime. This is one of the better indie comedies in a long time, enjoyable from minute one until the final frame, and deceptively insightful about the structure of the modern world, one that encourages us to do more with our free time but doesn’t offer much guidance to what exactly we should be doing.

In the phenomenal opening scene, Drew (Burgess) goes to his superior at his job to express his dissatisfaction with being more of a data entry employee than a data analysis one. What starts as a conversation that feels like it will lead to a new position or maybe even a promotion ends with Drew quitting on the spot, aggravating his boss by leaving him without an employee. Drew takes his stuff and goes back to the apartment he shares with a clickbait-writing roommate, having no idea what he’s going to do next.

Drew’s efforts to figure out that last part is the driving narrative force of “Free Time.” He quickly realizes that his friends have lives that include jobs, leaving him little to do during the day—a bit where his roommate’s girlfriend yells at him for how often he’s watched the same movie on DVD (this time with commentary) is excellent. As he faces more people in his life who are stunned that he quit a good job in this economic climate, Drew starts to realize that he made a mistake. When the band he’s in shifts focus to country, leaving Drew’s keyboard playing behind, it’s another blow.

From art to fiction to motivational speakers, we’re constantly told to make the most of our free time, but what exactly are people like Drew supposed to do with all that freedom? How do you make your dreams come true when you don't really have interesting dreams? Some of the direction is a little too loose, and the non-stop piano score grows a little grating, but Brown’s script is wonderfully natural and organic, allowing Burgess to drift through the film in a way that’s consistently fascinating. Whether he’s completely blowing a potential hook-up (Jessie Pinnick, so great in “Princess Cyd”) or aggressively trying to get his job back, Burgess is perfect here, never leaning too hard into what could have been a really mannered performance. We all know guys like Drew. We may have even been guys like Drew.

“Free Time” is a funny character study for about an hour before it becomes something even more remarkable that I couldn’t possibly spoil. Suffice to say, this movie has some surprises up its sleeves, and they unfold in a way that really drives home the theme that free time can be more emotionally costly than we’ve been led to believe.

from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/05/1222869886/memory-review-jessica-chastain-peter-sarsgaard

Memory (2023)

By Justin Chang

The Mexican writer-director Michel Franco is something of a feel-bad filmmaker. His style can be chilly and severe. His characters are often comfortable bourgeois types who are in for some class-based comeuppance. His usual method is to set up the camera at a distance from his characters and watch them squirm in tense, unbroken long takes.

Sometimes all hell breaks loose, as in Franco's dystopian drama New Order, about a mass revolt in Mexico City. Sometimes the nightmare takes hold more quietly, like in Sundown, his recent slow-burn thriller about a vacation gone wrong.

I haven't always been a fan of Franco's work, not because I object to pessimistic worldviews in art, but because his shock tactics have sometimes felt cheap and derivative, borrowed from other filmmakers. But his new English-language movie, Memory, is something of a surprise. For starters, it's fascinating to see how well-known American actors like Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard adapt to his more detached style of filmmaking. And while his touch is as clinical and somber as ever, there's a sense of tenderness and even optimism here that feels new to his work.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a single mom who works at an adult daycare center. From the moment we meet her, at an AA meeting where people congratulate her on her many years of sobriety, it's clear that she's been through a lot. She's intensely protective of her teenage daughter, rarely letting her hang out with other kids, especially boys. Whenever she returns home to her Brooklyn apartment, she immediately locks the door behind her and sets the home security system. Even when Sylvia's doing nothing, we see the tension in her body, as if she were steeling herself against the next blow.

One night, while attending her high school reunion, Sylvia is approached by a man named Saul, played by Sarsgaard. He says nothing, but his silent attentiveness unnerves Sylvia, especially when he follows her home and spends the night camped outside her apartment. The next morning, Sylvia learns more about Saul that might help explain his disturbing behavior: He has early-onset dementia and suffers regular short-term memory loss.

Some of the backstory in Memory is confusing by design. Sylvia remembers being sexually abused by a 17-year-old student named Ben when she was 12, and she initially accuses Saul of having abused her too. We soon learn that he couldn't have, because they were at school at different times. It would seem that Sylvia's own memory, clouded by personal pain, isn't entirely reliable either.

Despite the awkwardness and tension of these early encounters, Sylvia and Saul are clearly drawn to each other. Seeing how well Saul responds to Sylvia's company, his family offers her a part-time job looking after him during the day. As their connection deepens, they realize how much they have in common. Both Sylvia and Saul feel like outcasts. Both, too, have issues with their families; Saul's brother, played by Josh Charles, treats him like a nuisance and a child. And while Sylvia is close to her younger sister, nicely played by Merritt Wever, she's been estranged for years from their mother, who refuses to believe her allegations of sexual abuse.

The movie poignantly suggests that Sylvia and Saul are two very different people who, by chance, have come into each other's lives at just the right moment. At the same time, the story does come uncomfortably close to romanticizing dementia, as if Saul's air of friendly, unthreatening bafflement somehow made him the perfect boyfriend.

But while I have some reservations about how the movie addresses trauma and illness, this is one case where Franco's restraint actually works: There's something admirably evenhanded about how he observes these characters trying to navigate uncharted waters in real time. Chastain and Sarsgaard are very moving here; it's touching to see how the battle-hardened Sylvia responds to Saul's gentle spirit, and how he warms to her patience and attention.

This isn't the first time Franco has focused on the act of caregiving; more than once I was reminded of his 2015 drama, Chronic, which starred Tim Roth as a palliative care worker. I didn't love that movie, either, but it had some of the same unsettling intimacy and emotional force as Memory. It's enough to make me want to revisit some of Franco's work, with newly appreciative eyes.

Eric (2024)

from Indiewire: https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/shows/eric-review-benedict-cumberbatch-netflix-series-1235009913/

Eric

BY BEN TRAVERS
MAY 30, 2024 9:00 AM


No matter how you dress them up, some characters just aren’t compelling enough to carry a story. They can be daring and desperate, kind and cultured, tattooed and full of ticks — heck, they can even be an alien from another planet, but if there’s no depth to their emotional spectrum, no hook to their charming personality, no mystery to their misery that merits its extended unraveling, well, then they’re just an empty suit — even if that suit is a horned, fanged, six-foot-tall puppet monster.

Such a descriptor may seem harsh for the star of “Eric,” a dad by the name of Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, on paper, seems like a perfectly suitable lead for a six-episode series. First and foremost, Vincent is the co-creator of a hit “Sesame Street”-like TV show titled “Hello Sunshine.” His staged neighborhood of colorful puppets is as beloved as Vincent himself is reviled. You see, Vincent isn’t a very nice person. He’s the cardboard cut-out of a tortured artist (perhaps his name is a nod to Vincent van Gogh?), angering his co-workers with nonstop complaints about everything from network notes to sloppy puppet construction, and driving loved ones away with his controlling nature, exhausting know-it-all-ness, and excessive drinking.


“Everyone thinks about changing the world and no one thinks about changing themselves,” Vincent says, mid-rant, waiting not-so-patiently for his 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), to identify his statement as a Tolstoy quote. Fun dad, huh? Not so much. But bad dads can make for good characters — there’s another show about a wayward father who also happens to be a famous puppeteer that’s actually worth watching — and perhaps Vincent could have been one, too, if only his central problem wasn’t obvious from the second he obliviously quoted one of Russia’s great writers. Vincent is so busy trying to perfect his kids’ show that he doesn’t realize his awful disposition is alienating his own child — until it’s too late.

Somewhere along his morning walk to school, Edgar disappears. The community goes on high alert. And Vincent flies into action. …kind of. “Eric” is predominantly about the search for Edgar, tracked via two parallel plots: a missing persons detective (played with a stirring mix of anger and poise by McKinley Belcher III) leading the NYPD’s official investigation, and Vincent, off on his own, charging ahead with his own misguided crusade. Because his whole world revolves around the fake sun painted above his pretend TV playground, Vincent can only process what’s happening to his family by convincing himself to build Edgar’s idea for a new puppet named Eric. If he can just get the giant, grumbling creature on TV, Vincent thinks his son will see him and find his way home.

As batshit banana-brained as that sounds, watching Vincent stumble around talking to a yeti-like imaginary monster gets old fast — partly because it’s always unclear whether the plan is actually supposed to work, or if everyone just thinks they’re better off humoring a sad dad who’s been pushed to the brink of sanity. (It stops and starts, its urgency waxing and waning with Vincent’s deteriorating mental state, which makes it difficult to determine if we’re watching a madmen in a death spiral or if we’re really meant to believe he’s on the right track.) But the other, arguably more pressing issue is that the cop’s grim investigation doesn’t gel with Vincent’s fantasy-land adventure. While Vincent is downing vodka all morning and dancing with a furry blue Sully substitute all night, Detective Ledroit (Belcher) is hunting down pedophile rings and staking out nightclub restrooms where sexually insecure men threaten to cut off each other’s balls.McKinley Belcher III in ‘Eric’Courtesy of Ludovic Robert / Netflix

The whiplash between the two stories is slightly stabilized by their shared setting: a beautifully gritty vision of 1980s Manhattan courtesy of production designer Alex Holmes. Rarely has New York City felt as full and filthy [complimentary] as it does here, and director Lucy Forbes uses the hustle and bustle to further emphasize that everyone feels like a suspect when you’re searching for a needle in a giant, grimy haystack. With transparent cliffhangers ending most episodes, a fluid pace, and the human compulsion to find out what happened, the episodes fly by, but I wouldn’t say they’re easy to watch. That whiplash never fully fades, and the pitch-black underworld dominating half the show creates a foul flavor that lingers after the credits roll / Netflix autoplays an ad for “Baby Reindeer.”

Plus, as soon as you recognize the embarrassingly flat arc Vincent is barely able to crest, there’s simply no saving “Eric.” For Cumber-enthusiasts, it barely functions as a showcase for its very capable star, since this isn’t the first time we’ve watched the two-time Oscar nominee depict a toxic white man, or a profound windbag, or a rich so-and-so who descends into a drunken and drugged stupor, and these repetitive character traits do little to draw interest toward his tiresome new character.

Aside from Vincent’s self-evident flaws, he also suffers in comparison. Det. Michael Ledroit doesn’t exactly break the mold. We’ve seen cops process their personal grief by throwing themselves into the darkest corners of their work time and time again. But in addition to Belcher’s tough-and-tender turn, his storyline expands beyond his dying boyfriend at home, beyond the search for Edgar among Manhattan’s ugliest denizens, into an affecting (albeit extremely unpleasant) concurrent quest. Marlon Rochelle, a 14-year-old Black boy, has been missing for much longer than Edgar. He’s been gone for enough time his mother has given up hope of finding him alive, but remains resolute in her demands for justice. She calls Ledroit’s office every other day. She asks the questions no one else will ask. Why is all this attention going to another kid? Where’s her son’s nightly news stories? How come the NYPD is trying to brush her and her boy under the rug?

The answers matter less than how Ledroit responds to the questions. As a closeted gay man in a station filled with macho white guys dropping racial slurs and homophobic retorts on the regular, the detective doesn’t exactly feel welcome at work. He doesn’t really feel welcomed anywhere, except with his partner, and that sole safe space comes with a ticking clock. But he’s very good at his job — good enough to know when suspects aren’t telling the full truth, good enough to notice clues overlooked by others, and good enough to spot curious overlaps between Marlon and Edgar’s circumstances. That he’ll have to put his own job, his own life, on the line to help these boys almost goes without saying, but showrunner Abi Morgan makes sure you feel the weight of the forces he’s up against, which feel especially hefty compared to the fluffy furball Vincent’s dragging around.

It’s a bit too simplistic to say “Eric” is half of a good show and half of a bad one. Questionable decisions abound, whether it’s what facts are shared to stretch out the mystery or how the series embodies some of the very problems to which it draws attention. (Maybe don’t spend the majority of your story on the white kid and his basic family while a rightly rage-filled Black mother sits in silence — except, of course, when the show wants to chastise the cops for racial discrimination?) “Eric” is filled with enough important issues — and one big hairy quirk — to make it seem like a series filled with fresh, serious ideas. But they’re really just window-dressing around another bad-dad saga that’s too distracted chasing a long shaggy tail.

from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/04/27/baby-reindeer-review-a-devastating-examination-of-trauma-and-abuse/?sh=659f967268c0

Baby Reindeer

by Erik Kain
Apr 27, 2024,07:00am EDT

Baby Reindeer is one of the best Netflix Originals I’ve ever seen, though it ended up being quite a lot darker and more disturbing than I expected. In its trailers and marketing, Richard Gadd’s adaptation of his one-man play (based on a true story) appears to mostly be about his character’s encounter with a stalker. I knew it was going to be dark, but at first blush it looked more like a dark comedy than anything.

That is not the case. Still, what I did get—while tough to watch and unexpected—was brilliant. This is a show I highly recommend, though before you do know that it includes graphic depictions of sexual assault and deals with challenging mental health issues, trauma and abuse. It deals with these issues with nuance and care, and it handles its challenging themes without being preachy, which I appreciate. But it’s not an easy watch.

Spoilers follow.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian working at a pub in Camden. He meets a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) who seems a bit down on her luck, and so he does what any decent human being would do and shows her a small act of kindness by giving her her drink (a Diet Coke) for free. Soon, she’s spending every day at the pub, talking his ear off all shift long, making up all sorts of obvious fantasies about her busy, glamorous life. It quickly becomes apparent that she has an obsession with him, and it’s not long after that the emails begin. Hundreds a day, filled with typos and misspelled words, mostly about nothing but increasingly flirtatious.

He looks her up online and realizes she’s been convicted and imprisoned in the past for stalking. But Donny is frustratingly incapable of setting healthy boundaries, and things get out of hand. I wrote about the first half of the show already, and how his character stressed me out so much. He ends up ruining the one healthy romantic relationship he manages to build—with a trans woman named Teri (Nava Mau)—because of all the baggage he’s lugging around, though we learn that his issues go much deeper than Martha.

In the second half of the show, we discover a lot more about what motivates Donny—and what’s holding him back. In the fourth episode (out of seven) the show takes a very dark, very difficult turn. We flashback about five years to when Dunn was just getting started as a comic, trying—and failing rather badly—to get his comedy routine going in Edinburgh. There, he meets a writer named Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill) and the two hit it off. Darrien helps him turn around his comedy show almost overnight. Donny gets that first taste of what fame might be like, and he’s addicted.

When Dunn moves to London, he and Darrien reconnect and soon they’re spending an inordinate amount of time together. Darrien promises to help Donny get his writing career off the ground. And he feeds him massive amounts of drugs in the process, something Donny goes along with because he’s trying to impress his new mentor. When Darrien gives him a shot of GHB—a common date rape drug—it becomes all too apparent what’s happening. He’s being groomed, lied to and put in a terribly vulnerable position. When all of this leads to repeated sexual assault, we hope that Donny will leave. He does not. He stays in this horrifying situation, still clinging to the idea that Darrien meant what he said about him having talent, that this really is still his best shot at fame.

When he returns to his girlfriend, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin) he’s incapable of having sex. She doesn’t understand why. They ultimately break up. Years later, Donny meets Martha and while she becomes his stalker, he becomes almost equally obsessed with her. It isn’t until things really hit rock bottom that he finally reports her to the police.

In the final episodes, Donny finally melts down, revealing everything that’s happened to him while performing at a stand-up comedy finals. It’s heartbreaking, and Gadd’s performance had me in tears. (I spent a lot of time crying in the second half of the show). The monologue goes viral on YouTube, and Donny finally gets his big break, landing sold-out gigs and once again tasting that sweet, sweet adoration and fame—but the nightmare continues.

When Martha begins stalking his parents, she threatens to tell them about his online confession, so he visits them first and tells them everything. It’s yet another heartbreaking scene, not because his parents reject him, but because his father reveals that he, too, was sexually assaulted when he was just a boy. Donny tells them that he worried they’d think of him as less than a man, and his dad replies “Would you think of me as less of a man?” before revealing that he was abused by a priest.

In the end, Martha is convicted of stalking and harassment against Donny and his parents after she leaves a threatening voicemail. There is little satisfaction at her sentencing hearing, as she weeps and admits to everything. She’s left countless voicemails, and after she goes to jail, Donny becomes obsessed with listening to them, trying to make sense of them. His friends and family worry about his mental state.

In the very final scene, he’s just come from visiting Darrien, his rapist. Deeply shaken—the confrontation did not go how he thought it would—he finds himself in a bar.

Sitting there alone, he listens to Martha’s voicemails. One he’s never heard comes on and stops him in his tracks. She finally reveals why she’s given him the nickname, “Baby Reindeer.” It’s because as a young girl, she had a little stuffed reindeer and it was the only good thing in her entire life, the thing she clung to when her parents fought and took comfort in during long years of neglect. And Donny, she says, reminded her of that reindeer right down to its wee bum.

It’s a moment of terrible revelation for Donny, whose guilt over Martha’s fate comes crashing down around him. When the bartender asks him for his drink order, he realizes he didn’t bring his wallet. Sitting there in his misery, dejected and alone, the bartender tells him the drink is on him. The same exact act of kindness Donny showed Martha at the very beginning of the series.

The credits roll.

This is one of the most perfect endings of a limited TV series I can recall, not because we’re meant to think that Donny will now become this dude’s stalker, but because of how it illustrates the way cycles of abuse can perpetrate, and how almost every abuser has at one time likely been a victim first. Baby Reindeer does such a phenomenal, gut-wrenching job at examining how trauma and abuse can make people act in ways that—to the outside observer—make no sense. Donny’s inaction with Martha seems inexplicable, until we realize that so much of what he does is driven by confusion and self-hatred. “The only thing I loved more than [Teri],” he says during his impromptu monologue, “Was hating myself. And I loved her so very, very much.”

He finally realizes that so much of Martha’s mental health stems from her own past traumas and that his behaviors and hers mirror one another. Sitting there in the same seat she was in, his empathy for his once-stalker finally makes sense.

It’s been a long time since a TV show has left me this emotionally shaken in the end. I meant to write about it days ago when I finished, but every time I tried to write I couldn’t find the words. (It doesn’t help that I’ve been quite sick for a week). Very few TV shows are able to grapple with these extraordinarily difficult topics with such nuance and care. Nothing here is glamorized. It’s not being done for shock value. Baby Reindeer simply shows us how abuse and trauma create problems that can be so cyclical and intractable that it can take years—an entire lifetime even—to ever overcome the damage.

I highly recommend this series, but go in knowing it’s a tough watch, with very graphic portrayals of sexaul assault and an examination of mental health issues that can be both very funny at times, and really tragic. The show itself is beautifully shot with some truly outstanding performances from its leads. Both Gadd and Gunning deserve awards as Donny and Martha. Easily two of the finest performances I’ve seen all year. Baby Reindeer will sit with me, I think, for a very long time.

3 Body Problem (2024)

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/television/3-body-problem-netflix-review.html

3 Body Problem

By James Poniewozik
March 20, 2024


The aliens who menace humankind in Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” believe in doing a lot with a little. Specifically, they can unfold a single proton into multiple higher dimensions, enabling them to print computer circuits with the surface area of a planet onto a particle smaller than a pinprick.

“3 Body Problem,” the audacious adaptation of a hard-sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin, is a comparable feat of engineering and compression. Its first season, arriving Thursday, wrestles Liu’s inventions and physics explainers onto the screen with visual grandeur, thrills and wow moments. If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, partnering here with Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), are best known for translating George R.R. Martin’s incomplete “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy saga into “Game of Thrones.” Whatever your opinions of that series — and there are plenty — it laid out the duo’s strengths as adapters and their weaknesses as creators of original material.

Beginning with Martin’s finished novels, Benioff and Weiss converted the sprawling tomes into heady popcorn TV with epic battles and intimate conversations. Toward the end, working from outlines or less, they rushed to a finish and let visual spectacle overshadow the once-vivid characters.


In “3 Body,” however, they and Woo have a complete story to work with, and it’s a doozy. It announces its sweep up front, opening with a Chinese scientist’s public execution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then jumping to the present day, when a wave of notable physicists are inexplicably dying by suicide.

The deaths may be related to several strange phenomena. Experiments in particle accelerators around the world suddenly find that the last several decades’ worth of research is wrong. Brilliant scientific minds are being sent futuristic headsets of unknown provenance that invite them to join an uncannily realistic virtual-reality game. Oh, also, one night all the stars in the sky start blinking on and off.

It all suggests the working of an advanced power, not of the cuddly E.T. variety. What starts as a detective mystery, pursued by the rumpled intelligence investigator Clarence Da Shi (Benedict Wong), escalates to a looming war of the worlds. What the aliens want and what they might do to get it is unclear at first, but as Clarence intuits, “Usually when people with more advanced technology encounter people with more primitive technology, doesn’t work out well for the primitives.”

Most of the first season’s plot comes straight from Liu’s work. The biggest changes are in story structure and location. Liu’s trilogy, while wide-ranging, focused largely on Chinese characters and had specifically Chinese historical and political overtones. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have globalized the story, shifting much of the action to London, with a multiethnic cast. (Viewers interested in a more literal rendition of Liu’s story can watch last year’s stiff but thorough Chinese adaptation on Peacock.)

They’ve also given Liu’s heavy science a dose of the humanities. Liu is a brilliant novelist of speculative ideas, but his characters can read like figures from story problems. In the series, a little playful dialogue goes a long way toward leavening all the Physics 101.

So does casting. Wong puffs life into his generically hard-boiled gumshoe. Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth in “Thrones”) stands out as Thomas Wade, a sharp-tongued spymaster, as does Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist whose brutal experience in the Cultural Revolution makes her question her allegiance to humanity. Zine Tseng is also excellent as the young Ye.

More curious, if understandable, is the decision to shuffle and reconfigure characters from throughout Liu’s trilogy into a clique of five attractive Oxford-grad prodigies who carry much of the narrative: Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a dogged physicist with personal ties to the dead-scientists case; Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), an idealistic nanofibers researcher; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a gifted but jaded research assistant; Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a sweet-natured teacher with a crush on Jin; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley of “Thrones”), a scientist turned snack-food entrepreneur and the principal source of comic relief.

John Bradley and Jess Hong in “3 Body Problem.” Part of the series takes place in a virtual-reality world reached via a mysterious headset.Credit...Netflix


The writers manage to bump up Liu’s one-dimensional characterizations to two-ish, but the “Oxford Five,” with the exception of Jin, don’t feel entirely rounded. This is no small thing; in a fantastical series like “Thrones” or “Lost,” it is the memorable individuals — your Arya Starks and your Ben Linuses — who hold you through the ups and downs of the story.

The plot, however, is dizzying and the world-building immersive, and the reportedly galactic budget looks well and creatively spent on the screen. Take the virtual-reality scenes, through which “3 Body” gradually reveals its stakes and the aliens’ motives. Each character who dons the headset finds themselves in an otherworldly version of an ancient kingdom — China for Jin, England for Jack — which they are challenged to save from repeating cataclysms caused by the presence of three suns (hence the series’s title).

“3 Body” has a streak of techno-optimism even at its bleakest moments, the belief that the physical universe is explicable even when cruel. The universe’s inhabitants are another matter. Alongside the race to save humanity is the question of whether humanity is worth saving — a group of alien sympathizers, led by a billionaire environmentalist (Jonathan Pryce), decides that Earth would benefit from a good cosmic intervention.

All this attaches the show’s brainiac spectacle to big humanistic ideas. The threat in “3 Body” is looming rather than imminent — these are not the kind of aliens who pull up quick and vaporize the White House — which makes for a parallel to the existential but gradual threat of climate change. Like “Thrones,” with its White Walkers lurking beyond the Wall, “3 Body” is in part a collective-action problem.

It is also morally provocative. Liu’s novels make an argument that in a cold, indifferent universe, survival can require a hard heart; basing decisions on personal conscience can be a kind of selfishness and folly. The series is a bit more sentimental, emphasizing relationships and individual agency over game theory and determinism. But it’s willing to go dark: In a striking midseason episode, the heroes make a morally gray decision in the name of planetary security, and the consequences are depicted in horrifying detail.

Viewers new to the story should find it exciting on its own. (You do not need to have read the books first; you should never need to read the books to watch a TV series.) But the book trilogy does go to some weird, grim — and presumably challenging to film — places, and it will be interesting to see if and how future seasons follow.

For now, there’s flair, ambition and galaxy-brain twists aplenty. Sure, this kind of story is tough to pull off beginning to end (see, again, “Game of Thrones”). But what’s the thrill in creating a headily expanding universe if there’s no risk of it collapsing?