The Gorge: Hi-Tech Blast from the Past

Thought I'd take a brief break from reviewing science fiction like Severance, which will break your brain if you watch it too much and try to understand.  The Gorge, though the story takes place in the present, harkens back to Creature from the Black Lagoon and Them -- simple stories with clear-cut heros and monstrous monsters, the pride and joy of the theaters in the boroughs in the 1950s, where in the case of The Allerton Theater on Allerton Avenue in The Bronx, you could get in for a double feature with a quarter.  And if you somehow missed one of these movies and the popcorn and the candy, you had a good chance seeing it a few years later on Million Dollar Movie, I think on Channel 9 in New York City --  where they shoulda been if they weren't there.

the Allerton Theater in the 1950s

The Gorge's story actually goes back just a few years before the 1950s, and the horrors it reveals -- mutants ranging from everything, including human-and-tree combos -- are the result of science gone awry at the end of World War II, with Oppenheimer and the atom-bomb specifically mentioned as a parallel development.

[Ok, here's an advisory about some spoilers ahead ... ]

And The Gorge is also a love story, with a male and a female sharp-shooter on both sides of the gorge.  When they're not fighting off villains of the worst kind, he writes poetry and she loves it.  They start off communicating with pen-on-paper viewed through binoculars across the gorge, and, of course eventually get together and fight the monsters in all kinds of ways.

By the way, when I say villains of the worst kind, I'm referring not only to the monsters who are partially human, but the monsters who are completely human, and try to exterminate our heroes with the latest in drones and weaponry.  Sigourney Weaver makes an appearance as one of the evil people, and Miles Teller (who looks familiar but I can't remember where I saw him) and Anya-Taylor Joy (who looks familiar because she starred in The Queen's Gambit) play our two loving commando heroes.

So, hey, if you're in the mood for a bit of adrenalin and true love in an insane life-and-death pressure cooker of a situation, you can't go wrong with The Gorge.

The Queen's Gambit: Will Check Your Attention and Keep It for a Long Time

If you'd like your soul lifted, refreshed, and recharged for a long time, check out The Queen's Gambit, a seven-episode mini-series, on Netflix.  Its story of Beth Harmon, a fictitious child chess prodigy who grows into a flawed but splendid champion, shines on so many levels.

The closest analog in real life is Bobby Fischer, an American child chess prodigy who went on to become World Chess Champion in 1972 by beating Boris Spassky, who held that title and represented the Soviet Union.  Fisher's career went downhill after that, and The Queen's Gambit ends right after Harmon gains that victory, so there the similarity ends.  But we're left with an extraordinary set of scenes and relationships.

Among my favorites -

• Beth with Mr. Shabel, a janitor in the orphanage who recognizes Beth's talent and teaches her chess
• Beth with the variety of boys and young men she usually beats in matches, and can't quite connect with or fall in love with.
• Beth with her adoptive mother, who comes to deeply believe in her.
• Beth in the Soviet Union, where she meets and bests a whole new series of masters and near-masters
• Beth and Jolene, a friend at the orphanage, who turns out to be quite a friend indeed

As this list which I could go on with indicates, Beth is the centerpiece of just about every scene in the mini-series.  And Anya Taylor-Joy delivers this role memorably, animating a character who ranges from almost autistic at the beginning to alcoholic and almost serenely triumphant at the end.   Same for all the other characters - memorably performed that is - ranging from those chess boys young and old, to the pharmacist with whom Beth has her own unique relationship.  Come to think of it, she has a unique relationship with just about each and every character in this narrative.

One of the main reasons The Queen's Gambit is so good is precisely because it comes from a novel, not real life, which all too often is not quite as incredible as the story told here.  And, though I haven't yet read the Walter Tevis novel of the same name from which the mini-series is derived, I see on Wikipedia that he authored six novels before he died in 1984 at way too young an age, and three of them, including The Hustler, were made into movies before The Queen's Gambit.  

All of which adds up to a real phenomenon on our hands, and cause for a big round of applause for everyone concerned, including Netflix for getting it on our televisions, computer screens, and phones.