Homecoming: Memory Spliced, in Ten Short Parts

A powerful, unusual, vexing yet ultimately satisfying short series on Amazon Prime - ten 30-minute episodes - created and directed by Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail (with Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz), starring Julia Roberts, with great supporting acting by Boardwalk Empire's Bobby Cannavale & Shea Whigham, and Stephan James, whom I've seen here for the first time.

The plot concerns a government contractor with a plan for PTSD soldiers - treat them with a drug that will make them forget the memories that are unraveling them, with the result that they will be whole and happy again.  Julia Roberts plays social worker Heidi, with a heart and a brain.  Cannavale is her boss Colin, in charge of the project.  Whigham is government investigator Thomas looking into this.  And James is Heidi's patient Walter, beginning to fall in love with her, as patients in therapy often do.

But that's the best of what's happening.  The worst, we soon discover, is that four years later, in 2022 (the present are the Spring months of 2018), Heidi has lost all of her memories of working in Homecoming, and Walter is nowhere to be found.  We're now not only in Mr. Robot territory - one of differentiating truth from lies, what's real from what's implanted - but in Chris Nolan's pathbreaking world of Memento. 

And Homeland delivers, with one of the most memorable performances ever delivered anywhere by Julia Roberts, a storyline that surprises and yet all fits into place, and even an ending that's good for your heart.  Cannavale is suitably megalomaniacal yet vulnerable,  Whigham is aptly dogged and a little clumsy, and James has a winning quality, making it not surprising that Roberts' Heidi has reciprocal feelings for him.   Hats off to all concerned, including whoever came up with the square and letterbox screens, as a way of showing limited and full memories.   I predict that by 2022,  Homeland will become as much a classic as is Memento.

 

The Second of The Third

The second episode of  Emon Hassan's The Third appeared online January 4, four days ago.    Short, quietly mysterious, inscrutable, like the pilot, but with a glim more of a plot, and two more characters, too, which makes it a tad more scrutable, if that's a word (I don't know that glim is, either), but, even if not, you get the picture.

The hero, well played by Philip Willingham, gets an assignment by smart phone, to make contact with someone in Bryant Park.  (Ah, Bryant Park, scene of much of my third Phil D'Amato novel, The Pixel Eye - a worthy place for mystery if ever there was one.)   Sitting on a bench, waiting to talk to our hero, is someone who may be his older self.  (That's just my opinion.  The man on the bench is American and much older than our British hero.  But the two did look in some sense the same.  The closing credits, however, do list two guest performers - in addition to our hero - so chances are, at very least, that the guy on the bench is not a bloke, that is,  is not played by Willingham.)

Are you with me so far?  (If not, don't worry, you can watch the second episode right here in the comfort of this blog, below.)  Anyway, the third performer is a woman, and indeed the topic of conversation between the hero and maybe his older self on the bench.   The hero follows her to a small graveyard with crumbling tombstones near Ground Zero, in sight of the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site.   The hero is clearly affected by this, he looks at the tombstone of Moses Gale (one of the amenities in watching any movie online is how easy it is to stop the action and see what's going on - just like with a DVD or DVR, but of course not possible in the theater).  No, I don't know who Moses Gale was, but feel as if I should.

And here is where the second episode of The Third concludes.   There's clearly something serious, sinister, wrenching going on - a smidge of Nolan's Memento now, too - you can see it on the hero's face.

You can see for yourself in the complete second episode below, and you'll see me back here (a statement of my intentions, not a command to you, but you owe it to yourself to drop by) soon after the third of The Third finds its way to Internet screens.



The Third Pilot: Episode 2 from Emon Hassan on Vimeo.


See also The Third - Three Minutes - on the Third

Inception: Brilliant

Given that this blog is Infinite Regress, I thought it was long since time that I reviewed Inception.  It had one scene literally of mirrors on mirrors, which is infinite regress par excellence.  And the rest of movie was just great as well - Christopher Nolan's best movie since Memento, which is high praise indeed.

The people part of the story is good.  Cobb (played Leonardo DiCaprio) is mostly in the business of stealing information from marks of clients by tapping into their dreams.   Introducing an idea into someone's mind - which if it takes root can change a person's life (and sometimes therein the world) - is called "inception," and is a much more difficult undertaking.   (Here the story picks up on Richard Dawkins' notion of the "meme" as an ideational virus.)    Cobb, we learn near the end of the movie, has done this only once before - to his wife, to get her to leave the deep dream state both were in.  It had disastrous ultimate consequences for her.

Cobb and team are hired to plant an idea into the new head of a company.  The team is a fine assemblage of memorable actors and performances, including especially Tom Hardy (good to see him back from Meadowlands),  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page (meshing well with her Cisco commercials).  The action is superb, with car chases and scalings of snowy mountains almost James Bondian in their sweep and power.

But the deepest thrill of Inception resides in the sheer intellectual audacity of its puzzles and their pursuit.   The mission requires the team to take their target not just through a dream state, but a dream within a dream within a dream.  Time moves more slowly - drastically so - the deeper the dream state, or the further away it is from our normal time in our waking reality.   And though death in the first level of dreams just awakens you in our reality, death in the deepest, or third state, can sentence you to limbo forever.    When you add these high stakes to the speed and impact of the action, with stunning visuals including the folding of streets and the crumbling of cities, you get one breathless rollercoaster ride of a movie.

As is always the case in which dreams mix with reality, a central underlying question haunts the proceedings: is what we are seeing reality, or some dream of which we're not aware.

Cobb explains that there are ways in which we can tell.   One of them, a token that we can rely on as an indication of reality, provides a somewhat ambiguous ending.    But there's another way - whether we know how we got to where we are in our current experience.    And, on that score, I think the ending is clear.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

NCIS 8.6: The Written Woman

Ray Bradbury's 1951 The Illustrated Man told the stories in tattoos all over a vagrant's body - it was a Canterbury Tales for the science fiction age.  Last night's NCIS 8.6 tells the story of a naval officer with all kinds of self-inscribed writing all over her body.   She's drugged and runs into the street and is killed by a car.  The team has to understand what she was trying to convey in her writing if they are to understand why she died.   The result is a cerebral, compelling episode of NCIS which resonates with Memento and Fringe.

My first thought that was that the ink in the self-inscriptions contained some kind of poison, quietly infused by the killer, which is what got Clea Thorson drugged (like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I suppose).  I wasn't that far off.  The poison came cumulatively from Clea's showers.   Meanwhile, Abby does a great job of cracking the code and Clea.  It was good to see her snap at Gibbs in the heat of the investigation - realistic.

My favorite line came from McGee this week.  When DiNozzo reveals the name of his new flame - Ethel - and waxes on about what the name means to him, McGee offers: "I've fallen, and I can't get up."  Point McGee!  The only name with an "E" that I can think of that's even more great-grandmotherly than Ethel would be Edna.

But DiNozzo polishes off the episode with a banging impersonation of John Travolta, in Saturday Night Fever garb.   Michael Weatherly could have a good career doing impersonations, if this NCIS gig ever gives him some time.

See also NCIS Back in Season 8 Action ... NCIS 8.2: Interns! ... NCIS 8.3: Tiff! ... NCIS 8.4: Gary Cooper not John Wayne ... NCIS 8.5: Dead DJ, DiNozzo Hoarse, and Baseball

And see ee also NCIS  ... NCIS 7.16: Gibbs' Mother-in-Law Dilemma ... NCIS 7.17: Ducky's Ties ... NCIS 7.18: Bogus Treasure and Real Locker ... NCIS 7.21: NCIS Meets Laura ... NCIS Season 7 Finale: Retribution

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                 Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, eHarmony, eMusic, Mozy, Zazzle

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book 


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