Black Rabbit: The Good and the Bad

Black Rabbit -- all eight episodes -- debuted last week on Netflix.  My wife and I binged the short series the past few nights.  To paraphrase Charles Dickens, I thought watching Black Rabbit was the best of times and the worst of times on streaming viewing.  Well, not the worst -- I wouldn't say I'm hopping mad (sorry) about problems in the series -- but there were indeed some highs and lows.  I'm not talking about what lows just about all the characters experienced in the narrative, but how their story was presented to the us, the audience.

[Slightish spoilers ahead ... ]

Here's some of what I really liked:  The series had incredible soul, great acting, and great music.  About the music, I especially enjoyed hearing a bit of the theme song of MobLand on Black Rabbit -- I think "Starburster" by Fontaines D.C. is the best British hip-hop I've heard, and up there with the best hip-hop period.  The story takes place mostly in lower Manhattan, and the cinematography was real, bracing, and refreshing.  And the story was riveting, with big and bigger surprises throughout.

Here's what I didn't like:  The series was too obvious, even annoying, in the techniques it used to tell the story.  Lots of series these days jump back and forth in time without usually identifying the time.  Even if the date is identified, too much of that can be distracting (my wife feels even more strongly about that).  I guess flashbacks as an essential part of the story was put on the map in Lost.  But in that brilliant, pathbreaking series (until the atrocious finale), the flashbacks were elucidating and revelatory because they were clear, mostly because they were limited to flashbacks about a single character in a single episode.  In Black Rabbit, there were so many flashbacks involving so many characters weaving in and out of the story it sometimes felt like reading a book with some pages randomly torn out and pasted back in in different places.

Sometimes watching Black Rabbit almost felt like watching an entry in a some kind of director's competition for innovation in a movie.  One episode used the now common technique of titling segments with the name of the central characters.  This did give some minor characters more time on the screen, at the expense of the slowing down the action.

But Black Rabbit did get it all together in the last two episodes, with a heart in your throat ending, at once wrenching and beautiful.   All in all, very well worth watching, despite its frustrations.

MobLand: The Godfather of Streaming Television

Just saw the finale of what will almost certainly be the first season of a tour-de-force series about warring crime families on the other side of the pond, i.e., the UK.  MobLand has everything -- a powerful, unpredictable story bristling with what The Godfather and its sequels did so well in movies.  That would be a potent, explosive blend of violence and family dynamics that can make your head spin.

Here I'll talk about two ingredients that brought this kick-in-the-solar-plexus across: the music and the acting,

First, MobLand has one of the best theme songs I've heard in years:  "Starburster" by Fontaines D.C.  I mean, I'm no expert in hip hop, but I know "Starburster" has powerful elements of it, and the recording suits the story to be told in every episode to a tee, as well as being instantly unforgettable mind candy. 

And that's just for literally starters.  In the finale alone, we get major songs by Johnny Cash (sung twice) and The Rolling Stones.  Like in The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, and all immediately classic crime family dramas, the music of MobLand is at once avant garde and classic.  

Now let's get to the acting.  Pierce Brosnan gave an astonishing performance as Conrad Harrington, the anti-hero crime boss whose gang is at the center of the action.  This man played two characters who were suave to the max -- Remington Steele and James Bond -- and in MobLand he trashes those icons and goes vehemently in the opposite direction, cursing and screaming and giving loud and withering vent to his anger and his other moods with the best of 'em.   Meanwhile,  Helen Mirren, a world-class actress, is every bit as vicious and violent in her role as Maeve Harrington, Conrad's wife..  Neither of them are youngsters, but I wouldn't want to meet either of them in a dark alley.  Or a lit one, either, for that matter.

And alongside these veritable criminal forces of nature -- Emmy-worthy spectacular -- we have Tom Hardy's portrayal of Harry, the Harringtons fixer (a lot of "Har"s in that sentence).  He's calm, contemplative but deadly when he needs to be.  Like Brosnan and Mirren, Hardy is a world-class actor, great in just about everything he does, but yet to establish himself in a role as luminary as James Bond, Vito Corleone, or Michael Corleone.  But his performance in MobLand could move Hardy into Al Pacino territory.

The lesser-known actors in MobLand were excellent, too.  Paddy Considine (House of the Dragon) as one of Conrad and Maeve's sons, gives a heart-rending performance, as does Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey), for different reasons, as Harry's wife.   The truth is, there's not a weak performance in this powerhouse of a series.

Hey, I managed to review MobLand without even a hint of a spoiler.  I'm going to listen to some more Fontaines DC music now.

Black Bag: Pick It Up

Just saw Black Bag, which popped up on Peacock on May 2, after debuting in theaters here in the U. S. on March 14.  It has a lot to commend itself,  including a top-notch cast, with Michael Fassbender (whom I just saw in The Agency, the CIA in London series which I reviewed the first three episodes of here), Cate Blanchett (who starred in lots of great movies and series, including recently Disclaimer, a brilliant literary psychological drama which I reviewed here), and Pierce Brosnan (formerly Remington Steele and James Bond, of course, currently starring in Mobland (giving a tour-de-force performance as a gang boss; I'll be reviewing it after its finale next week, but I can tell you now that it has one of the best theme songs I've heard in many a year).

Black Bag actually has some music running through it, too.  It has some action, but most of the time it's more a chess-piece cosy that Agatha Christie would have appreciated.  It also, like The Agency, flaunts the very best of current and possibly imagined AI and digital media in the spy-craft it details.  But its best feature is Fassbender's George and Blanchette's Kathryn as a loving couple who are likely good guys, and the rest of George's team, evenly matched between men and women who are also romantically involved in one way or another.

If I had a complaint, it probably would be that the narrative resolved itself a little too quickly, and may have played better as a limited series of three or four episodes.  Also, the villain was not as ingenuously concealed as in Agatha Christie's work, and maybe more time for that story to spool out would have been helpful too.

But the mix of espionage and romance worked well, and one advantage of a movie over a TV series is that you're not investing as much time in watching a movie as you would a series, so the movie's lack of perfection is less objectionable.