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.

Peaky Blinders Season 3: Still Peak

Finally had a chance to see the third season of Peaky Blinders on Netflix - available for a few months now - and happy to report that it's superb, as good or better than the first two seasons.

I'll try not to give you too much away - there are lots of surprises, well worth waiting for.

First and foremost comes at the very end, when Thomas comes up with a unique way to keep his family and business together.   Totally unforeseen, and astonishing.

We also have a shocking death, early in the season, which changes, well, not everything, but a lot.  As much as I regretted this happening, it gives the story a jolt, to say the least.

Arthur and John are in fine form - including in one scene in which tattoos are searched for - and Michael and Polly have an important roles, too.   Tom Hardy is memorable, again, as Alfie, and in fact all the acting is outstanding, with Cillian Murphy and Paul Anderson in the lead.

As always, Tommy has his hands full, fighting old and new enemies, and keeping his family in line and resistant to inner and outer demons.   After three seasons, I would say that Peaky Blinders has equalled or exceeded Boardwalk Empire, and may be on its way to giving the Godfather saga a run for its money.

England in the 1920s is a great locale for this story, mixing cars and horses, Soviets and locally corrupt authorities of all stripes.   The third season, like the first two, is just six episodes, leaving plenty more to tell in the story.  So you here next year!

See also Peaky Blinders: Peak Television

 
deeper history

#SFWApro

The Drop: A Lift

I saw The Drop last night - the Dennis Lehane movie (he wrote the screenplay, based on his short story, "Animal Rescue"), starring James Gandolfini in his final performance and Tom Hardy in what, by my lights, is probably the best performance of his career so far.

The plot is intricate, with lots of sharp, dangerous, fast and slow moving pieces, and it's all brought together beautifully in the end, with a twist that's stunning when it happens but perfectly plausible in retrospect - in other words, precisely the kind of surprise ending you would want.

Tom Hardy delivers of powerful performance as Bob, who seems well over his head in the lethal currents swirling all around him, but has a quiet strength and a heart, which we see applied to Nadia, the complicated love interest, and Rocco, an adorable puppy.  As a police detective remarks, you don't see Bob, even though he's right in front of you.  And Hardy's portrayal is as memorable as it gets, like a low key Pacino, if that makes any sense.

Gandolfini as Bob's cousin Marv was outstanding, making it all the sadder that this is his last performance. As he did in all his renditions of people in one way or another involved in criminal activity, Gandolfini managed to project a no-nonsense toughness combined with an appealing humanity.

All of this is played out against a tableau of a bar owned by the Russian mob, and used a "drop" place for its illegally gotten gains, and a psycho not connected to the mob who is thrown in for good and bad measure.  The pace and the dialogue are reminiscent of Tarantino at his best, and I found The Drop is one of the most appealing movies of this kind to come along in years.

a different kind of crime

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

Watch for Flood on Ion Television!

I realized the Brits had an eye for the human-scale disaster movie when I was pretty young - in 1962, when I saw Day of the Triffids. It's still one of the best horror-disaster movies ever made.

Triffids is about plants gone wild. Flood is about bad weather - hurricanes causing devastating floods, in particular.

Flood was first released in the UK in August. It will be shown here in the U.S. on Ion Television - a digital television network - as a four-hour mini-series debuting on December 16.

Don't miss it.

Flood starts, at first, as an unsurprising post-Katrina movie, with maybe a little Jack Bauer mixed in. The establishment meteorologist misses the monstrosity of an approaching storm. An older scientist who predicted it could happen - or, if it did, that the precautions built to make sure it didn't wipe out London were insufficient - has been ignored, and is on the outs with his son, a marine engineer. Life's not the greatest for the son, either, insofar as he and his beautiful Canadian wife, heading up the Thames Barrier operation - designed to prevent flooding - are divorced.

But then the movie takes off - in two top-notch ways. First, Tom Courtenay (who starred in the classic Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), puts in a superb performance as the father scientist, Leonard Morrison. Courtenay projects a perfect, quiet power rarely seen on television or in the movies. Joanne Whalley also puts in a powerful performance as the Metro Police Commissioner in London, as does David Suchet (Casino Royale!) as Deputy Prime Minster. Robert Carlyle - who was excellent in The Full Monty - is excellent as Leonard's son Rob, and Jessalyn Gilsig (Heroes' Meredith!) is fine as Rob's ex-wife and Thames Barrier chief, too.

And, a shout-out for Ralph Brown and Tom Hardy of Meadowlands. It was good to see them again in Flood.

So the acting is excellent - and better, in fact, than what we usually see in mini-series.

And the story of Flood is better than the usual disaster movie, too. The personal relationships really start to count as the movie proceeds, and the final half-hour had me fixed to my chair, hoping that ...

Well, I don't want to give any of it away. But I can tell you the scenes of London flooded are excellent, the action taut, and the mini-series all together satisfying.

Except - ok, there was one thing. Stuck about 2/3rds into the movie is a scene in which the Deputy Prime Minister is speaking to some American financial honcho with a German accent (Henry Kissinger?). The British DPM is saying the pound is taking a beating because of the flood, and can he count on the Americans to help. And the American creep with the German accent says, no, we can't, we have to make sure the dollar stays strong...

Two things wrong with that scene. One, who the cares about pounds and dollars at a time like this? And second, here's clue for you Brits: don't take gratuitous potshots at Americans, and portray us with German accents, and expect us to like it ... :)

Otherwise - I highly recommend Flood. Keep yours eyes out for it.

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Meadowlands: Episode 2

Meadowlands is clearly a dangerous place - everyone who is there, unless they're there with a family member who is there, is there for a reason. In case anyone doubted that, we see it played in scalding violence in Episode 2...

Jack the handyman is attracted to Zoe, who enjoys and invites his attention. Jack's played by Tom Hardy. To give you an idea of the mix of sensitivity and brutality he projects, think of Mickey Rourke with Harry Connick, Jr and even a little young Humphrey Bogart thrown in. (I know, that might seem like a stretch, but it's there.) So Jack comes over to the Brogan's house to see Zoe, but finds her brother Mark instead, dressed as Zoe ... Jack soon realizes this, but is excited by the situation nonetheless - he feeds on fright - and tries to rape Mark-

At which point Danny comes home, pulls Jack off Mark, punches Jack and- Jack is dead.

And to make matters worse, if that's possible - but making things worse may be the intriguing hallmark of Meadowlands - a mysterious man with a blue cap, whom we've glimpsed before, stands in the doorway and thanks Danny for taking care of his job for him...

Meadowlands is place teeming with danger. But at least Mark is talking now...

Excellent acting and set design and production all around. In addition to Hardy, especially fine performances by Harry Treadaway (Mark) and David Morrissey (Danny) in that crucial scene.

But I think my favorite scene is the opening of every episode, with the four Brogans, backs to the camera, walking to their new home. Kudos, especially, to Mrs. Brogan - Evelyn, played by Lucy Cohu - who walks best, with a shiny stud on each cheek of her black jeans, and the music keeping beat...

Useful links:

Intriguingly Miasmic Meadowlands: A Preview

reviews of other episodes: Meadowlands Opens ... with Tongues and Grooves ... Episode 3 ... Episode 4 ... Episode 5 ... Episode 6 ... Episode 7 ... Episode 8

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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

Meadowlands Opens - with Tongues and Grooves

Meadowlands opened on Showtime last night. I saw the first four episodes a few weeks ago, but watched the debut again last night, and enjoyed it even more...

This may be the summer of strange tv shows - well, there are at least two of them, Meadowlands on Showtime and John from Cincinnati on HBO - and so far Meadowlands is well ahead in power, intrigue, and cavalcade of bizarre and compelling characters (though I haven't given up on John yet).

The set-up is a family of four, the Brogans, put into something like a witness protection program - in Meadowlands.

Presumably, everyone else in Meadowlands - whatever their ostensible job - has been put there for some dangerous reason, too.

The MD - Dr. David York (Tristan Gemmill) - falls instantly love with Mrs. Brogan (Lucy Cohu). The cop in town - Bernard Wintersgill (Ralph Brown) - clearly has a taste for torture. (He also had a nice sharp tongue - when the Brogans apologize for squabbling in public, Wintersgill tells them, "Don't be sorry - be quiet!") Mark Brogan, the son (played broodingly well by Harry Treadaway), enjoys watching the talk-machine middle-aged neighbor undress, after she tells the Brogans that her daughter is devastatingly beautiful (we haven't see her yet). Danny Brogan (David Morrissey) - previously Eddie Foy, and apparently the reason for the (Foy) Brogans' relocation - struggles to get his family adjusted to this life, as it is, in the new town.

My favorite exchange in the premier episode takes place between the daughter, Zoe, played with sass and style by Felicity Jones, and the slightly sinister handy-man, Jack Donnelly, played in just the right unsettling way by Tom Hardy.

Jack comes over and whispers his first, introductory words to Zoe with his lips an inch from the back of her hair and neck. Zoe pulls back, but clearly likes this. By the time their brief conversation ends, Zoe has "Jack (Of All Trades) Donnelly"'s card and phone number, and Donnelly has told her that his speciality is "tongues and grooves" ... (This is actually a carpenter's term. I also liked that Zoe pronounces Jack's last name Done-ally - so the "Done" rhymes with stone, or Doan's Little Liver Pills - but maybe that's just me, and my American accent.)

There will be plenty more where this came from ... If you like your mysteries just a touch cracked, with shots at unexpected times of humor, plain and demented, and savagery, stay tuned to The Prisoner on Twin Peaks with maybe Dexter looking in ... in Meadowlands...

Useful links:

Intriguingly Miasmic Meadowlands

reviews of other episodes: Episode 2 ... Episode 3 ... Episode 4 ... Episode 5 ... Episode 6 ... Episode 7 ... Episode 8

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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