TV Reaction: 13 Reasons Why

That was a hell of a thing.

I don't do a lot of TV discussions (which I need to fix). Part of the reason is because the nature of TV shows, several parts told over a longer amount of time, dilutes the impact in a way that doesn't happen in film. I actually prefer what shows do over movies, but there's no denying that they are different discussions to have. I had to say something about 13 Reasons Why though. It's rare that a show emotionally flattens me like this. In the past few years, maybe The Leftovers is the only other show that has.

Since I'm not sure how many people have watched this series yet, and I'm hoping to convince people to do so, I'm going to hold off on any overt spoilers until the end, which will be labelled.

The concept is pretty simple: A high school girl, Hannah (Katherine Langford) commits suicide and leaves tapes for the people she holds responsible for it. 13 tapes. 13 episodes. The tapes are passed around by those people and kept secret from everyone else. The show begins when Clay (Dylan Minnette) receives the tapes and slowly listens through them. The show is part teen-drama, part mystery, part conspiracy, part romance, and so much more. It tells the dual narrative of the months leading up to Hannah's suicide and the fallout from it.
More than anything, it is a character study. That makes the two lead roles vitally important. Katherine Langford is a star. She is an absolute star. I was stunned to see how few credits she had on IMDB, because she is so polished and perfect in this. Dylan Minnette has a lot more experience, but I was still surprised that he was so good in this as well. Just as importantly, the two actors have incredible chemistry together. And it doesn't stop there. This has a great young cast. With one notable exception, every person in the tapes is a multi-dimensional character with likable and unlikable traits. In the high school cast, I only recognized Minnette and Miles Heizer (Drew from Parenthood). I wouldn't be surprised if ten years from now, the likes of Alisha Boe, Christian Navarro, Devin Druid, Brandon Flynn, Ajiona Alexus, Justin Prentice, and others will be looked at as a "murderers row" the way that the Freak and Geeks cast is now. I also need to single out Kate Walsh in the adult cast who is devastating as Hannah's grieving mother.

I normally say that the best shows/movies/books are not the most perfect ones. It's about the good far outweighing the bad. 13 Reasons Why has some problems. Some episodes need the full hour. Others, many in the middle, don't have enough content to justify the length. Clay stalls for time a lot, and that gets very frustrating. The show writes checks it can't cash several times, ominously alluding to things that aren't worth the build-up. It's the kind of show that if you start picking at it, it completely falls apart. And there's the core idea of laying the blame for one's actions on someone else, which is a non-starter a segment of the potential audience.

All that's fine though, because when 13 Reasons Why works, it is so damn good. The collection of directors (including 2 episodes directed by Spotlight director Tom McCarthy) do an excellent job weaving the past and the present together. They even manage to insert dream sequences and fake outs without making them feel like cheap tricks. The series is unflinching. I've never seen a Netflix series with content disclaimers before them, and they are needed. There is no romanticizing about what happens to Hannah [and others]. At times, it is brutal to watch. Where most shows would cut away (pun not intended), it doesn't. Even something as simple as teenagers swearing in a real way was a refreshing change. What hit me the hardest was the inevitability. Hannah dies and there's no way around it. That was always there. Every time Hannah and Clay hit it off. Every time it looks like Hannah has made the friend or connection that could save her. The incapability wrecked me. And, the show isn't a slog to get through. While the dramatic beats are what will stay with me, the mystery of it all is told in such a compelling way that I couldn't stop watching. Hannah's story expands and compounds. Like in life, the butterfly effect leads everything to this awful conclusion, and it's fascinating to see how one innocuous comment or different perspective can change everything.

That's about all I'm going to say to convince anyone who hasn't watched yet. It's an imperfect show that has moments that are as good as anything you are going to see. A lot of moments. That's enough to make it essential viewing for me. It's not an easy watch. It's not "homework TV" though. Once you start, it has a propulsive narrative that will hook you in. I'd have something lighter to watch at the ready though for when you finish. It'll put you through an emotional wringer.

After the Credits:

I just have a few thoughts that move into spoiler territory.

-That head bandage did so much of the work for the directors. It's a trick I've seen used before, but I love the simplicity. Clay has a bandage on his head = present. No bandage = past.

-I'm undecided about Bryce. He's the only irredeemable character. One argument is that there needs to be one true villain in the story to make everything palatable. Without him being truly evil, it would make it harder to find the shades of grey in Justin's actions, for example. The other argument though is that it lets everyone off the hook. Bryce raped two girls. Bryce sent Justin's picture of Hannah out. While everyone killed Hannah Baker, Bryce is the only one essential to her death.

-Similarly, I don't see why everyone banded together against Clay so strongly. His tape wasn't that bad. Not bad for him, that is. It devastated him to find out that he could've stopped this, but there's nothing there that would actually hurt him if he released the tapes to the public. It only hurts him internally. Everyone else has their own motivations (Zach, Marcus, and Courtney, for instance, have relatively minor offenses  but have a lot more to lose if the tapes become public), but I don't buy the slow rate at which people began siding with Clay.

-Jeff. Poor Jeff. In any other show, his death would be a central event. Part of what I love about 13 Reasons Why is how it is completely secondary Jeff's story is. They are canny with how they hide the reveal. I just like the Jeff character though. As far as the show is concerned, he's the only good person at that school. Zach thinks he is the nice-guy jock, but that title actually belongs to Jeff*. It isn't a reach to suggest that if Jeff was still around to push and prod Clay and otherwise balance out other groups, not to mention easing Hannah's disgust with Sheri from before the accident, maybe Hannah would still be alive. A lot of what sold me on this show was in the details and side-stories, and Jeff was one of the best of them.

*Unless I am completely forgetting about something. Especially in the first half, a lot of the jocks were indistinguishable to me.

-Here's my big thought: Do not make a second season. Don't do it. The ending is just about perfect. Yes, there's a lot of dangling threads in the narrative and Netflix hasn't been dismissive about doing another season. Look, I love closure. I love it so much. I hate when TV or filmmakers don't resolve things because they think it makes it more "artistic" or something equally stupid. But, I think 13 Reasons Why has plenty of closure. I don't need to see Bryce go to jail. I know the truth will come out and I know from his scene with Justin that his friends are abandoning him. Sheri confessed. Good. That's all I need to know. Hearing about her punishment doesn't matter. Clay's mom knows he has been listening to the tapes. That explains everything she needs to know. The biggest mysteries left involve Tyler's guns and Alex getting shot. Unrelated or related, I really don't need to know. Alex's story has to do with his feelings of guilt. That's been completed. The whole point of Tyler is that he's never included in anything, so isn't it fitting that the show doesn't care enough to end his story? The main reason I don't want a second season though is because it would take the story away from Hannah. To do that would mean missing the point of the series in the first place. Don't do it.

Movie Reaction: Life

Formula: Alien / Gravity

Some films are more concerned with effectiveness than novelty. It's very hard to be the first or the original. When that isn't an option, getting it right can be an equally noble goal. No one is pretending that Life doesn't look an awful lot like a bunch of other movies. The hope is that it is done so well, that no one cares.

Life begins when the 6 person crew of an international space station retrieve ground samples from a Mars probe. In that sample is a single cell that they manage to bring back to life. People all over the world rejoice and name this evidence of life on another planet Calvin, because, why not? Soon after reanimating Calvin, he starts growing and getting stronger. It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that, eventually, Calvin turns on the crew and leaves a lot of dead bodies.

It's a pretty small cast, since almost all of it takes place on the space station. I recognized Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds. I didn't recognize Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ariyon Bakare. No one stood out above the others though. Ryan Reynolds is about the only person I couldn't see being played by any other actor, which I don't mean as a slam on any of the cast. It's a movie about survival, not characters. Granted, better fleshed out characters would've certainly helped the film to stand out.

It really is hard for me to not talk about Life in terms of the films it reminds me of. It's a mission from Mars (The Martian), in which an alien attacks the crew (Alien). They are struggling to get back to Earth (Gravity), while also worrying about containing the creature (The Thing). As I alluded to earlier, all this pulling from other movies is fine. It just has to be done well. I can't say I bought into enough of the story. The lack of fail-safes in the space station seem poorly thought out. The crew had little regard for proper protocol (a common trope in this genre). Once it's revealed that Calvin can survive for an extended period of time outside the space station, he became a bogeyman who couldn't be stopped. In general, Life takes the easy way our a lot. It's easier to create conflict that the result of one unlucky break after another than it is to have people doing the right thing and still getting resistance. Life is a little too content going with what's easy for my taste. The characters weren't developed enough for me to invest in them, so that left a lot of focus on a story that showed its narrative hand too early and often. It's entertaining but not memorable.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Captain Fantastic

The Pitch: What if Lord of the Flies was on purpose?

When I heard that Matt Ross, Gavin Belson from Silicon Valley, wrote and directed a movie, my first guess wasn't that it was about a father raising his children in the wild and introducing them to the "real world" to go to the funeral of their mother who killed herself. Then again, that's not something you just assume. Now, Viggo Mortensen as the patriarch of this family: that something that's easier to guess. Mortensen very well could have an Oscar nomination for this film simply for how good a fit for the role he is. He's quite good too, make no mistake. In fact, this is rather spectacular casting all-around. The kids all get personalities and differences. The oldest son, Bo (George MacKay) especially stood out. The look he gives when he's nervous and shuts down is incredible. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. The extended family too. Kathryn Hahn has plenty of experience being mortified and frustrated interacting with the Pfeffermans. Frank Langella and Ann Dowd both want to work with Mortensen for whatever's best for the children. They just have a different idea about what that means.

The film celebrates this family's lifestyle while still judging it heavily. Ross does a terrific job showing the benefits (the kid are very strong and very book smart) and the weaknesses (they have no social skills outside of the family). Toward the end, the plot is a little forced. The daughter's injury is one of those "and then this needs to happen" moments that felt a little too convenient. There's a sense of humor to the film that I wasn't dialed into. Things like the different characters getting naked for no reason or the children getting weapons for Nohm Chompsky Day are silly but they felt more to me like underlining a point that had already been made. Unless those were supposed to be mortifying, sobering moments, in which case, I completely missed the point.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Passion

The Pitch: Rachel McAdams is a manipulative boss, but not in a funny way. More like a Single, White Female way.

I wouldn't say that I'm a Brian De Palma fan, but I sure have seen a lot of his movies, specifically 1993 on. Let's just say that his fastball isn't what it used to be. I watched Passion for many of the same reasons I watched Femme Fatale and was similarly unimpressed. I could not connect with the tone of the film. The score starts off distractingly whimsical and moves to the slow jazz of softcore porn before too long. It called attention to itself far too much.

I love Rachel McAdams, but she felt miscast. She can totally play a manipulative villain. She kind of launched her career doing that. She doesn't do two-faced though. She doesn't fake sweetness. You always knew where Regina George stood. Her niceness, was obviously fake. In Passion, Christine Stanford is meant to actually fool people and I didn't buy it.

Speaking of not buying things, Noomi Rapace's plan for getting away with Christine's murder is nonsense. It relied far too much on chance. Finding a non-bloody scarf as a sure-fire way to get out of prison is USA detective-series level weak/circumstantial. Look, it's not that hard. Just don't treat that like a master-plan. Admit that it was weak or that Rapace got lucky. Don't have the assistant retrace the steps at the end like it's some brilliant scheme she uncovered.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Kubo and the Two Strings

The Pitch: A boy with musical magical powers tries to protect himself from his wicked grandfather and aunts with the help a monkey and a beetle warrior - you know what. Just watch it.

I've learned two things from Kubo and the Two Strings (in conjunction with my fond memories of ParaNorman). 1) I need to see The Boxtrolls. 2) I need to give Coraline another shot. Because, I'm a fan of what Laika Studios does. Kubo and the Two Strings is a pretty movie. I agree with it being only the second animated film two be noted for its Visual Effect by the Oscars. This movie is fun. It's inventive. There's an edge to the story while still being accessible to people of all ages. After all, the kid is missing an eye. His parents are dead by the end of the film. Yet, it still manages to have a happy ending. No matter when you figure out that the monkey and the beetle are his parents, it's really entertaining to see how they play off one another. The twin sisters are quite creppy. Even though the story is straight up a video game adventure structure (collect all the items, defeat bosses), it totally works. I was thoroughly pleased with this start to finish.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Made

The Pitch: Swingers 2. This time, with mafia connections.

Swingers is a fun movie. I saw it several years ago and mainly remember it for the epic meltdown when Jon Favreau's Mike leaves all those messages on that poor woman's answering machine. Made is the spiritual sequel to Swingers and it feels like it. The stand out parts of Swingers (namely, Fareau and Vince Vaughn's dynamic) get brought along and the story is a little more ambitious. It's Jon Favreau's directorial debut. That sounds about right. The direction is pretty simple. I'd rather have a debut direction be simple and invisible rather than experimental and distracting. Favreau as a director is fun to track. The man is good at it, even if I can't put my finger on what he does. What do Made, Elf, Iron Man, Chef, and The Jungle Book have in common? A director who can disappear into his work, perhaps? Vince Vaughn is putting on the full Vince Vaughn in this. He is an actor I like best as a supporting character (even in Wedding Crashers, he was very prominent but second to Owen Wilson in the narrative). Made pushes about as hard as it can on the amount before Vaughn becomes irritating. If he didn't play off Favreau so well, it would be much less watchable.
While I think the ending was a bit clunky, the credits scene at Chuck-e-Cheese was wonderful.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: He Got Game

The Pitch: The incarcerated father of the #1 basketball recruit in the nation get a furlough in order to convince his son to go to college at the governor's alma mater. A Spike Lee film.

I saw this movie for one reason and one reason only: I wanted in on the Jesus Shuttlesworth jokes. I'm a big basketball fan, so I knew Ray Allen picked up that name from a Spike Lee movie he was in. I didn't really get the reference though. Now that he's functionally retired, I of course finally decided to get on the bandwagon. It also helps that I'd heard praise for Denzel Washington's performance, and I'm always looking to figure out what I think of Spike Lee as a director (I really should know by now but I don't). The most enjoyment I got out of the film was the cameos by actual basketball people, especially the coaches (they all look so young). All the basketball made this the most accessible Spike Lee I've found for me. Ray Allen is a better actor than I expected. Not great. Not all that good. But, much better than I'd expect for a professional athlete with no experience. I do wonder what the Kobe Bryant version (Lee's first choice for the role) would've looked like. It goes on a little long and I couldn't help but question the discrepancies of what I do know about college recruiting processes vs. what's portrayed in the film. The villainous characters are arch in that way that annoys me in Lee's films. Denzel really keeps it watchable though.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Suffragette

The Pitch: The story of the Suffragette movement in London.

I could say that I was motivated to see this movie because I was inspired by something like the Women's March* or some other response to a political issue of our time. However, that would be a lie. I saw this because I like Carey Mulligan, and it also promised me Helena Bohnam Carter and Meryl Streep. It could've been about anything and I'd've watched it. That said, it was nice to get a glimpse into the suffrage movement. It's baffling to me to think that women (or minorities) weren't allowed to vote, less than a century ago all over the world (and several places currently). People actually argued that women shouldn't vote because their fathers/husbands/sons already had their best interest in mind. Poppycocks!

*This is my obligatory reminder that I have these Delayed Reactions in the can for a while, so it's a least a month or two between when I see a movie and when I post about it. Sorry. Turning these things around day-off is way more stressful than I can deal with. Besides, these are delayed reactions, so I'm kind of making a point.

Carey Mulligan is as good as the character can be. I don't think the beats of her transformation are earned in the story. Mulligan makes them seem as authentic as she can. Helea Bohnam Carter has a nice and lived-in role. I remember being surprised when Meryl Streep failed to get an Oscar nomination for this movie last year, because it looked like low hanging fruit (Meryl + period piece + political issue = Oscar). Having seen how little she's in it, I get the "snub" now. I like that some of the men are given a measure of conflict about what's going on with the suffrage movement. Ben Whishaw is a jerk, but it's partly because he's unable to process the change he's seeing in his wife. It's not that he simply dumps her because she thinks women should be able to vote. Brendan Gleeson is the classic "I'm just doing my job" kind of villain.

The movie is more of a survey than a deep dive. Mulligan's character reminds me of Mark Wahlberg's in Patriot's Days. She's always in the right place at the right time. She's in the center of it all so that there's a POV character for the events. It all fells like a checklist though: the early protests, the secret rally with Emmeline Pankhurst, the hunger strike in jail, blowing up mailboxes. Given my lack of knowledge about the suffrage movement, every chapter of the film seemed like it was saying "That's a taste of what happened. Now, look it up on Wikipedia for the real story".

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Ghost in the Shell

Formula: (I, Robot / Her) * Lucy + Robocop

Some movies are a hard sell. On paper, everything looks right about it, but it still can't generate much excitement. That's how I feel about Ghost in the Shell. It has Scarlett Johansson, who is a legitimate movie star and can draw an audience. She proved with Lucy that she can carry an action movie without the rest of the Avengers crew. This film is adapted from a fairly popular Japanese property, which has a built-in fanbase. The style of the movie evokes the best of what the Wachowskis (The Matrix) and Ridley Scott (Blade Runner) among others have to offer. It even has a killer visual that can be used in all the trailers and TV spots: ScarJo revealing that full body suit, diving off the top of a building. Despite all this, it had a hard time convincing me that it was something to be excited about. "Hard sell" and "not excited about" are thoughts going into a movie though, not coming out of one. It wasn't until I got to seeing the movie, that I could determine there still wasn't much to be excited about.

I will give my standard warning now that I know nothing about the source material, so I don't particularly care what they "got wrong" or what "makes more sense if you know the manga". I'm looking at this movie. The movie is about Major Mira Killian (Johannson). She was a person, until every part of her body except for her brain was replaced with robotic parts. This makes her claim of being "human" questionable but makes her claim of being a super soldier unquestionable. She is the key piece to a special anti-terrorism task force. Someone is killing a group a researches who work for Hanka Robotics, the company who made Mira. While Mira and her team investigate and try to stop these killings, Mira learns there's something more nefarious going on with Hanka that she may be the center of.

Storywise, it's a familiar conspiracy story, with a helping of wrongly accused and on the run, and a dash of plucky misfits take on a large corporation. All things any movie fan knows well.

The movie leans heavily on the visuals as a selling point. Similar to the story though, at this point, it doesn't look very inventive. I assume it was at the time of the manga's release, but it seems like every 5 years for the last several decades, some director hires a few future theorists to come up with the same, sensory overload but grimy, "everything tied into a computer" view of the future (Blade Runner, Robocop, Total Recall, Minority Report, I, Robot, etc.). In a lot of ways, the movie reminds me of John Carter. John Carter of Mars was the original space opera, but by the time it finally became a film, the same thing had been done dozens of times before by works that it originally inspired. The Japanese style of Ghost in the Shell was a nice enough change. Not enough, but something, nonetheless.

Speaking of Japanese, let's talk about the whitewashing. I wasn't going to go into this too much, partly because I wasn't comparing this as an adaptation. I was even going to go as far as saying "as long as the movie is good, I don't really care about the casting". Then, in the movie, they point out that ScarJo was originally a Japanese girl before being put into her ScarJo body. That just seems strange to me. They literally point out that they made an Asian character white. Then they don't even explain why, in this Asian city, they would do that. Even a token attempt to explain that would put me at ease.

Regardless, ScarJo is good in this. I don't buy the internal conflict she's supposed to be going through. I think that is more on the script and direction than her though. She kicks ass well, which it what's most important. I don't recognize a lot of the cast, but they uniformly fill their roles as needed. Polou Asbaek gives me an "Action-star Eddie Izzard" vibe (Was that just me?). Michael Pitt's delivery in general reminds me of a glitchy robot (in a good way), so it's awful fitting that they cast him as a glitchy robot. It's always nice to see Juliette Binoche. Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki. Either that actor is some Japanese screen icon or Aramaki is an incredibly beloved character (or both), because he gets the "legend treatment" in this. He's a bigger BAMF than ScarJo, it turns out, and gets to speak Japanese the whole time. I'm too lazy to look up which it is, but that's the kind of thing normally reserved for Harrison Ford showing up in Force Awakens or Tim Curry doing the narration in Rocky Horror Picture Show. Peter Ferdinando's Cutter is an aggressively forgettable antagonist.

Ghost in the Shell is a hard sell for what turn out to be justifiable reasons. The production design isn't as inspired as it once would've been. They appear to have overplayed their hand on the bankability of Scarlett Johansson: her name and a flesh-colored full body suit aren't enough to sell a movie without a clear hook*. The decision to make the movie PG-13 is becoming more of a liability as movies of its ilk are increasingly turning to R-rating. Personally, I was shocked to find out it was PG-13. It felt incongruent with the type of movie it was, like they were holding something back. Where last week, I was too close to appreciate Power Rangers, I feel like I was too distant and unfamiliar with Ghost in a Shell to appreciate it. It's fine, but mostly forgettable.

*Compared to the Lucy's advertising, I don't have a great idea of what to expect from this. By next year, I'm not sure I could pick this out of a lineup with Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend 

Delayed Reaction: Florence Foster Jenkins

The Pitch: Meryl Streep sings very poorly and you'll still watch it because it's Meryl Streep.

It's starting to feel like there's nothing Meryl Streep can do that won't get nominated for an Oscar. Is that true though? She has 79 credits on IMDB after all, and "only" 20 Oscar nominations. Break that down though. 13 of her credits are for TV work. 5 are shorts. Another 9 are for animated project or voice/narrator credits. That means, really, we are talking about 52 roles. 20/52 = 38.5% of her filmwork gets an Oscar nomination. That's an incredible rate. For some context, Katherine Hepburn batted around 27.3% (12 nominations, 44 roles) and Jack Nicholson is at 20% (12 nominations, 60 roles). Except for some one-off nominations or special cases like James Dean* (2 nominations, 3 roles), no one is even close. So, yeah, she isn't nominated for everything, but excuse me for wondering how she was snubbed for her work in Stuck on You.

*Side tangent: That guys worked a lot. Between 1951-1956, he has 31 roles, mostly in TV.

It's no surprise that Florence Foster Jenkins is another one of those Oscar nominated roles. After Ricki and the Flash and Suffragette went unnoticed, the law of averages dictated that another one was coming. Also, it's actually pretty hard to sing that badly consistently when you actually can sing well (I'm told. I'm more of a counter-point for that). She's wonderfully oblivious. Hugh Grant is sweet. You believe he cares for Florence deeply, although there's always a question about how much of this is because she's wealthy. Simon Helberg is delightfully nervous. It's a silly character that only works because of his commitment to it. Those three actors/characters hold up an otherwise unimpressive movie. I'm not a big fan of farce unless it's done at a very high level, and this relied heavily on the farce of Florence being oblivious. I appreciated some of the smaller character moments, but the rest didn't do much for me.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend