What to Watch This Week

Twin Freaks, A Large and Violent Man, Three Streaming Gems, and a Wonderful Web Series About Weed

Echoes

In Hollywood, concept is the lord and master of all. Find a great concept, or premise, and you can sell your TV show or movie regardless of whatever failures may attend it in those pesky little areas like writing or filmmaking. And there's a good reason for this: a great many people aren't all that interested in great writing or filmmaking (try getting your average viewer to sit through Chayefsky's The Hospital or Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev), but a great concept will keep them glued to the screen, because it's entertaining.

And if you're looking for a great concept in a TV show this week, you might indulge in Netflix's Echoes. This is a seven-episode psychological thriller about a pair of identical twins (both played by Michelle Monaghan) who have perhaps two or three screws loose in their mental machinery. One of them, Leni, stayed home in their small southern town of Mt. Echo and married a local guy who owns a farm; the other, Gina, moved to Los Angeles, married her therapist, and became a famous author. At the beginning of the story, Leni goes missing, so Gina flies back to Mt. Echo – where she's none too popular – to help find her. And then…well, I can't say much more than that without spoiling the whole thing.

But I will say this: the show is really trashy and really fun in exactly equal measure.

On the trashy side are a number of technical elements, of which the dialogue is maybe the best example. Take the first two minutes of the first episode. We open with Monaghan, playing the L.A. twin, who is out for a "run," a term I use advisedly, because she's doing the kind of "running" that Hollywood folks for some reason seem to think is both impressive and believable – a kind of three-quarters sprint with ludicrously high arm-pumping (one imagines the director just off-screen hollering "Higher with the arms, Michelle – we have to let them see how intense you are!") – and comes home to find her husband just returning from work. Here's the dialogue that ensues:

Husband: Hey.

Gina: Hey.

Husband: I missed you this morning. You were up and gone before 6:00.

Gina: Did the mega loop twice today. Once this morning and again just now.

Husband: Ten miles. You're driven.

Gina: You know who you married.

This is the kind of dialogue that's known by the technical term "total crap." It's clunky (Does anyone ever say "You were up and gone before 6:00"? Why not just "You were up early"?), almost purely expository (Other than "Hey," the husband's dialogue consists entirely of saying things that his wife already knows, but that the writer wants desperately for the audience to know), and borderline nonsensical ("You know who you married.") And this sort of shinola continues on and off throughout the entire series: characters are constantly saying things for the audience's benefit, dropping in the most wooden lines imaginable, and occasionally doing things that make absolutely no sense at all. Furthermore, it's all in the service of the kind of the hothouse topics (Overwrought childhood traumas! Accidental murders! Slimy deceptions! Flowers that symbolize true love!) that threaten to push the whole thing into soap-opera territory.

Counterpoint: who the hell cares?! It's entertaining! There's a top-notch premise and, like a hippy on acid dancing to The Doobie Brothers at a state fair, the show really does pull off some amazing, hypnotic, mesmerizing moves. Those of you who've been reading my stuff for a while know that I'm fascinated by plot (I've written about it here and here, among other places) and the happenings in this area in Echoes are delightful. Which is to say that, yes, the whole thing can feel a little overripe at times, but there are some twists and turns here that are deeply satisfying for someone who loves the way stories are put together and the way they're told. And on top of this, Monaghan does really good work in a pair of pretty great roles.

Does it all make sense in the end? May I repeat myself? Who cares! (Although I should note that the last line of dialogue in the series, true to form, really does make no sense at all.) There's some weird-ass people, some gothic creepiness, some love, some hate, and a concept that's both capable of carrying seven episodes and not stretched out any more than it should be. No one in their right mind is going to describe this show as highbrow, but, I mean, we're talking about Netflix here, and the point of TV is to have fun, right? Available, obviously, on Netflix.

Reacher

If you're going to be a fan of the action genre, you're going to have to learn to accept some gloriously silly scenarios. Amazon Prime's Reacher – an eight-episode lollapalooza of fisticuffs, gun battles, mystery-solving, and occasional wisecracking – certainly qualifies. Based on a series of novels by Lee Child, the setup is straight out of old-school TV or dime-store Western novels: the titular Jack Reacher, a massive fellow with a bevy of violent skills he learned in the military police, wanders the land solving crimes and helping people in need. Like David Carradine in Kung Fu, he owns literally nothing – when he needs clean clothes or a toothbrush, he just goes to Walmart and buys them – and at every stop, in addition to discovering an injustice that needs to be righted, he gets entangled in a love affair with a beautiful woman that lasts precisely as long as that stop's adventure.

Cheesy and tropey as it is, it's also a magnificently successful formula, which is what makes it surprising that the two Tom Cruise films that took on the character were so absolutely middling (despite the delightful, finger-chewing presence of Werner Herzog (see below) as the bad guy in the first). And so, this past spring, Amazon Prime set out to rectify the situation.

If you're like me, you may be suspicious about this endeavor, as the vast majority of the action fare that comes out of the streaming services is so definitively mediocre. But I'd like to report that Reacher is a virtually unqualified joy. These eight episodes tell the story of Reacher's stop in Margrave, Georgia, where he becomes involved in a mystery featuring murders, a possibly corrupt local businessman, South American murder squads, environmental degradation, a prickly local police captain, a cute local police deputy, and more.

The plotting is cogent, the mystery is intriguing, and the action sequences are entertaining, but the real draw here is lead actor Alan Ritchson, who is, simply put, one of the only men in Hollywood who is physically big enough to embody Lee Child's character the way he's written in the books. And Ritchson puts that size to good use here, bashing more than one puny adversary into submission. But he's not simply a walking muscle with a painted-on smile; he also imbues the character with a sly sense of humor and real charisma. And, in the greatest trick possible in this genre, he manages to mostly render the unbelievable believable: the preposterous-in-the-real-world notion of a gigantic man journeying across America confronting evil (and occasionally dispensing homey wisdom) here becomes a tale entertaining and plausible enough that it whisks us happily right along without ever threatening to push us into the idea that this is all more laughable than it is fun. Definitely worth a watch if action-mysteries are your bag. Available on Amazon Prime.

Hi! Thought I'd take a break to mention that this is an entirely reader-supported publication. If you're enjoying yourself here – and I certainly am – I'd really appreciate it if you'd pony up for a paid subscription. For $5 a month – AKA less than a new three-pack of socks costs Reacher – you'll get each new post as it's published, full access to the archives, and the satisfaction of knowing that you're helping support the arts. Thanks!

Three Streaming Gems

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)

When I was teaching environmental writing at a college in Colorado sometime way back in the dim mists of time, I used to have my students watch this. Not because it's an "environmental" film, but because of the monumental confrontations inside us that it provokes. A documentary centered on the story of Timothy Treadwell, a grizzly bear activist and amateur conservationist who ended up being eaten by one of the bears he loved, it's a fascinating tale and a stunning piece of documentary art. Herzog is no nature-lover – he declares here that he believes "the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder" – but perhaps his signal skill as a filmmaker is his ability to put on the screen the feeling of coming into contact with that other presence that so frequently lurks just at the edges of our experience. That so many people are made so uncomfortable by the suggestion of the existence of this thing is precisely the reason so many of them try to laugh Herzog off. But instead of laughing, try watching, and attend to the feelings it stirs in you. Available for free on Tubi and Kanopy, both for free.

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

There is something almost obsessively confrontational in De Palma's work, as I noted here, and that something is often in a kind of productive conflict with his technical mastery as a director. Blow Out is a thriller about a low-budget movie sound engineer (John Travolta) who gets involved in what he soon begins to suspect is a political assassination. Full of extraordinary camera work and fascinating insights into the way sound in films (and the real world) works, it's both a character study and a thriller about a man caught up in a Kafkaesque (or perhaps Karl Rove-esque) attempt by the powerful to create their own reality. And it's got John Lithgow playing an unhinged bad guy! Lurid, a bit batty, and with an absolutely perfect ending, it's a great Saturday night flick. Available on HBO Max

Run Silent, Run Deep

I have a thing for old submarine movies. Maybe this goes back to some kind of childlike fascination with military history, or perhaps it's because the number of storytelling variables is so reduced. There's almost always a mad, Captain Ahab-like quest, a struggle over the loyalty of the crew, and the question of whether someone is going to go crazy because of the pressure of being at war in too-small boat that drives around underwater: it's simple, straightforward, and makes for memorable character confrontations. Run Silent, Run Deep uses these variables expertly, and adds some star power das boot, er, to boot: Clark Gable plays an obsessive captain out to for revenge on the Japanese destroyer that sank his last sub, and Burt Lancaster plays the executive officer who's trying to keep him in line. A great slice of classic Hollywood war drama. Available on Kanopy and Tubi, both for free.

A Wonderful Web Series About Weed

One of the great paradoxes of Los Angeles is that the city is absolutely bursting to the seams with talent, and yet the entertainment industry still manages to produce, on the regular, really mediocre things. The reasons for this are as varied as the items in the buffet line at Golden Corral, but the most basic is that it's damn hard to be entertaining. A second, however, is that we live in a culture that sees everything as "content." This word is ubiquitous right now, and many folks out there even proudly advertise themselves as "content creators," seemingly without ever thinking about the blathering that comes out of their mouth.

What does the word "content" mean? Well, Wikipedia has a useful defintion: "Content is the information contained within communication media. This includes internet, cinema, television, radio, audio CDs, books, magazines, physical art, and live event content. It’s directed at an end-user or audience in the sectors of publishing, art, and communication."

Which is to say that "content" has nothing to do with beauty or meaning or joy or laughter or terror or any of the other things that actual artists might conceive of themselves as striving for. Instead, it's about undifferentiated gruel that faceless droogs stuff into the maw of the "communication media" so that it can be force-fed to drooling, dully idiotic "end-users" (not human beings, mind you!) who reside not in an actual human world, but an economic "sector." And there are goddamn people out there embracing this notion of themselves as "content creators"! And imagining in their insipid little heads that this is somehow akin to being an artist!

It's not. I say a pox on the house of all content.

So do yourself a favor, and turn away for a moment from the massive churn pumped out by the corporate interests designed to turn you into little more than an eyeballed automaton whose spending is oriented in the right direction; seek out some of the actually creative, actually talented people in Los Angeles who are making wonderful, hilarious things down along the margins.

Cannabis Mom's Club is a brilliant little web series – a handful of five-minute episodes – and so well-titled that there's little I can do to describe it that it itself hasn't already done. Yes, it's about cannabis. And yes, it's about moms. And yes, there's a group of them. Give it a look and remember that there's actually joyful things out there to be seen, and wonderfully talented people making them, struggling along beyond the reach of the industrial content complex.