What To Watch This Week
Pointy Ears and Braided Beards, A Head, Three Streaming Gems, and Some Shameless Self-Promotion
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Out there in the online universe, it seems like the chatter about Amazon's new series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, based on some less-well-known writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, is about everything but the show itself.
Many of the reviews of it I've read have leaned heavily on comparisons to the HBO Game of Thrones franchise, rather than try to tackle it on its own terms. Some have latched onto the idea that it corrects the misogyny the latter is often accused of, or onto the idea that it presents a better model for the way Americans should be pursuing civic life, as if the job of this show is to somehow make up for the deficits of its franchise competitor. Others have tried to make the argument that its story structure – which braids together multiple lines of narrative – was something invented by Game of Thrones, apparently forgetting that this kind of structure is a long-running trope in the fantasy/sci-fi world (see authors as diverse as Robert Jordan, Ursula Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick) and was an approach employed by none other than Tolkien himself, who spent most of the second and third books of his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy doing just this.
As if the comparisons to Game of Thrones aren't enough, the show has also (rather predictably) become a new front in our name-calling, meme-posting, firebombing culture wars. Amazon Prime has decided shut down people's ability to write reviews of the show on its site, because of the number of "fans" of the franchise (and other trollish folks without anything better to do with their lives) who are so infuriated by the decision to cast non-white actors in the series that they've decided it's their mission to destroy the reputation of the series by giving it bad reviews in public forums. (I don't have much to say in this space about the beliefs of these kinds of folks, other than that I find them sad, silly, and monumentally naive about the way art works.)
I bring these things up not to dwell on them myself, but because they demonstrate, I think, the real power of this kind of story. The best works of so-called high fantasy, and Tolkien's books in particular, match immersive, imagination-stirring worlds with a certain notion of what constitutes the fundamentals of life: namely, battles between good and evil, as well as the celebration of noble virtues like courage, friendship, love, and constancy. In doing so, they approach the tenor of myth. They feel powerful. They exude an air of larger significance. They seem elevated, made of something finer than our own mundane existence. (One understands why the adjective "high" has been applied to the genre.)
This force they generate is why, I think, shows like this attract such fervent fandom, and so often become magnets for our cultural conflagrations. And the power of the source material also means that the bar for these shows is set high, and that reviewers are tempted to review through comparison with other successful works.
But the primary question in a review of something like The Rings of Power shouldn't be whether or not it's like Game of Thrones, but whether it's any good as a piece of narrative entertainment in its own right.
And for this viewer, the answer is yes. I think it's quite good, and the primary reason for this is that the spell it casts on the viewer – its feeling of immersion in another world, its sense of tale-telling grandeur – is powerful. Basically, the story is about life in a far-off, magical land full of elves and dwarves and humans and precursors to hobbits and other mythical stuff, in which everyone has started to accept that an evil menace has finally been defeated. But it turns out that the evil has only been regrouping, and is now re-emerging at precisely the moment that good has been weakened by its own complacency. If you've read Tolkien's books, seen Peter Jackson's big screen adaptations, or have any experience with works of fantasy in general, you'll get the drift pretty quick.
I do have some quibbles. The writing isn't superb. The pilot gets off to a strangely awkward start, as if the writers couldn't quite decide whether they wanted to open with backstory or in-scene, and so tried to do both at the same time; similarly, there are a few moments throughout in which the situations the characters find themselves in are somewhat poorly set up. The characters can also be a bit broad, although this is in part an inheritance from Tolkien himself, and not always a bad thing, as I'll note below. And there's a lot of dirty people. By this I don't mean morally corrupt, but literally dirt-smeared, as if someone in the production design department made the decision to emphasize the earthiness of these folks by having the show's make-up artists put lots of crusty black stuff all over the actors, to the point where this viewer, at least, felt the occasional urge to holler, "Damn it! Just go wash your face, would you?!"
These things aside, the high-fantasy side of the show works really well. It creates a detailed world that feels as though it has a deep history and is full of strange, yet-to-be explored corners; at the same time, it does a nice job of building the sense that the denizens of this world are going to be caught up in a grand confrontation with epic good versus evil implications. We can feel the storm coming in the early episodes, and its approach gives things a nice forward momentum. And if the characters are indeed somewhat broad, I think this is better understood as them being simple, not in a pejorative sense, but in one that taps into the power of legend itself. If memory serves, it was Erich Auerbach who made the point that the force of pre-Christian mythic tales (his example was Homer) comes in part from the fact that it they are not interested in internal psychology but in external confrontation, and I think this idea is applicable here. Put differently, setting broad characters into broad situations is not always a way of shirking the idea of "character complexity" that so many critics love to prattle on about; it can also be a way of elevating the story and giving it the feeling of the symbolic.
All of which may be much too cerebral an approach for a show like this one, but is just a way of trying to say that if you feel like settling into a pretty darn good yarn that feels like it's aimed at the best parts of your imaginative self, you could do worse than The Rings of Power. Available on Amazon Prime.
The Head
Here's a question: have you ever wished that someone made a mashup of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians and John Carpenter's The Thing? If you just leapt out of your seat, pointed your hand at the sky, and hollered "Yes!" then I've got a show for you.
Here's the situation: there's a group of scientists spending the winter at a research station in Antarctica, and then they wake up one morning to discover that one of them has been decapitated. (Which is to say that, to quote Wayne's World, it's not just a clever name: the show literally starts with a head.) Is one of their fellow scientists the murderer? Or is there someone else out there on the ice sheet with them? I could tell you the answer, of course, but I won't – you'll just have to watch for yourself.
With a running time of six hour-long episodes, the show moves fast, and it does nothing superlatively, but everything fairly well. The identity of the killer (or is it killers?) is nicely hidden, there are some clever misdirections, and the reveal at the end is satisfying and only slightly strains credulity. (It must be said here that this formula, involving murder(s), a contained setting, and a limited set of characters, is perhaps the most difficult sort of mystery to plot, and so kudos to anyone who can pull it off even passably.)
On top of this, as is the case with so many things that come out of Europe (the show is in English, but produced by a Spanish company, and has a largely non-American cast) the acting is really solid. Is this because in American film and television, the emphasis is so squarely on how gorgeous the actors are, while elsewhere in the world the focus is on how good they are at acting? The answer is obviously yes, but please don't say you heard it here, as I don't want to piss off my Hollywood-hopeful friends.
Nothing about this macabre thriller will cause you to lose your, er, mind, as it were, but if it's either The Head or that new movie on Amazon where Sylvester Stallone plays an aging superhero who befriends a wayward kid and they teach each other life lessons, I'm going in this direction. Available on HBO Max.
Three Streaming Gems
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974)
There is a legend that Michael Cimino, who made the astounding The Deer Hunter in 1978, bankrupted an entire studio (United Artists) with his followup Heaven's Gate in 1980. While that isn't quite the truth, Cimino is a major figure in Hollywood history and represents as well as anyone some of his era's penchant for both success and failure. The charming, touching, road-trip crime flick Thunderbolt and Lightfoot – starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges as a pair of ne'er-do-well strangers thrown together in the pursuit of the missing money from a bank heist – is his first movie, and it's definitely worth a gander if you've somehow missed it up to this point. Available on Showtime and Paramount+.
The Invitation (2015, Karyn Kusama)
An intelligent, contained, slowly-building horror flick from one of Hollywood's most underrated directors, The Invitation tells the story of a man (Logan Marshall-Green) who brings his girlfriend to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard), who has been out of the country for a year or two. The atmosphere of the party gets continually stranger and more menacing until eventually it's revealed what the real purpose of the gathering is. Well acted and tautly made, it's a strong entry in the new cycle of contemporary horror being turned out by folks like Ti West, Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, and Ben Wheatley. Available on Tubi and Kanopy (both free!)
Haunted Palace (1963, Roger Corman)
If you're like most human beings, you need more Roger Corman and Vincent Price in your life. This campy gem somehow melds two different pieces of source material: a poem by Edgar Allan Poe and a story by H.P. Lovecraft. I mean, do I have to say anything more? Probably not, but I will. The plot starts with a guy in the 1700s (Price, of course) who gets burned at the stake for attempting to open a portal to the dwelling-place of the elder gods, because he wants them to mate with human women to create a monstrous new race. Flash forward a century or so, and his great grandson (also Price) has just inherited the old guy's creepy mansion. Does he have any idea what's in store? No! Do gloriously weird things occur? Of course! Is there a haunted painting? You bet there is! If you want to remember that feeling of turning on the TV on a lazy Saturday afternoon when you were a kid and discovering something delightfully chilling, seek this one out. Available on Amazon Prime.
Bonus Content! An Excerpt From My New Novel
I've just released a new novel, called The Subterranean Man. It's a hardboiled noir mystery set in contemporary Los Angeles that tells a story involving Hollywood depravity, art theft, European gangsters, and more good stuff.
If you'd like to read the opening chapter, you can do so here. To buy a paperback or e-book copy, visit Amazon here; and as an added perk, for the next five days, the e-book will be available for free! So go grab a copy!