What to Watch This Week

A Pair of Pilots in the Thunderdome, Three Streaming Gems, and a Beautiful Love Poem From the Midwest

A Pair of Pilots in the Thunderdome: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and House of the Dragon

You know it's an interesting week when you get the chance to throw a couple of totally different but deeply related pilots into the Thunderdome and see which one comes out victorious.

Our first contestant is She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the Marvel industrial-content complex's newest show. In case the title didn't tip you off, this is a half-hour comedy/action show about a female Hulk who's also a lawyer. How in the world did this come about? Well, it turns out that up-and-coming legal eagle Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) happens to be the cousin of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), famous in the comic-book-world over for turning into the giant green Hulk and smashing things when he gets angry. They're involved in an accident and she gets infected by his blood, which transfers some of his powers (or his curse, depending on where you stand on these things) to her, and thereby puts her in a conundrum: can she just continue being a lawyer, or does she have to be a superhero too? And can she find a way to do both?

The pilot is as insubstantial as a feather pillow. Most of the run time is taken up with the backstory of how Walters became the She-Hulk, there's one pretty good (as these things go) CGI fight scene, one terrible one with a ridiculous villain, and it all floats along on a current of accomplished comedic writing. In fact, the latter is the main strength of the show. Showrunner Jessica Gao started out with Nickelodeon back in the day before going on to write on a number of comedies, and my guess is that the writers' room is probably staffed with people from similar backgrounds. The verbiage is clever and amusing, the comedic timing is good, and the talented Maslany, who made her name on Orphan Black, has real abilities in this area too. She's watchable, knows how to land a line, and plays saucy against Ruffalo's dour to great effect.

Does anyone care about the low spots? My sense is that many superhero-fare fans do not, and are simply after the allure of falling into a comfortable world full of magic powers and broad moral dilemmas, where every third sentence is a quip. But it should be noted that the direction here is pretty lacking – there are a few laughably bad attempts at things, like inserts and blocking, that anyone working with this kind of budget should be able to do better – and there are a few events that happen for seemingly no reason at all other than plot contrivance. Which is to say that, outside of the really good dialogue, the writing is surprisingly weak.

The bigger issue is, of course, that any kind of creative person operating in this franchise-extending mode is operating in a set of handcuffs so strong they might as well have been forged, like Thor's hammer, in Svartalfheim by Eitri the dwarven weapon-smith. A show like She-Hulk can't take any real chances, can never get crosswise with the brand identity, and can never tell a new or different kind of story; instead, all it can do is its small part to push the monolith forward a few more inches. This is why the show feels both so pleasant – the Marvel content creation system is extremely effective – and so familiar.

And perhaps this is a good thing. If you're looking for a pleasant way to spend 34 minutes (and who the hell isn't these days) there are a large number of worse shows to choose from. But if you're looking for something new and different, you may have to look elsewhere. Available on Disney+

If we were to, as the title of this piece suggested, put the pilot for House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones prequel, into the Thunderdome against She-Hulk, it would indeed be a heck of a battle. The big green lawyer has on her side a massive franchise universe, beloved characters, comedic sensibilities, and a nice lack of self-seriousness.

House of the Dragon enters the fight with an almost diametrically opposed sense of itself. It's the descendant of one of the most popular shows in HBO history, which is in turn descended from a revered series of fantasy novels. And in place of referential comedy laced with morality tales, it brings a tapestry of violence, sex, Machiavellian plotting, and ambiguous, power-based ethics. Gentle, self-aware, self-effacing entertainment? No indeed.

The story here is set some 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, and concerns the history of the Targaryen family dynasty, which featured so prominently in the initial show. In brief, this is a family whose control over the dragons that populate the realm of Westeros has allowed it to come to power. But the issue facing King Viserys (Paddy Considine) at the opening of the tale is that he has no direct male heir. Instead, he has a loopy, sadistic brother named Prince Daemon (Matt Smith) and a young, dragon-loving daughter named Princess Rhaenyra (played by Milly Alcock in the pilot). The King is also somewhat wimpy, and he's surrounded by advisors and courtiers that one senses are just dying to have a go at him to see if they can take his crown for themselves.

So the set-up here is exactly the same as it was in Game of Thrones: a brutal, conniving, violent, backstabbing, and breast-baring battle for power is going to take place, full of dragons and poison and beheadings and all the rest of that good stuff. In the pilot, the show pulls all this off with some panache, although everything is perhaps three degrees less good than the original. There are some intra-family rivalries, some hints of incest, some scenes of brutal violence, some scenes in which characters are faced with Sophie's Choice-level choices, and of course there's a scene set in a brothel.

(I have no choice but to pause here and shout out a pair of background actors whose names I will never know. In the brothel scene, the characters are drinking and being bawdy, and then one gives a speech; the others all stop what they're doing to listen. It's shot so that the speech-giver is framed in the foreground, and behind him is the now-stilled sexual chaos of the brothel. In that background are these two actors, a man and a woman. They are naked and positioned as though they were having vigorous sex but then stopped on a dime – without changing their position at all – so they could listen to the speech, which they are doing with attentive expressions. To the two actors put in this position I say: oh you who have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in pursuit of your Hollywood dream, we see you.)

In the end, as with She-Hulk, I tend to think that if you liked the parent franchise you're going to like this. But you will also, I suspect, be struck by the feeling that it is, sadly, just not quite as good. Because if the writers for the Marvel universe are forced to wear handcuffs, the writers here are clad in not only those same cuffs, but leg-chains and iron girdles as well. You will notice, for example, that virtually every character in the show feels like a slightly less charismatic version of a character in the original series, as if the casting director was under strict orders to try to find actors who looked like characters from the first show…but not be too obvious about it. Similarly, the basics of the plot feel so much like a reprise in a lesser key that we begin to suspect they are trying at once to entertain us with what's on screen and to stimulate our memories of the way things were in the earlier series so that we'll go watch it again.

Game of Thrones, or the first few seasons at least, felt profoundly new. There was a time when I could walk down my block in L.A. on a Sunday night and see scads of young folks arriving at each other's apartments, six-packs in hand, for the required viewing party – it had a kind of dynamism to it, both on the screen and off, that is rare. House of the Dragon, through no fault of anyone involved, is like an enervated sibling with slightly thinned-out blood. Yeah, it'll do in a pinch, but it's no contender (if you'll allow this silly metaphor to play out) for the throne.

And as for my other silly metaphor? The show's contest in the Thunderdome with She-Hulk? I call it an exact tie. Because who wants to piss off those kinds of fan bases?

Three Streaming Gems

Galaxy Quest (1999, Dean Parisot)

If you like goofy entertainment and have never seen Galaxy Quest, or have not seen it in a long time, this might be a good weekend to to rectify that. It's a terrifically entertaining, lighthearted comedy with a wonderful conceit: the cast of a Star Trek-like sci-fi show get pulled into an intergalactic space battle because some desperate aliens think that the show is real and the characters are heroes. Add to this a top-notch cast – including Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, and Sam Rockwell – and you've got a real gem: expertly made, really funny, and sentimental without being cloying. Available on Amazon Prime.

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, Olivier Assayas)

If you're looking for something a little more mature, with strong dose of so-called "European sensibilities," might I suggest the French/Swiss drama The Clouds of Sils Maria? The film is about a successful actress well-ensconced in middle age (Juliette Binoche) who gets cast in a new film playing opposite an ambitious newcomer (Chloë Grace Moretz), while also maintaining a relationship with her personal assistant (Kristen Stewart) that has strong sexual undertones. Assayas is an accomplished director, and the film is intelligent, patiently-paced, and place-oriented in a way that makes the most of its Swiss setting; the acting is also masterful, and if you're somehow still thinking of Stewart as "that girl from Twilight," you should definitely watch her in something like this. Available for free on Kanopy.

Dial M For Murder (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

Based on a stage play, this little Hitchcock canape is a delight. A tennis pro (Ray Milland – and what a great profession for a movie like this!) thinks that his wife (Grace Kelly) might be having an affair, so comes up with a dastardly scheme to murder her; when it doesn't work out quite like he planned is when things start to get fun. The whole thing is made with the kind of devilish derring-do that Hitchcock is the greatest practitioner of, and while it's not usually regarded as one of his stone-cold classics, it's more than enough fun to keep you entertained on a Friday night. Available for free on Tubi.

Bonus Content: A Beautiful Love Poem From the Midwest

Marvin Bell was an American poet and something of a legend in the state of Iowa. He attended the famous, or infamous, Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and then went on to teach there for some forty years, while also serving as the state's first poet laureate.

He wrote many, many wonderful poems; perhaps my favorite is the beautiful "To Dorothy," which was introduced to me, if memory serves, by an old comrade, novelist, and friend of these pages Sean McGinty. It's a subtly, perfectly-crafted love poem that has several surprising little twists and also inverts a number of the standard tropes – turning roses into weeds, for example – in order to create a testament to the way love exists in, and elevates, the smallest details of our lives.

Hopefully, if you're one of those mad people who like poetry, love, or life itself, you'll enjoy it.

"To Dorothy"

By Marvin Bell

/

You are not beautiful, exactly.

You are beautiful, inexactly.

You let a weed grow by the mulberry

and a mulberry grow by the house.

So close, in the personal quiet

of a windy night, it brushes the wall

and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

/

A child said it, and it seemed true:

"Things that are lost are all equal."

But it isn't true. If I lost you,

the air wouldn't move, nor the tree grow.

Someone would pull the weed, my flower.

The quiet wouldn't be yours. If I lost you,

I'd have to ask the grass to let me sleep.