What To Watch This Week

A Show You May (or May Not) Like, A Show You May Have Missed, Three Streaming Gems, and the Greatest Lifetime Movie Ever Made

A Show You May (or May Not) Like, and A Show You May Have Missed

PAPER GIRLS

If I was in a movie - say The Player - pitching the new Amazon series Paper Girls to a studio executive, I'd describe it as Stranger Things meets a Terminator spin-off, with a dash of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure thrown in. Which is to say that while the show does feel familiar to the point of being a bit of a knock-off, it also holds a number of clever surprises and manages to achieve a nice level of entertaining, teenagers-saving-the-world-by-taking-a-cosmic-trip-through-time buoyancy.

The show opens with four teen girls delivering papers on their bikes on the night after Halloween, in 1988. After a quick bonding session composed of taking on some male high-school bullies, they find that the sky has turned pink and purple, and encounter two black-clad strangers. This gets them drawn into a kind of space/time battle between good, ragtag rebels and bad white-clad fascists; to help save the world and win the war, the girls have to travel around time, confront various possible futures, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

But is it good? Well, that's a complicated question. I'll answer it this way: if someone threatened to kidnap my dog unless I placed a wager (we're talking real pressure) I'd bet that 65% of you would enjoy this show, particularly if you watch more than just the pilot, which is pretty uneven…while the rest would have no use for it at all. It can be both funny and touching, and it spins a rather grand yarn. The real heart of shows like this – for this viewer, at least – is their ability to put the characters in positions that force them to face (and remind the viewer) of both the dilemmas of adolescence and the larger "life questions" those dilemmas evoke, and it accomplishes this in a clever ways. At its best, through the time-travel trope it forces us to ruminate on the complex relationship between the ways our lives actually turn out and the way we wanted them to turn out before we knew what the hell that entailed. If that kind of narrative, wrapped up in a retro-teen adventure tale, is your jam, then this is a great show for you.

At the same time, though, it has some flaws that may drive some of you crazy.

It does center on teenagers and science fiction, and I know a lot of you like watching more realistic things focused on adults. Beyond this, there's a certain paint by numbers quality to it that can make it feel at times eerily like an amalgam of recycled attractions from stuff like Yellowjackets, Stranger Things, or hell, even Little Fires Everywhere…and then, for good measure, we get a lift from Pacific Rim, of all things. This shows in the character construction too: there's an Asian girl, a Black girl, a rich girl, and a poor girl, as if the show is carefully ticking off one of each class of person, a la The Breakfast Club. Because of this, and because of some not-great dialogue tendencies, it struggles a bit to create charcters that rise above trope. Finally, there's a smidgeon of preachiness to it that can be straining: the metaphor it would like us to see as lying at its center, for example – about old rich people trying to thwart progress and young ones trying to change the world – feels both bald and insisted-on a bit more strenuously than the intelligent viewer might need. If these kinds of things test your patience, you may not survive this one.

Either way, if you do give it a look, let me know what you think. Available on Amazon Prime.

THE INVESTIGATION

This is a Danish limited series that seems to have flown a bit under the radar when it was released in the U.S. a couple of years ago. A rendering of the true story of a journalist who disappeared after going to interview an eccentric man who had built his own, functioning 40-foot submarine, it's a really good, engrossing, slow-burn drama about the difficulties involved in investigating a case in which there are virtually no clues at all.

There are a couple of fascinating elements to the show. The first is that the alleged perpetrator of the crime is never named, nor is he ever shown on screen; instead, the story is concerned only with the investigators assigned to the case. Their pursuit of the truth involves the standard attempts to piece together a picture of the lives of the victim and perpetrator and to pull answers out of scanty forensic details, but the real difficulty is presented by the fact that they must try to locate bits of evidence that they believe may have been thrown off the submarine into the ocean.

What this leads to is a show in which the seemingly insurmountable complications of this kind of detective work are almost perfectly portrayed. In refusing to focus on the titillation of the crime itself, The Investigation reduces that crime to what, for the vast majority of people involved with it, it really is: a painstaking attempt to make sure that the right thing happens in the end, against all odds. Highly recommended if you like police procedurals. Available on HBO.

Three Movies To Watch This Weekend

THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939, Jean Renoir)

One feels a little silly offering a recommendation of one of the greatest films ever made - it's like saying, "Hey, you like ice cream? You should try this kind called chocolate!" But Pierre-Auguste's son made a knockout, acerbic comedy of manners about a group of French eminences who retire to an estate for the weekend for a bit of hunting and partying, and it's the kind of film that can be re-watched many times. If you haven't seen it for a while, or have never encountered it, give it a look. Available on Kanopy (free!)

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (1993, Nora Ephron)

C'mon, admit it. You kind of want to watch this again, now that I've brought it up. Well, if you don't want to, you should. Telling the story of a long-distance cosmic love connection between two strangers (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), Sleepless in Seattle is far better than many people's recollection of it as a kind of sentimental pile of mush. Ephron's comedic writing and direction is flawless, and the performances are wonderful. Bonus points, too, for a good deal of movie-in-movie referencing, including the running commentary on An Affair to Remember and a priceless gag about The Dirty Dozen. Grab your sweetie, snuggle up, and put it on. Available on HBO.

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY (2014, Hossein Amini)

Whoever it was that said that Patricia Highsmith's novels make the best psychological thriller films (and maybe it was me) was right. The author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, and many more also penned the tale on which this underseen mystery gem from 2014 was based. An American con man and his wife (Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst) traveling in Italy in the early 1960's make friends with a young American scam artist (Oscar Isaac). And then exactly what you want to happen does happen: deaths, love triangles, and several well-plotted twists. Definitely worth watching. Available on Hulu and Tubi (free!)

Bonus Recommendation: The Greatest Lifetime Movie Ever Made

STALKED BY MY DOCTOR (2015, Doug Campbell)

There will come a time when you're at a party – perhaps even wearing fine clothes, like Harvey Keitel's character Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction when he gets the call about Marvin's body – and you feel the need to drop a beautiful piece of trivia. This movie may be it. Because someone's going to be talking about how terrible the movies made by The Lifetime Network are, and you'll nod (because most of them are terrible) and wait for that inevitable pause in the conversation, and then you'll say: "Well, actually, there’s this one…"

And that one is Stalked By My Doctor.

Now, is it a great film? No. Is it for everyone? Definitely not.

But if you have friends who love campy fare, this is the kind of flick you can put on for them and blow their minds. It's a thriller about an aging heart surgeon (Eric Roberts) who saves the life of a beautiful young woman and then develops a wee bit of an unhealthy obsession with her. The first twenty minutes run a bit slow (and you'll have to wade through some bad acting) but once things get going it's a tawdry, madcap, joy, at once lovable and astounding in its audacious trashiness. Its many attractions include:

• A bonkers, glorious performance by Roberts as the bad guy. Jammed full of pathos (and oddly, psychological insight into the male psyche) this acting job is far more entertaining than most villains of those run of the mill big-screen thrillers. Roberts takes it, as the man said, to eleven.

• A plot which absolutely dispenses with character development, because who needs that when you've got soap-opera level melodrama? All there is here is one plot turn after another, a number of which work way better than those in whatever $200 million dollar flick Netflix is trying to sell you on.

• A man playing a role that in 99% of Hollywood movies gets dumped on women. Are you familiar with the needy, insecure, emotionally-unstable, sexually-manipulative character who gets obsessed with a lover and then stalks them? Of course you are! You saw Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction! And you've seen Hollywood put women in those roles a hundred times. But have you ever seen a man play it? Enter Mr. Roberts…

• The single greatest line of dialogue written in the past 20 years. Okay, maybe not the single greatest, but this one – involving the old "There are three things…" trope – is so magnificent that if you don't make a verbal acknowledgment of it when it hits you – a gasp, or a guffaw, or a chuckle, or a groan – I'll buy you a cup of coffee the next time I see you.

Don't hate me if you watch this and find it to be unwatchable. You've been warned. But if you watch it and find something absurdly entertaining in it, think of me fondly when you recommend it to friends. Available on Amazon Prime.