Netflix-ing, Part II
Jul. 29th, 2008 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseHey, look at that. Sometimes I actually do follow up on my serial-post intentions. Go me!
Heroes, Season One: Having finally watched the entire first season, I've been digesting my reactions to it. Mostly, they're positive - it's a good story, well- (and often cleverly-) told. However, it was far from flawless, and I think most of its major problems were due to simply running out of time.
Given that the show itself professes to be essentially a live-action comic book, I'm going to go out on (not much of) a limb here and compare it to Watchmen. Indeed, the show lifted numerous elements from that particular graphic novel, and utilized a similar storytelling style (moving back and forth through time, following disparate characters and how their stories interconnect). Part of what makes Watchmen such a well-written story is how, as you're reading it, you get a very distinct sense of how each individual character's story interconnects with the whole. And while you might not see where it's all going on first read, by the time you've finished it, the whole thing seems more or less inevitable.
So far as Heroes goes, while the first couple episodes are a touch jarring because of the huge number of characters you're meeting and sheer load of background information you're digesting, things soon fall into place. And part of what made the end of the show so frustrating for me was, they stay in place throughout most of the season - up until the last few episodes, the various threads of the story are very cleverly interwoven, we see where the connections are and how everything has affected everything else, and the time-jump episodes ("Six Months Earlier", "Company Man", "Five Years Gone") do an excellent job of both filling in both background information and contributing to the main plot. Again, you might not see exactly where it's going, but you can see that the writers know what story they're telling and are good at telling it.
The problem is, during the last two or three episodes, this sense of cohesive interwoven storylines suddenly fragments pretty spectacularly. Character arcs that were only recently introduced and never really explored are brought to an abrupt halt; themes that have been touched upon but not given any depth are either spelled-out and forced down our throats or ignored entirely; subplots that showed a lot of promise are dropped or also quickly ended, and plot holes big enough to drive a Cadillac through start appearing left and right. The Final Climactic Battle sequence isn't given anywhere near enough screen time, leaving you feeling like it was more of an anticlimax; and despite the characters spending a significant chunk of the season figuring out how to prevent the Major Plot Point, we're never given any actual explanation as to how or why that event occurred. I guess that they figured having told us said event was going to happen the whole season was enough?
I don't know. It just felt like the whole sense of story fell apart over the last few episodes. I think it mostly came from just plain running out of time; the quality curve reminded me of a well-researched term paper written by a talented student who suddenly found themself faced with a next-day deadline and the last several pages unwritten. It's too bad they couldn't just extend the season by a few episodes - I think that would've given them more time to pull everything together for the Big Finale. Still, it was a very enjoyable story, and for sheer ambition (as well as one of the most hilariously clever uses of an outside-work reference I've ever seen), I'm going to award them a B+
Michael Clayton: Everything that Heroes wasn't, Michael Clayton is - a dark, claustrophobic, sleek, self-confined little tale about an all-too-human antihero of a character struggling with his sense of integrity while working within a system set up to encourage lack of conscience, morals or even basic human decency. George Clooney turns in a hell of a performance as the title character; he's almost a microcosm of his environment. Conservative, well-groomed, self-contained, secretly bankrupt and intensely unhappy, he's spent his entire career as a "janitor" for large corporations, cleaning up legal messes (or at least getting them swept out of sight until they can be dealt with). When a bipolar friend and colleague of his goes off his medication while holding the smoking gun to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, he's faced with an ethical dilemma both profoundly complicated and (as such things often are) fantastically simple. An excellent example of the power of minimalism in movie storytelling, as well as a near-perfect legal-noir-thriller - much like a John Grisham tale written by a better author. A+
Love and Other Disasters: A shameless romantic comedy-of-errors that elevates itself above the conventional level through a distinctly lighthearted tongue-in-cheek sensibility and some of the most scathingly clever dialogue I've seen in a movie. For all its predictability in plot, if you're a fan of British rapid-fire viciousness (while still maintaining a sense that yes, all these characters do care for each other) I highly recommend it. Me being my snarky self, I couldn't stop laughing all the way through. Bonus - it's available through direct streaming on Netflix, if you've got a good connection and a computer that can handle it. (I watched it in blur-o-vision on our crappy Alaskan "broadband"; everything came through well enough but it'll definitely benefit from a DVD rental/purchase.) It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it made me laugh so consistently that I'm going to have to give it an A-
Trois couleurs: Bleu: While I could see what story the filmmaker was telling, I just couldn't get into this movie. It might've been the 1990s foreign-film minimal-dialogue style, it might've been the dearth of interaction between the main character and any of the other characters, it might've been the frankly overkill bombast of the Baroque music used (yes, we get that it's painful for her to think about her husband, you don't have to interrupt the action every single time it happens with a blank screen and an emotionally tormented chorus), it might've just been that I wasn't in the right mood for this particular story. Whatever the case, I admired the director's storytelling skill enough to watch it all the way through but just wasn't all that interested in the main character or her journey. C
Heroes, Season One: Having finally watched the entire first season, I've been digesting my reactions to it. Mostly, they're positive - it's a good story, well- (and often cleverly-) told. However, it was far from flawless, and I think most of its major problems were due to simply running out of time.
Given that the show itself professes to be essentially a live-action comic book, I'm going to go out on (not much of) a limb here and compare it to Watchmen. Indeed, the show lifted numerous elements from that particular graphic novel, and utilized a similar storytelling style (moving back and forth through time, following disparate characters and how their stories interconnect). Part of what makes Watchmen such a well-written story is how, as you're reading it, you get a very distinct sense of how each individual character's story interconnects with the whole. And while you might not see where it's all going on first read, by the time you've finished it, the whole thing seems more or less inevitable.
So far as Heroes goes, while the first couple episodes are a touch jarring because of the huge number of characters you're meeting and sheer load of background information you're digesting, things soon fall into place. And part of what made the end of the show so frustrating for me was, they stay in place throughout most of the season - up until the last few episodes, the various threads of the story are very cleverly interwoven, we see where the connections are and how everything has affected everything else, and the time-jump episodes ("Six Months Earlier", "Company Man", "Five Years Gone") do an excellent job of both filling in both background information and contributing to the main plot. Again, you might not see exactly where it's going, but you can see that the writers know what story they're telling and are good at telling it.
The problem is, during the last two or three episodes, this sense of cohesive interwoven storylines suddenly fragments pretty spectacularly. Character arcs that were only recently introduced and never really explored are brought to an abrupt halt; themes that have been touched upon but not given any depth are either spelled-out and forced down our throats or ignored entirely; subplots that showed a lot of promise are dropped or also quickly ended, and plot holes big enough to drive a Cadillac through start appearing left and right. The Final Climactic Battle sequence isn't given anywhere near enough screen time, leaving you feeling like it was more of an anticlimax; and despite the characters spending a significant chunk of the season figuring out how to prevent the Major Plot Point, we're never given any actual explanation as to how or why that event occurred. I guess that they figured having told us said event was going to happen the whole season was enough?
I don't know. It just felt like the whole sense of story fell apart over the last few episodes. I think it mostly came from just plain running out of time; the quality curve reminded me of a well-researched term paper written by a talented student who suddenly found themself faced with a next-day deadline and the last several pages unwritten. It's too bad they couldn't just extend the season by a few episodes - I think that would've given them more time to pull everything together for the Big Finale. Still, it was a very enjoyable story, and for sheer ambition (as well as one of the most hilariously clever uses of an outside-work reference I've ever seen), I'm going to award them a B+
Michael Clayton: Everything that Heroes wasn't, Michael Clayton is - a dark, claustrophobic, sleek, self-confined little tale about an all-too-human antihero of a character struggling with his sense of integrity while working within a system set up to encourage lack of conscience, morals or even basic human decency. George Clooney turns in a hell of a performance as the title character; he's almost a microcosm of his environment. Conservative, well-groomed, self-contained, secretly bankrupt and intensely unhappy, he's spent his entire career as a "janitor" for large corporations, cleaning up legal messes (or at least getting them swept out of sight until they can be dealt with). When a bipolar friend and colleague of his goes off his medication while holding the smoking gun to a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, he's faced with an ethical dilemma both profoundly complicated and (as such things often are) fantastically simple. An excellent example of the power of minimalism in movie storytelling, as well as a near-perfect legal-noir-thriller - much like a John Grisham tale written by a better author. A+
Love and Other Disasters: A shameless romantic comedy-of-errors that elevates itself above the conventional level through a distinctly lighthearted tongue-in-cheek sensibility and some of the most scathingly clever dialogue I've seen in a movie. For all its predictability in plot, if you're a fan of British rapid-fire viciousness (while still maintaining a sense that yes, all these characters do care for each other) I highly recommend it. Me being my snarky self, I couldn't stop laughing all the way through. Bonus - it's available through direct streaming on Netflix, if you've got a good connection and a computer that can handle it. (I watched it in blur-o-vision on our crappy Alaskan "broadband"; everything came through well enough but it'll definitely benefit from a DVD rental/purchase.) It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it made me laugh so consistently that I'm going to have to give it an A-
Trois couleurs: Bleu: While I could see what story the filmmaker was telling, I just couldn't get into this movie. It might've been the 1990s foreign-film minimal-dialogue style, it might've been the dearth of interaction between the main character and any of the other characters, it might've been the frankly overkill bombast of the Baroque music used (yes, we get that it's painful for her to think about her husband, you don't have to interrupt the action every single time it happens with a blank screen and an emotionally tormented chorus), it might've just been that I wasn't in the right mood for this particular story. Whatever the case, I admired the director's storytelling skill enough to watch it all the way through but just wasn't all that interested in the main character or her journey. C
