Lock, Defrock, and a Few Broken Morals

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Rian Johnson is back with Benoit Blanc and he’s here to ruin your childhood specifically

Going from talking about one hard genre to discuss with comedy a couple of weeks ago, I’m back with another hard one.  Mystery.  It’s not useful for me to tell you that the butler did it or that I was surprised that the butler did it.  For one, I’m rarely surprised at the end of a whodunnit, but that’s mostly my fault.  Obviously I pay attention to this sort of movie thing, if you haven’t noticed, so once you read narrative structure, a lot of things become predictable.  But growing up, mysteries were all I cared about.  I had at least 50 Hardy Boys books as a kid, as well as several of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew crossover books, which were some of my favorites because they were longer, and I read each of them at least five times.  I wanted to be a detective when I was a kid.  You got to wear a cool hat and talk like Humphrey Bogart and dames were always coming by your office in need of help before betraying you.  Surprise!  The kid who grew up to write this blog was a nerd.  So I love mysteries and always have and over the years, I’ve developed an eye for how these things play out.  And even if I’m surprised at the end, that’s not enough either.  A surprise has to be earned and too few mysteries earn their reveals, instead opting for a cheap twist that no one saw coming because it doesn’t make any sense.

But when there’s a good one, oh, I am thrilled.  I’ve talked about my love of whodunnits before, so for longtime readers, this isn’t news.  And much like Rian Johnson’s modern day Poirot, Benoit Blanc, I’ve given myself a problem to solve.  How do I talk about a mystery without talking about a mystery?  Let’s get into Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

I’m not as worried about getting older if looking this cool remains an option

In case you haven’t seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig (Logan Lucky, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), is one of those world famous detectives.  This is one of the things we accept in fiction, that there are world famous detectives.  I’ve been part of the world for a while now and I’ve never heard of even a locally famous detective.  But, like I said, he’s in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mold; a quirky, reclusive detective who is the very best at what he does, trading Poirot’s signature moustache for a charming Foghorn Leghorn southern drawl.  For being so blatantly a Poirot archetype, Blanc never manages to feel like a ripoff, even though it seems like Poirot was a huge influence; Craig’s charm and charisma paper over any concerns I could have with the character.  Blanc is instantly endearing.  But he’s not really in this one for the first 40 minutes or so.

KISS! Although they probably won’t

Instead we get to spend that time with Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud, played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), is a young Catholic priest, new to the cloth, and after the red mist descended during a heated debate in which the recipient of his right cross was dropping some old school bigoted views, he’s being punished.  They’re sending him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a one priest church in Chimney Rock, New York.  Normally I’d say something sarcastic about bigoted views in the Catholic Church, but this new guy from Chicago they have in charge seems pretty alright, so I’m going to let them slide on this one.  But just this one.  Jud, you see, was a boxer in his previous life, pre-cloth, and sometimes his fighting side comes through.  But in his heart, he’s an Anthony Norman-level good guy; all he wants to do is help to heal the world through the word of Christ.  Another priest tells him that they need fighters because the Church is under attack.  “A priest is a shepherd,” he says, and “the world is a wolf”.  The Church against the world.  Doesn’t leave a lot of room for the people, whom so often can forget that they’re a part of the world as well, same as the Church.  But Jud disagrees and expresses concern that treating those who disagree with them as a wolf would lead them to seeing everyone as a wolf.  He seeks unity instead of division, understanding instead of ostracizing.  Which to me seems like it’s something that should be pretty standard for someone in his profession, but the idea of helping people can be pretty foreign some of the more fire and brimstone types.

Wicks’s pulpit looks like the bow of a ship, but he never seems as jazzed as Luffy does when he’s at the front of the Going Merry

Those fundamentalists include Dr. Nat Sharp, played by Jeremy Renner (The Avengers, The Town), a doctor left reeling after his wife left him; Lee Ross, played by Andrew Scott (Fleabag, His Dark Materials), a science fiction writer who fled the “liberal hive mind” of New York City to write in small town America for right wing white men; lawyer Vera Draven, played by Kerry Washington (Scandal and the underrated Unprisoned) and her illegitimate brother/adopted son Cy, played by Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters), a failed right wing politician and aspiring grifter social media star, whom she was forced to raise as her own from a young age by her father; and world class cellist Simone Vivane, played by Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Devs), a young woman in the grips of a debilitating, progressive disease that doctors don’t understand and that ruined her career.  Rounding out the church is Martha Delacroix, played by Glenn Close (The Shield, 102 Dalmatians), the religious zealot and Wicks-devotee who runs all the church admin; and recovering alcoholic groundskeeper Samson Holt, played by Thomas Haden Church (Wings, Sideways).  The cast is completed by Mila Kunis as Police Chief Geraldine Scott.  Hopefully she shows better judgment as a police officer than she does in the friends she chooses to support.

You can see why this is the flock.  Why these hardened few became Wicks’s army is easy to see.  They all have something that he can manipulate, that he can control.  Nat wants his wife back and blames everything but his own behavior for her leaving.  He’s not good looking enough, doesn’t make enough money, etc; all the excuses men love to make instead of looking internally.  Lee Ross wants to find inspiration again and perhaps his respectability, which he lost with his turn to extreme right wing views.  Vera wants her life back; it was completely hijacked by her father when he brought Cy home for to take care of.  She wanted to be a lawyer who makes a difference and then circumstances beyond her control forced her into this life instead of the one she was working towards (I know that feeling).  And now she’s stuck in a perpetual sunk cost fallacy of faith.  Cy is power hungry and lacks any level of self awareness or integrity.  And poor Simone, a world class talent struck down by a disease medical science can’t figure out.  Desperate and hopeless, she’s willing to throw her money and support behind anyone who will promise her a solution to her problem; or at the very least, enough false hope to stay on the line.  Easy prey for a wolf.

The most intense book club you’re ever likely to see

If you look at the names in the cast, you’ll know to expect great acting performances all around.  Glenn Close is great here, playing up the sort of Helen Lovejoy, pearl-clutching church lady stereotype with a more vindictive edge.  Nothing about how she’s written is subtle and that’s intentional.  Her last name is Delacroix; French for “of the cross”.  Cailee Spaeny adds another feather into the cap of her short and already impressive career with her smaller, but genuinely played role.  Josh Brolin leverages everything about his age, appearance, and manner of speech as the Monsignor to make him properly intimidating.  Frankly, Brolin is more imposing and threatening and, frankly, scary, than Thanos ever was.  Part of it is the source material; I’m not really worried that a giant purple alien will snap his fingers and erase half the world, but I do worry about religious fanaticism doing that (or worse).  And if I ever come across a performance by Daniel Craig that I didn’t think was good, I’ll let you know.  But it won’t be this one.  And yet, for all the notable names in the cast, it’s Josh O’Connor as Father Jud who really impressed me the most.  There isn’t a moment where his acting isn’t completely believable, where he isn’t sympathetic, where you don’t want to root for him.  His acting is subtle at times, headstrong at others, and impressive at every turn.  I’ve never seen him in anything else, but after this, I hope to see him a whole hell of a lot more.

“It’s a 3 hour science lesson that ends in a magical love closet, we need to be honest about it”

We’ve gotten this far into this murder mystery without talking about a murder yet, so this is where I tell you that a murder happens.  It’s an impossible murder.  Someone dies and someone else made it happen, and on the face of it, it couldn’t have happened.  And yet, it did.  And that’s why Blanc is there.  You don’t call Benoit Blanc for the kind of mystery any old tin star can solve, after all.  And that’s all you’re going to get on the murder.  Blanc is the detective, I’ll let him solve it.  He’s brilliant and unorthodox and funny, and I absolutely cannot get enough of Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc.  I can watch these movies over and over again.  This is a crafted mystery, and it comes together so amazingly, you really have to hop on Netflix and watch it for yourself.  Normally I advise to avoid trailers in general, but when it comes to a Rian Johnson mystery, it doesn’t really matter.  He’s that good at this.

And I thought my apartment was small

There are some observations that I made when watching this, though.  As much as this is a takedown of a certain kind of religious person who uses religion not as a faith and a guide of how to live their life, but as a means of judging others and forcing them to live by their standards, it’s also a strong defense of good people of faith.  This movie isn’t about Benoit Blanc coming in and dismantling religion and taking down the Catholic Church brick by brick, but rather it’s a tug-of-war between the two schools of thought within religious institutions.  It shows that some people are willing to look the other way when it comes to heinous acts that harm and harm again as long as the person doing the harm continues to benefit them in some way.  That any transgression is forgivable as long as it’s the right person is committing them because the benefit of the hypocrisy outweighs the shame being a hypocrite brings.  But it also shows the softer side of Catholicism.  It shows people who genuinely want to make the world a better place and to do it through kindness and empathy, albeit faith-based.  Dead Man doesn’t judge the religious; it judges harshly those who put on the veil of religiosity to hurt other people and impose their views.  And much like Glass Onion dismantled the cult of personality around so-called geniuses and Knives Out before it took on immigration, race, and the ownership of stolen land, Dead Man looks at the two faces of modern religion; taking down those who use it as a weapon and bolstering those whose faith is a sustaining force that isn’t used against others.  In an era where I of all people follow the Pope on Twitter, it’s an extremely relevant film for right now.

She takes the church fantasy football draft too seriously

I don’t know how Rian Johnson keeps doing it.  Crafting a film that’s both universally true and also right on the pulse of the moment.  Perhaps it’s a sad commentary on how little changes.  60 years on from the inciting incident, the original sin of Our Lady of Ceaseless Suffering, women are still being blamed for the ill deeds of men.  The original sin isn’t what the “harlot whore” did to the church, it’s what her father the priest did to her.  And yet she’s the one who’s been scorned and shamed and spoken ill of for six decades.  Women are still judged harshly and constantly while men are given pass after pass.  Religion is still being used as a weapon to divide while the heart of its message is drowned out by the volume of those who seek to twist it.  The truth still gets buried for a comforting or sensational story.  Lies told first are still hard to disprove with truths told later.  I love Knives Out and Glass Onion.  I think they’re two of the most brilliant mysteries made this century.  They showcase Johnson’s fantastic writing, casting, and directing.  Wake Up Dead Man might be his most brilliant one yet.

See what I was saying about the hat thing?

He does this thing, this magical thing where he never hides the ball.  Johnson can show a murder, put it right in front of your face, and it isn’t until Poirot—I mean Blanc—gathers suspects in the parlor to deliver his sermon on guilt that all the puzzle pieces fall into place and you say to yourself “How did I not see that?”  Which is the best feeling at the end of a whodunnit.  Being surprised is not enough; throwing a character on it who was barely in the entire thing and then hanging it on them as a shock reveal is cheap and it happens too often.  It’s a punchline to different joke.  That’s not what Rian Johnson does.  I admit to being closer to the mark on this one than the previous Blanc mysteries, but that takes nothing away from it.  If anything, it makes it even more engaging that I was so close to getting the whole picture.  He has this way of making you forget that the tangerine was never there (now, if you’ve never seen the movie Burning, that won’t make sense to you, but trust me when I say I’ve been wanting to use that reference for years). 

I think this cements him in the upper echelons of auteurs right now.  Of course, auteur theory is up for debate and no film is one person’s singular work, but I can’t think of a name other than Ryan Coogler that makes me so excited to see as a director credit.  Nolan’s disappointed me with both Oppenheimer and Interstellar; I know I’m in the minority about them, but I found them overly long and self indulgent.  Villeneuve is on his Dune detour, who knows how long it’ll be before he starts making serious movies again (yeah, I didn’t like Dune either).  Even the setup of Dead Man is riveting.  It’s told in such an engaging way that the 40 minutes in the first act go by with barely a blink when all it is just talking.  There are no car chases, no explosions, but it’s so captivating.  And a large part of that is the writing and acting.  O’Connor makes you forget for the better part of an hour that this is even a Benoit Blanc movie.  Smart, funny, and poignant, Wake Up Dead Man is 2 hours and 24 minutes well spent.  It’s rated PG-13 and streams exclusively on Netflix.

"Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”

The Wolf of Gall Street

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the very first Shrek film, putting the vaguely Scottish green ogre and his talking donkey friend Donkey seemingly permanently into our pop culture.  Lego is even releasing a set to commemorate this momentous occasion, but instead of diving into a movie that, if you either were a kid or had a kid (or, like me, watched I Am Legend) in the last 25 years, you’ve probably seen or had quoted to you the first Shrek ad nauseam for two and a half decades.  No, instead I want to talk about the best movie in the Shrek franchise, one that hasn’t been around nearly as long.

It’s confession time.  I neither was a kid nor had a kid in the last 25 years (I was a teenager), so I watched Shrek for the first time just a few years ago as an adult.  This was a bad idea.  I should have just continued enjoying the “I like that boulder” clip when it was played on my local radio morning show.  There’s nothing really wrong with the movies, but approaching them as an adult with no nostalgia for the films built up from a childhood watching them or watching through the eyes of a child, the humor was kind of gross (which is fine, kids love that), the references were incredibly dated at this point (are people still talking about The Matrix?), and I hated “All Star” by Smash Mouth the first time I heard in 1999.  So by the time Shrek came out in 2001, I was already beyond sick of it.  Well, the years start coming and they don’t stop coming; fast forward over 20 years from then, my affection for the song has done everything but grow.  I cannot stand its ear-bleeding infectiousness and inescapable ubiquity.  Shrek didn’t hold up for me; it didn’t feel like a movie written to be evergreen.  Not Shrek 2, not Shrek 4, not Shrek, and not even Puss in Boots, the reason I saw Shrek 2 in the first place and why I saw the others in that order.  I still haven’t seen Shrek the Third, but I’m not sure that’s the one that’ll turn me around on the franchise with its 41% RT score.  But when Antonio Banderas returned in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022, as skeptical as I was, I sat down to watch it and it blew me away.  Pull up the cardboard box your cat bed came in and start making biscuits.  Let’s get into it.

At a celebration in his honor, Puss in Boots is really living it up.  He sings songs about how fearless he is, people heap praise on him, but it turns out they’re partying in the governor’s mansion.  Without permission.  And when he interrupts it in the middle of the festivities, there’s an even further interruption in the form of a giant who attacks.  As Boots defeats the governor’s men, boasting that he laughs in the face of death and that no blade has ever touched him, he faces down with the giant with aplomb.  He fights heroically and vanquishes his foes with some effort.  However, unfortunately, in his triumphant moment, he dies.  It’s a rough go and, to be fair, not a lot of franchises have the guts to kill their titular character in the first act of the second movie.  Can you imagine if in the second Fifty Shades of Grey movie, Annalise Fifty died in a car accident after being choked to completion?  I’ve never seen those movies, but I assume that doesn’t happen.  But this is Puss in Boots.  Puss in Boots laughs in the face of death, remember?

If I had nine lives, I’d probably have a chuckle myself, so when he wakes up in a doctor’s office and he reminds Boots that death comes for us all, Boots is understandably perturbed.  I mean, keep it light, Doc.  It’s a PG movie.  Boots has died eight times, though; he’s down to his last guy.  When drowning his sorrows alone with some frosty milk in a quiet bar, a whistle cuts through the night air.  The Whistling Wolf sits next to him and is very friendly at first, despite his menacing appearance.

Inevitably, violence breaks out.  The Whistling Stranger (Wagner Moura, aka Pablo Escobar in Narcos) wants Boots’s bounty and a fight ensues.  This is where I want to stop and talk about the animation because this is one of the things that makes this movie so breathtaking.  It’s right in the middle of the sort of modern animation trifecta we’ve seen recently where the movies are incredibly visually inventive.  I’m no animation expert, but it seems like this new era was ushered in by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in the way that it told its story by using different animation styles.  The animation wasn’t just a look, it was diegetic, it was part of the storytelling.  Then recently we had the same sort of thing in the now-global phenomenon and fast food meal KPop Demon Hunters.  All due respect to The Bad Guys, another very good animated kids’ movie that engages in this mix of styles, it’s The Last Wish that bridges those two aforementioned films for me.  This is DreamWorks doing their best to go toe-to-toe with the leaders of modern animation, Sony, and they do an excellent job making this movie look and feel unique and not just like it’s copying Spider-Verse.  It learned from it, of course, but it’s doing its own thing.  The animation here is absolutely beautiful, taking influences from anime for the frenetic fight sequences and changing the animation style for different characters, even within the same scene.  There will be times where the Whistling Stranger looks like he’s from another movie altogether, which emphasizes what Boots is facing in the moment.  Here is an otherworldly foe who has cornered him in his most vulnerable moment, and, what’s more, he’s good.  He’s really good.  He’s better than Boots.

For the first time, a blade touches Puss in Boots.  Wolfie here draws blood and knowing that he can’t just shrug this one off if the unthinkable happens; if Puss in Boots actually were to fall, there’d be no getting back up.  What a horrible thing to only have one life to live, isn’t it?  The hairs on the back of his neck stand up.  The fur, I guess.  And elsewhere, too.  He’s a cat, he’s covered in fur, it’s going to stand up.  His pulse quickens.  The only sound that fills his ears is his heart pounding in his chest.  And the whistling.  The incessant, threatening whistling.  For the first time in all his lives, Boots feels fear.  In an act of incredible human reality, the once boastful, once brash, once brazen cat does something very much unlike him.  He does what any sane person would do in that moment.  He flees.  He has a panic attack.  For the first time in his life, he goes into fight or flight and chooses flight.  He goes to a cat sanctuary and sheds the boots that make his name.  More than that, the whole outfit goes into a grave and he gives himself a eulogy.  Death may not have claimed him, but there is a funeral after all.  As Dr. Hiriluk once said, “When does a man die?”  Boots may be a cat and alive and well, but Puss in Boots died before the last mound of dirt fell on his grave.  All that’s left is a cat-shaped husk who lives in anonymity, sharing a trough and litter box with dozens of other cats.  And one small dog.

There’s a legend in fairy tale land about a shooting star that fell to Earth and created a magical forest around it, a sort of pocket dimension called the Dark Forest.  It’s said that if you get to the star you will be granted a single wish.  So when Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, Samson Kayo) show up to the cat sanctuary doing their best bull in a China shop impression and let it slip that they wanted Boots’s help stealing a map to the Wishing Star from Little Jack Horner (John Mulaney), Boots can’t help but figure that he can steal it for himself and use the wish to get his nine lives back.  Not a bad plan.  Along with him is that one small dog, Perrito (Harvey Guillén), and, boy it pains me to say this about a cartoon cat, his former lover Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault).  But all through this adventure, the whistling specter of finality follows behind, always nipping at the backs of his paws.

So by now, you and I and probably any other adult has realized what Boots and most kids probably haven’t, but the Whistling Stranger is no mere bounty hunter.  Carrying two handheld sickles, cloaked in black, with arcane knowledge, this big bad wolf isn’t the Big Bad Wolf.  He’s Death.  Capital D Death.  He’s the Green Knight and Boots is Sir Gawain.  And now we’re grazing the surface of why this movie is so brilliant.  It’s actually about something.

A lot of people have compared this movie to Logan, and while I see the similarities in vibe, I mention the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because, I’m almost certain coincidentally, The Last Wish came out just one year after David Lowery’s The Green Knight, which was also excellent.  Now, I know the production time in animation is very, very long so it’s not like one movie inspired the other, but I was struck by the similarities in theming.  They were so similar, it made me want to sit down and ask if the writers intended to adapt Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with this movie.  And that makes sense to me; there’s a reason 700 years later, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still a relevant story.  Because we, as human beings, still die.  And it’s still something that’s in the back of our minds, especially as we get older.  It’s one of the reasons, in addition to it being Shrek’s 25th anniversary, that it’s been in my thoughts.  I had a milestone birthday recently, so now I’m the oldest I’ve ever been (which is kind of always true, because that’s how time works, but you get what I’m saying).  Living through the global fear of the COVID pandemic and perhaps still in its shadow in some ways, getting older; death comes to mind a lot.  There are multiple multi-billion dollar industries designed around combatting aging or at least the signs of aging, so I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.  When the opportunity arose to revisit this brilliant film, I had to take it, because I’ve been itching to share my thoughts on this movie with you all for a while.

Boots and his companions take on the classic hero’s quest, just like Sir Gawain.  Everything they experience is right out of classical mythology, right down to the journey to the underworld; in this case, in the form of the magically malleable Dark Forest in which the path to the star is determined by the character of the person holding the map.  He has to face his past lives.  And then he has to confront his own mortality; both conceptually and the personification of Death itself.  He has to fight Death, a wonderfully poetic and futile battle that we all fight.

Death cannot be defeated.  But we must fight against it.  Not to become some immortal legend, not for glory, but because all life is precious.  Death is supposed to wait until it’s “your time”, whatever that means, but here, Death wants Boots because through eight lives and eight deaths, Boots didn’t appreciate any of them.  Death isn’t holding a grudge because he was laughed at, he’s holding a grudge because life has value and Boots hasn’t valued any of his.  It’s not just Puss in Boots’s arrogance that bothers him, it’s the cavalier attitude with which he throws away his lives.  The time here is short and with whatever time we get, it’s up to us to make that time count.  To fill it with family and friends, to speak up for those who need it, to make some little difference for the better in the world while we’re still here.  I’m reminded what Isaac Asimov said in The Relativity of Wrong; “There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference.  But how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.”  And Boots has to come to this realization for himself.  The Last Wish is about Puss in Boots coming to terms with his own mortality and making peace with it.  As he faces down the ultimate enemy, Boots has to know and accept that he cannot win.  It is desperate, it is visceral, and it is one of the most human things I have ever seen on screen.  With each lunge and each slash, with each parry and each riposte, Boots fights more and more valiantly against inevitable defeat.  “I know I can never defeat you, Lobo, but I will never stop fighting for this life,” he says.  Like Gawain, Boots eventually stands tall.  But it’s not that he’s fearless once more, no; for the first time in his life, he’s being brave.  Because bravery is continuing on in the face of fear, not the absence of it.

I hope when my time comes that I don’t greet Death like an old friend, but like Puss in Boots; with sword drawn and something still to fight for.

There’s so much in this movie.  I could write this length again on its focus on found family, support structures, and appreciating the things and people that are right in front of you instead of spending your time and effort on wishing for something else.  I could talk about how the movie puts emphasis on finding your own strength by putting your trust in others.  But suffice it to say that I absolutely love this movie.  Yes, it’s a bit violent for something made for kids; in addition to the fast paced, anime-style action sequences, The Last Wish has quite a significant body count, so do with that information what you will if you’re a parent.  It’s incredible to me that a movie this good came from a franchise as silly as Shrek, and despite not liking any of the ones I’ve seen, I’m incredibly grateful that they gave way to this film.  25 years of Smash Mouth was worth it for this movie.  Movies like this are why I’m so hard on movies like Minecraft and Mario.  Because it’s not enough to say that a movie is for kids and then shrug off how bad it is because it’s sufficiently brightly colored and filled with references.  Puss in Boots: The Last Wish may be called a kids’ movie, but this one is for everyone.  It’s rated PG, 1 hour and 42 minutes long, streams on Peacock, and boasts a 95% RT score and 94% audience score.  Do yourself a favor and watch this one.  And then when that’s done, take a breath if you need it (I know I did), and watch the excellent video that Cinema Therapy did on it.  I’ve only scratched the surface here and they go quite deep into the psychology of it.  Definitely worth a watch, just like The Last Wish itself.

Betting Player One

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

If you’ve been listening to my blog posts over the past couple of weeks, you know that in my sign-off, I reference the old saying about the difficulty of comedy.  And I’ve never quite kept it a secret that I’m something of a comedy snob.  Most sitcoms especially that get very popular are, at best, fast food comedy.  They quell the hunger in the moment, but the lasting feeling is one of dissatisfaction and usually a bit of bloat as well.  But there are good comedies out there.  In the past, I’ve sung the praises of shows like Going Dutch for being unexpectedly funny and well written (and the second season is even better than the first) and while shows like Abbott Elementary and St. Denis Medical aren’t having their best seasons at the moment, they’re both still really good sitcoms.  Even the reality/prank/improv/sitcom hybrid Company Retreat delivers great laughs along the way.  There are others that get regular chuckles but are literally nothing worth writing about (I’m looking at you, Animal Control; you’re not bad, but we both know you can be better).  But when I took a look at Peacock’s preview episode of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, I found myself uncomfortably hopeful that there’d be a great new sitcom on TV.

After all, Peacock has burned me before like this.  Killing It had me laughing all through the pilot and then not again for the entire two season run.  So I waited, patiently and cautiously, and after four episodes or so, I tentatively said to someone “I think Reggie Dinkins might be really good”.  And this is where I am now after having watched the first season twice.  Let’s get into it.

The titular Reggie Dinkins is played by comedy legend Tracy Morgan (SNL, 30 Rock).  He’s been a little hit and miss as a headliner, but there’s a reason he’s still a household name.  Over many years of doing comedy, he’s really mastered his comedic timing.  If you ask me, he’s one of the funniest and most endearingly off the wall former SNL cast members.  Reggie is a former New York Jets player who has earned all the plaudits through his career, including several MVP awards.  He accomplished just about everything you can accomplish in the NFL, but he has never received even one vote for the Hall of Fame, which is his life’s greatest ambition.  Why?  Like Pete Rose, he was caught up in a sports betting scandal (from a time when you couldn’t do sports betting on your phone from your bathroom), but I won’t spoil just exactly it was that he was betting on.  So he’s been banned for life.  But he wants in.  He hires Arthur Tobin, a documentary filmmaker, to make a movie about him that Reggie hopes will change the public’s opinion.  Tobin, played by Daniel Radcliffe (Miracle Workers, Now You See Me 2), quietly failed his biggest break.  After winning an Oscar for one of his documentaries, he was hired on to the biggest project of his life and washed out.  So a disgraced footballer and an embarrassed filmmaker team up to redeem each other, in a way.

Morgan and Radcliffe may be the backbone and heart of this show, but there isn’t a single person in the supporting cast that doesn’t shine.  Reggie’s ex-wife and current manager Monica Reese-Dinkins, played by Erika Alexander (Living Single, Get Out), is the one with her head on her shoulders.  Reggie played ball, Monica made it a career and keeps him in a mansion years after he was banned.  Bobby Moynihan (SNL, Hoppers) plays Rusty Boyd, former Jets kicker and Reggie’s best friend who lives in his basement and manages his socials, among other things.  Rusty is the kind of character who could easily be overused, but he’s so lovably goofy and good-natured that the amount that we get him leaves us wanting more rather than growing weary.  Reggie and Monica’s son Carmello is played by relative newcomer Jalyn Hall (Space Jam: A New Legacy, All American) and he injects just the right amount of youthful cynicism and self-awareness to the family unit.  The final member of the family is Brina, played by Precious Way (Days of Our Lives, Heist 88), Reggie’s young fiancée, who is an aspiring singer, rapper, and content creator.  Even recurrings like Ronny Chieng, Craig Robinson, Heidi Gardner, and Megan Thee Stallion are perfectly cast.    

Brina is one of the most refreshing surprises in a show that’s full of them.  She easily could have been stereotyped as a ditzy gold-digger whose function in the show is to stoke conflict between her and Monica or Reggie and Monica, but how her character is handled is one of the most adept parts of this show’s writing.  Instead of pitting Monica and Brina against each other, they’re incredibly supportive of each other (with some bumps in the road, of course) and instead of being after Reggie’s money, she has genuine affection for him and is fully capable of standing on her own two feet.  She’s smart and savvy and really quite funny.  Rusty cracks me up in every frame; there are sometimes characters that just get peppered into a show or movie that hit every time. Tariq in Abbott Elementary, Barry Zuckerkorn in Arrested Development, and now Rusty in Reggie Dinkins.  And Tracy Morgan, just wow.  I don’t know how much of it is the sharpness of the writing or his delivery, but the marriage of the two is excellent.  The writing is deceptively intelligent, weaving great setups and punchlines that all make sense.  The show knows the subtle difference between an unexpected punchline to a joke and a nonsensical non-sequitur that masquerades as a punchline.  Look, I warned you that I was a comedy snob at the top, I’m not apologizing now.

Daniel Radcliffe is a revelation as documentarian Arthur Tobin.  I did not know that Radcliffe was this funny.  I watched the first season of Miracle Workers and while it was pleasant enough (and featured the best explanation of what cows are in all of recorded history), I bounced out at the second season.  But Tobin delivers just as many laughs Reggie does; talk about miracle work, standing on the same ground as Tracy Morgan and holding your own.  I really need to see his performance in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story now.

Talking about comedy is always difficult because me trying to explain to you why I think this show is so funny would be boring for me and for you, and it would ruin any gag that I’m trying to explain when you go to watch this show after reading this.  But I laugh more at this show than any other right now, including Going Dutch, which I would have called the funniest sitcom on TV this season before I saw Reggie Dinkins.  I laugh more at just about any cold open of Reggie Dinkins than I have at full seasons of Animal Control and I like Animal Control.  It’s pleasant enough.  But this show is just really, really funny.  It’s smartly written too, which is why despite being parodic in some ways (Reggie’s biggest rival on and off the field is Craig Robinson’s Jerry Basmati), it never feels locked down into predictable patterns.  This may not have the layered narrative jokes that something like Arrested Development had in its heyday, but it’s so sharp.  There are cutaway jokes, but they never last longer than a few seconds and never overstay their welcome.  And there are so many little moments that cut deep if you notice them, but you can easily miss them if you’re not paying attention.  When Reggie finds out that a local business has taken his portrait off the wall, the remaining pictures include the likes of Diddy, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, and Harvey Weinstein; a cutting commentary on what American society considers a dealbreaker, but it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of moment.

Like many other ensemble comedies that I’ve loved over the years, like Parks & Rec, Community, The Good Place, and Brooklyn 99, it’s an incredibly positive and welcoming show that proves over and over again that comedy is alive and well and can be absolutely riotous without resorting to easy jokes and punching down.  I cannot wait for more of this.  Normally, even when I really love a piece of media, I will be honest about its flaws.  I will find something to criticize because nothing is perfect and I don’t want to be blinded by enthusiasm to the point of becoming a fanboy who irrationally defends (or these days, irrationally criticizes) something just because I love it.  Right?  It’s the 2 Fast 2 Furious thing that I keep bringing up.  I really enjoy that movie and I have such a soft spot for it.  But I’m not going to pretend it’s Sinners.  But trying to find something I don’t like about Reggie Dinkins has been an exercise in futility because I just can’t.  I can’t promise that you’ll like this show as much as I do, but it absolutely has its hooks in me.  It has that particular resonance, similar to One Piece or Truth Seekers, that just finds a little place in my brain and sets up shop.  From the good-natured and supportive characters to the quick, pithy, agile writing, it feels like this show has been made for me.  But maybe it’s been made for you too.

Reggie Dinkins hasn’t been renewed for a second season yet, so in a way, this post is kind of a plea from me.  As any fan of Firefly or Terriers or Lodge 49 or The Sarah Connor Chronicles or No Tomorrow or A.P. Bio (yes, I was a fan of all of them) knows, falling for a show and then having it cancelled too soon is not fun.  But maybe after this, you’ll hop on Peacock and watch it.  And then tell your friends about it (and my blog, feel free to share this with anyone) and then they go watch it and tell their coworkers and then before we know it, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins gets six seasons and a movie.  And if it stays this good, then it will deserve it.  It’s the kind of show that’s for anyone who is looking for a wholesome, heartfelt redemption tale that’s filled with laughs.  It feels like the kind of thing we need right about now.  I’m going to try and give it a week before I watch it a third time.

The Prank Job

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

The Jury Duty crew is back at it again with Company Retreat

Meet Anthony Norman.  He’s just started a new job at a small hot sauce company as a temp.  Hired on to assist the HR director in his duties during the company’s annual retreat.  The company, Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, is a small family-owned business on the verge of a generational transition as the founder and CEO is preparing to retire and hand the company off to his son, Dougie Jr.  You probably haven’t heard of Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce and if you look up Anthony Norman on IMDB, you won’t find a very long filmography.  Because Rockin’ Grandma’s doesn’t exist.  And Anthony Norman doesn’t exist either.  He’s a ghost.  Kidding, of course; he’s a regular guy, not an actor; unlike everyone he will interact with over the course of this company retreat.   

When Prime Video’s Jury Duty rolled around in 2023, I was skeptical.  It seemed like a setup for the kind of cruel joke at someone’s expense who, when put into a situation where they’re at a complete disadvantage, is made to look silly.  But that ended up not at all what happened in that show.  And now, in Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, the team has managed to take what I thought was a singularly magical season of television, change it completely, and yet deliver that magic once again.  Let’s get into it.

Trustfalls with coworkers, I can’t imagine anything I’d be worse at doing

Jury Duty and subsequently Company Retreat are basically a marriage of a prank show, an improv show, and one of those shows they used to do where they put people in extreme public situations then stop them and shame them for not intervening.  Which I get why they did that, but at the same time, you’re going up to a random person and asking them why they didn’t step into a situation with no regard for where they are in that particular moment.  Seemed like an odd lack of empathy in the shaming of people for lacking empathy.  For the most part, walking people into orchestrated scenarios in which everyone has more knowledge of what that person is getting into than they do leads to someone being made into a fool, especially when TV cameras are involved.  So I was a little worried that this show would be serving up laughs at the expense of its patsy who has no clue that they’re in The Truman Show.

Like father, like son. Same height, same hair, same everything really. Hard to believe they’re just actors

But I am very glad to report that is not the case.  Pretty much everything I’m going to say in this paragraph applies to both seasons.  The goal here isn’t to humiliate anyone, least of all Anthony.  I’ve seen some articles online describe him as a “prank victim” and I think that’s profoundly missing the point.  In the show’s scripts, he’s named simply as “Hero”.  He’s put in ridiculous situations, one after another but he’s never made to be the butt of the joke.  And when all is said and done, if everything goes to plan and Anthony is the kind of person the showrunners think he is, then he really will have been heroic.  Does that sound like a victim to you?  Because it doesn’t to me.  The show is about his reactions and his approach to people.  The patience and genuineness of Anthony (and Ronald Gladden in Jury Duty) is what makes Company Retreat such a delight.

Poirot gathers the suspects in the parlor to reveal who farted and why

The cast here is excellent.  Compared to this season, Jury Duty was a star-studded affair, with Sonic’s Dad Cyclops and Sewage Joe being regulars (and Mekki Leeper, who went on to star in St. Denis Medical) There isn’t a name among them that you’d know (although I did recognize a face or two among the guest actors), but they were tasked with convincingly playing a group of coworkers from a small family business who have known each other for up to 20 years.  And they didn’t put a foot wrong; if it weren’t at the top of every episode that they were all actors, I could see someone forgetting the premise of the show because they were so real.  Of course the situations they get into are quite fantastical, but if one or two of those things happened on a real company retreat, you wouldn’t be surprised.  Not after the company picnics I’ve been to.  They play roles, and they play them very well.  The retiring CEO and founder, ready to pass the torch.  The prodigal son and heir apparent.  The hard-working and overlooked woman who probably should be the one who takes over when Doug Sr. retires.  The veteran who has been there from the start and is near the end of her own career.  The receptionist who has one very specific obsession.  The overeager reformed walking HR violation determined to prove he’s not that guy anymore.  And so on.  Yes, in a way they’re stock characters, but they’re those stock characters for a reason.  I saw several of my old coworkers in these actors.  They’re more than realistic enough.  But as fantastic as they were, the show isn’t about them.  It’s about Anthony.  All the great acting, the hidden crew, the visible crew (some cameras are known to Anthony as part of a fake documentary being made about Rockin’ Grandma’s), the weaving of storylines where you only hope your protagonist does what you want all amount to nothing if Anthony isn’t the kind of person that he is.

I don’t think this is the kind of human furniture they were talking about in Succession

Anthony Norman is a 25 year old Nashville native who dreams about one day building something that he can hand down to his son, the way Doug Sr. is handing the reins over to Dougie Jr.  That’s kind of all you know about him going in.  He’s just a guy who needs a job and this temp listing came up.  On his first day, Anthony is there for a coworker’s 40th birthday party and he sang full throated for her.  I don’t even sing happy birthday like that for people I know and care about.  The strength of this show is Anthony; he’s such a good guy.  He makes friends with everyone instantly; yes, of course the point of this show is to stress test him socially, but the actors, while having a script, are meant to improv and play off Anthony.  He could have been anything.  He could have been cold, reserved, standoffish, mean (though unlikely they’d bring him on to the show in the first place if he were mean), but he never is.  I spent last week praising the kindness of Monkey D. Luffy and the Straw Hats, but that’s fiction.  Obviously, of course, it’s important to see things that like in fiction.  That kind of openness and empathy.  In an increasingly dark world where division is the default and hate is so readily encouraged, seeing this kindness in a real person in the real world, albeit someone chosen out of a huge pool of possibilities and surrounded by actors creating what is really only a simulacrum of the real world is moving.  His actions are being guided or at the very least, gently nudged by an invisible hand, but every step of the way, Anthony had choice.  And every time, and I say this with no exaggeration, he makes the choice to accept people, to help people, to be positive, and to encourage those around him.

Now that Happy Birthday is in the public domain, I think we should sing it more often. Why can’t you sing it on Thanksgiving? Paint “no rules” on the water tower!

Whenever someone embarrasses themselves in front of Anthony, he is the first to cheer them up or play it down.  Thrust into a leadership role almost immediately, Anthony pivots and adapts and makes it his goal to ensure that everyone has a good time, feels comfortable, and bonds with him and each other.  He doesn’t throw his hands up and say anything’s not his problem.  He forms real connections with his new coworkers right away and maintains them in such a positive manner.  In eight episodes, I cannot recall a single moment where he was even passive aggressive.  Where he even rolled his eyes.  I understand there’s editing, but this man doesn’t even have a dismissive or mean reaction to anything.  I’m not that good of a person.  On my best day, I couldn’t imagine being that good of a person.  I don’t say mean things to people, at least I try not to, I’m human and fallible as anyone else.  But they still pop into my head sometimes and my poker face is a little out of practice since the pandemic, so yeah, I roll my eyes or make a face sometimes.  Anthony doesn’t.  And he’s a real person.  I can’t stress this enough because I can scarcely believe it myself.  This is a person, a man who walks around everyday being that genuine and kind to people.  He’s not a superhero.  I’m almost certain he’s not Spider-Man, I didn’t see him stick to a single wall or ceiling.  He’s not one out of a fantastic foursome.  He’s never given me so much as an inkling that he does any avenging in his free time.  He’s just some guy who was looking for a job.  I didn’t know that people could be this kind.  It’s one thing to write a character who is good, who is the embodiment of good ideals and an inclusive morality and can pull down a helicopter that’s taking off, but it’s a completely different thing to live it.  To be fair, though, I didn’t see him interact with any helicopters, so I don’t know for sure that he can’t stop one from taking off.

After the first season left me both laughing so hard that my face hurt and moved to tears by the end of it, I thought it was lightning in a bottle.  A feat that could never be replicated.  Because there couldn’t be another person like Ronald.  Statistically, what are the chances that there are two good people left in the world?  This world?  The one I’ve been living in?  Pretty damn low when I look around and every time I aimlessly open Twitter to doomscroll, those chances feel slimmer and slimmer.  But Company Retreat proves that Jury Duty wasn’t lighting in a bottle.  It proves that Ronald Gladden isn’t the only good person in the world.  And if Anthony Norman is that good, maybe there are others, as unlikely as that seems.  This is a show that is joyful, kind, empathetic, and genuinely gave me hope for the world.  I’m not dancing in the streets quite yet, but it raised the needle.  So no, it’s not lightning in a bottle.  This show is hope in a can.  Well, not a can.  A streaming platform owned by a billionaire who parties with Sydney Sweeney and has permeated every part of our lives with a company he once wanted to call Relentless before settling on Amazon.  Look, I didn’t make the world.  You get what you can get.  But if we all acted a bit more like Anthony, maybe the thing we get could be a better world.  Company Retreat is 8 half hour episodes with two bonus episodes and if you haven’t seen Jury Duty yet, that’s another 8 half hour episodes for you to enjoy as well.  Both seasons stream on Prime Video.

An altogether joyous and life-affirming experience, Company Retreat is not to be missed