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Reviews
Exception (2022)
Not sure how to feel
"Exception" is a highly cerebral story that's not for people with short attention spans or those wanting lots of action, although there is some in the last two episodes. I did not mind the character designs and think the reason for them is that the reprints are stylized versions of the original people, materializing attributes of their personalities and worldviews. The reason the ship carrying a small crew is so large is that it's carrying a large atmospheric converter.
However, without spoiling any details, the supposedly happy ending for a subset of characters is tempered by what is done to achieve it, an act which Mr. Spock would describe as "a crime against science." That may have been the point.
His Dark Materials (2019)
A noble effort given the budget constraints
First, to the person who complained that the show turned into a full attack against (authoritarian) religion, that was the author's intent, and the series surprisingly does not shy away from it.
While the 2007 movie had better visuals, director Chris Weitz, under studio pressure to keep the length down, made a fatal error in 'severing' the last chapters of the first book, including an image that absolutely, positively had to be the final shot of the movie but was replaced with an inane speech by Lyra about what she planned to do in the sequel.
The first season of the series does that ending right, albeit not as spectacularly as I imagined. The pacing of the first season was admittedly uneven due to the showrunners introducing Will before his time in the books, stretching his story out with the rationale of having it sync up with Lyra's. The second season does not have that problem and is probably the best overall of the three.
The budget limitations show up more in the third season, as it takes on "The Amber Spyglass", the biggest and most difficult to film of the three books, but they pull it off about as well as one could hope. The young actors in the lead roles, plus one supporting, grew noticeably older than their characters over the course of the series, but there was really nothing the showrunners could do about that, and the upside is they avoided a potential scandal over the series' finale.
Dafne Keen is excellent throughout, as are James McAvoy and Ruth Wilson. Also, Lin Manuel Miranda (a casting coup that came as a result of his being a fan of the books and really wanting to do it) lights up the screen whenever he appears, even in the land of the dead. Miranda may be a better composer and songwriter than he is an actor, but the guy simply radiates positive energy.
One quibble I have, which comes from the source material, is speciesism in the selection of animal daemons for good vs bad characters. It seems author Philip Pullman doesn't much like reptiles, or insects (unless it's a butterfly), or rodents (unless it's a wabbit), or large dogs. He likes cats, birds, various members of the ferret family, and, of course, for a certain pivotal character, a golden monkey.
First Kill (2022)
Despite not being in the show's target demographic, I find it engaging.
Though there have been some bumps along the way, the vampire genre has change dramatically for the better since the times of Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi. We are more likely to see stories about vampires as fully fleshed out characters then than as monsters to be destroyed. "First Kill" manages to have its blood and drink it too by fully developing its vampire characters while, at the same time, pitting them against equally well-developed people bent on destroying them as monsters.
The first few episodes are rough going, with the main characters engaging in deception to keep secrets from those closest to them, but then it improves when the truth comes out. There were some eye-rolling moments, such as the Garden of Eden references. At least the vampires have a better version of the Eden story (dispensing with the misogyny) than the Bible has. The two leads are completely convincing, and I'm surprised to learn that Sarah Catherine Hook is a full decade older than her character, Juliette. She looks 16.
As others have mentioned, there is social allegory to be had. On the one hand, the characters and their families are open about and accepting of LGBT relationships. But substitute vampires and other "monsters" for either LGBT people or "the elite," and you see characters engaging in the same kind of othering that we see in the culture wars today. And note that the cop who tips off the vigilante group, MAAMs, thinks that the black girl, instead of the white girl, is the monster.
The author may have written that quadruple cliffhanger of an ending as an insurance policy against cancellation, for it absolutely requires there to be second season. I hope the tactic works, because if it doesn't, we're left with a very depressing conclusion. And Calliope (Cal) needs to forgive Juliette (Jules). What happened to Theo was an honest mistake. Jules intended only to relieve his suffering, not to turn him, she confessed immediately, and she's sorry. Cal may have been raised to believe her brother being made a vampire is a fate worse than death, but her mother believed that too, until it happened to her son. Then she changed her mind. So, Cal can change hers.
I'd like to think the point where Cal screams and starts running down the road is her feeling Jules' pain over the breakup and is running after her to make amends. In any case, she'd better watch out for MAAMs who are likely to find her before she finds Jules. And don't think they'll be satisfied with a negative silver test. People like that are impervious to facts.
On the point someone made about why Jules doesn't bring up her brother Oliver's witch-friend being able to change a vampire into a human, maybe that works only for legacy vampires who are alive, and not for made vampires who are undead. I'm glad, however, that, earlier, Jules turned down Oliver's offer to turn her into a "real girl" in exchange for taking down their sister, Elinor, yet turned Elinor in anyway, not for a quid-pro-quo, but because she discovered her sister really is a monster, even by vampire standards.
Cursed (2020)
The show is better than its title.
Let me say this right off the bat. This series was written to be polarizing. It pushes the right buttons for those of us with socially progressive sensibilities. Conversely, religious right culture warriors, misogynists and racists (who tend to overlap) will absolutely hate it. Much has been said about the colorblind casting and the women who rise to powerful roles. But also the writers really, really do not like the Catholic Church, as it was constituted in medieval times, yet, in a sense they are accurate. Considering how the real Church went on crusades and pogroms against people with competing belief systems, think of how it would have reacted upon encountering subspecies of humans with magical abilities attributable to something other than the Biblical God. The Church would have tried to wipe them out.
The series' influences are legion. As the saying goes; To steal from one person is plagiarism. To steal from everyone is research. The series also is aware that we know what its influences are, and it uses them to play with audience expectations and sometimes subvert them. For example, "The Sword of Power" affects people in much the same way as "The One Ring to Rule them All," and there are times when it comes close to turning our heroine into Daenerys Targaryen, but, thankfully, she pulls back from the brink. Another character who appears destined to become a monstrous villain, instead makes a choice that makes her something far more interesting. That said, among the characters from Arthurian legend whose identities are revealed late, one of them is a real stretch.
The season ends in a major cliffhanger, making us either wait an indefinite amount of time for a second season or look for the book to resolve it.
Carrie (2013)
A tradeoff between this and the 1976 version
I know I'm in the minority in having disliked Brian de Palma's 1976 version of "Carrie." While liking 90% of it, I absolutely hated the over-the-top religious symbolism in the final scenes, which undid the rest of the film for me. For a long time, I assumed that was Stephen King's doing, but it turns out that the book ends very differently, and the fault for the film's ending lies with de Palma and his screenwriter Lawrence Cohen.
Kimberly Pierce and her script doctor Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa have not changed the story from the 1976 film as much as I hoped they would, but they did remove its most offensive element. That was the crucifix with the glowing eyes, which implied that Carrie's death via the house sinking into the ground was divine retribution. Without giving away exactly what happens, I'll say that the new ending makes better use of the character Sue Snell, although missing an opportunity that presented itself in the novel. And the final shot suggests that Pierce may make good on her claim that she sees "Carrie" as a superhero origin story, by having her heroine return somewhat like a character or two with similar powers have in "X-Men." What Pierce's new version lacks is directorial style to compare with de Palma's, and a score to compare with that of Pino Donnagio. The main reason to see the 2013 film is for the performances of Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, who act circles around everyone else in the cast, and whose characters are better developed than their 1976 counterparts. Pierce is definitely more sympathetic to Carrie's plight than was de Palma, whose film sent mixed messages.
So, for me, the 2013 remake of "Carrie" is a close call, but I'm giving it a marginal recommendation, because it does, though only in part, fix what I found wrong with 1976 film.