To say The Menu is a dark comedy is understating the issue. This is BLACK comedy, as dark as it gets. Voldemort doesn’t hold a candle to Ralph Fiennes’ Julian Slowik. Imagine crossing The Bear with Eating Raoul, and you might get a vague idea of what this film is up to.
When the topic of a novel is First Contact, as the past thirty-odd Cawdron novels have been, they almost by default have to address the notion of alien intelligence. In his previous novel, “Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse,” Cawdron’s alien was utterly flabbergasted by the notion that intelligence could exist in billions of tiny, bite-sized units, rather than as a vast distributed hive mind. I noted at the time that we were similarly coming to grips with the notion that octopuses were intelligent, and our reaction paralleled that of the invaders in LSAA
As soon as I noticed that Bad Monkey was based on a Carl Hiaasen book of the same name, I knew I was in for a treat. Hiaasen is reliably loopy, witty, dark, with indelible characters and absurd but compelling murder mystery plots. And Apple+ has a well-deserved reputation for ensuring that television series respect the source material.
Ani (diminutive of Anora, the titular character, played by Mikey Madison) works in a strip club, pole dancing and taking customers to back rooms for a friendly lap dance. She sometimes does a bit of escort service on the side. She is pretty, and young enough to not have become resigned to her lot in life. She makes good money, enough to live in New York City.
Because she speaks some Russian, management assigns her to “Vanya,” (Mark Eydelshteyn). Vanya is what Steve Martin might characterize as “a wild and crazy guy” – perpetually high, living life as one long party. They have a pleasantly blurry good time together, and when he next pops into the club, he asks for her by name.
Putin caught a lot of critical attention right from the get-go, simply because it’s the first film made to use AI to make the actor performing the role of the main subject exactly resemble said subject. Vladimir “Vova” Putin was a sensible choice since his mien is somewhat unco and frigid, a living example of uncanny valley. Given his power and viciousness, perhaps a risky chance, too. Patryk Vega might want to avoid buildings more than two storeys high.
Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a fading sex bomb whose career grinds to a halt on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. She is cruelly fired by her producer, Harvey (played to brutal, sleazy, sexist perfection by Dennis Quaid). Later that day she crashes her car, and while not seriously injured, gets checked up at the ER. A nurse, learning of her circumstances, tells her there is a drug to be had that restores youth and beauty. He hands her a card with a number.
Adolescence is a four part series about a thirteen year old boy who is accused of knifing a female classmate, Katie Leonard, to death. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that he did commit the crime, as the viewer is presented with incontrovertible evidence late in the first episode.
Each episode is filmed in a single shot sequence, a remarkable accomplishment in itself. West Wing, famed for its single-shot sequences, never managed more than 17 minutes. By doing it this way, director Philip Barantini throws away most of the usual narrative and plot tropes seen in such shows and replaces it with something far more realistic and compelling.
The first thing to know about The Electric State is that the whole thing is daft as tits on a tank. It has the same blend of deadly seriousness and utter lunacy that one finds in, say, Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
I realized, with a delighted grin, that the prose was some of the best writing I’ve ever seen. Rich, detailed, sophisticated, and very realistic, the Farseer world sucks the reader right in. Hobb manages the neat trick of being fairly slow-paced (the trilogy is about 2,000 pages) but is never boring.
It’s hard to imagine a title more Canadian than North of North. “The true North, strong and free” is part of the Canadian anthem, and while few Canadians have ever been north of Edmonton, polar bears, baby seals, and rawhide snowshoes are a large part of the national identity.