One Star Classics

It’s the age-old story: Girl walks into boy’s bookstore, boy falls for girl, boy stalks girl, boy breaks into girl’s apartment, boy kidnaps girl’s boyfriend, and… Well, you know the rest. It’s Love Story of our time.

Based on the novel of the same name, You is a Netflix-streaming Lifetime show, and it does everything you would expect a Lifetime show to do. It’s an over the top stalking story, filled with flawed characters, most of whom are downright unlikable to the point of them being social media influencers. Yow. When the most sympathetic character is the stalker-cum-murderer, you know you are watching dubious quality. And yet, it’s absolutely glorious.

I can only assume Lifetime was angling for Henry Cavill to star, but had to go with the closest lookalike, Penn Badgley, when realities of funding set in. It worked out surprisingly well. Badgley does an impressive job as Joe, striking a balance between creepy and charming. He appears in virtually every scene throughout the ten episodes, without giving the slightest wink to the camera, no matter how outlandish the plot gets, which is pretty damn outlandish. The production value might be higher than what you’d expect from Lifetime, but You is as over the top as anything Meredith Baxter has starred in.

How no-one seriously seems to find it particularly strange that everyone around Joe disappears without even a good-bye—ghosting them—is baffling at best. You would think somebody, somehow would question why a serious number of his girlfriends’ acquaintances are victims of gruesome accidents. You really don’t have to be Columbo to figure this one out.

Yes, You is high-concept, but entertaining it is none-the-less. It is presented in the type of slickness one would expect from the producers of Riverdale, and the cast gives performances one wouldn’t or shouldn’t expect from anything of You’s pedigree. If there ever was a guilty pleasure, You is it, to the point where their dignified statesman of special guest stars is John Stamos. That’s right—Ray Wise and Steven Weber have been replaced by Uncle Jesse. That’s a statement in itself.

Inexplicably, You has been renewed for a second season, and I have no idea where they can go with it. No matter, I’ll be there, binge-watching the crap out of, getting sucked further and further into a vortex of Lifetime lore.

The Trailer

If you like design of any sort, odds are you at the very least respect Dieter Rams. At the German appliance company Braun, he led the design of products that still are iconic, not just because they look good, but because they define how we can and should work with appliances today. For all intents and purposes, I doubt we can improve on the Braun ET66, as far as a pocket calculator goes.

It’s surprising it has taken this long for someone to make a documentary about the man. Product design has gone from being du jour to something that is expected these days. Apple (and Rams acolyte Jony Ive) ushered in the modern era, and even companies like Microsoft has started taking design seriously¹ over the last half-decade or so. Would any of this have happened without Rams? Maybe, maybe not, but there is no denying his impact on our contemporary world.

Gary Hustwit was the right person to make the movie. His work on Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized is very much a part of our design zeitgeist, and Kickstarting Rams was a no-brainer for me. Not surprisingly, the documentary places itself well into his canon. It’s a fascinating and inspiring movie.

Rams is formed in the type of simplicity its namesake has been a steward of for almost sixty years. We learn about Rams’s history from being a young architect, through his forty years with Braun, to his current work with Vitsœ. He talks about his philosophies (captured in his Good Design principles) as well as his opinions on contemporary design.

One particularly amusing scene shows Rams in an Apple Store, with his voiceover lamenting how products today aren’t designed to last; it’s easier to buy a new model than getting the current one fixed. I’m willing to bet a large percentage of Rams’s audience is made up of the very people who design those products.

It’s a good documentary, then, and a must view for anyone who has an interest in design, or those who just wants to learn a bit more about why the world around us looks like it does.

¹ Though nice as the Surface may be, it’s close to all for naught as it doesn’t run an operating system that can handle the touch interface the hardware was designed for.

The Trailer

If the victor of the cartoon wars of the thirties and forties was Warner Bros. or Disney is entirely subjective. On one hand, Warner’s shorts—Bugs, Daffy, et al.—are still more omnipresent than what Disney produced. On the flip-side, Disney has been a feature-length animation juggernaut since Snow White so it wouldn’t be outlandish to call it a draw.¹

Me, I’m into the recent Mickey Mouse shorts. They maintain the sensibilities of the late-twenties/early-thirties cartoons, with similar character designs to the classics, and stories in the vein of Steamboat Willy. To wit…

These new shorts feel more like something seen in today’s alternative animation, and with the atrocities Disney has performed with the characters over the years, it’s nice to see them coming back to their roots.

¹ Disney’s standalone shorts, Silly Symphonies, artistically trump any of the others, but that’s neither here nor there.

If we are in the golden era of television as many (probably rightfully) declare, then there was a handful of shows that had to sacrifice themselves to get us to where we are today. Shows like Better Off Ted was not long for this world, but it gave its life to allow other smart programs to make their way onto the small screens.

To me, the greatest of these was Reaper, which ran on The CW for two seasons between 2007-2009. Had it been released today, it likely would have found a good home on Hulu (where the old episodes currently reside), but Reaper never had the mass appeal to make it on network television back in the late aughts.

The premise of the show is simple: Sam learns on his twenty-first birthday that his parents sold his soul to the Devil before he was conceived (under the belief that they would never have kids), and he now will have to eternally work as a reaper, bringing escaped souls back to hell.

It’s an amusing concept, and the situations Sam and his two friends, Sock and Ben, get themselves into while hunting souls are imaginative. It’s one of those simple ideas that quickly can be tossed aside if one does not take a step back and see the promise it brings. (Which was clearly what America decided not to do.)

Yet, great as the writing is, the essence of the show is Ray Wise as the Devil. Ray Wise, what a class act! It doesn’t matter what role it is—big, small, cameo—Wise always brings it, and Reaper serves as a showcase for the trifecta of what makes him him. Do you like his genuinely menacing presence as Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks? You got it. The earnest, charming humor from Fresh Off The Boat? It’s here in full force, all neatly packaged in the suave swagger we saw in Mad Men. This is the Ray Wise mother lode, and we are all richer because of it.

(Frankly, as far as television goes, if there is a good show out there, odds are Wise guest-starred in it: Anything from Psych to Fargo to Gilmore Girls have been blessed with His presence.)

The casting, in addition to the principal characters, is inspired. The escaped souls are mostly high-concept—e.g., convicted murderer returning to kill those who prosecuted him—and they serve as playgrounds for a host of contemporary greats. Michael Ian Black and Ken Marino appear semi-regularly as a demonic couple, and Patton Oswalt brings comedy gold. Armie Hammer and England’s national treasure, Lucy Davis¹, both deliver. Back in the day when we actually had to wait for these things to come on weekly television, one of the small joys was the anticipation of who the next guest-star would be, and rarely did the wait not pay off.

During its run, Reaper was pitted against Chuck in the battle of winning the hearts of those who at the time was referred to as the geek-chic. Fair or unfair as it might have been, that was how the media framed it, and Reaper lost. I still feel the world was big enough for both shows, and Reaper deserved better than what it got. I don’t know how it fares these days, but a part of me hopes streaming at least has elevated it to a cult-hit status.

And Chuck? Well, no prizes for guessing who made a guest appearance in that show.

Bonus fact!

Sam and Sock appear in an episode of Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. It was created by the same people who made Reaper and it, too, was canceled.

¹ I will defend Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to my death.

The Trailer