Bad Branding

There's been a giant proliferation of columns this week explaining last week's news release about the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl , achieving the highest ever rating on IMDB.  The internet movie database is an index of everything TV and movies, the site to visit for information on cast, crew, ratings, and reviews. The IMDB ratings mean squat, though.  They do have an algorithm at work, so it's not just a popularity contest, but it's still mostly a popularity contest.  All the recent columns have said as much: basically, Chernobyl is good, but don't trust the ratings. It just strikes me as a strange time to be having this conversation, because it's not out of the question that Chernobyl might be the best thing that's ever been on television.  If something like Friends or NCIS were at the top of the list, then surely the columns are justified.  Chernobyl is just good, riveting, beautifully shot, insanely well done TV. Conceived of and written by th...

by Ryan Scott I went to high school a very long time ago, like Can’t Hardly Wait long, so I wasn’t expecting to resonate so completely with Booksmart , Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut that’s become widely available this weekend.   It’s been getting crazy buzz since South by Southwest and it almost totally lived up to its billing. One trait that every lasting high school movie seems to have is an ability to capture what changes at graduation.   The jock, nerd, drama kid, stoner, delinquent labels that seem so fitting through most of high school melt away towards the end.   As you approach graduation and the dawning of “real” life, those things just matter less and you find a camaraderie in your shared experience of transition. Booksmart , like Can’t Hardly Wait , and a number of other great high school films, clearly defines the stereotypes epitomized by each character, but also leaves those distinctions as background in the larger coming-of-age experiences th...

by Ryan Scott (nothing but spoilers) I definitely did not react as viscerally as many others to the end of Game of Thrones .   I thought it was fine – not great, but the odds of the finale being tremendous were just so slim.   The major critique was that things moved too quickly; they just didn’t have enough episodes to get the story where it needed to go.   They rushed.   That’s true. One piece of the storytelling, though, could have easily been different and solved many of their problems.   After the Battle of Winterfell in episode three of this final season, we presumed that nearly all of the Dothraki and most of the unsullied were dead – sacrificed to the Army of the Dead to buy time to draw out the Night King. It’s only in episode four that we surprisingly discover only half of each army was lost; the numbers, by episode six, are still huge – enough to scare the survivors of King’s Landing about exactly what Daenerys was capable of doi...

by Ryan Scott Baskets began as a place for Zach Galifianakis to play.   Along with the brilliant Better Things , Baskets was introduced as part of Louis CK’s development deal with FX, although unlike Better Things , CK had little to do with its content. On the surface an absurdist dark comedy meant to showcase the ridiculous, it quickly morphed into TV’s best showcase for brilliant, well-rounded character work.   Galifianakis plays twins, Chip and Dale Baskets, who at first appear to be complete opposites (including radically different accents), but wind up being two very different manifestations of the same damaged, arrested-development persona. The rest of the cast is an odd assortment of characters, placed around the twins presumably to react in strange ways.   Louie Anderson won an Emmy for portraying Chip and Dale’s mother, Christine Baskets, as an embodiment of Anderson’s own mother, long an integral part of his stand-up act. That the Emmy win was...

by Ryan Scott Two modern soap operas about rich, entitled families are coming back for Season 2 in June.   Succession was the popular and critical darling, with great performances, witty banter, and permanently cranked to eleven.   It’s basically a Murdoch family allegory – rich dysfunctional New York business elites – but there are enough Trump parallels available that many have tried to make the connection. In doing so, they missed the real Trump series, probably because Yellowstone is dressed up in cowboy hats and lost in the woods of Montana (and on the Paramount network, which, people promise me, is a real thing). Yes, it skews more melodramatic and slightly less believable, but the visuals are stunning and it’s written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the writer of Sicario and Hell or High Water (and the writer-director of Wind River , my favorite movie of 2017).   It’s no slouch. Oh yeah, and it stars Kevin Costner. Costner plays a Montana...

by Ryan Scott By now, we all know the flaws of Bohemian Rhapsody , the jumbled semi-biopic about Queen front man, Freddie Mercury, but also sort of about the band itself. It plays like a film that lost its director halfway through production, which it did. The first hour is full of cliché and tired storytelling tropes. The casting and performances are excellent, but it drags under the weight of indecision. That being said, the most compelling critiques of Bohemian Rhapsody are about its narrative choices. Mercury’s sexuality is downplayed or avoided and Queen’s historical timeline was cut into a million pieces and re-assembled randomly, with key elements fabricated or “finessed” to serve a storyline that doesn’t deserve it. Still, I walked out of the theatre on a high, partly because of how cool the recreation of Queen’s Live Aid set was, but mostly because the music of Queen is just so wonderful. Mercury was magnetic and his voice is unparalleled (I know, because I spen...