Netflix

Review: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

/ Peter Martuneac / 7 Comments

As usual, I was fashionably late in getting around to watch this Netflix blockbuster, but being a fan of all things Edgar Allen Poe, watching it was inevitable. And even if I wasn’t such a big fan of Poe, the premise might be far too interesting to ignore. It’s a dramatized version of Poe’s story of the same name, while the themes and plots of some of his other most famous works are woven into each episode.

The general plot goes thusly: Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, are the billionaire owners of a corrupt pharmaceutical giant on trial for a drug that has killed millions. Suddenly, Roderick’s children begin to die in mysterious circumstances and he finally invites the man prosecuting him, C. August Dupin, to his abandoned childhood home to ‘confess’ to his crimes.

Overall I enjoyed the series, but it never quite fully hooked me. There were several reasons for that. One, I find it odd that each and every one of Roderick Usher’s children are completely and irredeemably depraved, leading lives of unabashed debauchery and obsessed with their own pleasure. You mean to tell me not one offspring became just a normal, relatively well-adjusted person?

Two, the constant and forced profanity. As I’ve said many times before, I spent four years as a United States Marines. I was in the infantry. So I’m not some overzealous prude clutching pearls at any language that goes beyond ‘gosh’. But my goodness, what purpose does so much profanity serve?

It was even forced into common phrases, which got a huge eyeroll from me. For instance, instead of saying ‘he knows which side his bread’s buttered on’, one character says ‘he knows which side his d**k’s buttered on’.

Really? Did we really need to pepper in adult language in that line? It’s crass and it comes across like a 14-year-old who just recently learned some new swears. It’s juvenile.

Last of all, in the final episode the show suddenly became ham-fisted and preachy. I easily picked up on the themes and the message that the show’s creators wanted to convey throughout the series. At times subtle, at times a little in-your-face, but never sanctimonious until the finale. Madeline, who, by the way, is morally reprehensible in every way and guilty of several atrocities, deigns to sermonize the viewers in an exhausting monologue just before the climax.

Which would have been bad enough except that the show did not seem to want to push back on what she said or underline the sheer hypocrisy of it all. It was as if the show wanted us to nod along and applaud, to suddenly like this character and root for her devious designs.

And how’s this for ham-fisted? At one point the show’s main antagonist, a demon of sorts or perhaps even the very Devil himself, mentions someone else with whom they’d struck a deal and proceeds to clearly identify this ‘mystery person’ by lifting an infamous line from one of his 2016 presidential campaign rallies.

The other character, one we have just learned in this same episode has committed every crime from rape to murder many times over, chimes in with, “Any chance that his bill is coming due soon? Even I have my limits.” Cue an eyeroll so big I gave myself a migraine. No, Netflix writers and producers, I am not going to chuckle along with this mass murderer who thinks he is somehow less damned than anyone else in the world.

Aside from these complaints, and despite how much time I spent on them, I really did enjoy the show, even if it left a sour taste in my mouth. The adaption of so many Poe stories was a triumph. Even the names of all the main characters, they were all names from Poe’s works. It truly was brilliant work.

My highest praise, however, goes to the acting. These actors did such a tremendous job, but I especially want to single out Mark Hamill, who portrayed Arthur Pym, the lawyer and fixer of the Usher family. Even though I just lambasted his character two paragraphs earlier, I would be remiss not to mention how mesmerizing he was as ‘the Pym reaper’. Hamill stole every scene with a gravelly voice and grave, unchanging countenance. Anytime Pym took the stage, I had to sit up straighter and really focus on whatever was about to unfold.

So if you have a Netflix account and are a fan of dark urban fiction, this is a show I strongly recommend as long as you can deal with the excessive profanity and flashes of gore. I may even watch it again in the future, despite my problems with the show.

Movie Review: “F.U.B.A.R.” on Netflix

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I hate how much this will sound like the ‘old man yells at clouds’ meme, but I generally don’t enjoy most of the movies or TV shows coming out these days. But I was searching for something new to watch and I’m a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so when his face appeared on Netflix with a new show called F.U.B.A.R., I decided to give it a try.

The premise is pretty simple: Arnold is a badass CIA agent on the verge of retirement, only to be pulled back in when he discovers his daughter is also a badass CIA agent currently working a dangerous undercover mission. Through eight 57-minute episodes, the father-daughter duo hunt down a violent arms dealer trying to steal and sell a nuclear suitcase.

Actually, one of my first thoughts as I watched the show was that it felt like a parody of Zach and Abby in an alternate universe, one where zombies had not risen from the dead and where the father-daughter team could have led happy, fulfilling lives.

That bemusing comparison kept me roped in during the first couple of episodes, when I still wasn’t too sure what to make of the show. The daughter has a lot of problems with Arnold’s character, who was largely an absent father because of his job, and at first it seemed like the entire show would be her just dumping on her dad over and over, leaving Arnold as the constant sap and butt of the joke. That’s not the kind of show I have any desire to watch.

Fortunately, as the show progresses, each character gets their turn to be the wise old owl, the one who is right and who everyone else should have listened to at the beginning of the episode. Every character also plays the goat at least once, the one whose shortcomings create chaos and makes everyone else have to work harder to finish the mission and get back home in one piece.

I will say that I’m not a fan of the way it ended. There is clearly going to be a second season based on the events of the final episode in Season 1, but that to me feels like too much. The way this mostly delightful action-comedy progressed, it felt like one season was the best fit for it. But I understand that dollars drive projects more than storytelling.

Overall, I can say that I recommend this show to anyone with a Netflix account and who doesn’t mind quite a bit of cursing. There’s no nudity and though there is violence there’s nothing terribly gruesome. So check it out! But before you do, I must conclude the review with a quote from the show’s final episode, spoken by Arnold in his gruff, Austrian voice. It was a great line, no two ways about that, but I’m also purely including this for the benefit (detriment?) of one Berthold Gambrel:

“I’ll be fine. I’m just going to kick back, and drink some beers with Napoleon, Thomas Dewey, the Buffalo Bills, and all the other great losers in history.”

Movie Review: Seven Kings Must Die

/ Peter Martuneac / Leave a comment

At long last, the hit Netflix series The Last Kingdom, an adaptation of the Saxon Stories book series by Bernard Cornwall, has come to an end. Seven Kings Must Die is a 2-hour movie that encompasses the final three books, differing from the show where one or two books at most would be the focus of an entire season of episodes.

My first thought is that this was a poor choice. I don’t read Hollywood news, so maybe there were budgetary concerns or perhaps some of the main actors wouldn’t commit to two or three more seasons of work, so they chose this out of necessity. But the two-hour timespan made for a story that felt rushed.

For example, an entire book in the series, the eleventh is completely glossed over, with just some few elements taken and sprinkled throughout the movie. Now this book felt like a lot of fluff to begin with, so maybe it’s not the worst idea, but the twelfth book, a far more pivotal entry in the series, was done in about ten minutes on screen and rather poorly. The English king is made out to be a psychotic, borderline-sociopathic murderer who is drunk with power, a complete distortion of the character in the books. The grand battle that cemented the king’s claim to the throne was watered down to a war of words at London’s gate.

Even the final, climactic Battle of Brunanburh felt less climactic. The battle in the books is built up for quite a few chapters, as the hopeless position of the English king is revealed, and negotiations to buy time drag on. In the movie, you get the sense that the enemy army has the advantage, but their victory does not seem so assured as it does in the books.

The ending of the movie was okay, though I won’t give any spoilers here.

All in all, it felt to me that both the books and the Netflix adaptation went too long. The series should have ended once Uhtred, the main character, reclaimed his lordship over Bebbanburg, since having it stolen from him as a child was the start of his character’s story arc and his all-consuming obsession throughout the first 10 books. Eventually, it all got a little stale.

If you’ve read the books and you’re dying to see for yourself how they were adapted, you should watch Seven Kings Must Die with an open mind. If you’ve only seen the show, my recommendation would be to ignore the movie since the final episode of The Last Kingdom was, in my opinion, a good ending for Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

All Quiet on the Western Front: Movie Review

/ Peter Martuneac / 3 Comments

Available on Netflix, this is a film I’ve been meaning to watch for a while now. I went into it expecting an experience based on the novel of the same name, but got something entirely different. That’s not a bad thing, but I wasn’t thrilled with the choices made by the directors and producers, either.

The film opens with complete silence, the camera facing upwards at snow-covered treetops. The serenity is soon shattered by the sounds and sights of war. You watch as soldiers die in a hopeless charge. I appreciate the affect here and it was well done, but none of the characters you see are the protagonists. It ends up feeling like wasted time. Again, I don’t think this was a bad choice per se, but the book opens with the main character, Paul, in his home village, and you get a glimpse of his idyllic life before he follows the drums of war.

There is a short scene after the opening scene of Paul and his friends as they happily enlist in the Army, but it doesn’t carry the theme quite as well as in the book.

Related to this, later in the book, Paul returns home on leave and finds that everything is the same, except him. He realizes that his war experience has changed him forever, and he eventually concludes that coming home had been a mistake. He is eager to return to the front because that is where he feels ‘normal’.

This is not shown in the movie at all, and that, I thought, was a big missed opportunity. The theme of the story is not just the horrors of war, but also how it changes the soldiers who return. It’s an important theme to explore because I don’t believe many civilians consider it.

We all understand the ‘ticking time bomb’ cliche, when the war veteran is constantly angry, drunk, and suicidal (this harmful stereotype is a whole other problem to be discussed another day, by the way), but in reality, so many more veterans internalize any grief or stress. They blend in because they know they have to. They’re home again, but they know they’re not really home. Home was before, when all was innocent, and they had all their childhood friends.

That’s gone forever. As the book shows, the hometown and the childhood friends are all the same, but the veteran is the one who changed, and he can’t be unchanged.

Failing to explore this theme left me feeling not so high on the movie as I might have been. I immediately contrasted it to the end of They Shall Not Grow Old by Peter Jackson, a film I consider required viewing. At the end of that film, you hear an old veteran of The Great War telling a story about returning home to his old town, returning to his old job, and reuniting with his old coworker. His coworker, who had remained at home, sees him come in after four years of being apart and says to the veteran, “Bob! Haven’t seen you in a while. You been working nights?”

And the movie ends there. I get chills just thinking about this powerful testimony. After four years of some of the most hellish warfare humanity has ever fought, the warfighter returns to an old friend asking if he picked up a different shift. The old friend is no longer a true friend because he can’t possibly relate to the warfighter. That old friendship is, in a word, gone, and the warfighter knows this. He knows that he will forever be an other.

Overall I enjoyed the film, and it did do a good job of faithfully representing the anti-war message of the book, but I thought there were too many missed opportunities. There’s another neglected section of the book that shows the boys struggling with a cruel, domineering corporal at the barracks before they ever even see war, but this review has gone on long enough.

I recommend this film (in the original German) to students of history, but I also feel compelled to warn you about some pretty severe violence. I’m sure you would expect that given the film’s subject, but be warned that it can get extremely graphic and includes gruesome hand-to-hand combat.