The Peripheral (Amazon Prime, 10.21), a kind of adventure series about a virtual reality traveller (Chloe Grace Moretz), is based on a 2014 novel by sci-fi author William Gibson (Neuromancer).
The teleplay has been created-written by ScottSmith (A Simple Plan, The Ruins). Westworld‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are serving as exec producers, whatever that actually means.
People who’ve continued to endure HBO’s Westworld series know that Nolan and Joy are purveyors of the puzzlebox approach to teleplay writing…endless dingle-dangle plotting that goes on forever without actually getting anywhere.
The series costars Gary Carr, Jack Reynor, Eli Goree, Charlotte Riley, Adelind Horan, T’Nia Miller and Alex Hernandez.
I'm very, very sorry that another season of Westworld is about to unfurl. I won't be watching, of course, but the mere fact of its existence is enough to bum me out.
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True story: “I was driving along Melrose Ave. near Doheny in late 1983. (Or was it early ’84?) I noticed that a new BMW in front of me had a framed license plate that came from a dealer in Westport, Connecticut, where I had lived only five years earlier and which is next to my home town of Wilton.
“I pulled alongside the Beemer and saw right away that the driver was Anne Baxter, who looked pretty good for being 60 or thereabouts. I rolled down my window and said, “Hey, Westport…I’m from Wilton!” And Baxter waved and smiled and cried out “Hiiiiii!” [Originally posted on 2.8.13.]
I realize that many Millennials and Zoomers have no idea who Baxter was, but eventually a generation will come along that has never heard of them. I can’t recall the name of the Westport dealership where Baxter bought her Beemer. For decades Baxter lived at 25 Knapp Street in Easton.
Who’s kidding whom? At best HE dabbles in broadcast/cable/streaming. In a word, I’m a dilletante. Meaning that I see what I have time for, but (a) don’t push me and (b) I tend to avoid comedies. I’m basically a movie, Bluray and 4K streaming guy in search of comfort zones. (Remember movies?) I live on Amazon, Netflix, HBO Max, Vudu and Criterion Channel. I’m nonetheless an educated human being with feelings, opinions, passions, etc. And so I decided to post this. Where’s the harm?
HE preferences are in boldface; random comments inserted. All hail Cate Blanchett, Tracey Ullman and the Mrs. America team.
Best Drama Series
“Better Call Saul” (AMC)…sure.
“The Crown” (Netflix)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu)…nope.
“Killing Eve” (BBC America/AMC)
“The Mandalorian” (Disney Plus)…no! “Ozark” (Netflix)
“Stranger Things” (Netflix) “Succession” (HBO)
Comedy Series
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” (HBO)…HE-styled humor, close to home.
“Dead to Me” (Netflix)
“The Good Place” (NBC)
“Insecure” (HBO)
“The Kominsky Method” (Netflix)
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime Video)
“Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV)
“What We Do in the Shadows” (FX)
Jeremy Irons (“Watchmen”)
Hugh Jackman (“Bad Education”)
Paul Mescal (“Normal People”)
Jeremy Pope (“Hollywood”) Mark Ruffalo (“I Know This Much Is True”)
Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie
Cate Blanchett (“Mrs. America”)
Shira Haas (“Unorthodox”)
Regina King (“Watchmen”)
Octavia Spencer (“Self Made”)
Kerry Washington (“Little Fires Everywhere”)
Michael Crichton‘s Westworld is no one’s idea of a great or even a first-rate film. It’s a primitive sci-fi formula flick. But at least it’s lean and trim and doesn’t tax your patience, which is more than you can say for HBO’s endlessly infuriating Westworld series.
Better yet, the Crichton doesn’t ask you to hang out with an actor like Tennisballhead. And the HBO series doesn’t offer one single moment like the one in which James Brolin and Richard Benjamin groan in irritation when Yul Brynner‘s robot says “draw.” Not one.
When I’m 103 and on my death bed (because I have the constitution of Kirk Douglas), someone will say “what did you do in your life that was good and redeeming?” And I’ll answer, “I hated Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy‘s Westworld with a passion, and I tried to spread that view frequently.”
Yesterday I posted a list of 130-plus scripts (“What Does This List Tell You?“) that have some kind of heat or momentum in the theatrical realm. Some have attracted positive attention but haven’t been produced yet, others have gone before cameras but have yet to open, some are buzzy but still waiting for a green light. The list contains a small sliver of titles that represent original stories; the rest are sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots.
The comment thread was appropriately despairing. At one point (and you knew this was coming) HE commenter Patrick Murtha reminded that “there’s this episodic art form that I think is superior…you may have heard of it…it’s called television.” While movies bang out sequels, remakes and rehashings, television “is superior for telling multi-part stories.” Except, of course, when these multi-part stories devolve into narcotizing, soul-draining puzzleboxing a la Westworld.
To which I replied: “Agreed — high-grade entertainment or profound absorption within a smart, above-average cable/streaming longform is in many ways superior and preferable to what movies are doing now for the most part. Hell, with the presumed-sequel mentality so fully embedded in the theatrical realm, movies themselves have almost become longform in a sense.
“But for those films that still play by the classic rules (a one-off delivering a strong, efficiently constructed story with a satisfying third-act payoff and a haunting thematic undertow within 100 to 160 minutes and sometimes only 85 or 90), a higher bar applies. It’s much harder to deliver the whole bull’s-eye package in a single sitting, but when that happens there’s really nothing better, and in this sense movies will sometimes leave longform cable/streaming in the dust. Every year between 5% and 10% of theatrical movies accomplish this.”
In the same sense it’s a harder and finer thing to write a truly effective 5,000-word short story than a long, elephantine novel running 1200 pages. Which is the more satisfying East of Eden narrative — the long, sprawling, Biblically-infused tale of the Trask and Hamilton families in John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, or Elia Kazan‘s pared-down screen version that concentrated on the Trasks (the focus of the novel’s second half) and primarily on Cal or Caleb (James Dean‘s character)?
Season #2 of Westworld has been airing for a few days now, but I’m pretty firm about not watching it. At all. Not this horse. Some other time.
Once again, the Brenkilco assessment: “The problem with episodic TV narratives designed to blow minds is that the form and intention are at odds. A show designed to run until the audience gets tired of it cannot by definition have a satisfying structure. It can only keep throwing elements into the mix until, like Lost or Twin Peaks, it collapses under the weight of its own intriguing but random complications.”
In short, my loathing for season #1 — that feeling of being fiddled and diddled without end, of several storylines unfolding and expanding for no purpose than to keep unfolding and expanding — is such that I’m determined to hate season #2 without watching it. I don’t care how that sounds or what it implies. Come hell or high water, I will not go there.
One question for those who saw the season #2 opener: Now that the host revolt is in full swing, it seems logical that the Westworld staffers, naturally concerned about their own survival as well as lawsuits and whatnot, would call in outside law enforcement. Perhaps even state militia. What’s preventing this? What am I missing?
From a 4.20 review by CNN’s Brian Lowry: “The first half of [season #2] repeats the show’s more impenetrable drawbacks — playing three-dimensional chess, while spending too much time sadistically blowing away pawns. The result is a show that’s easier to admire than consistently like.
“The push and pull of Westworld is that it grapples with deep intellectual conundrums while reveling in a kind of numbing pageant of death and destruction. Where the latter is organic to the world of HBO’s other huge genre hit, Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always feel integral to the story here, but rather a means of killing (and killing and killing) time.”
“For all its strengths, the series [is] a bit of a slog, at times, as the wheels turn along the dusty, blood-specked road to wherever this maze leads.”
Posted on 11.28.16: Last night a pair of posts about HBO’s vaguely infuriating Westworld series — one by Matt of Sleaford, the other by brenkilco — really hit the nail on the head.
Brenkilco: “The problem with episodic TV narratives designed to blow minds is that the form and intention are at odds. A show designed to run until the audience gets tired of it cannot by definition have a satisfying structure. It can only keep throwing elements into the mix until, like Lost or Twin Peaks, it collapses under the weight of its own intriguing but random complications.
“Teasing this stuff out is easy. But eventually the rent comes due. Dramatic resolutions are demanded. The threads have to be pulled together. And that’s when things gets ugly.”
Matt of Sleaford: “Westworld is a puzzle-box show, which is kind of the opposite of a soap opera. Puzzle-box shows, like the aforementioned Lost and X-Files, can be fun to chew on while they’re progressing. But the solution is almost always anticlimactic. And though it may seem counterintuitive, puzzle-box shows are less effective in the internet era, because someone in the vast sea of commenters is almost certain to solve the puzzle before the end (see: Thrones, Game of).”
“We’re not gonna take it! / No, we ain’t gonna take it! / Oh, we’re not gonna take it anymore!” — anthem of the long-horned steers who rebel against the Westworld owners and engineers in Season 2, which launches on 4.22.18.
From “Westworld Hate Will Continue To Spread,” posted on 12.5.16: “Like many others, I’ve gone totally negative on Westworld over the last three or four episodes. The HBO miniseries finally ended last night, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a major revolt going on. I hate this series with a passion for just layering on the layers, for plotzing, diddly-fucking, detouring, belly-stabbing, meandering and puzzleboxing to its heart’s content.
Yul Brynner owns this scene in The Ten Commandments. Poor Anne Baxter is defeated by the grotesque dialogue, but somehow Brynner isn’t bruised. His deep baritone voice, buff bod and sexual confidence (he was 34 or 35 at the time) rule.
I wonder if this scene would be written, much less go before the cameras, in today’s climate. Things have gotten so political. I’m trying to imagine the reaction to a scene in a big-budget, major-studio film in which an arrogant sexist ruler (a) professes a complete lack of interest in whether or not his presumed future wife loves him and (b) is only interested in conjugal rights once she becomes his queen.
Adam McKay‘s Dick Cheney biopic with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong. Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots. Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign for The Wife. Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased starring Lucas Hedges. Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here. Alex Garland‘s delayed Annihilation.
All of them 2018 releases, and numbering 19. Not bad for a starting roster.
What follows is a copy of an 11.20.16 piece about likely award-season contenders of 2017, but with the links changed to 2018 forecasts:
It’s time to spitball what the Best Picture hotties will be twelve months hence, or just after the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday.
Every January I begin to compile a list of likely or at least promising-sounding goodies. I thought I’d start a little earlier so that by New Year’s Day I’ll have a half-decent 2018 roster to build from. It’s always hard to cut through the smoke and try to figure out what might poke through. Right now I can’t see much out there. If you check the usual sites and sources (Wikipedia, Box-Office Mojo release schedule) it’s all the same old nauseating crap — the usual mind-melting, idiot-brand, animal-friendly superhero franchise CG Asian-market slop.
Theatrical films are slowly dying, certainly if you go by the product being cranked out by the five families these days, but never say die. Netflix, Amazon, Megan Ellison, A24, Scott Rudin, Sony Pictures Classics…anyone and anything that turns the key. Ambitious theatrical fare…what is that these days? Most believe the form can only go downhill, but the discipline of having to put it all together and cram it into 95 or 110 or 125 or 140 minutes (as opposed to the relative ease of sprawling Westworld-like longforms)…there’s something so vivid and extra-feeling when movies somehow manage to do that thing and deliver like it matters. I wouldn’t want to live in a realm in which people aren’t trying like hell to keep doing this, each and every year.