"Best" Picture

A few months ago, I wrote that The Substance was the movie that may have finally broken me of needing to see Oscar-nominated movies just because they're Oscar-nominated. Well... it turns out that was just the first blow of a one-two punch that might have cured me of needing to see Oscar-winning movies as well. The year's Best Picture winner, Anora, hit streaming recently. I decided to watch it and see what all the fuss was about. And I still have no idea.

Anora (who goes by Ani) is a young stripper who one night, because she speaks Russian, is tapped to entertain Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya begins hiring Anora outside of her club with increasing frequency -- and soon, the two get married in Las Vegas. But this rash action brings down the wrath of Vanya's parents, who send in goons to detain the couple and annul the marriage.

I've heard Anora described as Pretty Woman crossed with The Godfather -- though I struggle to see how a fan of either would like the combination here. If you're up for the light rags-to-riches story of a sex worker clawing out a new life for herself, I think you'll find neither enough "rom" or "com" in Anora. The movie has moments that seem to be intended as dark comedy -- but even if they make you laugh, they would seem like curdled milk next to the bubbly champagne of a typical feel-good romance.

The first 40 minutes of the film feel like borderline pornography, as Mikey Madison secures herself a Best Actress Oscar seemingly by a willingness to be even more naked, simulating even more sex, than when Emma Stone won for Poor Things in the previous year. And at no point does any genuine romance appear to blossom between Ani and Vanya. I don't think it's supposed to... and yet the rest of the movie seems to turn on Ani's investment in the relationship, not merely what she gets out of it.

If I'm dubious of what the rom-com audience would make of Anora, I'm even more skeptical about what fans of gangster films would find here. Bear in mind, please, that gangster stories in general usually leave me cold. (I'm one of the few heretics who dislikes all the Godfather films as much as most people seem to hate Part III.) I imagine much of the appeal stems from the intersection of violence and domestic life, the sense that criminal danger is a true threat at any moment. (At least, that's what I feel in the handful of stories that do work for me, like Breaking Bad.)

I felt an odd lack of danger in Anora. I grew too bored to keep close track, but I believe there's not a single gun anywhere in the film. Of course, violence can take other forms -- and in particular, brutish men don't need a gun to menace a vulnerable woman. But at no point does Anora ever really come off as a vulnerable woman. Maybe that should be seen as a credit to both the character and the movie. And yet once the "gangster" section of the story kicks in, it takes only minutes for it to become clear that even in situations where Anora isn't in control, she isn't in any danger. While I'd like to think I'm not looking for only the cheap thrills of danger in this movie, I would like some source of suspense or tension in the ensuing hour-and-a-half.

Instead, I found Anora to be deeply boring at best, actively off-putting at worse. (Seriously, what's with the repeated homophobic slurs that don't do anything to further plot or differentiate characters?) By the time the end credits mercifully arrived, I was sure I'd watched what had to be the worst Academy Award Best Picture winner I'd ever seen. Although a moment's reflection made me realize, "nope, I've seen The English Patient," the fact remains that it's close competition.

I don't usually make time these days to blog about entertainment I dislike. But I figure I have to make an exception for an Academy Award-winning Best Picture. And because I wish others had been blunt enough to have saved me the two hours and 20 minutes, I'll mince no more words. I give Anora an F.

The Gang's All Here (and All In?)

When someone first tells you about the game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, you're likely to wonder how it would even work. A trick-taking game that's somehow cooperative? But it does work, brilliantly. And the innovation has spawned a sequel, many imitators, and a bunch of new games trying to apply player cooperation to inherently competitive gameplay.

The Gang is a cooperative game for 3 to 6 players, who try to pull off three successful bank heists before tripping three alarms. The mechanism for this is poker. The group plays a standard hand of Texas Hold 'Em, but at each moment where there would normally be a betting round, each player instead selects a chip with a number on it. This is the only way to pass information to the other players, who otherwise cannot discuss the contents or quality of their hands. After the final round of "betting" (chip taking), the players reveal their hands in order. The player who took the lowest-valued chip in that final round must have the worst hand, and so on up to the player who took the highest-valued chip, who must have the best hand. You succeed or fail completely as a group, playing a "best of five hands" format to win or lose the game.

Board gamers -- especially the ones trying to maintain a smaller, curated game collection -- will often talk about whether one game "kills" another, offering the same thrills and more in a new package that displaces some earlier release. I don't think that The Gang is a "Crew killer." But I think it does show that there's room for more games following in The Crew's footsteps.

For one thing, a lot more people are familiar with poker than, say, Hearts, or Bridge, or any of the trick-taking games commonly played with a standard deck of cards. If you're looking for a game that's easy to teach, and accommodates players with a wide range of gaming experience, The Gang feels like the far more approachable option to me over The Crew.

As a practical matter, the fact that The Gang takes up to six players is notable. The Crew caps out at five (and, realistically, is far better with four). Not only can The Gang take more, it's actually better (or at least, more of a challenge) the more players you have. And thanks to the simultaneous, cooperative play and people's likely familiarity with Texas Hold 'Em, it's still a fast game with six.

That said, if you're bound and determined to have only one game in your collection -- this, or a version of The Crew -- I'd say you're unlikely to choose The Gang. First, there's not as much variety here as there is in The Crew. The different goals you pursue in The Crew (especially in the Mission Deep Sea version) can make different hands feel wildly different in strategy. The Gang has less variety; you're always trying to rank the strength of your poker hand. Sure, the nature of Texas Hold' Em itself can make that trickier some times more than others, but you're always thinking about the same basic possibilities.

The specific thing you wind up doing in The Gang can feel quite similar too. When another player takes the lowest chip, and you're convinced you have a worse hand than they do, you're allowed to take the chip from them for yourself. They're allowed to take it back. You can "debate" through the passing of chips as much as you want -- so long as you don't actually say anything about the cards in your hand. And since you can't actually make any persuasive arguments -- as you could in, say, other cooperative games like Pandemic where players find disagreement -- you kind of just wind up having one player eventually say, "okaaaaaay" in a tone that clearly says they don't think it's okay.

In other words, the gameplay of The Gang can get a little repetitive over time. I think in recognition of this -- or at least to inject more variety generally into the system, the game includes a series of "temporary rules" cards you can optionally use. Whenever you fail at a hand, you reveal a condition for the next hand that helps out. Conversely, when you succeed at a hand, you reveal one that makes the next hand more challenging.

Regardless of whether you use those optional conditions or not, the game generally stays interesting throughout its quick play time -- especially if you're playing with a new player or even a new mix of experienced players. Each person has their own estimation of the strength of their own poker hand, which simply might not match how any other player might estimate the same hand. One player might use "betting" along the way to try to indicate potential (a "drawing hand," in poker parlance), while another player might always be trying to state simply how good the hand they have right now is. These quirks of communication make The Gang a different experience for each group that might play it.

I give The Gang a B+. There's a chance that playing it might just make you want to play Texas Hold 'Em or The Crew instead. But taken on its own terms, it's a fast-paced, fun enough experience.

Enterprise Flashback: The Seventh

The seventh episode of the second season of Enterprise was the cheekily titled "The Seventh."

T'Pol is tasked by the Vulcan High Command to capture an escaped fugitive: a surgically-altered Vulcan who refused to return home after the completion of his undercover mission. This is a mission she failed at once before, decades earlier. But it soon becomes clear that T'Pol has repressed certain memories about her earlier mission.

This episode is pushing hard on the door the writers tried just recently to open, the notion that Archer and T'Pol might become a romantic couple. For no reason more than "I trust you," T'Pol invites Archer along on her secret mission. As things unfold, it's suggested that the information T'Pol hides from Archer is really just information she's hiding from herself. Ultimately, Archer has to help her face emotions she's not used to grappling with. And, I guess we're supposed to believe, the two become closer for it.

Except that Archer is acting quite out of character throughout the episode. Sure, he gets pissy early on about being jerked around by the Vulcans. But once he and T'Pol are on the mission and it appears that the Vulcans have lied about the fugitive they're chasing, it's T'Pol who questions her superiors and not Archer. Where is Archer's ingrained distrust of Vulcans?

That's just one of several weird inconsistencies throughout the episode. Much is made of an acid-drenched landing platform that the characters can't cross, stranding them on the planet for a few hours. But when a fire destroys their shelter, they DO all somehow get across (though we aren't shown how). The final climax centers on a classic "you won't shoot me" standoff -- as though phasers don't have a stun setting that undercuts the tension.

And more importantly, there's a huge hole at the core that's never adequately addressed. There are no doubt countless intelligence agents who could have been tasked to bring in this Vulcan fugitive. Where's the logic in asking T'Pol to do it? She specifically had her past memories of this target tampered with, so it's not like she has reliable special knowledge she can draw on. Why risk having the buried memories resurface (which, predictably, is exactly what happens)?

Perhaps above all: why structure this whole episode as a mystery, only to give it a title like "The Seventh" that's a total giveaway? The first time you hear that T'Pol once chased down six fugitives, you pretty much know what the big secret is going to be.

The episode is slow to get going. A situation that would have been set up in a single briefing room scene on Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Voyager takes an entire act to unfold here. First, T'Pol won't tell anyone anything about her secret mission. Then she confides small details to Archer. Then it's Trip's turn to complain about all the secrecy. Finally T'Pol provides her personal backstory. None of this feels like a slow revelation of context that's the hallmark of skilled writing. There's no actual suspense, and little new context as more information is revealed. It just feels like the episode is being stretched for time.

But the episode does have a couple of things going for it. One is guest star Bruce Davison, a real "that guy" of an actor who plays the Vulcan fugitive Menos. His career has included a wide enough variety of characters that you can never really be sure whether this one is telling the truth. He seems awfully convincing when he says he's being persecuted by the Vulcan High Command, and guilty of no actual crimes. But when he's ultimately revealed as a truly bad guy smuggling bioweapons, that feels equally as plausible.

Another strong element of the episode is the subplot following Trip taking command of Enterprise. While this would have been better to see in season one (after all, I'm pretty sure Trip's taken command before this), it's fun to watch him struggle. First, he's putting on airs, watching water polo and inviting crew to dinner because that's what the "cap'n" would do. Then he's overwhelmed by the demands of the job, wanting to put off every consequential decision until Archer is back to make it. Finally, he has to put an extra pip on his collar and actually pretend to be Archer on a call with the Vulcans.

Other observations:

• I really do like the way Vulcan writing looks. It's just a nice bit of design.

• At one point, we see a sulking Archer bouncing his water polo ball off the wall of his quarters. Whoever lives on the other side of the wall must hate being next to the captain's quarters.

• Star Trek has had its share of scenes in alien bars over the years, and often struggles to include music that feels appropriate to the setting. Here, they don't even try. The bar in this episode has no music at all.

I feel like putting Archer and T'Pol together overrode all other story considerations for this episode. I think a much better version of the story would have been just leaving the mission at T'Pol and Mayweather, as is suggested at the outset. Watching Travis struggle with helping the emotional breakdown of a superior officer could have been quite compelling. As it stands, though, I have to take the fun where I find it in the "Trip in command" subplot, and give "The Seventh" a C+.

It's in the Bag

Director Steven Soderbergh has served up a one-two punch at the movie theater to open 2025. I missed his first movie a few weeks ago, Presence. But this weekend, I did catch Black Bag.

A British spy is tasked with investigating five people who might be a traitor to his organization -- and one of them is his own wife. But when practiced liars are pitted against each other, it's nearly impossible to tell what's true.

Having recently finished the television adaptation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, that (and the original movie) were certainly on my mind when watching Black Bag. There really aren't that many moment-to-moment similarities, but to distill things down, Black Bag is a more cerebral version of the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" story. There are no chases, no epic shoot-outs, and very little of what most people would call "action." Still, I found Black Bag to be full of intriguing suspense and engaging cat-and-mouse games.

It also feels incredibly fast-paced. Black Bag clocks in at barely more than 90 minutes, and packs in a ton of story in that small package. The plot is a touch Macguffiny, with the actual "why" of it all not being hugely important. Yet it's still enough for the movie to lull you into an expectation, only to thwart it a few times along the way. (The script is the work of the incredibly successful David Koepp, so this should probably come as no surprise.)

Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to sleek and stylish scheming. This movie draws a lot on Out of Sight and his Ocean's trilogy, in the way it's about clever people being clever. But it's different too -- much more controlled in the use of long single takes and tight closeups. It's like a drawing room version of a James Bond movie.

And it even has a James Bond in the cast. The supporting players include Pierce Brosnan, along with Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and others. But the real draw, of course, is the two leads: Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. Both excel at portraying people who keep their cards close to the vest. They don't feel like emotionless ciphers, but you can't tell exactly what's going on behind the eyes -- perfect for a twisty spy thriller.

It's perhaps nostalgia for the earlier Soderbergh films I've mentioned here that makes me think Black Bag is not quite as good. But I still thoroughly enjoyed it -- I'd give it at least a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Marauders

Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa, is a massively influential film. It famously inspired The Magnificent Seven, a high star-powered remake, and countless other stories. If you bother to click on that pile of links to my older posts, you'll learn that none of those versions of the story resonated particularly well with me. So it will likely come as no surprise that I didn't think much of Enterprise's take on it, the episode "Marauders."

The Enterprise stops to refuel at a small mining colony, but finds them unwilling and unable to help. They soon learn this is because of the regular visits from a group of Klingons who have left the colonists barely able to survive. Archer sets out to teach the colony to stand up for itself and repel these marauders.

Even assuming that you like the Seven Samurai story structure more than I do, this episode undermines the structure in several ways that I think compromise its effectiveness. First, the "samurai" in this story actually need something from the "villagers." While it's true that Kirosawa's samurai are paid to help in the original story, Enterprise's need for fuel gives them a more personal stake in this story that mutes the nobility of helping a group of helpless strangers.

In Seven Samurai (and The Magnificent Seven), not all of the saviors survive; some end up dying to protect the villagers. But the seven main cast members of a Star Trek series all have script immunity, of course, once again undercutting the nobility inherent in the original story's structure. And they don't kill any Klingons, either, simply trapping them all in a ring of fire and telling them to "go on, git!" What in the prior 36 years of Klingon behavior suggests to the audience that this will be a sufficient deterrent? (As usual, T'Pol is right: this time when she says that likely killing the marauders is the only way to end the unjust situation.)

Most critically, the mining colonists don't ask for help. Archer observes the colony leader caving to the Klingons, and decides that he needs to teach them all to defend themselves. And sure, by the time all is said and done, it seems to be the right decision. (Though crucially, we'll never be there to see if the Klingons return someday when Enterprise is not around, and how that goes.) These "samurai" are not answering a plea for help, they're forcing their help on a group who hasn't asked for it.

But as usual, Enterprise has excellent production values going for it. (Indeed -- my greatest discovery on this re-watch of the series has been just how much things improved between Voyager and Enterprise.) This episode is filmed largely on location. (In a quarry, from the look of it.) There's elaborate camera work including the use of a crane. There are huge set pieces brought in to create the environment of the colony. Up in orbit, we get a cool new tanker ship design -- clearly Klingon, but clearly meant for hauling.

The climax feels a bit more "Home Alone" than combat, but the action is captured very well by director Mike Vejar. T'Pol's defense-heavy martial arts is well-conceived, we get plenty of phaser blasts to satisfy (although Malcolm Reed displays the accuracy of an Imperial stormtrooper), and that outdoor environment is maximized in the visuals.

Other observations:

• T'Pol's desert outfit is pure white. Where's the logic in that?

• The Klingons have transporters, and aren't at all reluctant to use them as Starfleet is.

• Seriously, though, what is Reed good at? He can't shoot straight, and he can't teach others to shoot straight either: Hoshi is shown to a better shooting instructor.

• It's not that I want them to kill the cute kid that hits it off with Trip. But it feels emblematic of the "Nerf toy" approach of this episode that he never even feels in serious jeopardy.

Sky high production values really do go a long way to making up for a weak script. But I still find "Marauders" to be a low C+ of an episode.

It's a Good Performance, I'll Grant You That

Can a movie with a strong opening and one great performance still be worthwhile despite a jumbled mess of a middle and final act? That's the question I've been wrestling with after watching Heretic.

This horror movie from last year is about two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton. When they knock at the door of the reclusive and mysterious Mr. Reed, and accept his invitation to come inside for his wife's blueberry pie, they quickly come to regret their decision when they become trapped in the house. An uncomfortable conversation about religion soon gives way to an ominous test of faith... and then far worse.

I think it's important to classify Heretic as a horror movie and not a suspense movie or thriller. Otherwise, the audience may find itself trapped just like its Mormon characters, having gone too far too escape a situation they didn't set out to find. Heretic is ultimately a gory movie in which its protagonists are menaced by a violent man -- and you really ought to be prepared for that going in.

But I don't think the movie presents that way at all in its summary, nor does it seem to be unfolding that way for the first 30 to 45 minutes. At first the movie's villain, Mr. Reed, comes off as an intellectual "Jigsaw killer," a lightning-fast mind who has thought of everything and has the created the perfect cerebral trap from which his victims can't escape. And for my money, this is when the movie is at its best.

Before the blood starts flying, Heretic actually makes excellent points about religion -- and even allows one of its missionary protagonists to make excellent counterpoints. There's just the right amount of moral debate on display, and it's perfectly woven into an unsettling and tense situation where you feel like anything could happen next. Strangely, Mr. Reed seems to me to be at his most menacing before he actually does anything. His bark is so deliciously malign than his bite seems less interesting to me. Plus, Heretic's plot twists -- of which there are several -- grow increasingly far-fetched. If you like a movie willing to take big swings, you'll probably be with Heretic all the way. But I was missing the early cat-and-mouse tension long before the end credits rolled.

It's likely the reason I found Heretic's first half-or-so so compelling is because of the casting of Mr. Reed. Hugh Grant delivers an absolutely amazing performance. I'm hard-pressed to think of a more compelling "mannered villain" since Anthony Hopkins' indelible take on Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. He puts the perfect spin on Reed -- a mix of professorial elitism and bottled menace. You wouldn't need to know you were watching a horror movie, wouldn't need the dramatic music heightening the danger, to feel that this character was a looming threat. You just feel like he's a predator playing with his food.

Heretic is nearly a "three-hander" play, and so it's worth praising the other two performers in the mix. Sophie Thatcher is good as Sister Barnes, the more strong-willed of the missionaries whose answer to this terrible situation is "fight." Chloe East is also good as Sister Paxton, her timid partner whose initial answer is "flight." In any case, Hugh Grant's already-great performance is made better still by having two good scene partners to work with.

Ultimately, Heretic lost me. I'd only give it a C, and normally I wouldn't have even bothered to blog about it. But it starts so good, and Hugh Grant's villainous performance was so exciting to me, that I felt compelled to at least partially praise it. Perhaps fans of the right horror subgenre -- a wilder, weirder one -- will like it. Perhaps going into it with more properly calibrated expectations would help too. In short... perhaps this is for you?

Hit Movie?

Glen Powell is one of Hollywood's more recently-minted pretty boys. While he has popped up in the occasional popcorn movie I've watched, I never had the impression he was much of an actor until I streamed Hit Man on Netflix.

Hit Man is very loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered college professor who works on the side for the police department. One day, he's made to step into a sting operation and pose as a contract killer. When he proves surprisingly adept at this, the one-off performance becomes a regular gig. Then one sting brings unexpected complications, as he becomes tangled up in the case, romantically involved with "the mark," and made to keep pretending to be someone he's not.

My route into Hit Man was knowing that it was a movie co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. He's made movies I've hated, but many more that I've truly loved. (And that's not even getting into Dazed and Confused, which many people seem to revere.) I feel I can rely on a Linklater movie to at least be worth a shot.

I didn't know that star Glen Powell was the other co-writer on this project, nor that he'd probably helped Linklater craft this as a vehicle to show what he can do as an actor that his other projects hadn't tapped. In that respect, Hit Man is a surprising success. The story essentially has him playing two characters -- the real Gary Johnson and his dangerous alter ego "Ron." And on top of that, we get tastes of a dozen other one-off hit man personas, each a fun little riff on a rapid-fire improv sketch premise. It turns out, Glen Powell can act!

But since he's purportedly half of the team responsible for this script, the bigger question might be: can he write? I think the answer is... mostly? Movies tend to have a three-act structure, but Hit Man is unusual in that each of those acts feels stylistically like a completely different movie. It starts as an undercover cop story, albeit one clearly striking a comedic tone. By act two, it has become a rom-com, the quirky and light tones lingering even as the real meat of the story arrives. But in the final act, Hit Man almost becomes a film noir -- a much more serious movie with many of the character and plot conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre.

It seems as though the movie's north star is to try to keep you guessing. Every time it changes modes, it settles in just long enough for you to think, "okay, I think I'm on this wavelength," before suddenly changing everything up again. And while it is refreshing to not feel like you know every twist a story is going to take, Hit Man takes some wild swings, especially in the last 30 minutes.

Still, I can make the case for each "segment" of this movie being worthy and entertaining. The cast helps a lot here. When Hit Man wants more than anything else to be amusing, Retta and Sanjay Rao are there, playing a pair of police officers with truly funny banter. When it wants to be a romance, Adria Arjona is there as Glen Powell's romantic foil, giving a solid performance and generating all kinds of chemistry with her screen partner. When then movie wants to be suspenseful, Austin Amelio and Evan Holtzman are two weaselly characters each posing a separate danger to the main character.

The result is that Hit Man is both an oddity you can't easy compare to one single movie. ("If you liked that, you'll love Hit Man!") But it's a movie with perhaps half a dozen different in-roads. ("If you liked that -- or that, or that, or that -- maybe you'll like Hit Man.") I give it a B.

Enterprise Flashback: A Night in Sickbay

Enterprise was created by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, and the two wrote a large portion of the episodes during the first two seasons. I wonder if in fact they were writing so many of the scripts that they were starting to get bored of it. At least, I wonder what other explanation could account for "A Night in Sickbay," an episode where they seemingly just decided to just troll everyone.

When Porthos falls critically ill after tagging along on an away mission, Archer spends a long, fraught night at his side in Sickbay, as Phlox tries all sorts of methods to restore his health.

This episode trolls the audience by putting Porthos (the best character on Enterprise) in jeopardy for cheap theatrics. Either you never believe that Enterprise would actually kill the dog, in which case this is a true waste of an hour... or you actually believe these monsters would kill the dog for the sake of a one-off episode, in which case any trust you might have been extending the writers is lost. Meanwhile, all the dog lovers in the audience have to see Porthos forlorn and abandoned in the decon chamber, desperately hugging Archer's surgical glove for any bit of physical contact he can get, and ghoulishly submerged in water.

The episode trolls anyone who until this point has tried to defend Archer as a well-intentioned starship captain finding his way. Here, he's a clueless Karen of a dog owner who lets Porthos pee on a sacred tree and then can't understand how this has caused a problem. (What if some alien creature came aboard Enterprise and took a dump on the warp core?) Archer whines about how hard it is to be diplomatic, yells at everyone who points out this whole crisis is entirely of his own making... and Phlox tells us he's probably this way just because he needs to get laid.

The episode trolls the entire cast of the show. Dominic Keating and Anthony Montgomery are only brought in to stand around for a few seconds in Archer's dream sequence. John Billingsley has to dangle a giant origami crane on a stick as he makes weird screeching noises. Linda Park and Jolene Blalock once again endure the indignity of rubbing goo on each other in the decon chamber.

And poor Scott Bakula. He has to deliver the line that "Starfleet didn't send us out here to humiliate ourselves" as he stands in his underwear and smears goo on a dog. He has to manufacture sexual chemistry with one of his co-stars out of nowhere, after 30 episodes of the show have suggested nothing of the kind between the characters. He has to deliver Freudian slips like "breast" and "lips." And he has to go shirtless, drape beads on his head, and wield a chainsaw -- all intended to look as ridiculous as it sounds.

The episode trolls the entire production department. Props has to come up with fake beagles to perform surgery on. Set construction has to come up with a graveyard for a few seconds of screen time in a ridiculous dream sequence. Visual effects has to use CG to depict Phlox scraping his tongue and a bat swooping around Sickbay. Paul Baillargeon is made to compose some of the most over-the-top music yet heard on the show, just to make any of this seem interesting.

This episode feel like it trolls reality itself. Are we really now being expected to "ship" Archer and T'Pol as a romantic couple? To believe that Archer, a person with no medical experience at all, should assist in a major surgery on his own dog? And that he thinks it's a good idea to engage Phlox in distracting conversation while doing it?

There would be absolutely no redeeming qualities to this episode whatsoever, were it not for the Herculean efforts of John Billingsley. Phlox is very much the "Neelix" of this Star Trek series, but the writers have at least done Phlox the favor of writing a competent character with actual skills. That gives more room for the clowning around, which Billingsley is excellent at. This episode is written as though it's funny, when largely it's just silly without actually generating laughs. But Billingsley is the exception, who somehow makes entertaining Phlox's weird quirks from public toenail trimming to Frankenstein-like surgical ideas. He even nails the closest thing this episode gets to a "moral," a conversation near the end of the episode about cultural insensitivity. John Billingsley as Phlox doesn't make this episode good, but he does at least make it watchable.

Other observations:

• Nope. I'm tapped out. What were they thinking?

John Billingsley is so good that I'm actually going to give "A Night in Sickbay" a C-. But make no mistake, this is the worst episode of Enterprise to date, and I feel embarrassed for the people who made it.

Grade C-

No Pain, No Gain (for Kieran Culkin)

Kieran Culkin recently won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The week before that happened, I watched the movie he would win for, A Real Pain.

Two cousins, David and Benji, have decided to travel together to Poland for a tour of their family heritage. The two are a classic "odd couple": one fastidious and the other messy, one reserved and the other outgoing... and also: one a fairly put-together family man and the other, we learn, troubled with mental health issues. As the cousins travel with a tour group, we gradually find out more about the circumstances that led them to this trip.

A Real Pain is the creation of actor Jesse Eisenberg, who not only stars in, but wrote and directed this film. It's the sort of movie you'd expect an actor to create as they try to expand their career to writing and directing -- a character-driven story built for a limited budget and an art house audience. There's barely a story here. David and Benji take their trip, have experiences, and are likely changed by it all... but it's hard to say what exactly the movie is about, how exactly the characters grow, or what exactly the message is.

There are plenty of movies like this, and they're generally not for me. But such movies live or die by the casting, and I endorse what the Academy has said by awarding Kieran Culkin an Oscar: the performances elevate this material. And if these sort of quiet character studies do align with your taste in movies? Then you might find A Real Pain to be really great.

Interestingly, the movie doesn't come off as a vanity project for its writer-director-star. The bestowing of the Oscar on Culkin is the big tip-off: the showier, meatier role in this movie is absolutely that of Benji. And Culkin plays the part wonderfully, infusing the character with all the obnoxious annoyances it requires without ever coming off as a caricature. Benji is recognizably infuriating, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who doesn't unreservedly love every single person in their family.

Eisenberg does give himself one great monologue at the heart of the movie... though even this moment is ultimately about Benji, the titular character who demands full attention at all times. But otherwise, Eisenberg was content to let Culkin take the spotlight and earn his awards, while also giving room for smaller, subtle performances from a cast including Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, and others.

One story choice I wrestled with was the backdrop of the Holocaust. The journey of David and Benji is absolutely centered on their Jewish heritage; they wouldn't be traveling to Poland otherwise. And the scene in which they visit the concentration camp Majdanek is one of the most powerful in the movie. But also, that sort of heaviness (in that scene and others) really overwhelms the overall tone of the movie. I feel like A Real Pain is meant to be at least equal parts funny and dramatic, perhaps even primarily a comedy. But I sensed hardly any lightness from it at all. I felt every minute of the movie's 90-minute run time -- not because pacing was off, but because the serious topics it engaged with so filled the space.

Ultimately, I'd give A Real Pain a B-. I absolutely get how it was an Oscar-winning movie for a performer while being nominated almost nowhere else. But I think it was a worthy performance, one you might want to check out.

Enterprise Flashback: Dead Stop

Enterprise was already dabbling in serialized storytelling with its Temporal Cold War storyline. But following an encounter with the Romulans that gutted the ship, the series explored another way of continuing story in "Dead Stop."

Hopelessly damaged after the impact of a Romulan mine, Enterprise is forced to seek help -- and finds it in a mysterious, uncrewed space station that will carry out extensive, automated repairs at a bargain price. But Archer suspects there's some hidden danger they can't see. And soon, one crew member in particular pays a very steep price indeed.

With this episode, I feel like Enterprise is playing with the model of serialized storytelling that Strange New Worlds would swoop in and perfect two decades later: stand-alone stories that nevertheless have connective tissue throughout a season. The "special sauce" that's missing here is that Strange New Worlds episodes always center one of the main characters in the drama. "Dead Stop" is built on an intriguing enough science fiction version of a devil's bargain. Yet there really isn't much growth for any of the characters.

Look hard, and maybe you'd find that growth for Archer? He's the one who first gets suspicious of this unusually benevolent space station. For once, T'Pol is not the "voice of reason" being ignored by the other characters. She's the one arguing that some species are just magnanimous, and there's no need to ascribe sinister purpose to the situation.

What's funny about that, though, is that it's basically an inversion of a Star Trek plot. Very often, our starship heroes are just out there exploring for its own sake. They encounter some alien species that can't imagine the Federation is just there out of the goodness of its heart. They want to know "the angle," and we the audience shake our heads at how backward these aliens are to not immediately sign on to this utopian future. Here, our Starfleet heroes are the "backward aliens" (as this prequel series often paints them), unwilling to believe that an unknown alien race could be benevolent.

Though of course, they're not, or this wouldn't be much of an episode. We learn (decades old spoiler!) that the station's computer core is a network of captured people, and Travis Mayweather is taken to join that "mainframe." And this isn't a "misunderstanding" where unknown builders of a 2001: A Space Odyssey style station simply don't understand how "lesser life forms" might value one person. They totally try to hide Mayweather's abduction by swapping him out for a faked dead body that Phlox cleverly identifies.

This leads to the one scene that comes closest to the character-driven drama I want more of from Enterprise. Hoshi Sato comes by during "Mayweather's" autopsy, and talks about a personal memory of him as she struggles to accept that he's gone. If there had ever been even the slightest inkling before this moment that the two characters had any friendship at all, I feel like this would have played beautifully. As it is, it's just a stark example of the thing Enterprise as a series ought to have been doing more of all along.

But the episode is really only interested in the sci-fi mystery of it all. Reed and Trip sneak around to try and find the truth. Later, they team with Archer and T'Pol to trick the station. A heist-like plan comes together, allowing them to free Mayweather and destroy the station. Action! Adventure! And a Twilight Zone-like ending that shows the debris of the station beginning to repair itself. It's all fun enough, in a sugary dessert kind of way that lacks narrative nourishment.

Other observations:

• I will never become numb to a cute Porthos bit. The scene of him seeking out the squeak in the ship is totally adorable.

• Its a fun callback to mention the scratch Trip put in the Enterprise back in the series premiere.

• Trip and Reed have a short exchange that's essentially about the potential of AI taking their jobs. It hits a lot differently today than it did when the episode was new.

• It used to be in season one that the decon chamber was the excuse to have the actors show some skin. Now in season two, no excuse is needed to just have Mayweather sitting around Sickbay in his underwear. But hey, if you've got an actor as ripped as Anthony Montgomery is here, I guess you'd better use that. Don't give him anything to really do, but have him sit there and look pretty.

• They make a point of saying that the other miscellaneous aliens captured by this station have been there for years. We're meant to understand that they're past saving, thus forgiving the fact that our heroes don't save them.

"Dead Stop" has some spooky moments. But with it having ultimately nothing to say beyond its premise, I feel it only deserves a B-.

Oh, Mickey, You're So Fine I Guess

It's always interesting to see what an Academy Award winner takes on as their first project after winning the prize. For writer-director Bong Joon Ho -- whose movie Parasite won him awards for both jobs, as well as Best Picture -- the next project was Mickey 17.

In the near future, Mickey Barnes is desperate to escape a bad situation on Earth, and winds up in an arguably worse one: he's on an interplanetary expedition to colonize a new planet. Specifically, he's the mission's "expendable" crewmember, someone sent into dangerous situations -- to invariably be killed -- because he can be "reprinted" to live again. When a strange alien encounter leads to a surprising non-death, Mickey suddenly faces more permanent consequences.

Science fiction was in Bong Joon Ho's background before he made Parasite, with Snowpiercer perhaps being the most widely known. Mickey 17 is cast from a similar mold -- but to me even more resembles the work of Terry Gilliam. The movie's irreverent tone, larger-than-life performances, and bizarre visuals all feel to me like they have a lot in common with Brazil (a movie I did not care for), and the limited future sequences of 12 Monkeys (a movie I truly loved).

It is for this reason that I'm choosing to blog about Mickey 17. To get right to it: I didn't love Mickey 17. And these days, I tend not to bother posting about movies I generally don't enjoy. But in this case, not only were there a few aspects to the film I did like, but I feel like I can clearly imagine the audience that would love all of it. That audience seems like it would include many people who read my blog, who might appreciate a recommendation.

I felt for most of the movie like it wasn't effectively "picking a lane" -- or at least, felt like it wasn't striking a balance between comedy and drama that worked for me. Yet I still found the opening act quite engaging.

I don't generally go for gonzo characters and performances in what mostly feels like a grounded-in-reality movie. But I kind of dug them here. Why does it seem like Robert Pattinson is doing a Steve Buscemi impression for the entire movie? I couldn't say -- but there's also a razor sharpness to the performance that serves the story well. Are we going to get sick and tired of actors giving us a blowhard buffoon clearly meant to evoke Donald Trump? Almost certainly -- but I still found Mark Ruffalo's take here to be entertaining. Can you really based an entire character almost exclusively on their drive to create the perfect sauce for dinner? I don't think so -- but Toni Collette might be the funniest thing about this movie. Plus there's fun work from Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, and others too.

Perhaps unfair expectation worked against my viewing of this Mickey 17, but in any case, I'd give it a middle-of-the-road C. But I have a feeling that fans of hyper-stylized science fiction will really like it, as would many fans of campier movies. I could even imagine watching it again at some point down the road and possibly appreciating it more than I did this time around. So, in the hopes that the movie finds its audience, I'll do my tiny part to spread the word.

7 WondLas

Apple TV+ has its share of breakout television series, titles known even to non-subscribers. But it also has series you've likely never heard of... which probably includes one based on a series of books I'd never heard of either, WondLa.

Teenager Eva lives in a bunker, cared for by a robot caretaker named M.U.T.H.R. When the bunker is suddenly attacked, she is forced into the world outside... to discover a strange planet inhabited by aliens. What has become of other humans, said to have been safe in other bunkers? What has happened to the planet? Can Eva find these answers, and her true destiny?

WondLa is based on a fantasy trilogy by Tony DiTerlizzi, and comes from a fairly new animation studio, Skydance. Apple TV+ gave the show a 2-season order right out of the gate, and the first of those seasons is now complete (and waiting on a cliffhanger until the next season). The show has many of the hallmarks of an American animated feature film: a plucky young protagonist, plenty of humor filling the spaces between more serious dramatic moments, and a vivid color palette for the visuals.

It has an even more colorful cast of characters. Just like Dorothy adventures through Oz with a distinctive trio, Eva's adventures in Orbona include the fussbudget M.U.T.H.R., the giant puppy-like tardigrade Otto (with whom Eva can communicate telepathically), and permanently cranky Rovender (who doesn't want to let on how much he's taking to Eva). The casting is as inspired as the visuals, with Teri Hatcher as M.U.T.H.R., Brad Garrett as Otto, and Gary Anthony Williams as Rovender.

Each of the seven episodes of the first season is about 20-minutes long -- a fast and easy watch. Yet I'm not entirely convinced that these almost bite-sized episodes are the ideal way to experience the story. If you skipped the various episode recaps and credits, you could stitch the entire season together into a "movie" running perhaps a little over two hours. And while this would be too long for a theatrically-released animated movie, it might be ideal for sitting at home on your couch and bingeing.

Or... that might be me trying to compensate for the fact that the story never quite got its hooks in me. I never felt like I had to know what was going to happen in the next episode of WondLa. But at the same time, I always enjoyed watching it. It looks amazing. The environments are the most stimulating I've seen in an animated movie since Strange World, the character design as creative and varied as the best Pixar movies, and the animation wonderfully detailed. WondLa is sometimes a meal for the mind, but always a feast for the eyes.

I'd give the first season of WondLa a B-. Depending on how long it takes for the second season to arrive, I can imagine myself coming back for that. Until then, it might be something for you to check out too.

Enterprise Flashback: Minefield

With one full season of Enterprise complete, several of the starring characters remained underdeveloped -- particularly Malcolm Reed. Early in season two, the writers put Reed at the center of another episode... only to double down on the few shallow and annoying characteristics they'd already given him. That, and a first appearance of the Romulans, is "Minefield."

Enterprise stumbles into a cloaked minefield, taking heavy damage and getting an undetonated warhead attached to the hull. When Reed tries to diffuse it and winds up trapped outside the ship, it falls to Archer to take over. But time runs short, as the mysterious alien owners of the minefield arrive and demand that Enterprise leaves their space.

Way back in the 1960s, the original Star Trek conceived of an alien race that happened to look like the Vulcans. The Romulans were a one-off allegory about the red scare of communism and the paranoia of traitors in your midst. There was no anticipating the decades-spanning franchise that would build out that story, making increasingly implausible the notion that the Vulcans could have spun off another space-faring society, with an extensive shared heritage, and yet have no knowledge about them. That all poses a particular problem for a prequel show like Enterprise, whose answer to the issue was probably the only one possible (other than: "don't use the Romulans") -- honor the fact that "no one prior to Kirk, Spock, and company knew what a Romulan looked like," and sort of hand wave the rest.

If you accept that approach, then this episode does well by the Romulans. They're certainly portrayed as xenophobic and unreasonable. They're secretive to the point of being inscrutable. (What was so valuable on this uninhabited planet that it was worth putting up all these mines anyway?) They're all the things that longtime Trek fans expect from Romulans.  I do question a bit the decision not to make them deadlier. We see the Enterprise with a nasty "bite" taken out of its saucer by the Romulan mine... but there are no lives lost. Still, I'd say overall that making the aliens of this episode be Romulans ultimately works well for the episode.

Besides, this episode itself puts other nitpicks much more in your face. The minefield is ultimately shown to be so dense that it's unclear how Enterprise could have gotten through it as far as it did without tripping one. You would think the Romulans would have some means of detonating them remotely -- like, say, the one attached to Enterprise, after they refuse to leave. Why are shuttlepod hull plates made out of some sort of explosion-resistant material that the Enterprise hull plates apparently are not?

If you get past the quibbles, the episode is all about Malcolm Reed -- and in these respects does the character just as dirty as previous first season episodes. The main thing we learned about him last season is that he's so boring that nobody actually knows anything about him. The same joke plays out again here, as Archer invites him to breakfast and he can't talk about anything but work. When Archer later tries small talk to distract Reed from an injury, Reed curtly maintains that senior officers and subordinates shouldn't fraternize.

Finally, we get a little background on Reed's family background in the navy, his own fear of the water, and an ancestor's death by drowning. But this quickly morphs into a repetition of the one other thing we know about Reed from season one: he's obnoxiously fatalistic. He's ready -- even eager -- to sacrifice his life in this situation (and pretty much any other), which doesn't exactly create narrative tension when Dominic Keating's name is there in the main titles every episode.

But as is so often the case on Enterprise, a shaky script is produced with top notch production values. I mentioned the look of the damaged Enterprise already. Also great is a version of the original Romulan "bird of prey" design. The outer space set of the Enterprise hull is nicely detailed, and the prop of the Romulan mine is excellent, full of widgets the actors can interact with in a series of bomb-diffusing scenes.

Other observations:

• I devoted a whole post to why "Faith of the Heart" makes for a bad theme song for Enterprise. This episode really highlights yet another problem: it never plays well against a dramatic teaser. This episode establishes a nasty threat with huge danger in the opening minutes... and then smash cuts to "It's been a long road...." Does not work at all.

• It feels like this episode must have run short. We get a rather long sequence of Reed suiting up to go outside the ship. It's the sort of thing that might have felt appropriate the first time we ever saw spacesuits on Enterprise -- but it's been more than a year now.

The episode looks pretty great, and it uses the Romulans about as well as you could in a prequel, given the weird constraints of Star Trek lore. But nonsensical writing, including the refusal to make Reed anything but boring or annoying, drags it down for me. I give "Minefield" a B-.

President Without Precedent?

Apropos of let's say nothing in particular, I recently was drawn to a non-fiction book written by constitutional law professor Corey Brettschneider. Including the subtitle, the book has an unwieldy name. But from it, you might intuit why I was interested -- The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.

This book presents ignominious slices of American history: details of presidents who pushed the power of their office, and in some cases pushed the country to the brink of collapse. More importantly, it recounts what was involved to pull the United States back from the brink.

First up is John Adams, whose monarchical view of the presidency led him to vicious attacks on the press, including prosecutions of anyone speaking critically of the office of the president (himself). Then, as you might expect from a book like this, we read about James Buchanan, who colluded with the Supreme Court to deny the basic personhood of black people. Next comes Andrew Johnson, who encouraged violence against his political opponents as he asserted authority above Congress. Skip ahead a few decades, and read about Woodrow Wilson's focused efforts to mainstream racial animus through expansion of bigoted laws. And of course, no book about U.S. presidents threatening democracy would be complete without a look at Richard Nixon, who contended that no action taken by a president could be illegal.

Corey Brettschneider's book provided me strange comfort. Current events may be unprecedented in my lifetime, but not without precedent, period. Strip the names out of my previous paragraph, and a reader might well think that it was about current events. It's not that reading this book made me think, "oh, the country has been here before, so we'll be fine," but it was a relief of sorts to see that we have been here before, and there were ways out.

The book presents the thesis (and I believe the correct one) that effective opposition to corrupt and captured governments comes from the outside. The three branches of American government do not have the final say on how the country's constitution is interpreted; the values of the document are ultimately up to "we the people" to decide. Brettschneider focuses on individuals and citizen groups who rose up to oppose these past presidents, in what he calls "constitutional constituencies."

The book highlights several truly impressing and inspiring historical figures -- especially Frederick Douglass (in the Buchanan and Johnson sections) and William Monroe Trotter (in the Woodrow Wilson section). The book does point out that a "constitutional constituency" need not be led by a singular figure like Douglass or Trotter. It cites the example of the grand jury against Richard Nixon, who collectively and (at the time) anonymously united in their view that a president can and should be held accountable for criminal acts. Yet Brettschneider also points out that this action was essentially thwarted by President Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon -- and he further suggests that this thwarting of the will of "we the people" prevented the sort of full recovery that followed the actions of the other presidents chronicled in the book. The pardon of Nixon, the author argues, was the first step down a path that led to today.

And the book does touch on today. Or, at least, "today" at the time it was written. An epilogue touches on Donald Trump and the events of January 6, 2021. But given everything that's happened since then, given the extent to which today's attacks on democracy feel like "all five of the other attacks detailed in the book, all at once," it's a quite disheartening note to end the book on. Still, focus on the central message, and there is hope. Yes, the Supreme Court says that there is sweeping immunity for presidential lawlessness... but Brettschneider's entire point is that the people are the final arbiter on that.

In any case, the message that we've been here before (or, at least, "here-ish") is a good one for today, and this author does a good job delivering it. Even if you read The Presidents and the People purely for the history and not for "inspiration" or "advice," it's a solid read. You'll be reminded of the achievements of Frederick Douglass, and educated about those of William Monroe Trotter. You'll be persuaded that James Madison may have been the most underappreciated of the "Founding Father" presidents, and that Woodrow Wilson was actually far worse than is widely thought. I give the book a B+.

When [I'm/]It's '64

Beatlemania may no longer be the dominant cultural phenomenon that it was decades ago... but it's a machine that still functions if you connect power to it. There was Ron Howard's documentary about the Beatles' touring years, Eight Days a Week. There was the monumental efforts of Peter Jackson and his technical wizards to restore the documentary footage behind Let It Be, resulting in Get Back. And now producer Martin Scorsese has thrown his clout behind documentary director David Tedeschi to create Beatles '64.

Like Get Back, Beatles '64 chronicles a very short window in time for the Fab Four -- specifically, their visit to the United States in February of the titular year. But this is a monumental few weeks for the band, including their famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and a wild concert at the Washington Coliseum (essentially played in a boxing ring).

The documentary features extensive footage shot at the time, from interviews with screaming fans to the big performances. A lot of time is spent hanging around hotel rooms; the band has become too big to just go out in public, and so their pent-up energy has no outlet but to call in to radio stations and mug for the documentary crew. It's a reminder that regardless of their celebrity, then soaring to unprecedented heights, they're ultimately four guys in their early 20s.

The classic footage is juxtaposed with modern day interviews. Many are with fans, looking back on Beatlemania with a 60 year remove and trying to find the words to explain it to today's audience. Many fail, yet as you watch them grapple with that, their emotions are on clear display. The feelings are still raw for them.

Some of the interviews are with other performing artists at the time -- and I find these to be a bit of a mixed bag. As the film acknowledges, the Beatles of 1964 were just as well known for their covers of other songs as for their original material. They were among the artists familiar with the black heritage of rock music, and were part of the movement to bring it to white America because they genuinely loved it. It's great that this documentary goes back to to the source, interviewing Ronald Isley, Smokey Robinson, and others, to make sure we all know where some of the Beatles' songs really come from. Yet at the same time, what are these artists going to say other than "I was honored the Beatles played my song," whether that's true or not?

The film also imposes a narrative about February 1964 that I'm not sure fits. It suggests that the intensity of the American response to the Beatles was driven in part by the assassination of John F. Kennedy less than three months earlier. The nation had endured a massive psychological trauma, and going mad for the Beatles was the joyous release. Maybe you had to be there, but I'm not entirely convinced. At least, I find it hard to point to any analogous fads in the wake of tragic events in my lifetime (like the Challenger explosion or 9/11). Or maybe the answer to that is, "well, but no one was the Beatles in 1986 or 2001."

Still, while this documentary wasn't exactly persuasive to me, I'm not sure that was first on its agenda. It is a well-made time capsule of a huge moment in pop culture history -- and that alone makes it an intriguing watch in my eyes. I give Beatles '64 a B-. Fans of the band will certainly want to check it out.

Agents Smith

The movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith now stands as an awkward memento of the relationship of stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But it still was the loose inspiration for a TV series created by Francesca Sloane and Donald Glover.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith stars Glover and Maya Erskine as the titular characters -- two strangers paired up as spies and dispatched around the world by an unknown handler. Navigating their cover as a married couple proves just as difficult as any of their dangerous missions. Over the course of eight episodes, the "Smiths" learn to love each other... and then sour on each other to an increasingly savage degree.

When this project was first announced years ago, it was a team-up of Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of Fleabag fame. That was an exciting prospect to me: two writer-creator-actors, each with a well-regarded show, pooling their talents in a spy thriller? Count me in! Except that within a few months, Waller-Bridge left the project due to the oft-cited "creative differences." My own enthusiasm faded, and here it's taken me a year since Mr. and Mrs. Smith released to actually finish watching the show we ultimately got.

What we got is still a pretty good show. It's not hard to imagine what the "creative differences" might have been, as this is a fairly dark and definitely gritty drama with very few comedic accents. Spy thrillers are pretty much unrealistic by definition, but to the degree one can suspend their disbelief, this show plays to be as realistic as the format allows.

While each episode has all the action you could ask for -- foot races, car chases, reversals and improvisations, explosions -- it is fundamentally a relationship drama. When you take the whole season in totality, you see it's a particular kind of relationship drama, focused on what draws two people together. Does having one or two things strongly in common make for enough "glue" to bind a couple together when they're incompatible in basically every other way? It's a slightly deeper take on the classic "opposites attract" rom-com, made all the more different for the spy genre it's grafted onto.

It might sound like the relationship elements overwhelm the action, but they really don't. Indeed, I could have done with more -- or, at least, a longer runway to deal with them. In my eyes, the eight episodes really wasn't enough to track the arc of Mr. and Mrs. Smith's relationship. Their emotional turns felt awfully abrupt to me in key moments, necessitated because the series only had a limited amount of time to get to where it was going.

But then, this is a TV show, so the end of a season isn't necessarily the end of the show, right? Well, in the sense that it was renewed for a second season, right -- we are getting more episodes at some point. But the arc of Glover and Erskine's characters feels complete to me by the end of season one. Picking up with them again feels to me like it would be struggling to squeeze more juice from a spent fruit. And throughout the season, it's made clear that there are other "Mr. and Mrs. Smiths" in the world of this show; so a season two might just as easily reveal that we're watching an anthology of spy thriller mini-series.

I think I'd be there for that. But on the other hand, a big part of the appeal of season one was the two stars. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are good separately in their roles, and have good on-screen chemistry in the story. Still, just as important in what made the show fun was the deep bench of guest stars who popped up throughout the season, including Paul Dano, Parker Posey, John Turturro, Sarah Paulson, Billy Campbell, Alexander Skarsgård, Ron Perlman, and more. This series had the acting roster of a long-running prestige show that gets actors in who just want to be part of something widely regarded to be great... even though not one minute of this had been seen publicly when they all showed up on set. If Mr. and Mrs. Smith can keep that going even if it decides to rotate the stars each season? I think that would still be fun.

I give Mr. and Mrs. Smith a B+. I probably shouldn't have waited so long to watch it... though with television production times so spread out these days, I'm still finished well ahead of the next crop of episodes, whenever they'll come. If you haven't watched it yet, you've got plenty of time too.