Here, Here

Maybe it's time for me to give "gimmick" films a break.

Recently, I watched the alien invasion thriller No One Will Save You, mainly because of its unique premise of telling the story without dialogue. Then I watched the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, because it was serving up a musical starring an ape. Both movies offered worthwhile moments, but ultimately couldn't rise above their gimmick to be truly good. Now I've completed my "disappointing movie gimmicks" trilogy with Here.

Here is a movie about a place. A locked-off camera remains completely still for the entire film as we hop backward and forward in time. We see one spot on Earth -- in the times of dinosaurs, pre-colonial natives, and the American Revolution. A house is built there in the early 20th century, and we're served glimpses of the lives of multiple families over the course of the next 100 years. Most our time is spent with the Youngs, a family who moves in just after World War II and lives there for over 50 years.

I was skeptical that a movie with no camera movement could be a compelling watch... but I was willing to take the chance that if anyone could pull it off, it would be director Robert Zemeckis. Besides him helming Back to the Future (my favorite movie ever), he gave us a masterwork of technical prowess in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and an emotionally moving story punctuated with tricky camera work in Contact.

But perhaps the past work I should have been thinking about was Forrest Gump, a treacly overdose of corrosive and regressive morality. The movie Here is a reunion of Zemeckis with the stars of Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. While I've loved separate work by all three, I might have expected that they'd come together again in service of something mawkish and trite.

It's almost stunning how many universal themes about life Here manages to touch upon in 104 minutes while hardly ever managing to evoke any feelings about them. Fortunately, unlike Forrest Gump, I don't think any messages are set in opposition to each other. Still, the emotional distance is as real as the physical distance, as events staged farther from the locked camera feel too far removed from the audience to engage the heart.

This is the reason I'm choosing to blog about a movie I essentially didn't like. I don't think Here set out to do so, but it winds up making a compelling case for the vitality of live theater. When you watch a live performance, you sit in your seat, your "camera" essentially locked off and giving you only one perspective on the action. The acting is happening at a distance (sometimes a great distance, depending on the size of the theater). And while not every live performance is emotionally transcendent, they sometimes are, in a way that Here really isn't.

Maybe that just means that if they made more movies like Here, some of them would be better -- just like those uncommonly good theatrical performances. Maybe. But I think the artifice of this storytelling device would weigh down any film, mostly because I can't imagine a movie working any better within the physical constraint than this one does. Here uses many clever transitions to evoke an illusion of motion, superimposing actions from more than one time frame on screen at the same time. Zemeckis stages the action so that most of the key moments happen as close to the camera as possible.

The movie also has actors working their asses off to overcome the artifice. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are both very earnest and natural in their performances. Paul Bettany also plays a key role, and thanks to his work in the MCU, he's no stranger to acting through challenging technical constraints.

They're all assisted in the time-jumping aspects of the movie with much more credible "de-aging" visual effects than we usually get -- though I can imagine that being the combination of many factors. De-aging effects have thus far set the bar quite low; these actors all have long careers offering ample reference on how their younger selves looked; the fact that everyone is often quite distant from the stationary camera provides a way to hide the imperfections.

Indeed, Here is a clever movie. Having decided on its gimmick, it finds smart narrative ways to work within it, uses technology well to hold everything together, and employs good actors with enough experience to be up to the unusual challenge. All that adds up to something -- not as low a grade as you might expect I'd give the movie. And yet, the achievements end at the movie's cleverness. It doesn't make you laugh or cry; it can only make you nod politely and think, "I see what you're doing here." (Or "I see what you're doing, Here.") I give it a C.

Enterprise Flashback: Cease Fire

The writers of Enterprise probably didn't set out to create an ongoing storyline about the Andorians. But cast Jeffrey Combs, let him do his thing, and before you know it, you'll have a recurring character on your hands. Combs appeared as Shran once again in "Cease Fire."

Archer is called upon to mediate a territorial dispute between the Andorians and Vulcans. But the talks are to take place in a war zone, and when Archer's shuttlepod is shot down, it's unclear if he will reach the negotiations alive... or indeed, if all parties actually want him to.

To a great extent, this episode is all about the casting. You have Jeffrey Combs returning as Shran, Vaughn Armstrong appearing as Admiral Forrest, and Gary Graham back as Soval. To that, they add Star Trek veteran Christopher Shea as a new Andorian, and veritable Star Trek royalty in Suzie Plakson as Tarah. (Her appearances as K'Ehleyr on The Next Generation made a huge impact.)

If you're not into what all these returning actors are doing? Well, then there kind of isn't much to this episode for you. Star Trek has shown that it can put us in a war zone and make that believable, but then this episode isn't really trying to make a point about war or violence in the way Deep Space Nine did. This is a more workmanlike effort to just nudge along the ongoing Andorian storyline. It "does the job" narratively, yet we don't really care much that Shran is betrayed by a close advisor, that Soval is inching away from his xenophobia, or that Archer is gradually being respected by both sides.

Well... maybe we do care at least a little about that last thing. After a season-and-a-half of regular incompetence by the main characters of this series, they really need to start posting wins. Even if the idea of the show is that "these people haven't learned how to do all this Star Trek stuff yet," at some point they need to start showing that they are learning -- otherwise, they really are as dumb as you've been making them look all this time.

So it's much needed development for Archer that he can make logical arguments that Soval can't counter, has T'Pol truly "cheering" for him to succeed (as much as a Vulcan could), and has past relationships that here make him "the only one for the job." He's set up to do "in four hours" what previously took "eight years." And not only does he succeed, but both Shran and Soval (in their own ways) express their appreciation!

Other characters get nice moments as well. T'Pol is made to suffer veiled insults from Soval about how human she's become, but doesn't rise to the bait. Phlox informs us of his history as a medic in the Denobulan infantry, a minor detail that nevertheless adds dimension to his character. Trip takes command and this time shines, stalling armed conflict between Vulcan and Andorian ships by putting Enterprise between them (and bluffing almost as well as James T. Kirk would).

But the episode does feel a bit rushed to me. It builds to a climax that could easily be the cliffhanger for a two-part episode, but then quickly resolves everything. Part of the rushed resolution is the reveal of Tarah as a full-on, mustache-twirling villain. A lot of time is spent on action rather than character -- though the big brawl between her character and Archer works surprisingly better than I would have imagined. Suzie Plakson then delivers her "you meddling kids" monologue with verve, but it's still no substitute for giving Tarah a more detailed and personalized grievance for her opposition to peace with Vulcans. 

Other observations:

• T'Pol likens the Andorians claiming a Vulcan planetoid to "Klingons setting up a colony on Pluto" -- an analogy that hit a little harder at the time the episode was made, when Pluto was still officially classified as a planet. Though if anything, the current state of this comparison seems more apt.

• A more fun exchange involving T'Pol is when Soval asks her why humans are so fixated on Vulcan ears. "I believe they're envious."

I would have liked more character development in this episode, but I'm really happy to see the Enterprise crew notch a win. I give "Cease Fire" a B.

Paradise Found

For six seasons, This Is Us wowed me with its unique blend of family drama and genre-style time-hopping. I enjoyed it so much that I mentally signed up in advance for whatever the series' creator, Dan Fogelman, did next. That turned out to be the Hulu drama-thriller Paradise.

Paradise centers on Secret Service agent Xavier Collins. As the story begins, it's clear he's had some kind of falling out with President of the United States Cal Bradford. But when Bradford is murdered, it's up to Collins to solve the case. The investigation involves all sorts of narrative hopping back and forth in time, as we slowly learn about the history of the two men... and, oh, big spoiler for the end of episode one: that this entire story is taking place in some hidden underground bunker, in the aftermath of a global apocalypse.

With this show, Dan Fogelman brought with him many of the people who worked behind the scenes on This Is Us. The transition totally works; they already had experience with twisty mysteries and dramatic tension, and now are bringing their skills to bear on an actual thriller. And like This Is Us, Paradise gives the impression that its storytellers know where it's all going, and aren't making things up as they go along.

But it isn't just the plot that drew me in; the cast also had a lot to do with it. Sterling K. Brown is a dynamic anchor for the show as Agent Collins; he's just as compelling when bottling his emotions up as he is when they show through. James Marsden is great as President Bradford, whose facade as a spoiled rich man-child is steadily eroded as we learn more about the character with each flashback. Julianne Nicholson perfectly takes the reverse journey as Sinatra, whose early impression of stern determination grows increasingly dark as the season unfolds. And I'm thrilled to see Krys Marshall as Agent Robinson; here's a role for her in a genre show that doesn't require her to endure hours of old-age makeup.

It's difficult to get into why I enjoyed Paradise so much without mentioning any of the big reveals that take place over the 9-episode first season. But fortunately, this is not one of those shows you have to try for a few episodes before you know you like it. Either episode one will hook you immediately, or Paradise isn't for you. It was for me, an A- overall, and a clear contender for my Top 10 shows of the year when it comes time for me to make that list.

Enterprise Flashback: Stigma

In early 2003, Paramount's parent company Viacom enacted an HIV awareness campaign. Though purportedly they did not directly ask their various TV series to produce "very special episodes" on the subject, Enterprise decided to do so. The result was the episode "Stigma."

T'Pol has contracted a disease from her recent mindmelding experience. When Phlox attempts to surreptitiously seek a cure from Vulcan doctors, two things happen. First, Phlox learns that Vulcans have no interest in curing the condition, as it is only transmitted by fringe, undesirable "melders" in the society. Second, when an influential Vulcan doctor learns that T'Pol has been infected, he takes steps to recall her from her post on Enterprise. Meanwhile, one of Phlox's wives visits him aboard Enterprise... and displays clear attraction to Trip.

I had a lot to say about Star Trek: The Next Generation's run at a "gay episode" -- but in short, I felt that producer Rick Berman really didn't seem to understand the topic being explored. Yet people can learn and change, and I will concede that in the 11 years between "The Outcast" and this Enterprise episode, it appears that Berman evolved a little in this area. At least, this episode he wrote with series co-creator Brannon Braga does seem like its heart is mostly in the right place.

The conception of "Pa'nar syndrome" as a Vulcan analog for HIV works, as does the President-Reagan-style contempt that Vulcan authorities have not for the condition, but for the people most likely to have it. T'Pol's role in the episode is inspirational and noble. She refuses to curry favor by revealing that she contracted the disease by being melded with against her will; she'd rather stand up to power, not condone prejudice, and not perpetuate a double standard. She also will not "out" a mindmelder she meets just to help her own cause. To all of this, I say: Good. For. Her. And her integrity spreads; for once, Archer doesn't seem whiny when he mounts his high horse to yell at some Vulcan.

Still, I'd say the episode could have pushed even farther. The villanous Vulcans of this story are straw men, and the episode doesn't engage at all with the question of how they could be this bigoted to begin with. Prejudice is motivated by emotion, not logic -- but there isn't even a veneer of logic offered. A Vulcan rationale is sitting right there, unvoiced in this episode: that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the view." How powerful would it have been to have Spock's famous words co-opted to justify prejudice? And how much more strong does a hero look when they overcome a more vile villain? Still... it's not like I'm really too down on the episode for failing to present "both sides" of a one-sided issue.

The bigger shortcoming of the episode is in its ridiculous "B plot" about Phlox's wife pursuing Trip. Sometimes, a story needs light and comedic moments to relieve dramatic tension before ratcheting things up again. Sometimes, humor feels like an unwelcome distraction from serious matters. To me, this feels like a case of the latter.

It starts with the fact that the issue getting comedic treatment is polyamory. Enterprise simply can't avoid trying to be "sexy." They're not quite "making fun" of the idea of polyamory, since Phlox and his wife Feezal aren't looked down on by the script. And yet there's something a bit uncomfortable in the implication that the show can be serious about being gay, while polyamory is a big joke -- playing out in preposterously suggestive dialogue, Trip's attempt to use Hoshi as a shield against Feezal's advances, and seeing Phlox's trademark enthusiasm applied here to encouraging a hookup.

Trip's reaction isn't great, either. Of course, it's fine for the character to not personally want to engage in polyamory, but he's portrayed as incapable of conceiving how it would work for anyone. It clangs to pair such close-mindedness with the gay-coded A plot. And it's unfortunate that Trip has the Southern drawl of a "good ol' boy" you'd expect to have exactly this attitude. I'd rather they'd ditched the subplot entirely to spend more time on T'Pol's story... but if they were going to do this, I'd wager it would feel a bit less icky with literally any other character. (And I was just saying how the show has been overusing the character of Trip.)

Other observations:

• In a fun bit of Denobulan world building, Phlox and Feezal greet one another by wafting each other's scent into their face.

• CG of this era really falls short in rendering people, at any scale. A sweeping shot of a medical conference is undermined by the fake-looking, unnatural movement of the "people" attending it.

• Enterprise continues to objectify its cast members to titillate its audience. In his visit to Sickbay, Travis Mayweather flashes his abs. (Feezal totally could have been into him rather than Trip.)

The episode means well, and in the A plot at least is mostly well done. But I think it could have been a lot better if it had ditched the silly subplot. I give "Stigma" a B.

Shore Thing

My blog has been silent for a week due to a family emergency. I might write about that in detail some day, when the troubles have truly passed. (Or I might not.) But I've decided that I need some normalcy where I can find it, and this is one place. So I'm going to try to go back to business as usual here. Maybe even lighter than usual to kick things off, as I say a few words about a real confection of a television show: Shoresy.

Shoresy is a spin-off centered on the chirping hockey player from Letterkenny, as he relocates to lead a struggling triple-A team. In equal measure, his trash-talking antics and dedication to his team begin to turn things around.

I always enjoyed Letterkenny, even as I thought that its schtick (and the quality of the jokes) declined gradually in later seasons. But one aspect I never liked about that show was the character of Shoresy. When they wrote him out to set up this spin-off, I really thought "good riddance," and was pretty sure I'd never check out the second show.

And yet... I had a little kernel of curiosity about Shoresy that I just couldn't deny. How would a show all about that guy even work? Even setting aside the fact that his face was never shown on Letterkenny, but would be on Shoresy -- he was just such a one-note character that I kind of had to see how big a mess the spin-off would be. Well, it turns out that series creator, writer, and star Jared Keeso seems to have known that he couldn't just stick Shoresy in a new show without some changes -- and the changes really work. 

First, Shoresy is much more of a story-driven show. Letterkenny was something between a stand-up comedy act and a live-action cartoon... a show that used the bare minimum of story necessary to facilitate jokes and riffs. Shoresy actually employs season-long story arcs, has a message in most episodes, and actually wants you to care for the characters beyond their ability to make you laugh. It's not as consistently funny a show as a result... but with the jokes thinned out a bit, there's room to be more invested in what's going on.

You probably have to care at least a little about hockey for that, though. Where Letterkenny sometimes used the ice rink or the locker room as a setting for comedy, Shoresy has way more hockey action than you'd probably expect for something branded as a sitcom. It has even more "hockey culture," so it's likely you'll know within just an episode or two if the show is for you.

But one thing that might grab you in that episode or two is another good strength of the spin-off: the other characters. Jared Keeso may be writing the show for himself to star in, but it doesn't really come off like a "vanity project." In particular, I feel like the team's managerial staff (all women, in a much-appreciated subversion of expectations) and coach bring a lot of heart to a show -- more heart than I ever would have expected.

Shoresy is four six-episode seasons in and counting, and is in the midst of a reinvention of sorts. (It's also a show willing to mess with its formula more than Letterkenny ever was.) Shoresy isn't exactly "can't miss" television... but somehow it won me over, and I plan to be there when the next season arrives. I give it a B+.

Monkeying Around With the Biopic Genre?

Better Man was an unusual movie released late last year, with a quirky patchwork of reasons why it might appeal to me -- and not appeal to me.

On the cons list: it's yet another musician biopic, and could be expected to observe all the tired cliches of that genre. It's about a musician of no particular importance to me: Robbie Williams. Though Williams was part of Take That, a mega-successful boy band of early 1990s, that band's global domination weirdly skipped the United States -- where their single modest hit ("Back for Good") was an atypical ballad that did nothing to draw attention to the rest of their music.

On the pros side: Better Man is a musical, immediately lifting it from the morass of biopics into at least the Rocket Man kind of sub-category, a movie trying to do something a little different. It's directed by Michael Gracey, the director of The Greatest Showman, one of the more entertaining film musicals in recent memory, making it more likely this movie would be a fun and boisterous affair.

Then there's the "I don't know what to make of this" element of the movie: the lead character is a walking-talking-singing-dancing chimpanzee. A CG-rendered, anthropomorphic, "Planet of the Apes" style monkey man. And the only way that this will be acknowledged by any character at any point in the movie is when the narrator (actual Robbie Williams) cheekily notes that he's often felt "less evolved" than the other people around him.

Having now watched Better Man, I must admit: they fooled me. They added enough quirky elements to this movie to make me believe it would be something different. But they tricked me into watching something pretty much the same as everything else.

They really didn't make anything out of the CG-ape-ness of it all. I suppose it added spectacle, since the degree of difficulty here for believably adding a CG character to a real-world setting is as high as it could be. But you could argue it detracts from the movie more than it brings. To fully appreciate it, you have to let yourself be taken out of the narrative to simply watch the technical achievement. Even then, you can still take the technical achievement for granted; after all, this was just one of three movies featuring anthropomorphic apes that was nominated for the most recent Best Visual Effects Oscar. (The other two being the newest Planet of the Apes movie, and the flying monkeys of Wicked.)

With the story not actually altered by its main character's simian nature, the next fallback position to find something different here is the musical elements. Here, at least, Better Man serves up flashes of brilliance. A handful of sequences fully embrace the artifice of musical theater, and director Michael Gracey makes the most of it being a film musical. The pinnacle is the "Rock DJ" sequence, a preposterously elaborate dance number presented as a single camera take, whizzing through multiple settings and costume changes as it builds to feature a literal cast of thousands. It's the kind of thing I was hoping for out of the whole movie. (And on its own, was good enough to make me decide to blog about this movie in the first place.)

Unfortunately, too many of the movie's songs are actual performances, where characters are singing diegetically on stage. All these moments lack the ambition and scope of the fantasy sequences. If you were to strip this "musical" down to just the non-realistic numbers, you can count the songs on one hand. And so you're left with a movie that has two wild baked-in premises -- it's a musical, and it stars an ape -- that only half engages with one of those premises. Otherwise, it trucks in all the tropes about struggle and success, rising and falling and rising again, that makes every biopic look like every other biopic.

And yet... I found a collective, say, 20 minutes of this movie to be kind of fantastic: huge, escapist, exciting, and bubbly. So much so that even though the remaining almost-two-hours of the movie left me cold, I'd pencil it out to a C overall. And I could imagine the ways in which other people might love the movie without reservation. Maybe you love the biopic genre in a way I don't. Maybe the visual amazement of the effects is enough for you, regardless of the story. Maybe you're a huge Take That or Robbie Williams fan, or at least know more than one of their songs (that isn't even in the movie). If any of those describes you, you might really enjoy Better Man.

And if it doesn't, maybe take three-and-a-half minutes and go enjoy the best sequence in the entire movie.

Enterprise Flashback: Dawn

I haven't seen the movie Enemy Mine in decades. I have the impression that while it may be unknown by the broader population, the average sci-fi fan absolutely knows this story about a human and alien marooned on a planet together, learning to set aside their differences as they struggle to survive. Or maybe I'm just a "child of the 80s" who thinks my pop culture is everyone's pop culture. Either way, I know I immediately clock when I see some other sci-fi franchise "doing Enemy Mine." Which exactly what Enterprise did with the episode "Dawn."

An alien craft shoots down Trip's shuttlepod, crash-landing with him on a barren moon. As Enterprise struggles to locate their missing officer amid the dozens of moons in a gas giant system, Trip must convince the alien pilot to work with him so that both can be rescued before the sun rises and the intense heat kills them both.

"Dawn" isn't the first time Star Trek has "done Enemy Mine." Arguably, they did it twice on The Next Generation, and expertly both times; the more pure version paired Geordi with a Romulan in "The Enemy," while the twist on the formula was one of the series' (hell, franchise's) best episodes ever, "Darmok." Unfortunately, I don't think the third time was the charm when Enterprise took a run at it.

Part of the problem is that the "journey to acceptance between rivals" is more compelling if that journey is longer and harder. "The Enemy" was a struggle because Romulans have long been hostile adversaries on Star Trek. "Darmok" was a struggle because of the extremity of the communications barrier between Captain Picard and the alien captain. "Dawn" features new aliens we've never met, who fairly quickly tell Archer that shooting down their shuttle was probably a regrettable overreaction. And while Trip indeed cannot understand the alien's language, pantomime and threats seem to facilitate communications between them easily enough.

I think another reason this episode feels weaker is because it's centered on Trip. I don't have anything against Connor Trinneer, but not only has his character featured in a lot more episodes than the other characters, many of them have been episodes like this -- Trip in life-threatening jeopardy. This episode even has to bend over backwards at the beginning to explain why Trip is piloting a shuttle alone and not Travis; why not just let another character have a turn centering an episode? Choosing Trip as the main character makes this premise, which already feels like a bit of a rerun, feel even more like one.

What does help distinguish the episode, though, is the performance of guest star Gregg Henry as the alien pilot Zho'Kaan. Henry is one of those working actors you've almost certainly seen somewhere else, though he's unrecognizable here under reptilian makeup. He really works well with it. We probably can't know how many of the character's ticks and behaviors were scripted, Henry's idea, or suggestions from director Roxann Dawson, but they effectively convey an alien: an odd twitch of the head taking the place of a nod, strange hissing sounds in place of laughter, and more.

The production values of the episode are quite good, as usual for Enterprise. One thing that's hard to make look top-notch on a TV budget, though, is the mountain climbing sequences near the end. (Both the CG and the set fall a little short of believable.)

The writing is also usual for Enterprise, littered with various plot holes that collectively bring down the whole. After it's established that the alien's water is toxic to the humans, it's quite fortuitous that his ability to spit on a wound to heal it is not similarly incompatible with another species. Later, Zho'Kaan spits in Trip's eyes to stun him; is that a different kind of secretion, or should Trip's eyes "heal over?" If it's hot enough on this moon for Trip's communications device to stop working, surely it's hot enough to also kill him outright. If using the transporter on the weakened alien would be fatal, why not at least beam down supplies to help him and Trip survive? And why does Archer for one moment entertain Trip's request to just stay on the planet to die with the alien? Why does Zho'Kaan end up in Phlox's care, when it's the alien shuttle that picks up him and Trip, and they clearly would be better able to tend to one of their own than Phlox?

Other observations:

• Trip gets awfully lucky with Zho'Kaan's "tripwire." Twice. Once, Trip slips and kicks up dust, revealing the sensor right before he crosses it. Later, the alien is in such a rush to return to his camp that he sets off his own tripwire accidentally.

• Finally, our heroes are "learning how to Star Trek" a bit more effectively. I like T'Pol's acknowledgement that humans did better relating to this alien race in one day than Vulcans did in a century.

"Dawn" isn't a bad episode, but it suffers from some weak spots in the storytelling, and from that storytelling overall being rather derivative to begin with. I give it a B-.