Noomi Rapace on the set of Prometheus
Category: Movies
Direct Beam Comms #20
TV
Vinyl
The season finale of the first season of Vinyl aired on HBO last Sunday. Overall, I enjoyed this show about a New York record label in the early 1970s a lot, but thought this finale episode was a bit weak. Vinyl does suffer from a typical first season issue many dramas suffer from these days — mainly an overstuffed story with too many characters/things going on. Series that have been on the air a few years can be overstuffed, but since the viewer already has a grasp of who is who and what all stories are happening it isn’t an issue. But with series like Vinyl in their first seasons this can lead to confusion.
I felt like in Vinyl maybe 40% of the storylines could be cut in order to let other stories expand. I thought the story of record exec Richie (Bobby Cannavale) and his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde) and what they were going through this season was very interesting. And of Richie’s partners in the company played by J.C MacKenzie and Ray Romano was great too.
But there was so much other “stuff” going on from junior record execs to a murder to the mafia to women in a 1970s workplace to the emergence of rap music … that drew the focus away from these core stories.
And at the start of the season I thought that some of Vinyl would focus on the past, especially with Richie and his first musical discovery Lester (Ato Essandoh), where Lester’s future as a musician was cut short by Richie’s mob ties. But this didn’t seem to be a part of the show other than in an episode or two.
Unfortunately, much of the finale of Vinyl hinged on a murder Richie committed in the first episode and spent the other nine episodes dealing with and whether or not Richie’s musical discovery The Nasty Bits would ever be ready for a big musical showcase opening for The New York Dolls. The whole murder plot line seemed very out of place in a show like Vinyl and only served to bring in Richie’s drug/alcohol abuse and mob-ties into the story. Which could have easily been done by opening the show with Richie being a drug addicted alcoholic with mob ties rather than the addition of the murder storyline.
And as for the whole The Nasty Bits storyline… While I appreciate what they creators of Vinyl were trying to do by showing Richie was onto something with this proto-punk band, this storyline went on so long and was so barely interesting that by the end of Vinyl I didn’t care if The Nasty Bits scored a big hit or fell apart and disbanded at the end of the show.
(I might be in the minority but I did greatly enjoyed actors playing real-life musicians in the show like David Bowie and Elvis and the psychedelic dreamlike segues of other actors as famous musicians miming songs too.)
Overall first season: B Season one final episode “Alibi”: C-
Better Call Saul
If the first season finale of Vinyl was a bit of a letdown, the second season finale of Better Call Saul was quite the opposite — it was wonderful. This prequel to Breaking Bad which has never been too beholden to that progenitor series has cut its own path right from the very first episode.
The second season finds a pre-Saul Goodman Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) accepting his dream job at a large law firm, and getting everything he’s ever dreamed of or worked for like a huge signing bonus, a fancy car and condo too. Yet even with all this Jimmy’s still not quite able to shake his streak of being one step above a con man. Be it filming and airing a TV commercial without the knowledge of his bosses or grifting people in bars with his girlfriend Kim (Rhea Seehorn) even if it’s all for fun.
Whereas most dramas these days are about high stakes — Stop the zombies before they overrun our settlement! Find the murderer before the end of the episode! — instead, Better Call Saul is the master of the low-stakes. Be it Jimmy trying get his brother Chuck’s (Michael McKean) respect even if Chuck has absolutely no respect for Jimmy, trying to start a fledgling law firm or keep out of hot water with his girlfriend.
The stories of Better Call Saul are barely newsworthy, or if they’re newsworthy at all they’re on the back page of the local paper. Which in an era of dramas that hype the impossible and go bigger and bigger with their plots each season is a breath of fresh air.
The stakes do get a bit high for another Breaking Bad alum Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) who’s living off a police officer’s pension and is trying to make ends meet as a parking lot attendant. Which is fine except that when his daughter in-law needs money to move to a safer neighborhood, Ehrmantraut starts down the path of a life of crime in order to make some fast cash. Much of Ehrmantraut’s later storyline this season dealt with him finding ways to not kill people yet still be able to pocket extra cash.
I get the sense that when the proverbial crap does hit the fan, when Jimmy does finally “break bad” and becomes Saul Goodman and Mike does finally cross over to the dark-side of murder, that things will change for these characters and the show as a whole.
Which I personally love — I have no interest in shows that stay the same year after year. Give me story change or give me my remote!
Grade: A+
The Last Panthers
This UK/French series is currently airing on Sundance here in the US. It’s an interesting show about the criminals who pull off a diamond heist that goes wrong and escape across Europe and the police and insurance investigators, the main one played by Samantha Morton, chasing them.
Watching the first episode I was struck as to just how much stuff happens from an intricately planned heist that involved setting cars on fire and parkour jumps from building to building to locations in France and Bulgaria and Serbia.
There was so much stuff going on that what happened in the first episode was almost enough to keep another series in story for an entire season.
Grade: C+
Comics
Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series
Collecting the original 1988 Dark Horse black and white Aliens series is the hardback Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series. I own the original six-issue comics series as well as a softcover collected edition of it too. But you’d better believe when I heard this oversized edition was in the works I placed an order for Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series at my local comics retailer the next day.
My one quibble here is that it’s the 30th anniversary of the movie Aliens, not this comics series which is still a spry 28-something. 😉
Movies
Independence Day: Resurgence trailer
“They like to get the landmarks!”
Cool Sites
All sorts of info on the classic 1984 movie.
This week in pop-culture history
- 1951: The Thing from Another World premiers in theaters.
- George Takei, Sulu of Star Trek turns 79.
Solarbabies (1986) cast photo
Aliens: This Time it’s Comics
This year the movie Aliens turns 30. It’s a seminal movie for me — it’s still one of my favorite films and for a time was my favorite movie. And while I suspect a lot will be written on it this year, I don’t think anyone else will be writing about something Aliens that’s just as important as the movie is to me; the Dark Horse Aliens comic books.
One of the things I find fascinating about Aliens is that while the movie was a hit at the 1986 box office there wasn’t an immediate rush to release a sequel. If Aliens were released today a sequel would go into production immediately and be in theaters in a year or two, but back then there was a six year gap between Aliens and the next Alien 3 in 1992. Which meant that fans of the Aliens story like myself were clamoring for anything Aliens related. Which meant that when Dark Horse Comics released a comic book sequel in 1988 we were all over it.
Written by Mark Verheiden with art from Mark A. Nelson, the six issue Aliens continued the story from the 1986 film in a comic form. Here, survivors of the movie Hicks and Newt must come to terms with what it means to have lived through the alien swarms where no one wants to be around Hicks since he was scarred by the creatures with Newt suffering mental problems from basically having her life destroyed as a young girl on a far-off world. Plus there’s government agencies wanting to weaponize the creatures and a religious group trying let the alien loose on the Earth as a cleansing force.
And like the movie, the Aliens comic was also extremely successful. The series was reprinted many times — one issue I have is from the fifth printing — which would lead to two additional Aliens series as a continuation of this story as well as a host of other Aliens comic books after. Even today Dark Horse is still producing new Aliens stories and comics.
I discovered the comics in a roundabout way, by buying the first issue of the second Aliens series first, being blown away then collecting the rest of the second series as those were released monthly. Then, later on, I saved up enough cash to order the first six issue series direct from Dark Horse to complete my collection.
(One funny thing about the first Aliens comic series is that when the film Alien 3 was released Dark Horse went back though the early series to feature Hicks and Newt and renamed them as Billie and Wilks and re-lettered those issues for future publications since in neither Hicks or Newt live to see the events in Alien 3.)
With Aliens comics being so popular Dark Horse would also do the same thing with the 1987 Predator movie, continuing that story too from the movies to comic book form in 1989. And with Dark Horse doing both Aliens and Predator comics it was only a matter of time before those two characters would cross over with Aliens vs Predator.
While the Aliens vs Predator movies of the last decade were, to put it mildly, quite lame. The Aliens vs Predator comics were anything but and are things I still pick up and read to this very day.
Comic books back in 1988 didn’t have much edge to them. To be sure things like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns had been released and were redefining the genera. But for the most part comics then were mostly super-hero in nature and were directed at kids. But the Aliens comic was anything but — it had an edge and wasn’t meant for kids. The comic dealt with adult things and Verheiden told the story on adult terms which appealed greatly to myself — a young teen who still loved comics but was quickly aging out of Marvel and DC’s core demographic.
If the movie Aliens were released today I doubt the movie studio would give Dark Horse as much latitude as they did in 1988 with the Aliens comic. My guess is that they’d either be limited to publishing a comic book adaptation of the movie or of perhaps telling a story in the same universe but not about two of the characters from the film.
The first three Aliens comic book series that tells the Hicks and Newt…errr…Billie and Wilks stories can be found collected as, in order, Aliens: Outbreak, Aliens: Nightmare Asylum and Aliens: Earth War or all three collected as Aliens Omnibus, Vol. 1 and a brand new hardcover Aliens 30th Anniversary: The Original Comics Series is also available.
Aliens Acheron miniature set photo
