Six Feet Under

I started watching Six Feet Under, a TV show from HBO, last week. The first episode was engaging, but five episodes in I'm losing interest.

The story concerns a family that owns a Los Angeles area funeral home. The father dies in the first episode and the previously stable family dynamics are thrown into chaos. I was hoping for something like the macabre humor of Dead Like Me, which I watched several years ago and enjoyed. Instead it is beginning to feel like formula TV.

Every episode begins with someone dying, and then that person becomes a lens for studying the characters or a fulcrum for episode plot. Several of the deaths so far have had some of the macabre crazy-way-to-go humor that filled Dead Like Me, but not all of them.

One episode begins with a washed-up porn star talking to her cat about a date she's about to go on, then the cat kills the woman by pushing a plugged in appliance into the bathtub. Good start, but then the episode goes downhill. A deep pocketed fan of the porn star foots the bill for the funeral. The more serious of the two brothers that now own and run the business has a "Yay profitable month" attitude. The other of the two talks about the the films the woman had been in with an employee until Mr Serious intervenes. The dead woman comes back and talks to Mr Serious, at least in his imagination. And "humor" is mined from the people who come to the viewing and share their memories of the star.

Haha, what a riot, religious people and newly grieving folk get to listen to stories of porn shoots and talk of the dead woman's tits. Maybe there are jokes to be mined there, but the ones in this just seem as lazy as the very episodic story structure.

Three mysterious barter arrangements in lieu of cash funerals out of six.

Six Feet Under at IMDB

Dead Like Me at IMDB

The Platform

The Platform on IMDB

This is a Spanish film dubbed by Netflix for world-wide play on their service. I had it recommended to me by a Swede. Some people have compared it to Waiting for Godot and other Beckett works. It's certainly heavy (and heavy-handed). If you interpret it as a parable of modern capitalism, you can find a message here, but the parable is a bit flawed.

The general set up is there is a vertical hole-in-the-ground prison. One cell per level, two people per cell, very little in the way of rules enforced. Saving food is the only thing we ever see punished. And food is a problem. Once a day a platform (the one of the title) is lowered through the prison for people to eat at for two minutes, then it is on to the next floor. When the film starts, a new prisoner has just started on level 48. The platform is a complete mess, and he is surprised his roommate can eat at it. Level 48, his roommate explains, is so much better than the deeper levels.

Not much about this prison arrangement makes much sense. It becomes clear that between the monthly floor assignment resuffles a lot of people die from hunger, murder, and suicide thus freeing up space for newer prisoners. Nothing about this experience will make anyone better negating all benefits of this over a fast execution. The food prepared is lavish at Level 0 and nothing but broken plates by Level 100 or so. It does not look like enough food for the 250 levels the main character guesses the place has. Why go to all that trouble preparing it?

That said it does leave an impression.

Four snails out of a plate of twelve.

Casino Royale (1967)

Maybe, like me, you've never seen it and been waiting for an opportunity. If so, perhaps your chance has arrived. Or maybe you don't subscribe to HBO. I watched it on HBO Now this week.

It's ... got continuity problems. But it's also a very over the top spoof. In one sequence Mata Hari's daughter Mata Bond leaves MI-6, gets in a cab and goes to Berlin (the London cabbie is rather angry at the pedestrians blocking the streets of the red light district next to the Wall). Then Mata Bond enters a dance school that is a cover for a spy organization which specializes in placing au pairs in important households. As soon as she enters the door it becomes a German Expressionist film, you know like Nosferatu. So with sequences like that, I can forgive the muddy story line. YMMV.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061452/ "Casino Royale at IMDB"

Scott Dorsey, who gave me the dud recommendation for Vanishing Point, believes this movie has Woody Allen's best role. I can't say I've watched enough of his films to agree 100%, but the small time he's on the screen is better than the Allen directed Match Point.

Love Death & Robots

Love Death & Robots at IMDB

LDR is a series of short cartoons on Netflix. There are eighteen episodes, all under twenty minutes and most at least ten minutes. I watched them all in two nine episode stretches. If you liked the 1980s cartoon anthology Heavy Metal, you'll like these. Those stories were all different, but linked by a blue sphere, here there's nothing linking them. They span different time periods, genres, seriousness, and explicitness. No two are alike in style or story. I understand a second season is in the works.

Heavy Metal at IMDB