Netflix's "Sisyphus: The Myth"

Beginning in the mid-2000s, there was a particular species of TV show that emerged on American networks: pilot episode full of intriguing mysteries, with subsequent episodes adding layers of complexity, answering one question but asking more. "Lost" (ABC 2004-10) was Patient Zero of this trend, and the prime example. The hallmark of this kind of show was that it was completely addicting even as you wondered if there really was a master story behind everything, or if the writers were making stuff up as they went along.

Almost always, it was the latter. "Lost," "FlashForward" (ABC 2009-10), even "Battlestar Galactica" (SyFy 2004-09) were all this kind of show.

Apparently, non-American shows are not immune from this syndrome. We recently added Netflix in our household, and the first series I checked out was the South Korean time travel/thriller "Sisyphus: The Myth" (Netflix 2021). It's a variation on "The Terminator," where someone in our present day (in this case, an arrogant genius) creates something that is of immense importance in the future, and time travelers from the future come back to mess with the timeline (or preserve it). The main future warrior is a 25-year-old woman named Gang Seo-Hae, and the genius is 38-year-old Han Tae-Sul.

Like the aforementioned American shows, the pilot episode is packed full of intriguing questions and daring set-pieces, and ends on anxious cliffhanger. Episode 2 deepens the mystery, and even as subsequent episodes answered a few questions, they raised even more. Unfortunately, as compelling as each episode was, the whole show started to collapse from the weight of its own mysteries. The time travel rules didn't seem consistent, and in the end, none of the plot really made any sense at all. It's too bad, because the production values were quite good (the dystopian scenes of South Korea in 2035 where fantastic), and the acting was solid. I guess it just goes to show that this "make things up as you go along" style of story-telling isn't unique to Hollywood. 

Paramount+'s "Rabbit Hole"

I somehow misclicked or mis-responded to Amazon's Alexa and signed up for a 7-day free trial of Paramount+. I don't have anything against Paramount+, but I'm finding all this streaming-creep to be too much, and on principle, I'm trying to stick to Amazon Prime and Disney+. Having signed up, though, even if inadvertently, I might as well maximize my free trial.

And look what I found..."Rabbit Hole," whose imdb description reads:

Nothing is what it seems when John Weir, master of corporate espionage, finds himself at the center of a shadowy conspiracy. After uncovering a dangerous plot by powerful forces with the ability to control populations and subvert democracy, Weir is framed for murder and put on the run, trying to figure out who and what is real in a reality turned upside down. As a man who deals in mistrust and deception, can John Weir trust a team of unlikely allies to outwit an enemy with deep ties to his past and who's bent on using our own data against us? John Weir must navigate a world of surveillance, misinformation and manipulation to uncover the man at the center of the plot and stop him before it's too late.

There are eight episodes in the series, so it should be binge-able in one week. I managed to watch two episodes while on the treadmill this afternoon.

It's nice to see Kiefer Sutherland in a thriller role again. For context, I watched the first two seasons of "Designated Survivor" and reasonably enjoyed it. Like that show, this one tries to give Sutherland a role different from Jack Bauer and is partially successful in doing so. Weir is cunning and able to orchestrate complex plots to manipulate people, but unlike Bauer, he's not a man of action.

The show is full of twists, although it hides information from the audience that Weir knows, and then reveals bits and pieces at the end of each episode. This approach generates suspense, but I think it's not fair to the audience.

Also, when Weir starts yelling "tell me what's going on!" at someone, I want him to go full Jack Bauer...but of course he doesn't. Seeing Weir get beaten up is surprising.

My ranking of John Carpenter movies

I've been eyeing the blu-ray of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China, and it finally dropped to a good price on Amazon. I've seen a good number of Carpenter's flicks, although oddly enough not Halloween, which was what really put his name on the map. Anyway, I got to thinking about my personal ranking of the Carpenter movies that I've seen, and here it is:

1. The Thing (1982) -- Unquestionably the best of his movies, and it's not really close. Simply drips with paranoia, and the blood testing scene still packs a punch. 

2. Big Trouble in Little China (1986) -- Really weird in a good way. I didn't realize it back in 1986 (because I was a clueless teenager) but Kurt Russell's Jack Burton isn't really the hero. He's a blundering, blustering fool, while Dennis Dun's Wang Chi is the real hero.

3. Escape from New York (1981) -- I thought this was awesome when I first saw it as a young teen (don't ask how a young teen got to watch an R-rated movie), but it doesn't hold up quite as well now.

4. They Live (1988) -- The ridiculously long fight scene between Roddy Rowdy Piper and Keith David gets all the attention, but I think it gets tiresome. The movie as a whole, though, is like a Philip K. Dick idea crossed with WWF.

5. Escape from L.A. (1996) -- Where the original made Manhattan look burned out and dystopic, the sequel turns L.A. (as a detention island for "degenerates") into a parody of Southern California living. More of a comedy than a thriller, it's nice to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, but it's so-so.

6. Black Moon Rising (1986) -- Starring a pre-Fugitive Tommy Lee Jones as an industrial thief who gets mixed up with the development team of a high tech car and Linda Hamilton's car thief, this is a pretty underrated thriller. It's very much a product of the 1980s, though.

7. Prince of Darkness (1987) -- The second in the loose "Apocalypse Trilogy" (along with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness), this is about a group of physics grad students who investigate a container filled with a mysterious fluid that may be Satan. Pretty gory and horrific, with a killer twist ending.

8. Christine (1983) -- This was a relatively faithful version of the Stephen King novel about a demonic car. It's much more a King movie than a Carpenter one.

9. Dark Star (1974) -- Impressive for its extremely low budget, but still a low budget sci-fi flick about a space crew assigned to blow up unstable stars. Great as showcasing Carpenter's talents, but not one I need to watch again.

10. The Fog (1980) -- Dead sailors come back as ghosts to exact their revenge. Has some very good mood, but supernatural horror just isn't my cup of tea.

The WGA strike...

As of last week, the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike. Shows still in production can continue with completed scripts, but there are showrunners who are members of the WGA, and some of those showrunners have stopped working altogether on their programs.

I remember 2007, the last time writers went on strike. "24" lost basically an entire year (although this seemed to work out well, as the delayed season -- number 7 -- ended up with a strong and coherent plot, possibly because the writers had close to an extra year to plan things out, rather than making it up on the fly).

Back then, streaming had not taken off, so the only "on demand" viewing was via DVDs (of older shows/seasons) or TiVo of currently airing shows. Between network and cable TV, I had a full plate of TV watching, so much so that I would sit down with the fall TV preview issue of Entertainment Weekly and plot out a grid of days and time slots to see if there were any conflicts between shows. (Yes, my original TiVo could only record one channel at a time -- the horror!)

As you can imagine (given the theme of this blog), the writers' strike left me feeling despair at the time. What would I do for entertainment?!? Reality TV (whose writing staff has a different guild) could only go so far.

Today? I kind of understand the issues involved and I certainly hope the writers can negotiate a fair deal to take into account the new economics of streaming and on demand viewing, but I don't feel anything like the existential dread that I felt 16 years ago.

The only scripted network shows that I've been TiVoing this season are NBC's "The Blacklist" and CW's "Kung Fu." (I also watched "Magnum PI" but failed to set my TiVo to record it after it moved from CBS to NBC, so I'll have to catch up on that.) "The Blacklist" is in its final season, and "Kung Fu" might not be renewed. And I got rid of cable years ago. That leaves the streaming services, where I have Amazon Prime and Disney+. The strike will definitely impact me there, but the fact of the matter is that between what's already on those streaming services*, plus a whole bunch of C-dramas available on YouTube (I just started an interesting looking one called "Stealth Walker" about an undercover female narcotics agent), and DVDs**, I'm not going to run out of things to watch for a long time.

* Season 4 of Amazon's "Jack Ryan" starts next month! And there's "Citadel," which cost something like $50 million per episode...

** I rewatched "Prison Break" earlier this year, and am just over halfway through with "Justified" right now. "Battlestar Galactica" and "24" await their turns.

Revisiting 90s TV: "Nowhere Man"

This was a weird, one-season show about Thomas Veil, a photographer who's just been critically lauded for a powerful picture he took that he called "Hidden Agenda," which seems to show three men being hanged. He attends a celebration in his honor with his wife, and then goes to dinner with her. When he comes back from the restroom, she's gone. He goes home and sees her there...with another man. When he tries to get inside, she doesn't seem to recognize him. What??? She's not the only one. As he soon discovers, no one seems to know who he is.

Played by Bruce Greenwood (Captain Pike in the rebooted "Star Trek" movies), Veil goes on the run, trying to unravel the mystery of who erased his life. Of course, there is a shadowy cabal behind this all, and he manages to stay barely one step ahead while making slow progress toward finding out what happened.

Like the best of these shows, every mystery is solved only temporarily, with more mysteries emerging. Paranoia is rampant through every episode, as Veil has no idea who he can trust and who is secretly working for his antagonists.

The risk for these kinds of shows is that the writers have a high concept to start with, but no idea how to wrap it up (ahem, "Lost"...). "Nowhere Man" lasted only one season, but news of its cancellation came with enough lead time that the show has a definitive series finale that satisfactorily explains everything.

Definitely worth checking out if you like this kind of paranoia-driven serialized drama.

Revisiting 90s TV: "The Pretender"

Although I watched TV before the 90s and have some nostalgia for TV shows that aired before then, my love of TV didn't really start until the early 90s. And I still think of that decade as having been a peak time for TV dramas. The X-Files, of course, was my favorite show from back then, but there was also Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (the best Trek series, in my opinion), La Femme Nikita (a precursor to 24), Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Xena: Warrior Princess.

One of the lesser known shows from the time was The Pretender, which I've rediscovered on Amazon Prime. I actually have the entire series on DVD, but my home gym has no DVD player, so I'm dependent on streaming (or over-the-air during football season).

The premise of the show is that a shadowy corporation known as the Centre (note the British spelling) captured a young boy named Jarod in the early 60s. Jarod is a genius who can literally master any profession or skill almost instantly. The Centre exploited him for decades by making him perform simulations, whose outcomes the Centre would sell to the highest bidder. Some of these were military simulations, and the Centre was happy to sell to foreign governments. (Along the way, Jarod also figured out how to save the Apollo 13 astronauts, and determined that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have fired all of the shots on Dec. 22, 1963.) One day, Jarod escapes.

The formula of each episode is that Jarod finds someone who has been wronged, and using his Pretender skills, he assumes an identity that is "helpful" to the perpetrator, who he then sets up and exposes. In this way, the show was similar to The Fugitive or The A-Team or any number of past shows where the protagonist goes from town to town. One key difference, however, is that Jarod, while the hero of the show, is a pretty dark character. He seems to delight in inflicting poetic justice on the villains, psychologically tormenting them by making them feel what their victims felt. "How does it feel, seeing nothing but water in every direction, and wondering what just bumped your feet down below?" he snarls at one of his targets, who left a man to drown, and who Jarod has dumped into the ocean from shore.

Besides the weekly revenge story, there is a continuing storyline involving the Centre, which naturally wants Jarod back. Assigned to catch him are the team of Miss Parker (no first name is ever given), Sydney (no last name is ever given), and Broots. Sydney is the psychologist who worked with Jarod from his childhood days, and who doesn't want Jarod harmed and sincerely thinks the Centre is the best place for him. Miss Parker is like Emma Peel in style but just wants to catch Jarod alive, preferably, but dead is okay, so she can get back to her career in the corporate division. Broots is the tech nerd.

Meanwhile, Jarod knows nothing of his past; his parents supposedly died in a plane crash, but he comes to doubt that. The Centre holds secrets, and he keeps trying to unearth them.

As the show went on, the backstory of the Centre became more and more complicated, with Miss Parker's father (Mr. Parker), her deranged half-brother Mr. Lyle, the emphysema-suffering Mr. Raines, and more joining the cast.

Coming up on 30 years old, this show still holds up pretty well by today's standards. It ended in a cliffhanger and then was canceled. That cliffhanger was resolved by a 2001 TV movie on TNT, but then TNT aired a second TV movie that also ended on a quasi-cliffhanger, and that was the last anyone ever saw of the show...

On a related note, I once met the star, Michael T. Weiss. Of all of my celebrity encounters, this was one of the very few that did not take place in L.A. Instead, it was at O'Hare Airport, in the line waiting for a taxi in the mid-2000s. He was with a friend, so I didn't want to be an obnoxious fan, but when there was an opportune moment, I turned to him and said I really enjoyed his work in The Pretender.

Why I think the "Mission: Impossible" movies are better than the James Bond ones

 

I'm not the only one who's thought about the "Mission: Impossible" movies versus the James Bond ones. Here's one site that does the "on the one hand...on the other hand" approach.

Well, I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to boil this down to just a single point (although I think there are many reasons to support my conclusion): the "M:I" series is better because the weakest movie in that franchise -- which is universally thought to be "Mission: Impossible 2" -- is better than at least half of the Bond flicks (in my opinion, of course).

Let's start with "M:I 2." The basic plot is derivative of the Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman movie "Notorious," where Cary Grant has to send his lover Ingrid Bergman as a honeypot against Claude Rains. Here, Tom Cruise's superspy Ethan Hunt has to recruit Thadiwe Newton's thief Nyah Nordhoff-Hall to gain information about her former lover's (played by Dougray Scott) nefarious plans involving a mysterious substance or item known as Chimera. The wrinkle is that during the recruiting process, Hunt and Nordhoff-Hall have fallen in love.

Hong Kong auteur John Woo directed "M:I 2," and so we have his signature action scene: Tom Cruise flying through the air, gun blazing in each hand. There's definitely some tonal whiplash from the first "M;I" movie, where Cruise was daring and acrobatic, and handy with a gun, but not the devastating one-man wrecking force here. On the other hand, as much of a muscular presence as Cruise presents, this movie doesn't have any of the insane stunt set-pieces that started with "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" and that have come to define the franchise.

Nevertheless, it's still clearly a "M:I" movie. We have the self-destructing mission message, the face masks, the IMF team (though this is the least ensemble of all of the movies), and the plot twists. Indeed, on my current rewatch, I'm having trouble understanding why this movie isn't more popular. Even if it is the weakest of the "M:I" movies, it's still really good. It has a coherent plot (which is more than can be said for a lot of the Bond movies -- looking especially at you, "Skyfall"), a capable villain (cf. Max Zorin in "A View to a Kill"), and a female lead with agency (Nordhoff-Hall makes a crucial move on her own that saves Ethan Hunt and temporarily stymies the villain).

It's like saying that season 6 was the weakest season of "24" - true, but it was still better than almost anything else on TV at the time.

Again, this is my opinion, but taking into account plot coherence, technical filmmaking craft, acting, action set-pieces, and strength of other characters, I'd rather rewatch "M:I 2" than the following Bond movies:

"Dr. No" - yes, it started things off, but it's kind of boring

"From Russia with Love" - I'll grant that this is a really good movie, and my preference may be dictated by changing tastes over 40 years, so I won't argue that "M:I 2" is better

"On Her Majesty's Secret Service" - oh, what could have been with a better actor as Bond, but as is, terribly flawed

"Diamonds Are Forever" - this really has not aged well (which isn't entirely its fault), but among other things, compare how female lead Tiffany Case devolves into another helpless bikini-clad victim waiting to be rescued, to Nordhoff-Hall

"The Man with the Golden Gun" - just no, another one with an annoying female lead

"Moonraker" - apart from Jaws, this is pretty awful

"For Your Eyes Only" - my recollection is this was pretty good, but the scenes with the ice skater are pretty cringeworthy

"Octopussy" - I actually like this one, but c'mon, it's not better than "M:I 2"

"A View to a Kill" - Roger Moore should have quit a few movies earlier, or gone on Tom Cruise's regime (compare Moore in this movie to Cruise in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"; they're close to the same age); he's so low-energy, and let's not get started about how bad Tanya Roberts' character was

"The Living Daylights" - ah, trying to make Bond something he's not, and what do end up with? a dour, uptight performance by Timothy Dalton (that fight hanging from the cargo netting out the back of the plane was pretty cool, though)

"License to Kill" - revenge-minded & rogue Bond...not bad, but nothing special

"The World is Not Enough" - admirable attempt at trying something new, but even though Pierce Brosnan is my favorite Bond actor, I've never felt the urge to watch this again

"Die Another Day" - okay, another one I'll confess to liking, but this is usually considered among the worst of the Bond movies, and I don't think anyone is going to be arguing this is better than "M:I 2"

"Skyfall" - I blogged at length about what was terrible about this movie. Now, this is the only of the Daniel Craig movies I've watched, but from what I've read, "Quantum of Solace" and "Spectre" are even worse...

That's somewhere around 12-14 movies (depending on how generous I'm going to be) out of 25 (not counting the "Casino Royale" parody and "Never Say Never Again") that I would rank as inferior to "Mission: Impossible 2." If the weakest "Mission: Impossible" movie is better than at least half of the Bond movies, and the three most recent "Mission: Impossible" movies are (again, in my opinion) better than every Bond movie, it's easy to see why I think one franchise is clearly superior to the other.