Virus TV

Roku offered a 30 day free trial of something called Epix. . .is it a channel, a network?  I don't know.  Anyway, this Epix thing offered Season One of War of the Worlds, an updated version of the H.G. Wells classic.  The first two episodes, set in England and France, were pretty good, they framed the extraterrestrial invasion and the ensuing fear and panic quite nicely, but it went quickly downhill from there, the show ruined by one dimensional diversity characters (though we must acknowledge a diversity ground-breaker: a character who is the offspring of brother/sister incest!) and a slow-moving script filled with giant plot holes.  It was a struggle getting through the last 3 or 4 episodes, and I can't imagine anybody not housebound by the virus bothering to do so.  The acting is pretty underwhelming and features a cast of mostly Limey/French nobodies, but it's actually the two most well-known names (at least, probably to Americans) who deliver the worst performances: Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern.  Byrne plays a neuroscientist obsessed with his ex-wife, but his performance is simultaneously inept and wooden, as if he so resented having to show up for his paycheck, he deliberately tried to give a shitty performance.  McGovern plays the ex-wife, and if you ever wondered what a sixty-year-old anorexic looks like, well, here's your once-in-a-lifetime chance.  McGovern is a wrinkled stick figure so emaciated she looks like she wouldn't need any makeup or costume to be cast as a skeleton in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.  Her acting range consists of one note: shrill.  The ET killer robots project more warmth and humanity.  

Amazon Prime's got Under the Silver Lake, a kOOk flick about a grimy, unpleasant LA stoner dude who tries to unravel a mystery/conspiracy about some rich people who want to ascend to a higher plane of existence.  This is basically David Lynch Lite material. . .and, really, it's not a half-bad movie.  In fact, it would probably be a pretty good movie, if it weren't for the stoner dude being played by Andrew Garfield, a decent actor in roles that require overly earnest do-gooders (The Amazing Spider-Man, Hacksaw Ridge), but here he stumbles badly trying to play a literally and figuratively greasy paranoid slacker gOOfball.  His acting lacks that redeeming degree of snarky unwashed charm his character demands, and so you don't really care what happens to him as he wanders from one red herring to the next, interacting with several competently acted and amusingly surreal characters who serve as archetypes of LA's corrupt entertainment industry (in particular the Songwriter, a centuries old musical wizard who is the ghostwriter for every hit from Beethoven's Ode to Joy to Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit and who tells the stoner dude that everything he thinks is genuine about himself is just a fabrication he absorbed from the decaying culture around him).  This is one of those frustrating It Could Have Been movies, a fun house mirror's reflection of LA grotesque that just misses the mark of Cult Classic.

Hand of God (Amazon Prime): If you ever wanted to see Ron Perlman butt-naked in a fountain speaking in tongues, this is the show for you! Perlman trades his biker jacket for a judge's robe in this lunatic story of a man who believes he sees visions from God sending him down a path of vigilante justice.  This thing goes in about ten different demented directions, with crater-size plot holes. . .it reminds me of some of Jim Thompson's bad pulp novels, but even bad Jim Thompson is entertaining, and so is Hand of God, with its cast of crazy characters (meth head pastor, flirty fisher choir girl, rapist cops, emo corporate hit man, reformed skinhead Christian hit man, saintly software developer, saintly high class escort and even a black mayor named Bobo) and bizarre conspiracies.  Added bonus: Dana Delany plays Perlman's wife and has got to be the hottest sixty-year-old bag on TV.  She looks even better than fifty-year-old Marisa Tomei.  Popcorn entertainment at the highest levels of Grand Guignol. 

Tiger King (Netflix): Frankly, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.  Is it because white trash aren't supposed to be faggots and toothless rent boys?  Otherwise, what's the appeal of watching hour after hour of petting zoo oddballs ranting and raving at each other? It's like a five hour long episode of the worst moments of Live PD.  

The Sinner, Season 3 (USA): Easily the best season of this show, as a high school teacher watches his life slip into smothering conformity, and has his cry for help answered by an old college buddy—who just so happens to be a suicidal/homicidal nihilist.  Watching Bill Pullman's repressed homicide detective Harry Ambrose trying to keep up with the high school teacher spiraling into full-on Nietzschean madness offers plenty of psychotronic thrills and a decent philosophic critique of contemporary society.

Dare Me (USA): LOL! "Cutthroat world of competitive high school cheerleading. . ."  OK.  Did you ever think you'd see cutthroat and cheerleading in the same tagline?  But. . .this gauzy teen hard body soap opera does have a, er, certain appeal.  OK.  For real, though.  It's a little like Friday Night Lights told from the point of view of an S.E. Hinton cheerleader squad.  OK.  All right.  But, if the Emmy Awards had a category for Best Jailbait Melodrama, this thing would win, hands down.