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We Were the Lucky Ones (2024)
Drab, dreary, dull, depressing, desultory
Watching this miniseries is akin to having to eat your spinach: Not a particularly enjoyable experience, but one you do because it's good for you. In this case because it's important to understand and appreciate the suffering and privation so many European Jews endured during WWII -- the ones that survived at least. Technically, though, it's a real drag. Every scene looks like it's been lit with a couple of 20-watt bulbs -- even those taking place in broad daylight. The musical score, played mostly by a weepy violin, is as wan and weak as the lighting. The actors' line delivery is so stilted as to border on robotic. And whether they're supposed to be Polish, Russian, German, or whatever, they all speak with the same unidentifiable, all-purpose, foreign-sounding accent, which for the American actors seems to come and go in fits and starts. I've watched the first five episodes. I can't wait for it to end ... er, I mean I can't wait to see how it ends.
The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (2020)
Less here than meets the eye...
If you're an older white guy who likes to watch other older white guys take charge of a situation and go out and get things done, and are a bit gullible or at least willing to suspend your disbelief, then you'll probably find The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch mildly entertaining. It fits comfortably among the shows about monsters, aliens, and the paranormal that occupy many of the second and third tier cable channels these days. Here a bunch of good-ol'-boys / tech bros are engaged by a wealthy businessman to investigate mysterious phenomena, possibly supernatural or extraterrestrial in nature, that are purported to be occurring almost routinely on a large plot of land, the titular ranch, in the Utah desert. The lead investigator is a guy who looks and sounds like a Texas used-car salesman and claims to have not one, but *two* PhDs! You'd be forgiven if you were somewhat skeptical about this guy's scientific bona fides, since his conclusion after his first year of "research" on the ranch is that the weirdness is the result of "portals" to another dimension that regularly pop open on, below, and above the property. He's often shown with a blackboard behind him containing Einstein's field equations from the theory of general relativity, which he implies prove (they do not) such wormholes exist.
Another main character on the show is a guy named Dragon, who's identified as the "head of security," an organization that comprises him and only one other guy as far as I can tell. He always has this forlorn look about him, as if he's just been told his best friend has died. He's evidently into SWAT cosplay, as he dresses in a black uniform complete with a black duty cap that looks very uncomfortable in the desert heat. In early episodes he's frequently shown toting a carbine rifle, but that disappears as the series progresses. He also has a fear of digging up the ground anywhere on the ranch because he's convinced that bad things happen when the ground is disturbed, which is something he came to believe when the ranch supervisor developed a mysterious brain injury after someone once tried digging sometime in the past. An x-ray of the supervisor's head (ostensibly) featuring a prominent bump in his skull is shown about every five minutes during every episode to drive home this peculiar and dangerous property of the ground below the ranch.
Production values on the show are surprisingly high -- a definite cut above other shows of this type, like, say, Ghost Adventures. Here, the team of investigators has all kinds of expensive, fancy equipment at their disposal -- a helicopter, earth-moving equipment (bulldozers, etc.), drilling rigs, drones, lasers, radar, lidar, rockets, high-altitude balloons, GPS trackers, high-tech cameras, telescopes, giant tesla coils, and all kinds of detectors and sensors for every conceivable type of signal in the electromagnetic and radialogic spectra. Seemingly every square inch of the ranch is under round-the-clock surveillance from a "command center" that looks like NASA mission control. The team frequently supplements itself with outside "experts" in various disciplines whom they bring in as consultants or equipment specialists whenever they're faced with a puzzling occurrence on the ranch, which seem to happen at least once a day and twice on Sundays. These ancillary personnel are frequently youngish, bearded, heavily muscled men dressed all in black or in camo and wearing those black plastic wraparound sunglasses favored by law enforcement, soldiers, and Capitol insurrectionists.
A leitmotif of the series is that often when the investigators are about to conduct an important experiment or are trying to take careful measurements of something or other, their expensive equipment malfunctions, or goes "crazy" or "haywire" as the guy in charge (the one with two PhDs) likes to say. Drones won't fly, batteries die, cameras won't record, "field meters" start buzzing and beeping ominously, iPhones start randomly dialing numbers, telescopes go blind, computers crash, etc. But what's really strange is that the video cameras, microphones, sound recording equipment, lights, and drones being used by the behind-the-scenes TV production crew to make the show seem to continue working just fine during these episodes.
The show's sound design -- rumbling, thundering, reverberating percussion mixed with growling bass strings and horns -- does most of the dramatic heavy lifting to keep up the tone of tension and foreboding that permeates every episode. Every cut in a scene is punctuated with a "sting," a loud boom, which gets tiring after a while.
Now into its fourth season on the History Channel, the episodes have settled into a familiar pattern: The lead investigator comes up with a new "scientific experiment" he wants to do, which is always more elaborate and outlandish than the one in the last episode and which is intended to excite or provoke a manifestation of the paranormal forces afflicting the ranch. Seemingly within a few hours all the necessary equipment is procured and flown or trucked in; outside experts are engaged and assembled on the ranch; staging areas where the experiment will be conducted are constructed; the various computers, monitors, sensors, and other electronic gadgets needed to control the experiment and collect data are hooked up and tested. Once the experiment gets underway at least one of several ranch-related "phenomena" are bound to happen: (1) Mysterious signals begin showing up on the monitors; (2) critical pieces of equipment malfunction even though they were working fine "a minute ago"; (3) someone on the team gets a bad headache or starts feeling dizzy and has to take a timeout in a "Faraday cage" (an old grain bin on the property); (4) a herd of cows on the ranch starts running around, mooing, and behaving strangely; (5) a "UAP" (formerly known as a UFO), usually in the form of a ball of white light, appears in the sky; (6) compasses, GPS units, altimeters, thermometers, and other environmental sensors start giving anomalous readings. The reaction of the team to all this commotion is equally formulaic: They stand around, mouths agape, in shock and bewilderment, making such insightful remarks as "Are you SEEING this?!", "Seriously?!", "What the hell is THAT?!", and so on. And sadly, after all this time, effort, and expense, the investigators seem no closer to uncovering The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch than they were four years ago when the show began.
Project Blue Book (2019)
The X-Files was better...
In this lugubrious knockoff of the X-Files "mythology" episodes, Dr. J. Allen Mulder, er, I mean Hynek, and Captain Michael Scully, er, I mean Quinn, motor around gloomy Vancouver, BC, suburbs in vintage 1940's sedans investigating strange lights in the sky. The supporting cast includes a pair of Walter Skinners, er, I mean Air Force generals, a Deep Throat character reimagined as a Man In Black, and (here we depart from the X-Files universe) a couple of Russian spies, one of whom exhibits lesbian tendencies, and Dr. Hynek's timid but curious wife. There's no ostentatiously cigarette-smoking man because the show is set ca. 1950 when everyone smoked cigarettes.
Dr. Hynek, a noted astrophysicist, has been hired by the Air Force to investigate and debunk the spate of UFO sightings that seemed to accompany the beginning of the Cold War, fear of the atom bomb, and growing national paranoia about communism. He's assigned a partner, Captain Quinn, whose orders are to keep Hynek on a short leash and to squelch this business about flying saucers before it gets too much public attention. Aidan Gillen, the actor who plays the Hynek role, has trouble portraying a consistent mien, or more likely it's the writers' fault. At times he's a meek milquetoast, at others frantic and obsessive, at still others cool and pedantic. The other guy, Michael Malarkey, the Air Force captain, bears a remarkable vocal resemblance to Jensen Ackles, the Dean Winchester character in the long-running CW show "Supernatural." He doesn't have Gillen's problem. He's stone cold and humorless in every episode. There's not much chemistry between the two leads and precious little wit or humor to endear these characters to the viewer.
The show also has trouble telling a coherent story. Roughly a third of each episode is concerned with the UFO sighting of the week, in which the professor and the captain traipse around in damp fields and forests, drink coffee and eat pie in roadside diners, interview local-yokel witnesses, and attempt to come up with some mundane explanation for the event (weather balloons, meteors, swamp gas). Another third of each show focuses on the female Russian spy and the professor's wife back at home, with the former seeming to be trying to seduce the latter, for what purpose it isn't clear. Finally we have the two generals who spend most of their time in a dimly lit conference room engaged in sinister conversation, but occasionally leave to visit a huge airplane hanger that may or may not contain an actual alien spacecraft. These three dissimilar plot lines are inexpertly interwoven. One gets the impression there are three teams of writers working independently without an overarching vision or "mythology" to tie everything together. As a result the episodes are choppy and disorganized with too little time devoted to the Project Blue Book cases upon which the show is purportedly based.
An enjoyable aspect of the show, however, is its detailed reproduction of 1950s-era American styles and culture -- the clothing, haircuts, cars, home furnishings, bomb shelters, dial telephones, clunky analog electronic equipment (e.g., radios the size of a microwave oven), etc. Anyone old enough to remember those days will undoubtedly experience a pang of nostalgia when watching it.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)
A poor remake of the original masterpiece
For anyone interested in the subject matter, I would strongly recommend skipping this tepid remake and viewing the original series on DVD or VOD. Almost everything about the first episode of the 2014 version is turgid and undistinguished, bearing an unfortunate resemblance to those old educational filmstrips shown to elementary schoolchildren as spoofed so hilariously on the Simpsons. Whereas Carl Sagan's much-parodied florid, plummy delivery was captivating (how did a guy from Brooklyn learn to talk like that?), Dr. Tyson's, in a pale imitation, is merely bombastic (he's from the Bronx...). The animation and visual effects are surprisingly cheesy (well, it's on Fox after all, not PBS). The "ship of the imagination" Dr. Tyson tools around in looks like the key fob of my Jeep Grand Cherokee. Vangelis's rich synthesized score in the 1980 version, which beautifully complemented Sagan's narration, has been superseded by a tinny, forgettable version by some no-name composer. And where's the originality? Dr. Tyson's attempt to summarize the history of the universe relied on the hackneyed trope of mapping various significant events since the Big Bang onto moments in a 24-hour day -- ho-hum. The one thing I did enjoy about the premiere was Dr. Tyson's heartfelt eulogy to Dr. Sagan at the very end. Too bad Carl's not still around to polish this rather dull makeover of his masterpiece.
The Chew (2011)
Not as good as it used to be...
I like to cook (and eat) and enjoy watching food-related shows on TV including, in its early days, The Chew. More recently, however, I've lost interest in it, as its emphasis has gradually shifted away from cooking and food and more toward idle chit-chat among the hosts and various second-rate guest celebrities, most of whom seem as if they've never set foot in a kitchen before. In fact, when you subtract time spent on silly games, craft demonstrations, dubious fashion tips, the aforementioned gossiping, and frequent, interminable commercials, there's probably less than ten minutes out of the hour-long show that concern anything edible. And when someone does get behind the stove on the set, all we usually get to see are billowing clouds of greasy smoke from burning fat and shots of food scorching in a blackened pot -- not very appetizing.
Parenthood (2010)
Painful to watch...
Am I the only one who finds this show painful to watch (and I don't mean that as a good thing)? Every single character is obstreperous, shrill, unpleasant, humorless, and emotionally bereft. This family, the Bravermans, seem expert at turning lemonade back into lemons. They're all tightly wound, jittery, lugubrious sourpusses, who persist in talking over each other so that every conversation rapidly escalates in stridency until it ends in a shouting match. The dialogue is like fingernails on a blackboard. Where do they live? Pasadena? What, do they caffeinate the drinking water out there? And that kid Max. Enough with the acting out already! He makes you want to give him a good swat upside the head. If the intent of his character is to promote understanding and acceptance of the developmentally challenged, they (the writers) are failing miserably.
The Outer Limits: The Borderland (1963)
An unusual episode -- compelling as an exponent of the power of technology
I was about eleven years old when The Outer Limits first aired on ABC back in 1963, and to this day it remains my favorite and, for me, the most influential television series I have ever watched. Many of the episodes (e.g., The Galaxy Being, The Sixth Finger, Production and Decay of Strange Particles) scared me almost to death back then and still make my skin crawl (a little) if I happen to catch one on cable today, but the Borderland had a different effect: With its jargon-filled dialog ("polarity ... REVERSED!") about magnetic fields, electric power, antimatter, and the like, its many stock-footage shots of the apparatus of a massive power plant, and its stunning, over-the-top visual effects, it left me awestruck, and succeeded in inspiring a profound curiosity about electricity, magnetism, matter, energy, space, and time. It made me want to be a physicist, and indeed, 15 years later I earned a Ph.D. in that field. Whoever said watching TV dulls the mind?