Why to watch Call My Agent

The French 6-part series Call My Agent (Season 1), or if you prefer the French title, Dix Pour Cent (10 Percent, the agent's cut from all contracts, at least in France) is a really good comic drama about a small but powerful Paris agency representing major French film starts, with the amusing kick that each episode involves a star (or 2) playing himself/herself, often against type. (This works better in France, to be honest, as we had never heard of any of the "stars" in Season One.) The pace is good, the dialog is crisp and funny (even in subtitles), the lead actors make a good and credible ensemble. Most of all this series gets at the role of the agent, coddling the fragile egos of the artists and fighting like dogs w/ tempestuous producers and directors. The show feels realistic, only slightly exaggerated for comic effect, and, to boot, it also builds in a good office drama as the team fights on various fronts (and with one another) to secure the future of the agency and to play out various office and family romances and traumas. In some ways it's like a comic version of Mad Men, in contemporary setting and with less chauvinism and more sexual openness and acceptance (particular re homosexuality). All told, a really good series that we will follow into Season 2.

A great contemporary film from Romania: Beyond the Hills

Contemporary Romanian cinema is not for everyone, but for those (like me) who love long and thoughtful narratives about "real" people, movies in the tradition of great 19th-century naturalist (and realist) fiction, Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012) is must-see. The narrative, in brief, set in rural, contemporary Romania, is about a 20-something woman, recently "released" from the orphanage where she was raised (since birth I think) who has now entered a strict Eastern Orthodox convent in the hills beyond the borders of a small city. At the start of the film she is visited by a friend, Alina, who was also raised in the orphanage and is returning from her Germany where she has felt horribly lonely and insecure. We soon learn that the two women had a sexual relationship while in the orphanage, and Alina hopes to draw her friend (I'll call her V) away from the convent so the two can live together. V, however, rebuffs these overtures - she has fully bought into the strict rules of the convent, run by a priest (Father, or sometimes Papa), which perhaps is common in the Eastern Orthodox, I don't know. In any event, the push Alina to make her confession, which leads to a nervous breakdown and many other developments, which I will not divulge. There is a quiet beauty of this film: the sensitive dialog, the examination of a wide range of issues - including medical care, religious faith, social services, as well as personal relationships over time - with at least some sympathy for and understanding of all sides of the many issues. Aside from provoking thought and comment, right down to the dramatic conclusion and the surprising final sequence, there is a visual beauty to this film as well, in particular the re-creation of the austere life in the monastery and the many scenes, including a great scene in the local hospital, where the sisters gather into a group that looks like a late-renaissance portrait and you want to just grab the image and frame it and wish you didn't have to read the subtitles. This kind of movie would never be made in the U.S. (Scorsese's Silence maybe comes close) but at least it's available from Criterion, including streaming.

An emotionally wrenching, sometimes hilarious drama: A Very English Scandal

The Amazon Prime three-part series A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant in the lead, is a terrific drama in the mode that we have come to expect from the best of British TV, with terrific writing, acting, and production values (not only the period settings, in Parliament and Old Bailey in the 1970s) but also in some surprisingly effective against-the-grain decisions, such as the use of a jaunty, upbeat score that at times is so jarringly at odds with the emotional subtext of this series that it brings the project into sharp relief. This series is based closely on actual historical events: the arrest and trial of a British MP,  Liberal Party head Jeremy Thorpe, charged with initiating a plot to kill his former homosexual lover, Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw) whom Thorpe believes is blackmailing him. The director (Stephen Frears) does a fantastic job balancing and juxtaposing the range of modes and moods in this drama: One the one hand, the smarmy Thorpe is an evil guy, exploiting his social status and position of authority to exorcise and eventually to eliminate his former lover, all to protect his social standing and his family honor. On the other hand, there may well be an element of blackmail, as Scott willing accepts regular hush-money payments from Thorpe (of course via an intermediary) but keeps popping up and asking for more. But by and large we are sympathetic to Scott, who becomes, against his will, a spokesman for the rights of homosexuals and a champion of the underdog. We see plenty of horrible, prejudiced behavior - from the police, from the judge who presides over Thorpe's trial - yet the writers and directors never let us lose sight of Thorpe's humanity, either. So in the end, this series is about the horrible choices and decisions people were forced to make in that era, when coming out as a homosexual would have immediately ended a career and a marriage - the tragedy is neither Thorpe's nor Scott's alone, but of their whole generation(s) or men (and women) leading secret or repressed (or both) lives. This series is thought-provoking and moving (the sorrow of both Scott and Thorpe, and the anguish of Thorpe's best friend who served as the intermediary and confidante) are painful, beautifully written, conveyed to perfection, and it's also, at times, surprisingly funny, particularly regarding the gang of misfits engaged to murder Scott and Scott's hilarious testimony as a prosecution witness. A postscript brings us up to date on all of the personages.

Shandling biopic could have been a great 2-hour movie; instead it's 4.5 hours LONG

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, Judd Apatow's HBO documentary about the life and career of the comedian, would have made a great 2-hour movie, but sadly Apatow, showing neither respect for his viewers nor faith in his ability to select from copious raw material, stretches this bio-worship-pic into an astonishing 4 1/2 hours. I literally could not make it to this finish, which is a shame because there's so much good, original material here - especially material on GS's early career as he gradually moved from a spec-script writer to a stand-up to a comic actor. Apatow, a close friend of Shandling's (who is not shy about grabbing his own screentime in this pic), had access to a vast amount of material, including stuff from the HBO vaults, from GS's own collections, and lots of backstage stuff from GS's two cable shows, plus extensive interviews w/ almost everyone who ever worked w/ GS. If he could only have edited this material - kept the best stuff, avoided the pointless repetitions - and maybe build some supplements and extras for those who really want to know more, as in a Criterion disc. In any event, the essence of the story is that GS was wounded for life by the death of his older brother, which his parents refused to discuss, and the consequent smothering attention from his mother. He left home for LA where he started writing spec scripts, gradually made the rounds of clubs, became a terrific stand-up (the doc shows among many other great clips his first appearance the Tonight Show), which of course led to opportunities such as sub-hosing on Tonight and elsewhere. But this wasn't enough for GS, who was always pushing the envelope, and himself - he wanted to improve as an actor, eventually developing two cable shows. The doc is a little short on these shows, not quite making the case that he was so groundbreaking and influential, and inevitably the narrative runs out of gas as Shandling's career (and health) wanes - made very painful when we see his extremely awkward and unfunny appearance on Conan, who tries (and fails) to save the day. To the end, Shandling's greatest success is as a writer, as we see from his late-life hosing of the Emmys - hysterical! - and by his furious and eccentric note-taking before every appearance, including an all-star night with Chris Rock and Seinfeld. Wish I could say this film is worth seeing; maybe just watch part one and fill in the blanks.

The Staircase was great but the remake is a dud

The Sundance documentary The Staircase from about 15 years ago I think was well ahead of its time, a terrific series that took us through a sensation murder trial in N.C. that had amazing twists and turns and revelations - surprises to everyone in the courtroom - along the way. The filmmakers had access to both prosecution and defense, with the goal of showing exactly how the two sides prepare for and proceed with the investigation and the trial (the prosecutors pulled out of the deal before the trial started, so it really becomes a documentary about the defense, by the end). The filmmakers had the idea of covering a "typical" homicide trial, with the focus being mainly on forensic evidence - but the trial became anything but typical, much more than they'd anticipated. Many years before the unstoppable craze for the TV miniseries in general and the murder case studies in particular, this series set the bar, and was tight and tense with 6 episodes of 30 minutes each. Now Netflix has the idea of expanding the series in 2 ways: building the first 30-minute episodes into 9 hour-long episodes by adding in outtakes from the original shoot (and perhaps some video shot following the initial trial) and adding 5 more episode of follow-up. Terrible idea! (Possible spoiler alerts) We watched the first episode and the first "new" episode last night. The first episode now feels bloated, tedious, and repetitious, providing no new elements of interest and just dragging the episode along to hit the60-minut mark. We thought - having seen all the original episode through the verdict - we'd just jump ahead to the first new, post-verdict episode, which seemed to have about 15 minutes worth of material and 45 minutes of waste - covering points that had clearly been made already, spending way too much time w/ the sibling and children and others friends of the perp. - we're clearly on the side of the defense now and doing the bidding of the defense team (helping see the man, Michael Peterson?, as a beloved victim of a miscarriage of justice). Maybe he is a victim, but we're getting no insight, no depth, nothing new. Did I really have to see his daughter's 30th bd party?, as well as her visits to court and to the jailhouse, plus various interviews, all to show how much she loves her dad? This series is a dud. Watch the 6 original episodes and and save yourself five hours by reading about the fate of the appeal on line.

Couldn't finish watching Department Q

Let's just say I couldn't wait to get to the end of the Danish film Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith, and in fact couldn't even watch the end of the fil as the entire premise was so over the top and ridiculous - a man associated w/ a church of devout, fanatical Christians over many years has kidnapped children of church members, held them for ransom, and then tortured and killed them, all of this unknown to the Danish police, but finally a literal message in a bottle is handed over to the trio of investigators in DQ (focused on unsolved cases) and in a matter of moments they put together some key clues and they're on the chase. To me a thriller such as this means nothing of the perp is a complete homicidal sadist as it's so far beyond the bounds of most cases and has no shadings or ambiguity - unlike say the series Mindhunter or The Fall, which are full of nuance and intelligent investigation, not unadulturated evil and cases alling into place through chance and coincidence and noncridble inferences. The one strength of this film - and I admit that I did not see the first two films in this trilogy, and they may well have been better and the team just ran out of gas by film #3 - is the relationship between the two male detectives, Morck (pron Merk), a laconic, socially awkward, skeptical savant, and Assad, a Syria-born Dane who maintains his Muslim faith, to the consternation of many inside and outside the force. The third member of the team, the woman (Rakel, had to look it up) has little role in this movie except to find amazingly complex info from the Internet via a few keystrokes. Would that it were so.