An excellent series that has fallen under the radar: The Honourable Woman

It's rare to see a high-quality miniseries with all episodes written, directed, and produced by the same person - but here's one: Hugo Blick's 8-episode BBC (via Amazon, for rent) series The Honourable Woman (2014). This has to rank as one of the most intelligent and best-acted shows I've seen recently, a totally gripping story start to finish. In brief - and I'm leaving out many elements - the story is about a sister (Maggie Gylenhall, doing a fantastic job and rocking an English accent) and brother (miscast) who have taken over the huge family business and charitable organization dedicated to bringing about peace and understanding between Israel and Palestine. Good luck! Across the eight episodes, there are many gripping and violent scenes of death, mayhem, and destruction (mixed in w/ some documentary footage in the final episode) as well as a strong family drama - plus a sub-plot focused on the investigator for the UK MI6, Stephen Rea (also terrific in a deliberately underplayed role) who unfolds the layers of the complex narrative, step by step. I must say that I have seldom seen a show w/ so many plot elements and so many twists; it's a little hard to follow at times and even at the end, thinking back, I couldn't possibly recall let alone explain all of the intrigue and double-dealing and nuances - except that they sure hate Americans just about everywhere! That said, the show will keep you thinking and guess and will at times shock and surprise every viewer. It's fallen under the radar - especially because it was never for some reason picked up for a 2nd season and in part because for some reason it's not available free from Prime or anyone else - but it's clearly a series of top quality in all the basics: writing, acting, production, social and topical relevance.

My Happy Family - title is ironic - has received no attention but is definitely worth watching

A Netflix-available film that's received pretty much Zero attention is the from from the Republic of Georgia My Happy Family (it's immediately obvious that the title is ironic or sarcastic) from 2017 (looking up these names: Nana Ekvatimishvili - writer, and co-rector with Simon Gross). The film is the story of a 50-something woman, a literature teacher in a high school, who without any direct explanation determines she will leave her family and set up life on her own in a small apartment in what is evidently an unsafe and unstable neighborhood. Much of the footage, especially in the first half of the film, establishes the family life that she is leaving behind: she and her husband live in small apartment owned by her elderly parents - her mother is a dominant figure and he father is silent and grumpy - along w/ their married daughter and spouse and their son (age 19?) who is lost in his headphone/computer world most of the time. Through # of great scenes shot w/ handheld camera for a true cinema verite look and feel we get a sense of the difficulty of family life in this crowded space - but we don't quite see why the woman is intent on leaving this home - to the great chagrin and embarrassment of her extended family, who try to persuade and dissuade her. Over the course of the movie, she adjusts to her new life and comes to enjoy her solitude, but she also learns about some family secrets, which shed light on the failure of her marriage. Obviously this movie will remind many of Nora in a Doll's House, but the woman - her name is Lamana - is Nora in reverse: She's not being patronizingly dominated in her family home; she's dominated and silenced, period, by a patriarchal society in which the men are privileged and all-powerful and the women are born to serve. Despite the social and family turmoil that fill the screen in many long and complex scenes, there are also moments of tenderness and beauty, especially in relation to music, an important facet of life at least in this family and, by implication, in Georgian society overall: at various tumultuous family gatherings and at one school reunion there is much entertainment and diversion provided by guests who break into song and harmony - very beautiful. (Also, note the use of Beethoven in the score - which by the way could serve as one of about a thousand counter-examples to a recent essay I read that put forth the notion that filmmakers primarily use classical music as a theme for "evil" characters, supposedly setting them up as esoteric highbrows; I think that is the exception rather than the rule.)

TV shows I've stopped watching for one reason or another

You readers of the blog may have noted that I like just about ever TV miniseries that I watch, and it's true that the reviews of same posted on this site are almost always positive. But that's because I post only on series-seasons that I watch in full, or almost in full. There are many that I have watched only for an episode or two and then, realizing that the show is either mediocre (or worse) or not for me because of personal predilections (I tend not to watch many comedies, shows about the supernatural, or animated pix) or in some cases not of interest to my watch-mate, M, who in particular doesn't like shows w/ too much violence (eliminating several of the mob-related shows that I probably would have stayed with). So here's a brief list of some of the shows we've started to watch but that I, at least, abandoned before the finale and never posted on (I don't have a record of dates on these shows, but I think this list covers about the past 2 years):

13 Reasons Why, Glitch, Shetland, The Keepers - don't recall why I dropped these.
Glow - first episode (about female wrestling) was funny and some good plot twists but had little interest in persuing this further.
Last Chance U Season 3 - loved the 1st to seasons, but the 3rd seemed as if it was tilling familiar ground
Time - the true-life story of a false imprisonment; seemed pretty good but had already seen The Night Of, and this seemed like a repetition
Suburra - too violent for someone
Dark - seemed too much like Stranger Things
Anerican Vandal - Season one was a riot, but season 2 seemed like a re-run
Wormwood - huh? don't even remember it
The Returned - I don't remember this one (French) either
Rita - though viewing-partner watched the whole series, I dropped out as I could never believe in the lead character or in the reality of this high school, even in Denmark
The Mechanism (Brazil) - too violent, ditto for La Mante (French), Border Town (Finnish), The Break (Belgian), and Cannabis (French ) - my memory is that each of these shows tried to be as shocking as possible from the first scene (The Break had a little more integrity, but the plot strained credulity)
More violent or gruesome dropouts: Spotless (Fr.), Money Heist (Sp.), The Frozen Dead (!), The Lava Field (Iceland), The Rain (Denmark), Evil Genius
Midnight Diner - Japanese series about weekly happenings in a small diner, cute idea for the first narrative was so preposterous that we stopped right there
The Good Place - too far fetched
Jessica Jones ,Parenthood, Maniac- did I really start to watch these?
House of Cards, final season - really like most of this series but the final season had nothing going on
Sinner - no, too weird
Marking a Murderer Season 2 - First season was great and the followup was worth maybe one episode
Hill House - read the book insteaad
Love Sick, reasonably funny first episode but little desire to see the same story multiple times
The Protector (Turkey) interesting to see a series set in Turkey, for about two episodes
Bojack Horseman - OK if you like animated comedy a la The Simpsons
Sex Education - At least it was intelligent, but had no desire to go beyond the set-up first episode
When Heroes Fly  Israeli - had some promise, actually watched 3 episodes, but the plot became increasingly preposterous
Russian Doll - full of trickery and narrative nonsense and not watchable,
Romance is a Bonus Book - South Korean - could not for a second by into these characters and their relationships, maybe a cultural issue
You - showed enogh promise to hold me for 3 episodes or so, and I liked the use of 2nd-peson narration, bur the plot never really gets off the ground
Shtisel - an Isaeali family drama about an Orthodox community that  liked far more than my watch-partner 

Not so much a series about climbing as about the personal life of a public figure - Hillary (Sir Edmund)

The first thing to note about the 6-part PBS series Hillary is that it's not about Hillary Clinton - it's about Sir Edmund Hillary, the first European and probably the first man to reach the summit of Everest (1953). But it's by no means another great climbing movie, a la Free Solo or Meru. limbing's just a small part of it, and in fact the series reaches the summit, so to speak in episode 3. All of the climbing scenes are staged and re-created, using some kind of double exposure to give a background of Himalayan peaks, but it's always apparent that this is not a documentary by any means. In place of the dramatics of death-defying exploration - we know that Hillary survives and succeeds, obviously - we get a close look at Hillary's life and his personality, and from the little I've read about Hillary the filmmakers stay close to the facts. He was a small and reticent youth and a shy and retiring man, who early in life found great difficulty in speaking and was especially awkward around women - a loner, a bit of an eccentric, nearly crushed by the doctrinaire behavior of his bullying father (the series drops this theme about partway through - whether the father mellowed or Hillary came into his own is hard to say). Though he's best known for his feats on Everest, we see that he literally had nowhere else to go after achieving that goal; everyone wanted a piece of him, but he couldn't find anything to do that held his interest. Eventually he joined an Antarctic expedition as an underling, which led to much isolation from his family for months at a time (somehow, though he seemed deeply in love with his wife, Louise, he seemed to need to get away on these long-term adventures as well) and led to serious conflict w/ the expedition leader, a blowhard and a fool. Next Hilary took on a ridiculous job sponsored by the World Book: a search in the Himalayas for Yeti - a circus stunt, really, and far beneath him, but he had no real alternative. Though we see only a glimpse of it in this series, he later years were filled w/ charitable work for the Nepalese and political engagement for liberal causes (notably, reproduction rights) in his homeland, New Zealand. The series is not as exciting as I or most viewers I would guess would hope and expect, but on the other hand it's a surprisingly moving look at the developing personality and maturation of a world adventurer and celebrity.

Free Solo

I predicted the RBG would win the academy award for best documentary and given the timeliness of its topic I'm still a little surprised that it didn't win but now having watched Free Solo, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, I can see clearly now - this is a tremendously exciting doc about the Alex Honnold's attempt to become the first person ever to free Solo - that is , climb with no ropes or external support of any kind - in a single effort scaling of el capitane (Yosemite). There have been numerous other movies about various ascents, all of them exciting to various degree (meru, the dawn wall, to name two recent ones) but none can match this one. Most documentaries are weighted down w too much explanation and too many talking heads, but this one is about the climb and its terrors - and you feel as if you're on the edge of death at virtually every moment. We get to know just enough about Honnold and what drives him and even what frightens him and of course the film is about him but it's also about something more grand - denying the impossible, living in the shadow of death. Hard as it is to scale el cap under any conditions let alone a free solo climb, it must have been nearly as difficult to film this perhaps fatal enterprise over many years; we get a sense of the difficulty - camera crews themselves suspended by intricate and maybe dangerous roping - without the technical difficulties ever intruding on the main story line. Note that one of honnold's key support personnel was tommy Caldwell, whose own daring climb was the subject of the nearly contemporaneous Dawn Wall, also worth watching.

Sent from my iPad

Three strong performances make The Favourite worth watching

The 2018 film from Greek director Yurgos Lanthimose, The Favourite, is in some ways typical of the palace-intrigue drama, a staple of so many British films and TV series (e.g. The Crown), with the couriers vying and plotting for the attention, support, and favor of the sometimes elusive or mercurial monarch. What's new and different here is that it's about the brief reign of Queen Anne, in the early 18th century, one of the less competent among all the monarchs - and this film in itself is enough to make us recognize that the Restoration was a huge mistake. The other unusual facet here is the frank treatment of the lesbian relationships among the Queen (Olivia Colman) and two aides: her closest advisor (Rachel Weisz) and a young woman, Abigail (Emma Stone) from the landed gentry who'd fallen on hard times, was dumped at the castle gates and put to work in the scullery - but because of her ambition (and, to be honest, her lineage) rises up to b in charge of the "bedchamber" and a sexual rival to Weisz, eventually displacing her from the Queen's favor. You can see that this is in part a monarchical version of A Star Is Born. All three women are really fine in their roles, which makes me think the Academy should have an "ensemble" award - Colman may be the best of the 3 but not by much and it's hard to see her role as "leading" (Stone's really is the lead I think). Overall, this is an exceptionally dark picture of the royal court, with not a single likable or sympathetic character among the crew. Lanthimose does a reasonably good job moving the plot along, creating a few really good scenes of tension (Stone and Weisz shooting birds, Stone wrestling with a young courtier who's trying to rape her) but the movie is marred by a # of quirks, such as a weird fascination w/ typography for intertitles and for the closing credits (which are essentially unreadable - what's the point of that!) and the fish-eye camera lens for long interior shots - he's like a kid who just got a new toy for his iPhone and can't lay off it. The score is kind of a muddle, with a lot of music suitable to the period and some music about 150 years ahead of the setting; go figure. It's a film probably worth seeing for the fine performances of the 3 leads, but it's hardly a gripping narrative, especially at 2 hours.