June media diet

A boffo month, as spring gave way to summer!  I've taken to driving home for my lunch hour (it's about 7 miles from work to home) -- figure the $15 I save on lunch is more than the $4 I spend round-trip on gas -- and watching 20 minutes of a show while eating.  That, plus the fractured nature of evening entertainment these days -- at least half the week, everybody is lost in their own shows on their own devices -- and I have enough time to watch and read all this stuff. 

The Flight Attendant - HBO | Season 2 was not as good as season 1, but still pretty trippy.  Curious if they’re going to try for 3.  Not sure why the editors are so wed to the multi-view transition to mark the passage of time or travel, but Kaley Cuoco is fun in a meaty role very unlike her star turn in “the Big Bang Theory.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi - Disney+ | I am a critical outlier, apparently, but I didn’t hate this six-episode limited series.  Were they hamstrung, storywise, because we know the fate of the title character and his nemesis, Darth Vader?  Probably.  But for this 50-year-old viewer who spun elaborate intergalactic stories while playing with Kenner action figures in the 80’s, it’s simply satisfying to see these characters on screen again.

Ozark - Netflix | An all-timer.  Top 10, easy, maybe Top 5?  Jason Bateman and Laura Linney break bad almost as well as Bryan Cranston.  And the actress who plays Ruth Langmore and drops an f-bomb within the first 15 seconds of every scene?  Yes, please!  Remarkable storytelling that reminds viewers what Netflix can do when they pay talent to produce prestige TV.  Question is: in the new fragmented streaming world that they once monopolized, can Netflix make enough “Ozarks” for customers to justify $20/month?

Barry - HBO | Turns out the SNL dude who created the character “Stefan” has a very dark sense of humor.  Bill Hader’s title character is a former military sniper who really wants to be an actor but is only good at one thing — murdering people.  Lucky for him there’s quite a market for that in this messed up world.  The erstwhile Fonz, Henry Winkler, also does some pretty incredible late-career work.

Hacks - HBO | I kind of hoped season 2 wrapped this series, but since we finished it HBO announced there will be a season 3.  Ah well.  Jean Smart deserved that Emmy, but I’m not sure she goes back-to-back.  The jokes in season 2 seemed a little more subtle, with full focus on the complicated female relationship between the elder Deborah and young Ava.

We Own this City - HBO | Wanted to like this way more than I did, given it was by one of “The Wire” creators and took viewers back to the corruption that infects Baltimore, in the streets and among the boys in blue.  But it didn’t have that slowly assembling puzzle quality that made “The Wire” so astounding.  Maybe because it was basically a true story?  Certainly didn’t make me feel any better about government and the people who swear to serve and protect.  Jon Bernthal probably gets an Emmy though.  The professional critics loved it.

Survivor 42 - CBS | The original and still the best “reality TV” show of all time.  I’d like to say we haven’t missed a single season in 21 years, but there were a few years in the 2000's when parenting got in the way.  We’ve returned to it now as a reliable family show and all get really into it, cringing with the contestants and occasionally shouting at the TV!  Kudos to CBS for leaning in to cultural changes, putting them front and center in the storylines and deliberately casting to reflect the diversity of America.

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley | An intense, raw depiction of an Oakland teen’s descent into prostitution written by the city’s 2018 Youth Poet Laureate.  Inspired by a true story involving Oakland cops whose sexual depravity was exposed by one of their victims.  Tough to read, but powerful.  Very unique narrative voice and a novelist to watch, for sure.  Read my full AP review.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin |  Some nonfiction in the book diet this month!  Two journalists reconstruct the 25-day journey of the MS Zaandam, a cruise ship stranded at sea as COVID breaks out in the Americas in March-April 2020.  Takes readers back to the height of the panic, when nobody knew anything about the disease, how it spread, or who was at greatest risk.  Spoiler alert: Not all the passengers set foot again on dry land.  Read my full AP review.

Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin | A dark fairy tale that transports readers to a mysterious mountain town where mothers occasionally vanish, a fact of life residents call an “affliction.” It’s got elements of the supernatural, but says something very real about a topic all readers can relate to in one way or another — motherhood.  Read my full AP review.

Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown | What does it mean to be a family? That’s the central question of this book. The bestselling author of “The Weird Sisters” (2011) crafts a story about three sets of parents who have adopted four biological siblings, and find out while on their modern family’s first summer vacation that the biological mother of their four kids is pregnant again. AP review drops on July 12.

Hustle - Netflix | Adam Sandler combines his two loves — movies and the NBA - and delivers a fairly earnest story about a scout for the Philadelphia 76ers who needs to find the next big star to earn an assistant coaching job.  Cameos from a whole bunch of NBA players were fun, but I can’t imagine this is what Netflix thought they were getting when they signed Sandler to a 10-film development deal for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Top Gun: Maverick - Theatrical | I gotta say, I wanted to be blown away by this on the big screen, but I wasn’t.  It was fine.  Tickled the nostalgia bone again and again, but other than speculating on Tom Cruise’s fountain of youth, there just wasn’t much on screen that interested me.  Sure, the flying scenes were cool and it was great to hear classic lines repurposed (“C’mon, Mav, do some of that pilot shit!”), but the plot felt vanilla and there just didn’t seem to be enough at stake.  Any of the flyboys (and girls!) could have died on the final mission and I’m not sure I would have cared.  That sense of meaninglessness probably wasn’t helped by the fact that the studio made the enemy nameless.  Would calling it North Korea really have made a difference in international relations?

Jurassic World: Dominion - Theatrical | Two movies in a theater in one month — take that, Matt Gilmore!  I really enjoyed this one.  It makes no effort to be anything other than what it is — a PG adventure featuring CGI dinosaurs chasing humans through exotic global settings.  Velociraptor assassins pursuing Chris Pratt on a motorcycle in Italy?  Check.  Bryce Dallas Howard avoiding pterodactyls in a parachute after ejecting from an airplane? Yup.  Throw in the oldsters like Jeff Goldblum, Laura Darn and Sam Neill doing their own dino-fighting and there’s something for everyone.