Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Kaleidoscope/The Traitors/Poker Face/Shotgun Wedding/The Mayfair Witches
We here at the DMR are excited to be back after a lengthy—and mandated—leave of absence. Hope everyone had a great holiday season and you’re ready to get back in the saddle for media reviews and more!
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
There have been non-linear stories in films before Reservoir Dogs, but Tarantino gets the credit for bringing the concept forward in such a way that it’s identifiable as a storytelling conceit. It’s especially satisfying when telling crime stories, because they take on elements of a mystery; instead of whodunit, the audience begins to ask “whatdunit,” or even “howdunit,” which is a big part of what we like about heists and capers.
Kaleidoscope takes that idea and adds, “...but instead of making a movie, we’ll make a mini-series!” This is the longest version of a non-linear story I’ve ever seen and it works, it works, it works like a charm. We get to drop in at various points to a heist some 26 years in the making, zipping back and forth to key moments in the timeline. According to the series’ introduction, you can watch the shows in any order, and while I think you COULD do that, and maybe there was some sort of weird randomization taking place during my viewings, but I got the White episode last—the heist itself—and it didn’t spoil anything for me. I was actually a bit surprised that we got to see it, considering how wide a swing each episode was.
It's obvious from the get-go that we’re going to see a lot of homage to Tarantino and Scorsese, including a Rolling Stones needle drop (really?), but I found this more charming than annoying. Nothing was heavy-handed (well, except for that needle drop—the Stones? C’mon...) and it felt more like someone passing me a note in a master class on stretching out a heist premise to its largest and longest version of itself. If that sounds like your cuppa Joe, then you’re in for a treat.
The Traitors (Peacock)
Ordinarily, I’d chafe at even being asked to watch anything Reality TV-based, but this was a bit different: it was set in a crazypants Scottish castle, it was hosted by a nattily-dressed Alan Cummings doing his own thing, and the cast members were basically playing Mafia (or Werewolf, or whatever version of the party game you know). Three people are trying to “murder” the inhabitants and the guests are trying to figure out who’s bumping them off in the night. During the day, they do a bunch of stupid human tricks to try and increase their prize money.
Half of the cast is made up of reality TV celebrities and the other half are non-celebrities. It was pretty obvious who’d been on camera before. A couple of the games they had to play (the “challenges”) were really cool, and I mean that sincerely. The Church Bells/Music Box game was inspired. Also inspired is Alan Cummings’ wardrobe decisions and his penchant for Hitchcock-esque puns and wordplay in the dispatching of various contestants. Watching him, traipsing around in that Scottish castle full of weird decorating decisions, I was suddenly gripped by the desire to play in his Dungeons & Dragons game. He seems like a really good DM.
The Traitors is filmed exactly like how all of them are filmed, with artificially overblown faux-cliffhangers and scripted drama and all of that nonsense. Thankfully, when you stream, you don’t get commercials, and you can stop and start an episode where you want. This made the show much more engaging for me; we’d watch the episode past breakfast, where it was revealed who got murdered in the night. Then we’d stop. I recommend watching it this way, as the idea of putting up with a manufactured cliffhanger during a binge is just silly.
Poker Face (Peacock)
It’s a matter of public record that I like Rian Johnson, even when I kinda don’t. But since he’s fast becoming the Steven Soderbergh of Murder Mystery, I’m somewhat honor bound to chase down all of his various projects and shove them into my eyeholes in the hopes that he’s sending me a love note.
Poker Face is most definitely a love note. I really liked Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll, and I’m glad to see some of the cast from that in this series, too, as well as her name listed in the Producer credits. It’s pretty clear to me that Johnson and Lyonne know exactly what they are shooting for; namely, “What if Murder, She Wrote and The Incredible Hulk were the same show? Oh, and what if Columbo was a woman?”
There’s some Rockford Files in there, somewhere, too, I’m pretty sure. My Gen X peeps will get a super charge out of watching the opening credits and flashing back to, oh, EVERY cop show from 1973 to 1978. Poker Face even goes the Colombo route of letting you see the crime, see who did it, and how they did it, because it was so much fun watching Peter Falk pin people down on their timeline contradictions and other mistakes. That’s the premise of Poker Face, except that Charlie (Lyonne) is a human lie detector, rather than just a good, seemingly bumbling, detective. She just says “bullshit” to their faces. It’s very 2023.
I’ve not had such a nostalgic rush for a show made in the here and now since The Mandalorian.
Shotgun Wedding (Prime)
An awful lot of romantic comedies turn on the idea of shenanigans at a wedding. Shotgun Wedding is almost a bait-and-switch, using a buddy cop action flick to nearly pull off a wedding day rom-com.
I have a theory about Jennifer Lopez. There’s no doubting that she is a good dancer, and a good singer, and even a good actress. However, and here’s where your mileage may vary—I don’t think she has a lot of charisma, or screen presence, or what-have-you. I think it’s why her movies are so hit-and-miss. When she’s with someone with “star power,” she shines like a diamond in Out of Sight. When she’s with someone lacking in that certain something, well, she’s with Ben Affleck in Gigli.
Josh Duhamel is no George Clooney, but he’s funny and believable, and the two of them have a certain something and they play well together. When Shotgun Wedding is firing on all cylinders, it’s really funny and weirdly violent, like a blood-soaked Wily Coyote cartoon. But the first fifteen minutes of the movie is a hot mess. It’s run time that could have been better used to give us a more complete snapshot picture of all the principles and the plot and premise. Instead, it almost picks up in media res, which is a weird place to begin a rom-com, unless you’re supremely confident that the audience is smart enough to discern the set-up and roll with it. Even with me discerning and rolling, it felt like a beat or two was missing.
If you’re not looking for Shotgun Wedding to be an affirmation for the triumph of romantic love over all, and also if you’re not expecting high end production values (some of the inset shots in front of green screens are embarrassingly awful), then this is a light change of pace between other things you’re more invested in watching that will at least give you some chuckles, if not outright guffaws.
The Mayfair Witches (AMC)
I am not an Anne Rice fan, not in the way that other people are. You can basically put them in two camps: people who have read a few Anne Rice novels and the people who have spent at least one or more years of their life really worried about if the Interview with the Vampire movie was going to be any good. I’ve not read all of her books, and likely won’t. All this to say, I had no appreciable buy-in to The Mayfair Witches. Janice watched AMC’s recent Interview with the Vampire series and said it was much better than she thought it would be. That was the spirit in which we decided to try The Mayfair Witches.
So far, I’m intrigued. It’s interesting enough and twisty-turny enough to keep me engaged with the story. Pacing seems good, and everyone is making the most of their screen time. Jack Huston is someone I like in just about everything, and he is playing the hell out of his...what? Dark Man? Demon? Devil? It’s nice to see him in something a little bit more theatrical.
Alexandra Daddario is the new Jennifer Connelly, or the new-new Linda Fiorentino, depending on where your pop cultural references lie. She does a great job of being both bewildered and also kinda frightening when she starts doing witchy stuff.
As with all of these shows, there are no guarantees, but I’m hoping they can stick the landing for season one. There’s no telling how long they will be able to stretch the premise out, but for now, The Mayfair Witches is worth a look if you like dark urban fantasy stories with interesting premises.
I'm also a big fan pf POKER FACE and the Greatest Guest-Star of all time, the Racist Dog.
I have a theory that stories like The Mayfair Witches that lean so heavily into the family incest couldn’t have been made before Game of Thrones. Even then, they had to have a successful season of an Interview with a Vampire remake to prime the pump, so to speak.