Archive for category: Television Series

What’s the problem with social media? This film cites two, without particularly differentiating them. 1) It’s an addiction that is consuming the time and minds of the younger generation, especially. 2) It’s driving the polarization of our society, as “likes” determine what information people receive. The first appears soluble, as several of the expert talking heads reveal at film’s end, by limiting, or even banning, their children’s exposure. The second is more accurately an accelerator, albeit on steroids, rather than an inherent problem. Polarization, and the universe of alternate facts, were being driven by Fox News and talk radio before we had Twitter. The problem is people’s willingness to accept false facts, not to mention disseminate them. Social media is just the messenger, and history shows that killing the messenger is never the answer.

For six episodes this is an enthralling intellectual chess match between adversaries that are equally likeable, featuring a crew of robbers who are uniformly engaging. If the plan succeeds, no one is to get hurt and no one will suffer the loss of the millions the robbers are minting for themselves. But then around episode 7, the brainy Professor turns into Harrison Ford, one of the robbers is revealed as a sadist, the plot developments become so impossible to believe and the chess match dissolves. We have to wait for season 2 to learn how the robbers get away, and I will be glad to see more of Tokyo and Nairobi and Moscow, though not so much the others, and I wish Raquel, the chief inspector, all the best.

A four-episoder about Jeffrey Epstein that is unpleasant, repetitive, overlong and maddeningly uninformative. We get dozens of the “what” – “Then he turned over…” – but none of the why or how and very little of the who. For years he preyed on unfortunate teenage girls, but their stories are the same. How did he get away with it? Who made the corrupt deal with the U.S. attorney? How did he get so rich – especially since he had a massage and sex every day instead of working? To whom was he trafficking the girls? What caused his perversion? What was his relationship with Bill Clinton? Woody Allen? Allen Dershowitz? Who else? What about his deal with Harvard (unmentioned)? What about the photos found on his computer? The visuals were also maddening: over and over we saw the same contemporary shots of Palm Beach and the same tabloid shots of Epstein (and Maxwell). The filmmakers also used a technique that bugs me (also overused in Liz Garbus’s new documentary about the Golden State killer): reenacting without faces or any identifying mark an incidental action – walking to the beach, drinking coffee – to illustrate what the narrator is saying. The material here was about enough for 90 minutes, not four hours; and even then it would have just been a warm-up to the real story.

Brilliant, indeed. Elena Ferrante’s novel, the second of the quartet, is brought to life by the subtlest of expressions on Lila and Lenu’s faces. Lenu, in fact, makes a total of two short speeches in the course of eight episodes, yet we feel we know what she is thinking every moment. Lila, by contrast, is an enigma, one of the great enigmatic characters of fiction (Ahab? Steerforth?). No one, least of all her best friend Lenu, can read her mind, but we can’t take our eyes off her. Somehow we are able to follow the constellation of the Naples neighborhood that requires an Index of Characters in the book. The settings are gritty and real, but no moreso than the people. Already I miss them.