Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 97
May 16, 2021
The Nevers 1.6: Sporific Terrific
And not to be too clever about it, but isn't that not knowing what's up -- or down, and in between, for that matter -- the essence of what The Nevers has been before tonight, and what tonight's episode was supposed to answer, which it didn't -- certainly not completely -- but did at least a little?
Yes. So let's see. The Galanthi are an alien species in the future -- possibly one being with many facets, but more likely just an alien species -- and they come to Earth and endow some humans via spores with the magical powers we've been seeing in the first five episodes. I especially like the spores as the vectors of superpower because a review of The Nevers I saw somewhere said that the series was "soporific" -- as in putting you to sleep -- and I didn't agree with that at all, and spores as the vehicle are a good way of answering that sophomoric "soporific" critique. (Hey, have some tea or coffee if The Nevers is putting you to sleep.)
So how far in the future is this? Hard to say, but the fighting had a World War I plus high-tech feel to it -- the war that ended the Victorian/Edwardian age -- and that age is where the action up until tonight had been taking place. We meet Molly who is really Amalia (not Amelia) somewhere around there, and also someone who I think is Maladie, who I think is still somehow on the side of the good despite the apparent evidence to the contrary.
My favorite scene in that amorphous future (stretching back to the "present" Victorian age) which is really prologue to the five episodes is how Amalia comes to meet Dr. Cousens. They're a good couple. The doc takes good care of both her body and soul. What remains to be seen in the real future of this first season -- that is, the episodes to come, not the future as prologue -- is what will happen now to our band of the Touched?
Joss Whedon, as you know, alas, left the series. So we may never know what he intended to do with The Nevers, or might have come up with whatever his intentions on the day that he left. But I'll be back when the new episodes hit, and will let you know what I think. In the meantime, my compliments to Joss Whedon for succeeding with the difficult combination of Victorian super powers and aliens in the future.
See also The Nevers 1.1: Never Say Never ... The Nevers 1.2: Song and Gun ... The Nevers 1.3: Mary's Melody ... The Nevers 1.4: Who Needs to Be Found? ... The Nevers 1.5: "Mindful of the Roses"
The Girlfriend Experience 3.4: “There is clarity in realizing what isn’t working”
An excellent episode 3.4 of The Girlfriend Experience, with an excellent quote from a researcher that tells us at least what part of the series is really about: “There is clarity in realizing what isn’t working.”
That quote is in response to Iris's question, not as a call girl, but as a researcher into human behavior herself, her alternate persona, to another researcher touting what she's been pursuing. Iris asks her, let's say you find you've been on the wrong track? And she gets her answer, “There is clarity in realizing what isn’t working.”
That answer comes right out of Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, and one of his bedrock principles of how we attain knowledge: we not only learn from our mistakes, but our mistakes may be our own way of really learning. If we see a hundred white swans, and see another hundred white swans, that doesn't and cannot prove that all swans are white. But the instant we encounter a swan that is not white, we have learned something very profound: all swans are not white.
Of course, they could be complications in our observation of the non-white swan. Maybe we are having a problem with our eyesight. Maybe the bird we saw is not really a swan. But the principle still remains: we learn by discovering our errors, and subtracting them from our possible knowledge.
Now, the fact a philosophy this astute can be part of The Girlfriend Experience tells us a lot about this show. It's not all about or just about sex. Iris, as prominent as that it is in her life, is more than that. She has a brain that quests for knowledge. That's why she has her day job, that's why she can have a conversation that gets at the root of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy.
And no, that's not the only reason I watch this show, but it's one of things that make The Girlfriend Experience intriguing.
See also The Girlfriend Experience 3.1-2: Intertwining Desires ... The Girlfriend Experience 3.3: Real Fakes
And see also The Girlfriend Experience 2.1-2: Two for One ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.3-4: Hard to Come By ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.5-6: In and Out ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.7-8: Sundry Seductions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.9-10: The End of Illusions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.11-12; One and One Is Less than One
And see also The Girlfriend Experience: Eminently Worth It (my review of Season 1)
It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...
May 14, 2021
Podcast: Double Review of Decades Apart
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 176, in which I review a short film that I first saw in May 2020, and its Director's "Noir" Cut that I saw yesterday, May 14, 2021: Decades Apart
blogpost reviews:
Decades Apart: Worth Keeping Close Decades Apart (Director's Cut): Worth Keeping Closer
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music
Double Review of Decades Apart
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 176, in which I review a short film that I first saw in May 2020, and its Director's "Noir" Cut that I saw yesterday, May 14, 2021: Decades Apart
blogpost reviews:
Decades Apart: Worth Keeping Close Decades Apart (Director's Cut): Worth Keeping Closer
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music
May 13, 2021
Decades Apart (Director's Cut): Worth Keeping Even Closer
Hey, it's rare that I review a 20+ minute movie, and even more rare (as in never before) a "Director's Cut" of a movie I've reviewed before. But I can almost never resist a time-travel narrative, and seeing as how I enjoyed Decades Apart, literally a week less than a year ago (here's my review), I couldn't resist the brand new "Noir" aka Director's Cut of Andrew Di Pardo's little movie.
The story, in case you didn't read my review last year or see the movie, is about a phone call from a train station in 1953 that lands in a home in 2018. The caller is Diane. The receiver is Nathan, who takes the call on the landline kept in the house for his grandmother. The conversation that ensues is savvy, tender, deep, and endearing.
It also occurred to me, as I was just watching this new cut, that the story of a possible couple who get to know each other only via phone, separated not by miles but something much more impenetrable -- decades -- has special relevance to our pandemic times, perhaps now just beginning to come to an end, as more and more of us get vaccinated, after more than a year in which the only way most of us could relate to each other, unless we already were living together, was via Zoom. When Nathan rushes over to the train station near the end of the movie to finally see and with any luck embrace Diane, they can talk and see each, but their hands, as they reach out to touch, are separated by some temporal barrier far more potent than social distancing.
Now the old-fashioned phone, as media theorists (including me as a doctoral student) realized back in the 1970s, is a profoundly personal, even intimate, instrument, in which the speaker's mouth goes right into the listener's ear. That's much more personal, all the time, than a Zoom or any video conversation usually is. So because of that, Diane and Nathan already have a lot going for them.
And there's a power in this Director's Cut, as in the pre-pandemic original, that stems from this telephonic connection, and makes you believe that Diane could be talking to the future, and Nathan to the past. It's what I had in mind when I wrote "If I Traveled to the Past" (I wrote the lyrics, John Anealio wrote the music) in 2010, and recorded it for Old Bear Records in late 2018 (released in 2020). It's what I had in mind in every time travel novel and short story I've ever written.
Deborah Hahn was good as Diane, and Martin Tylicki as Nathan, as they were in the original (of course they were, it's the same performance). The original is still on Amazon, and I saw the new Noir Cut on YouTube. I have no idea if that link will work for you, or how long, but with any luck you won't have to travel too far into the future to see it.
May 10, 2021
Debris 1.11: Connections
Tonight's episode 1.11 didn't make things easy for Bryan at all. A woman near some Debris knows about Bryan's past -- about events only he would have known, from when he was serving in Afghanistan. Finola figures out that when Bryan was cloned in Pennsylvania a few episodes back, the Debris kept a part of him, at very least some or all of his memories. And this woman who know things that only Bryan knew had some into contact with some Debris, and picked up Bryan's memories from that piece of Debris.
It's a nice, original premise for an episode. And it made me realize even more vividly that Debris is actually an anthology series, a compilation of all kinds of science fiction tropes, common and rare, all injected into Earth and humanity via the Debris. The only problem with this, at least so far, is that all the episodes are pretty much equidistant from the Debris, in the sense that none of them are telling us what the story behind the Debris and their interstellar artifacts really are. Isn't anyone on Earth devoted to investigating that? Or are they just running from one report of Debris to another?
But perhaps some good news on that score at the end of this episode. Finola has access to the Legari files. And it looks as if all of this is connected to some kind of Native American event or legend.
See you here next week.
See also Debris 1.1 Some Probability of Gems Among the Pieces ... Debris 1.2: Clones ... Debris 1.3: Trapped Out of Time ... Debris 1.4: Suspentia Belief ... Debris 1.5: Fine Tuning ... Debris 1.6: Fountain of Youth and Its Complications ... Debris 1.7: Ferry Cross the Moebius Strip ... Debris 1.8: Resurrection and Its Hazards ... Debris 1.9: Resets 1
The Nevers 1.5: "Mindful of the Roses"
Back to that, I'm against capital punishment, so I was very glad to see Maladie outwit the rope. I'd have felt the same way even if Maladie deserved it, but I don't think she does. At the same time, I would have been happy without anyone dying, but, then again, that would have been a different show. Detective Mundi figured it out. He's the smartest (presumably) untouched human.
The other significant element in this episode is the "galanthee" or however it's spelled. It sounds like galant but it's more than that, and I'm not even sure that it's galant. But it may explain the Touched -- how they came to be, why they're in London, who knows. That would be very welcome and a very big deal.
Amalia wanted to focus on the galanthee, and not rescue Maladie. That might have been wise but certainly not galant. Did Amalia know that Maladie had made the switch? Probably not. But you never know with these usually galant women. I was glad to see that a majority of them joined Penance not Amalia on whether to rescue Maladie. That was galant indeed.
Next week will be the final episode of Part I of this series. That's a big deal, too, since Joss Whedon won't be back for the second part, which apparently hasn't even started filming yet. That was due to the pandemic -- Whedon's leaving -- which, in a sense, looms over this series, even though it takes place in late Victorian times. There are two World Wars, and two pandemics ahead of that Victorian time. Would have been good had the Touched been real, and somehow been able to stop some of that future.
Speaking of the future, I'll see you here next week with my review of episode #6. I'll likely do a podcast after that with my reviews of all six episodes.
See also The Nevers 1.1: Never Say Never ... The Nevers 1.2: Song and Gun ... The Nevers 1.3: Mary's Melody ... The Nevers 1.4: Who Needs to Be Found?
May 9, 2021
The Girlfriend Experience 3.3: Real Fakes
The Girlfriend Experience 3.3 on earlier tonight on Starz is entitled "Deep Fake" -- a good name for this episode and for the series in general, because:
1. The very essence of the girlfriend experience kind of call girl is that the woman provides not only the real sex, but illusions that she likes of even loves the client. We saw this literally tonight when Iris says "I love you" after her john tells her "I love you".
2. Iris's day job is about deep fakes, too, as she and her colleagues try to boil down sexual attractions to a series of algorithms. (Algorithms, by the way, have a way to go in our reality to match human intelligence, let alone emotions. I know someone whose video, a critical report on Trump's lies about winning the election, was taken down from YouTube, because algorithms flagged it as spreading disinformation because it had a clip of someone spouting Trump's big lie about winning the election.)
But back to Iris, who is much more fun and for that matter interesting to consider, she also in this episode talks about a video clip of a German politician being a deep fake. So what we have is someone who is a deep fake in her reality, in two jobs, at all hours of the day and night, recognizing deep fakes in our off-screen reality, as she looks at a clip on a television or computer screen.
And I was writing this, I was thinking of a good theme song for The Girlfriend Experience -- Simon and Garfunkel's "Fakin' It", released in 1967, written by Simon, one of his/their lesser-known but I always thought very best songs. Now there were certainly prostitutes back then -- "man's oldest profession" -- and algorithms, too, but they were mostly used in slide rules. I don't know if there were girlfriend experiences for sale in the 1960s, though.
See also The Girlfriend Experience 3.1-2: Intertwining Desires
And see also The Girlfriend Experience 2.1-2: Two for One ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.3-4: Hard to Come By ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.5-6: In and Out ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.7-8: Sundry Seductions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.9-10: The End of Illusions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.11-12; One and One Is Less than One
And see also The Girlfriend Experience: Eminently Worth It (my review of Season 1)
It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music
May 7, 2021
Podcast Review of Stowaway: Breathless Realism
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 175, in which I review Stowaway.
blogpost review: Stowaway: Breathless Realism
See also The Missing Orientation
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's music
The Mosquito Coast 1.3: Broadening Horizons
As I said last week in my review of the first two episodes of The Mosquito Coast, one of its most attractive and important features is the picture it provides about life on the southern border, and its depiction of immigrants. The third episode, on Apple TV+ today, goes one big, original step, further, bringing the Fox family into contact with Mexicans in the northern part of their own country.
The guy who ultimately rescues the Foxes and Chuy was only on the screen briefly. But he conveyed a humanity you don't often see from Americans along the other side of the border in TV series and movies. He had a quiet confidence and power that was reassuring. You knew that the Fox family and Chuy would be safe -- at least for now -- even though Chuy had been bitten by a snake.
How Chuy managed to contact this guy was also a pleasure to see. He has a phone in the dead of the desert and way out of range. Leave it to Allie to know a way to get Chuy's phone synched and operational with a telephone tower. Allie's a little crazy, true, as Chuy tells Margot. But he's also clearly a genius.
The series, so far, has a freshness, an intensity, in a mix that even has some humor that I've never seen before (again, I haven't read the book or seen the 1986 movie). My only regret is having to wait a week to see the next episode. One of the great advantages of streaming is seeing as many episodes as you like, turning the television series into a kind of book and its chapters. This is one of the joys of most of what is available on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Not that Apple is going to listen to me, but hey, it would be a good idea to put up a new series or two all at once.
In the meantime, I'll just look forward to the next episode, and at least give Apple creds for making new episodes available at 12 midnight local time, or the instant it becomes Friday.
See also The Mosquito Coast 1.1-2: Edgy, Attractive, Enlightened, and Important
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