Volume 046: The Underground Railroad, Dark Woods, The Bite
THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 046
Greetings, all. Don’t really have a lot to say this time around as I’m wrestling with a lot of conflicting emotions. Feeling good about my life while stressed about what’s happening in the rest of the world. I won’t bore you with the details as I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about.
A bit of a shorter newsletter this week - reviews of three new TV series available on streaming services this week and next. One is essential. The other two are fine diversions with some minor flaws.
Free Palestine.
TV REVIEWS
The Underground Railroad
There’s a lot to love about the way streaming services generally hand a blank check to filmmakers and TV producers, letting them create daring and sometimes provocative work free of the interference of meddling/middling corporate interests. At the same time, how much richer does Jeff Bezos need to get and how much should we be adding to his absurdly overflowing coffers? That’s my dilemma with Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of The Underground Railroad. Everyone needs to see this series. It is a towering acheivement from a filmmaker who has already hit so many creative peaks in his career. With the sprawling 10-hour canvas at his disposal, he lets his dream-like visions linger, pushing us into and pulling us out of the journey of Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre), two slaves who managed to escape a Georgia plantation via the titular network. It’s a harrowing odyssey, to be sure, but none of it is played for exploitative purposes. This is the reality of how white prosperity was built on the backs of Black labor, and the dehumanizing effects of being treated like chattel. And the subtle and not-so-subtle parallels that Jenkins and his team draws between this period in American history and our current era are devastating to absorb. Watching, for example, a plantation owner wield the words of the Declaration of Independence like a cudgel or the smug back patting that several white abolitionists engage in as they purport to help should feel familiar to anyone watching the current political landscape and white liberal responses to the growing resistance movement. Again, as difficult and discursive as this gets, you still need to see it - not in the manner of most streaming series with a long day/night of bingewatching. These need to be taken in small doses to let the messages and images achieve their fullest cumulative effect. At the same time, while I applaud their willingness to shepard this series into the world, I can’t, in good conscience, encourage you to support Amazon. There are other options at your disposal however. Start by doing a web search for VPN and BitTorrent services and go from there.
Dark Woods
With the exception of the various series from the U.K. that find their way on to American flatscreens and laptops, the TV shows imported from other countries tend to be the serious ones. Dramas or tales of horror culled from the airwaves of Europe and beyond. Which can be a stultifying prospect for a minor critic like myself. The saving grace is that the networks and streaming services that go fishing for fresh material to share with the world tend to have great quality control. So, when a crime drama like Dark Woods, which originally aired on German TV late last year, comes across my desk, I can dive in knowing my time won’t be wasted. Nor will yours be if you decide to stream this six-part limited series. The story is based on true events, tieing together the murders of two couples in a forest in Lower Saxony with the disappearance of the sister of a high-ranking police official around the same time. At its core, a simple murder mystery, but writer Stefan Kolditz expands out the scope of the series just so to explore the weight of grief being borne by the brother and daughter of the missing woman, as well as the strain being felt by the police investigators trying to juggle these cases as they fend off the officials that want easy answers and tidy prosecutions. That is, essentially, the baseline plot for any number of crime thrillers and long-running TV series so it falls upon the actors to give these material its power and energy. Matthias Brandt, playing the police chief whose sister vanishes, does a fine job realizing the psychological strain of a man being pulled in six different directions at once, as does Karoline Schuch playing a rookie detective who has a far better grasp on the intricacies of an investigation than her older, male peers. They’re cliched roles handled with nuance and control by these veteran actors. Keep an eye out, though, for Hanno Koffler who plays a surprisingly stylish gardener who may or may not have had a hand in the disappearance of the police chief’s sister. He digs into this role with the distressing charisma of Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in The Vanishing or Alan Rickman in so many of his best villainous roles. (now streaming on Topic)
The Bite
We’re already approaching the crest of the first wave of films and TV series attempting to reckon with and reflect the ongoing pandemic. And, by and large, the efforts I’ve seen to date have been wanting, with the exception of the special episode of Mythic Quest that truly captured the isolation and discomfort of trying to live life and maintain relationships while being forced to keep the world at at minimum six foot remove. Michelle and Robert King’s new series The Bite is the next best thing. The limited series isn’t perfect, but the way it uses the stress of juggling multiple video calls, intrusive neighbors, and actual real life relationships should be a familiar sensation to us all. The character doing the most juggling is Rachel (Audra McDonald), a doctor trying to maintain her practice from home while also dealing with the shaky state of her marriage to a CDC scientist from afar. Amid her consultations, she witness the spread of a second pandemic - a strain that is turning people into zombies. Stuck in the middle of this insanity is Rachel’s upstairs neighbor Lily (Taylor Schilling), a part-time dominatrix and budding writer fending off a client who becomes a flesh-eater on her watch. The Kings manage to build a healthy amount of thrills into this series, even if it comes at the mercy of the comedy that only fitfully appears throughout. Though it’s a little stingy on the laughs, The Bite is still a lot of fun to watch - a feeling sure to grow as the world finally gets back to normal. (available to stream through Spectrum On Demand starting May 21)
That’s it for this week. Back again with more soon. Love you all. Be kind to one another.
Artwork for this week’s newsletter is by Palestinian artist Mohamed Khalil whose work is on display at the Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah.