What Ben's Watched On Streaming for June/July

I've watched a bunch of things on streaming media recently. Here are my short-ish reviews:

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 3 (Netflix)

A friend of mine recently said, "yeah, I was watching Agents of SHIELD, and then it got really stupid." I think she was referring to sometime in Season 2. 

Which is true, Agents of SHIELD perenially has a plot which I'd describe thematically as "peak comic book," where all plot threads come together into a unified whole no matter how disparate they seem to be at the beginning, and some stuff seems shoehorned in. It is apparently inconceivable to the Agents of SHIELD writers that SHIELD could have to deal with two major issues at the same time and they never team up or subsume each other. 

The show is also knocking off characters at a Game of Thrones rate (okay, pre-season 6 season finale Game of Thrones rate) sometimes seemingly because Joss Whedon doesn't want to pay for an actor anymore. Similarly, the "big bad" for the last half of the season sometimes seemed to be down a henchman because, I think, either the actor they had for him (who's B-list famous) was too expensive to be in every episode if he didn't have lines or he had a prior commitment so he couldn't appear in half the episodes you'd expect to see him in.

That said, as a guy who just read all the issues of Radioactive Spider-Gwen and spin-offs available on Marvel Unlimited (Gwen Stacy is a much more interesting Spider-Person than Peter Parker! Also she's in an alternate universe where Captain America was always an African-American woman and Daredevil is evil! You really should read it!), I have a pretty high tolerance for comic book stupid (I had to read through several issues with Spider-Ham -- yes, the Spider-Man that is an anthropomorphic pig -- crossovers) if a show is otherwise diverting. And Agents of SHIELD remains entertainingly diverting.

Also, Clark Gregg is still clearly enjoying his job and is a joy to watch.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress (Amazon Prime)

Elevator pitch for this show: "It's Attack on Titan, but with zombie mobs instead of naked giants, and it's set in a steampunk late Tokugawa Japan where most of the action takes place one of the armored supply trains for the rail system that keeps the last few human outposts connected."

The execution is, at best, fair. Writing seems to be done by folks given the directive: "use the formula we know works for shounen [teenage boy-marketed] anime for the elevator pitch you just heard. Do not, under any circumstances, take any risks with plot or characterization or otherwise give the audience something they likely have not seen before in another anime."

It's always magical zombies with glowing hearts covered in some sort of difficult-to-penetrate metal alloy. isn't it?

I could go on and give details, but it would really be a waste of your brain space. It's not good.

Penny Dreadful (Netflix)

This was reviewed before on this blog, but I actually like it a little more.

Let's not get too excited: I don't love Penny Dreadful as high art. I like it as a television version of a gothic horror (which also has influence from - and name-checks - the Grand Guignol style of gory theater) acted by people who are capable of much more substantial work than being "morally compromised supernatural evil-hunting team."

And that's what Penny Dreadful is -- Timothy Dalton plays the rich African explorer father of Mina Harker -- yes, that Mina Harker -- who assembles a semi-random team of dangerous misfits to rescue his daughter from a vampire. They are:

• the African explorer's mysterious African warrior butler/something (Danny Sapiani)
• demon-possessed psychic childhood friend of Mina (Eva Green)
• American gunslinger whose dark secret would be only revealed in the last episode of the first season if it wasn't spoiled by the credits sequence (Josh Hartnett)
• Dr. Victor Frankenstein -- yes, that Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadway)

In a parallel plotline, for reasons I can't quite understand, there's Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney); yes, the Oscar Wilde one with the painting. He seems to be there mostly to create multiple romantic issues with Josh Hartnett's character; Gray has sex with two women Ethan Chandler (Hartnett) is romantically entangled with, plus Chandler himself. I don't think this spoils much in the first season because, as I said, Dorian Gray has no direct relationship to the main plot. 

Here's Ethan Chandler and Dorian Gray making out. While there is a bunch of male full-frontal nudity in this show, sadly not of these guys. 

Also, Billie Piper is in this as a prostitute dying of consumption. She needs a better post-Doctor Who agent. 

As I said above, this show is sort of an update of gothic horror and Grand Guignol; the point is not that it's good, it's that it's constantly entertaining or at least shocking in a visceral way. There is a plot and there is dialogue. As the previous blogger on this beat noted, neither are particularly compelling (although the pacing of the story is good). But the production values, the acting, and the fact that everyone making this is taking it seriously instead of winking at the audience somehow raise it above "dumb" to "weirdly fun." 

Netflix I Watched On Paternity Leave: Ben Nitpicks Attack on Titan

So, I've been spending some quality early mornings feeding and rocking and otherwise caring for a small person whom I am 50% responsible for. As a result, I've watched a lot of streaming video. Also I am writing this with a baby in my left arm.

First up: Attack on Titan. It's a diverting show, not a complete waste of time, but a bunch of things keep wrecking my suspension of disbelief:

1) The Title. The show's English title is "Attack on Titan" because that's what the Japanese designer wrote in English under the Japanese title, in English only slightly better than my Japanese.

These two lines of text are not the same.

Basically, the way this was translated is if I wrote a manga-style comic called "Revenge of the Otters" and titled it in Japanese "Revenge on Otter." Depending on whom on the Internet you ask, the Japanese literally translates to "advancing giants" or "the giants' attack." Also, in Japanese grammar you don't always have to indicate whether a noun is plural (you can leave it to context), but this is kind of an important thing in English.

And the Japanese version makes a lot of sense, because the story is one of mankind under assault by giant, man-eating, genital-less naked people with varying amounts of skin and/or grotesque physical deformities (for which "titan" is an acceptable homonym). So the titans are attacking. 

But with every opening sequence, I'm smacked with that English title and I say, "translation fail!" Which opens me to be critical of-

2) That's How You Intend To Kill 50-Foot-Tall Monsters?

So, you are being attacked by giant, super-strong, regenerating monsters, and cannon are not ideal weapons against them because you can only kill them if you hit a precise spot on the back of their necks. Let's further add that you have a century to develop an awesome steampunk way to combat these giants.

The obvious development in weapons technology is to arm the traveling cast of Peter Pan with Batman grappling hooks, jetpacks, and mini versions of those utility knife swords from Evangelion, right?

This makes so much more sense than developing man-portable, semiautomatic artillery with high-explosive shells that could be mass-produced for use by minimally-skilled troops.

As you can imagine, when humankind's soldiers fail to be the absolute perfect combination of Spider-Man, Zorro, and Cirque de Soleil, they get eaten. And as this show keeps a plausibly low number of characters with superhero-level talents, casualties are high.

So, every episode, I ask myself, "why aren't you doing something more efficient?"

But this is not what made me say, after episode 15 or so, that I could put this down and watch more episodes of Leverage when bottle-feeding a newborn. That was:

3) Obligatory Magical Teenage Boy.

So, after watching a lot of Lost Boys fail to think enough happy thoughts to avoid getting eaten by titans, the plot decides to give one of the obligatory Overly Moody Teenage Boys magical powers. Of course it goes to the Harry Potter-like one with the impulse control issues.

An aside: this show's Harry Potter has as his potential love interest his sort-of adopted sister (who has the same name as the company that made my wedding china), which is made even weirder because the reason she's sort of his sister is that as pre-tweens they teamed up to kill the slavers who murdered her family and were going to sex traffic her, so she ended up living with his family. In my mind, that's a set of facts that do not lead to a romantic relationship that I am comfortable endorsing.

The powers, sadly, do not go to the show's Ron Weasley.

Sorry, Armin, you're totally the Ron Weasley of this show.

So, basically, now I have to get smacked with bad translation title, cry with frustrated despair at futile wire-work swordplay, and deal with the least deserving, most irritating main character with magical powers, plus at least Ron gets to mack on the brains of their trio. I may finish the season; I'm a little curious what's in Magical Angst Teen's Creepy Unethical Medical Dad's basement, but I'm in no hurry.

From the Depths of Netflix: Psycho-Pass

So, as I said, I spend a lot of time surfing Netflix's recommendations to see what's up. Sometimes, however, I get a recommendation.

My brother recommended the anime Psycho-Pass to me. Things I watch with my brother tend to be hit or miss; even though he's a real film buff, we never end up watching Fellini or Godard together; we usually end up seeing something like The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug, which is fine, but ultimately slightly unsatisfying.

According to official nerd lorekeepers, 

it's "smOWg," not "smAHg."

While I did enjoy seeing It Follows (the best horror film about a sexually-transmitted, slow-moving, partially invisible, relentless murder demon you will ever see, even if the Disasterpiece soundtrack made me feel like I left Kavinsky's 1984 on repeat and too loud), Psycho-Pass is back to the usual "not horrible, but not better than average."

There is no "business casual" in the future.

The setting is in a future Japan in a new state of Tokugawa era-style isolation, where society is controlled by a personality-reading supercomputer system called Sybil (possibly an abbreviation, definitely a reference to the oracle). The following things are true in this future Japan:

1. The Sybil system can determine your mood and propensity for criminality through its nationwide network of surveillance cameras.
2. If your mood and/or criminality are aberrant, Sybil sends the mental health cops out to involuntarily commit you to a mental institution (often indefinitely).
3. The cops have guns that kind of make them like the Sandmen from Logan’s Run.

   

   A Sandman, for reference. I liked the selective-fire chambers of the Gun in the book better.

   In Psycho-Pass, they're called "Dominators," because (sarcasm) that's not fascist at all. The guns don’t fire unless Sybil decides the gun is pointing at a criminal, at which point the gun generally unlocks to a stun mode. If the target’s criminal rating gets really high, Sybil unilaterally switches the cops’ guns from “stun” to “grotesquely murder.” There’s also a “vaporize with plasma” feature that I am pretty sure the writers did not come up with consistent rules for; it shows up twice and then is never heard from again.

   

   The "dominator" in "someone's about to explode like Deacon Frost/La Magra at the end of the first Blade film" mode.
4. The cops are mostly “latent criminals” who get to not be institutionalized all day in return for stunning and/or grotesquely murdering other folks who set off alarms. They are supervised by a small cadre of supposedly psychologically healthy people, but apparently hanging around "latent criminals" whose job it is to explode their fellow citizens in a shower of blood tends to push the supervisors towards latent criminality themselves, so for some it's a small slip from supervisor to supervised.
5. Japan is still a place where, after weeks of running around with a firearm chasing fugitives, a young professional woman will still continue to wear a pencil skirt as her primary criminal-chasing outfit. Look, I get it, there's a slit in the back so the wearer isn't mincing everywhere. But it's not really designed for one to sprint all over the place, which is what the job entails.

   

   Look at this skirt that Akane is always in. Just try to imagine being in that skirt and running up and down all the stairs that are in this show. And yet, pants are verboten for the whole season.

   It’s like pants are reserved for the lesbian cop (who is a latent criminal, as most of the show’s lesbians are either latent criminals or outright criminals). Stay classy, Japan.

The show starts out following a group of mental health cops as they find their way onto the trail of a sort of Moriarity of future crime, a puppet-master who aids the disturbed in committing really sick crimes and getting away with them. He has hair borrowed from Berzerk’s Griffith (that’s how you know he’s truly evil, bishounen with long white hair are always really evil).

"I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!" I was considering putting in one of the available images of the guy above murdering one of the various people he kills with a straight razor, but hey, let me just put it down here - this guy is more violent with a straight razor than Sweeney Todd and he's not the sickest murderer in the show.

This first part is entertainingly diverting in a police procedural way, although the crimes tend to be aiming toward maximum squickness factor. If you like watching Law & Order:SVU, you should be OK.

Then, about halfway through, someone involved in writing the plot realized, “hey, wait, a society where a nigh-omniscient supercomputer determines your destiny and then sends the Sandmen after you if you get stressed out about it is really screwed up,” and suddenly everyone, good and evil, is engaged in a much larger struggle against the system itself, which is also entertaining, but if you were really getting into the police procedural part, you might be thinking, “how did I end up in something that feels like a book in the Divergent series?”

At least Tris gets to wear pants in the supercomputer room. Akane does not. And there are many, many stairs up and down to the supercomputer room in Psycho-Pass.

Psycho-Pass is sufficiently amusing and plotted with enough cliff-hangers that, if you’re not careful in your binge-watching, you’ll blow through all seven-some hours of it just to see what happens. You’ll feel a little empty afterwards, because the tonal shift robs satisfaction from the season-ender victory over the Napoleon of Crime type. 

But if you like Blade Runner-style shows and anime, and you're not really doing anything else for that seven hours, it's better than Flame of Recca.