Netflix I Watched on Paternity Leave: The Transporter, The Series (designed and written for teenage boys, apparently)

Another thing that I've been spending my time on as a small person is being fed from a bottle or being held while I bounce on a pilates ball making soothing noises is Transporter: the Series.

Did you see the Luc Besson action film The Transporter with Jason Statham? (Note that I am not asking if you saw the two sequels; they were pretty crap.) It was an insubstantial but well-constructed action film where Jason Statham is a getaway driver par excellence in a tricked-out BMW doing jobs for criminals in the south of France, but he gets tasked with delivering a package that turns out to be an attractive Chinese woman in a duffel bag, and he ends up breaking his traditional non-intervention code of conduct and instead just beats on a bunch of people who really deserve it (also two cops who then get blown up by a car bomb, but Statham totally didn't know his car was going to get blown up when he stuffed the knocked-out cops in his trunk, so let's give him a pass on that).

One of the best scenes in the film Transporter is this balletically choreographed fight where Jason Statham stands on bicycle pedals in the middle of a giant oil slick and everyone else is playing slip-n-slide on the floor.

The movie had two great attributes: amazing driving sequences and some of Luc Besson's best fight sequences.

The TV show is capitalizing on the popularity of the movies, but also needs to make its money from somewhere (Canadian, French, and German TV subsidies only go so far), so it uses the Audi sports cars from the later movies as promotional consideration, as well as Fords whenever the show is shot in Canada (more on Canada later). Also for TV, intensely bald and working class-looking Jason Statham is swapped for Chris Vance, who looks like how teenage Sherlock slash-fic writers probably imagine Martin Freeman in sex scenes.

No, ladies, he is not shirtless enough. You get to see some fat, hairy British dude's not-as-tan-as-the-rest-of-him butt for like two straight minutes in one episode, but Chris Vance is rarely shirtless.

Chris Vance is good at following creative fight choreography, and he has appropriate looks of grim determination while pretending to upshift, which is really all you can ask for in a show like this.

This show was shot with a ton of Toronto film subsidy money, so if you know how to spot Canadian soundstages portraying everywhere else in the world, you will see them here. However, there are legitimately scenes shot in France and Berlin, possibly to get local content requirements high enough to be considered "local shows" in some European markets and avoid foreign (read: American) TV rebroadcasting limits, so unlike some "pretends to be NYC but shot in Vancouver" shows, there are some real locations.

So, what's the show, well, about? Basically, imagine watching someone remake the first movie in a 45 minute version. Over and over and over again. I liked this, you may not.

Frank Martin, "the Transporter," has a secret package he has to deliver. There is a problem with delivering the package. Car chases and fistfights and maybe some gunplay ensue. The package is either delivered to the good guys or not delivered to the bad guys, or maybe the package is delivered to the bad guys and Frank Martin then comes back to beat the everloving tar out of them. One of those three.

Also, there's usually a woman involved. Either she is immediately enraptured by Frank Martin's animal magnetism (he's got the Irish mythological figure Diarmuid's love spot or something, seriously) and will have sex with him on or off camera if she doesn't die during the episode, or she is someone else's girlfriend/wife who will have sex with that character on or off camera. Odds are 50/50 you will see her topless, except for Vikings' Katheryn Winnick, who managed to keep all of her clothes on and wear normal clothes (as opposed to the usual form-fitting slinky clothes) for her guest starring episode, and even managed to fight a bit. Lost Girl's Rachel Skarsten apparently did not have as good an agent, and is for her episode both gratuitously naked a bunch and basically a useless Macguffin object of a character.

This is Frank Martin's fixer/computer hacker partner. This particular bikini scene is less gratuitous than the scene where she spills red wine on her blouse and you watch her take the blouse off along with her bra to immediately spot-clean as she talks to Frank on the phone, or the episode where she's naked for a couple scenes because the guy she's having sex with turns out to be tangential to the plot of the episode; the latter being an episode which is otherwise entirely about people with their clothes on driving from Paris to Marseilles.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this show does not feature women as actual human beings, but as occasionally topless plot points and eye candy. If this is a deal-breaker for you, then you have been forewarned.

"So what," you say, "what about the driving and the fighting, which is what The Transporter is about?"

Let's start with the driving, which is weaker. The driving is awesome on closed courses, such as off-road and in parking garages; the stunt drivers do some pretty amazing things. The show is also willing to crash some real cars in some impressive ways.

However, the show can't afford to shut down the streets of any of the cities (Nice, Marseilles, Berlin, and Toronto) it's set in, so the on-street driving scenes are mostly scenes of cars weaving back and forth jump-cut to stock footage of clutch pedals being depressed and sticks being shifted. It is lame.

Just look at this, then look at a picture of a road, then look back at this, and you'll get the idea of what the city street driving sequences are like.

On the plus side, Chris Vance's Frank Martin doesn't always drive an Audi, but will drive other cars (including a Smart car and an ATV) when necessary.

The fighting? It's pretty great. Lots of clever work with improvised items; for example there's a great fight in a lingerie store where mannequins, clothing racks, and some fabric items are put to great use. Any fight in a kitchen is going to be amazing; my favorite ended with a knockout via cutting board.

To recap what the show is about, Transporter: The Series has Chris Vance in a suit and tie either delivering or not delivering a package via an Audi. Car chase and fisticuff complications ensue, as well as occasional female nudity. If you were ever a 13-year-old boy, this will hit a little fun zone in your brain even if you find it problematic from an "is this good for culture" standpoint. That's why I keep watching.

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.