You'll Believe A Dog Can... Run Really Fast?

It's going to be kind of a Grab Bag of TV and Movies today, I think. Hard to be sure. I'm making this up as I go along. Then again, what else do I ever do?

First up, Ted Danson's new Netflix hit show

A Man On The Inside

I straight up would never even have looked at this if it hadn't been for The Good Place. I'd always thought of Danson - assuming I ever thought about him at all, something I certainly wasn't in the habit of doing - largely as an amiable buffoon, someone who got lucky in the 'eighties and was coasting on that luck ever since. This, clearly, is complete nonsense.

Following his excellent comic turn in the afterlife sitcom, Ted appears here in another show from approximately the same team and turns in a subtle, nuanced and very moving performance, playing a recently-retired, recently-widowed professor, now so adrift from any kind of meaningful life he's been reduced to cutting out endless "interesting" articles from newspapers to send to his only daughter, a busy mother of three teenage boys, who has neither the time nor the inclination to read them.

That's how we see him as the series opens, anyway. From there, the extremely unlikely plot has him taking a job with a private detective agency to act as the titular man on the inside. The inside of a retirement home. 

Here's the thing about the plot: it's ludicrous but it's one hundred per cent internally consistent, which means it works. More impressive yet, even though I finished watching the show more than a week ago, I could very easily rehash the entire storyline here and now without having to look anything up. I can even remember the names of most of the characters. Given my memory these days, that's one heck of an endorsement.

The plot isn't the main reason to watch the show, of course. It's more of a sitcom than a mystery. Do we have a portmanteau name for those yet? We should. There are enough of them. Mystcom, maybe? Sittery? Someone workshop that for me...

The show has been very well received by both viewers and critics. About the only bad thing anyone seems to be able to find to say about it is that it may be very heartwarming but it's not that funny. I read a few comments like that before I watched the show for myself so it may be that I'd had my expectations lowered but it made me laugh. Quite a few times. 

As for the heartwarming part, it manages to walk that difficult line between sentimentality and genuine emotion with great facility. Danson himself is just about as good as you could imagine anyone being in the part, which isn't an easy one to play. It requires him to be sympathetic but also slightly annoying, amusing but also kind of sad. He also has to come across as basically competent while also being goofy and out of his depth.

Perhaps the toughest sell of all is his ability to get along with, well, everyone. You have to believe that both old and young people would find his character almost immediately appealing; that they'd want to spend time with him, listen to him, tell him stuff they might not tell anyone else. As an actor he's playing to the audience on the other side of the screen but his character is also playing to an audience on the inside, some of whom have no idea he's acting, some who suspect it and some who know. It requires a complex set of skills and Ted has them all.

Danson is the center and the star but as usual these days there's a whole ensemble of supporting roles, all of which are played well, some very well indeed. I particularly liked the three non-pensionable-age women who orbit around Ted in the roles of his actual daughter (Sometimes pretending to be his niece.) his employer (Sometimes pretending to be his daughter.)and the owner of the residential center where he pretends to have settled, who has the good fortune never to have to pretend to be anything other than the caring, empathic, over-worked professional she is.

It's an unusual show, especially for a hit, in that a lot of the roles are given to actors in their sixties, seventies and eighties. As someone in his mid-sixties, I imagine I'm supposed to find that an added attraction but actually I just found it a bit weird. I'm not entirely convinced old people in general like to watch other old people being old. I know I don't. They all do it very well, though.

The end of the final episode absolutely screams "Give us a a second season!" and I imagine there will be one, given the show's positive reception. One more will probably fly but it's very hard to see how the premise could be parlayed into a long-running series. I mean, just how many cases could there be that need a guy in his seventies, willing to act as a P.I.'s inside man to solve crimes? As many as make Netflix money, I guess.

I'd happily watch another eight episodes, anyway.

The Sticky

For reasons I already forget, I'm back watching Amazon Prime Video again after a months-long lay-off. It's good to leave the streaming services to lie fallow for a while. When you come back you find all kinds of new things have cropped up.

As soon as I came back I found this one being pushed at me in that unsubtle way Prime has, shoving its latest offerings to the front of the queue like a proud stage parent. I glance at the shills and mostly ignore them but this one caught my eye because of the peculiar title. The Sticky? Who the hell calls a show that?

The title, it transpires, refers to maple syrup. It's an odd name for a very odd show. It's a comedy crime romp (Cromedy? No, don't start that again.) inspired by an actual theft known as The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.  The makers of the show are very concerned you know it's Not The True Story. Every episode starts with a disclaimer to that effect.

I'm not sure what they're worried about. Having watched all six episodes I feel safe in saying no-one could possibly mistake anything that happens here for reality. It's a black farce from start to finish. 

Every character, pretty much without exception, is a type and the playing, by and large, is directly to that type. Occasional hints of backstory or personality peep through the facade but mostly everyone sticks firmly to their assigned role, occasionally hamming it up like it's panto season.

That makes it sound shallower than it is. I thought it was pretty good fun all round even if it didn't have a lot of depth. 

I had been hoping it would be a Canadian version of the excellent Australian show Deadloch  and of all the shows I've seen, that is the one it most reminds me of, although it's nowhere near as funny or as dark. Still, the similarities are hard to miss. 

There's the abrasive, big city detective, sent to a small town to sort out a murder for a start. The extremely brief, barely acknowledged, sexual frisson between the incomer and the local cop even seemed as if it could be an intentional parody of the same relationship in Deadloch. Then there's the small-time power-broker, top of the local dung-heap, pushing their influence too far and getting their come-uppance. Plus there's swearing and casual violence and some solid one-liners but every show has those.

Mostly, though, The Sticky feels too odd to be derivitive, what with minor-key elements like one character being in a coma for the entire series and one of the supposedly most sympathetic characters running a mink farm. 

Peak weirdness arrives with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Bo Shea, a hit-person with a limp and a cane, who manages to be both terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. Her bravura turn in Episode 5 does a lot more than just steal the scene. It makes the show.

Curtis also co-produces, along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse and indeed the whole thing has the feel of a personal project, something someone with the power to make it happen thought would be fun to do. I imagine they were right. Jamie Lee certainly looks like she's having one hell of a good time as Bo. Luckily, it was fun to watch, too. I enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud a few times. 

Like A Man On The Inside, The Sticky ends with the clearest possible lead-in to a second series. I hope it gets one.

My Old Ass

From TV to movies. I've watched more movies this year than... well, in quite a while. Still, it hasn't been all that many - maybe half a dozen - but at least I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm. I'm optimistic for next year. I mean, one a month wouldn't be too much to shoot for, would it?

Two of the movies I watched in 2024 starred one of my top three current favorite actors, Aubrey Plaza. She's in the select group of people whose name on a cast list is all the information I require to add it to my watch-list.

In this case that could easily have led to disappointment and possibly anger. Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the movie. Just because Aubrey Plaza is hardly in it.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. She's probably present for about a third of the running time. The thing is, I have only ever seen My Old Ass referred to by the various movie and entertainment sites I follow as a movie "starring Aubrey Plaza", a claim that, not unreasonably, led me to believe she would be playing the lead. 

She is not. The lead is played by Maisy Stella and very well she plays it, too. Maisie is Elliot, just turned eighteen, in her last summer at home before leaving for college in the big city. Aubrey Plaza plays the same character at thirty-nine. 

Not to dwell too much on the plot, which once again has complete internal consistency and works perfectly even though objectively it makes literally no sense whatsoever, what happens is that Maisie takes a bunch of shrooms and hallucinates her older self, who proceeds to give her enigmatic advice about her future while bantering with her in a most amusing fashion.

When this happens, the film has already been running for a while. By the time the older Elliot (or her hallucinatory imago) disappear, maybe half an hour has passed and Aubrey Plaza been on screen for about ten minutes of it. 

It was at that point that I began wondering how they were going to keep her in the picture for the rest of the running time. It turns out it wasn't going to be a problem. They weren't.

For most of the rest of the movie, all we hear of Aubrey is her voice on Elliot's mobile phone which, through some form of metaphysical magic, she is able to use to talk to her older self from two decades in the past. Then even that stops and for quite a while there's no Aubrey at all until she makes a brief, visible and possibly physical return right at the end.

As I say, this could have led to my feeling somewhat cheated but fortunately Maisy Stella provides an entirely satisfactory substitute. The supporting cast, for once, is neither extensive nor particularly foregrounded, everyone pretty much sticking to their supporting roles and doing so solidly, without anyone being especially noticeable or memorable.

The exception, at least from my perspective, was Percy Hynes White as Chad, who stood out from the rest mainly because I did not like him at all for most of the time he was on screen. I did, eventually, come around to him but more through the writing than his performance, which I found quite annoying. You'e supposed to think he's a good guy, though, and I guess if you like goofy puppy-dog types, it tracks.

The script is by Megan Park, who also directed, doing a great job in both departments. This is a very high concept coming of age story and the absolute best thing about it is the way no-one ever attempts to explain how any of it is happening. The set-up verges on magical realism and the last thing you need with that is any kind of pseudo-scientific rationale.

At under ninety minutes, My Old Ass is short and bittersweet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if I still do kind of feel like I was short-changed on the whole Aubrey Plaza deal.

Superman

Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? No, it's a Trailer!

I don't watch a lot of movies but I do watch a lot of trailers. They're a bit like demos for games, I think; sometimes the trailer's all you need.

That absolutely does not apply to the first trailer for the Superman movie, the one that's coming out next July, directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, now heir to the cursed throne of the DC Cinematic Universe. The link popped up in my NME feed yesterday, with the teaser headline "First ‘Superman’ trailer sees Krypto the Superdog make his live-action debut." 

I was more than a little curious to see the non-CGI Dog of Steel so I clicked through right away. And he's sooo cute! I mean, seriously! Krypto has been a lot of things since he first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 nearly seventy years ago but I don't believe "cute" has often been one of them. 

Most of that is down to his signature look. I've never been sure what breed he's meant to be - he looks like some kind of cross between a Staffie and a Labrador - but whatever it is, it doesn't scream cuddly ickle doggy. 

This time, instead of the smooth-haired look he's sported for all those decades, they've gone for a much rougher, tousled, almost-terrier appearance and I am so totally here for it! It's these small changes that sometimes make all the difference and even as a long-time fan, this make-over works for me.

It's not just Krypto, though. For a Superman fan, the whole trailer is just amazing. It hits exactly the right tone and sustains it for entire the 2.17 run time. I quite literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck watching this one and the moment it ended I watched it again, at which point I admit to tearing up a little.

If the YouTube comments are anything to go by, I was not alone in my immensely positive response. Superman has been made over so many times it's hard to believ upermae actor there could ever be a version that feels fresh but this promises to be the one. It's certainly going down well with actual DC comic fans, if not with those of former Superman actor Henry Cavill, which should at least make for good pre-release word of mouth.

Whether the finished movie will have any significant appeal beyond that demographic, I guess we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out but I hope so. DC - and super-hero movies in general - could do with a hit..

If there's one thing I really hope for this iteration, though, it's that it isn't just the damn origin story all over again. I appreciate the logic of the Groundhog Day approach: there's a new generation of movie-goers every decade and if the huge majority of the audience is going to be 12-24 every single time, you can't just assume everyone knows who your characters are...

But this Superman ffs! Everyone does know who he is. Just take the origin as read and move on.

Which is just what I'm going to do. Laters!