Atlanta

The Best Show on TV

So by now even those of you who hadn’t heard of Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino before , probably would’ve taken notice of him this year. His music video ‘This is America’ was quite the storm this summer but his other big project hasn’t quite got the same attention. Well, for my money this is the best show that I’ve watched all year. 
So Atlanta does something very special. If The Wire is the standard for Realism and Twin Peaks the same for Surrealism, Atlanta you could say is the first show that I’ve watched that combines the two perfectly. And that is quite an extraordinary thing to do ( polar opposites ) and I’ll make an effort here to explain how this is achieved with the example of an episode. No big spoilers.

So Season 1 has this episode where we meet Black Justin Bieber. Now without going into any more details on the plot. Just think about that for a minute. Black Justin Bieber ? What ? No really, he’s the Justin Bieber we all know but he’s black that’s all. Well, so you now have Justin Bieber who is a larger than life figure today but a very ‘real’ person right ? He’s now black and that is quite a surreal thing. As the episode unfolds, you can imagine this to be quite funny. Your surprise and your amusement to this fact tells you a lot about how people see race. You’ve now achieved racial social commentary simultaneously just cause of this one character. This is what Glover and his frequent collaborator Hiro Murai are trying to achieve. It’s so beautifully layered not some preachy sermon (looking at you J Cole). 



You ever had this moment where you’re narrating a story to your friend about what happened earlier in the day which was quite surreal to you but to the one you’re conversing with it was just a very normal incident. Well, Atlanta is a bit like that. Season 2 quite incredibly was an improvement on Season 1 and boy was it haunting (very much in the same vein as 2017’s ‘Get Out’). The team behind Atlanta was at the peak of its powers. It’s probably the most important show post Obama.

Daredevil

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen

Well, for starters it just got cancelled this week. So that’s not great news for fans of this series which was one of the success stories of serialized comic book adaptations. Now Daredevil is interesting cause is he a super hero at all ? No super powers to speak of. He doesn’t have a lot of money either.

Is he relatable ? If his New York counter part is friendly and from the neighbourhood, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen is more like your angsty estranged cousin who also happens to be blind. 

Empathy goes out of the window in a matter of seconds. What you’re now feeling is sympathy. And you feel that throughout the series cause many episodes deal with his wounds being tended to after quite a pummeling. He’s not very super and this show has been praised for its dark and gritty realism. Now wait a minute I’m not saying that makes for a good show. Look how dark and gritty has worked out for the DCEU. I almost forgot to mention how there’s no shaky cam. This is something that was being abused for far too long as is why people get turned off by action movies (In the same vein as the John Wick series) Shaky cam has been abused for far too long after its success in the Bourne trilogy. 

Now I've really enjoyed Season 3, Vincent D’Onofrio is once again very terrifying as Wilson Fisk. Guy has acting chops. Haven’t really seen a lot of his work since Full Metal Jacket. Yes, Jurassic World came after Daredevil. I’ve not forgotten that. 

We also had another favorite from the comics introduced as a villain. He was well, he was okay. He wouldn’t feel out of place in the final seasons of Dexter ( not great those final seasons ). All in all Daredevil stood out among those it was constantly being compared to and I for one wouldn’t go so far as recommending it to those who don’t enjoy comic book stories but this is one of the better ones. If you want to forget about comics completely I’d suggest you give ‘Legion’ a look. What a surreal journey that show is. Also do check out Frank Miller’s Born Again issues which is the inspiration behind the series. 

Frozen

Elsa and Anna's enduring popularity. 

Just last week, a friend at work broke into Idina Menzel’s now iconic, ‘Let it Go’ song and naturally I started to hum along with him and like I always do I asked him why the song is still so popular ? To put it into perspective the work mate is a body builder/gym instructor around 6ft 5 with 10k Instagram followers. His answer was simple. My daughters love it and now I love it. No fragile masculinity here.

Well, the timing couldn’t be better and Frozen now celebrates its 5 year anniversary as the highest grossing animated film of all time. So to the drawing board, why is it so popular ? 
Two protagonists? Well, it worked for Pixar’s Toy Story that started it all so that could always work. ( Frozen was developed by Walt Disney Animation Studious not Pixar - they’re both owned by Disney though ). 

Social media at its very heights in 2013 with Memes. All right fair enough. 

What about having a iconic song a bit like your ‘bare necessities’ , ‘whole new world’ and ‘circle of life’. Check.

Breaking traditional tropes like love at first sight. I hear ya.

Beloved side kicks like Olaf ? Well most movies have that but sure.

Don’t get me wrong, in this last decade I could name you Disney animated movies at the top of my head that I enjoyed more than Frozen ( big hero 6, incredible 2, zootoopia and Coco - absolute favorites , list goes on ....inside out). Ever since the turn of the century there has been a need for nuanced characters. We want sympathetic villains. We want people who we thought were good ‘breaking bad’ (literally in the case of Walter White). We want characters who we thought were evil having redemptive arcs. Things have changed, we don’t want black and white anymore ( Ben Solo is working tirelessly as we speak to create ‘shades of gray side’) and Elsa who is the focus of ‘Frozen’ fits this mould.


 It’s great that little girls and boys of course are empowered to embrace their imperfections. ‘Let it go’. I believe it’s a combination of all these things that have helped ‘Frozen’ endure a lasting legacy since its release in 2013. 

Cowboy Bebop

See you Space Cowboy

It’s been a little over a week now since the Netflix live action remake of this legendary anime was announced. Yes, I used to L word. I tend to usually ignore plot details in these pieces and focus more on themes and I’ll try doing the same here. 
So why has this remake been making noise and why is the original so beloved ? Well, for starts if I were to recommend anime to someone who might be a little prejudiced to this medium, I think Cowboy Bebop would be right at the very top of that list. One of the major themes in this show is ‘existential ennui’. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this term, a simple definition would be boredom but it’s more than just typical boredom. It’s a sort of indifference to one’s surroundings. A sort of dissatisfaction with everything . A feeling of listlessness. Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed are characters without any real purpose in this world. 


In the anime this is a consequence of loss. At times we all put so much of ourselves into one thing that once it’s gone we are left feeling very empty. Well, this show handles that expertly. It also deals with surrogate families that we adopt on the way, this is unintentionally of course , which provide for some of the most tender moments in this series. Now, there was another show which was a space western and had its characters adopting each other called Firefly starring Nathan Fillion. They definitely share a few similarities in a generic sense but they're very different shows.  Now, the creator of this series Shinichirō Watanabe is a master at this.

 Another very distinct aspect of his creations is the music in these animes, Bebop was a style of Jazz developed in 40s America. If you remember Charlie Parker in whiplash being constantly used as a reference point , well he was a pioneer of this style. His series Samurai Champloo set in the Edo period in Japan also has these characteristics. Instead fusing that period with jazzy hip hop sounds. As bizarre as that sounds, this juxtaposition of sounds works and must be credited to the now deceased musician, Nujabes. 

Another trademark of Watanabe's creations is that despite these worlds being set in a different era of history, the worlds these characters inhabit are not so different from the world we inhabit. Shichciro Watanabe is now being tasked with making an anime adaptation of Blade Runner as well and it really feels like a match made in heaven. So my recommendation to you this week would be to maybe give these shows a chance as a gateway to this beautiful medium