Weekend Watch - The Penguin Episode ONe

                Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is the debut episode of the television spin-off of 2022’s superhero hit The Batman – The Penguin. It describes itself as a series following Oz Cobb (the Penguin) as he tries to seize the power in Gotham City’s criminal underworld and picks up following the events of The Batman. The show stars Colin Farrell in the titular role, reprising his performance from Matt Reeves’s film, joined by Cristin Milioti as the daughter of the deceased mob boss Carmine Falcone, Sofia, Rhenzy Feliz as an inopportune henchman that Oswald picks up, Victor Aguilar, Mark Strong as Carmine Falcone in flashbacks, and Clancy Brown as the imprisoned mob boss Salvatore Marone. The show is also slated to feature performances from Theo Rossi, David H. Holmes, and Kenzie Gray. Its first episode aired this past Thursday with subsequent episodes releasing on Sundays starting next week. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: B+; a strong, if slow, opening provides plenty to be optimistic for as the rest of the season unfolds, but I’m not going to guarantee anything just yet.

Should you Watch This Show? If you loved Matt Reeves’s The Batman and want to get a taste of that version of Gotham again, this is a must-watch. If you’ve been craving a good crime drama on television that doesn’t revolve around cops and lawyers, this also definitely checks that box, and it might also be a great prestige miniseries that everyone should watch by the time everything’s said and done.

Why?

                The Penguin’s first episode takes us deeper into the criminal underbelly of Gotham City, focusing on the grounded world of organized crime where Oz Cobb and his associates operate. It picks up immediately after the events of the film, giving unfamiliar audiences (what few there may be) a quick montage of news reports explaining the pertinent details as Cobb stands by a window overlooking Gotham, plotting his rise to power. The show then takes off with a literal bang as he finds himself scrambling to cover up a murder with the help of a hapless street criminal (Feliz’s Vic) who had the unfortunate luck of being caught trying to steal the Penguin’s rims. The remainder of the episode spends its time introducing us to the various characters who will no doubt become important players over the course of the season as Cobb visits mob mansions, prostitute-populated streets, drug factories, prison, and even his mother’s home in the suburbs as he attempts to shore up support in the city while gauging the wisdom of staying versus fleeing the inevitable gang war. Across it all, Farrell’s Penguin remains the central figure, playing all sides with just as much weight and squirrelliness as he had in the film, and we start to see the shape that this (mini?)series will be taking. The question of whether Cobb ends up more as a Tony Soprano or a Vito Corleone feels like the real drama of the series, and it should be a fun ride along the way.

                If there’s any major complaints to level against this first episode, it lies in its relatively slow pacing after a quick opening. It teases us with threats of mob violence and surprising turns, but so far all of the surprising turns have had very little lasting impact, serving more as tantalizing teases that never pay off as intensely as they possibly could. Obviously, this is the first episode of an eight-episode season, so they can’t be dropping every body and complicating the plot too much early on, but there will definitely be some fans who’ve come to the show more for its comic book premise than its mob drama who won’t be thrilled with the limited action of this debut. There’s enough twists and turns that have the potential to pay out into some interesting complications down the road that I’m willing (and even excited) to give the show time to cook up to its inevitably messy conclusion. Is this show going to dethrone The Sopranos or The Wire as the best crime drama in the history of television? Doubtful. Is it going to be the high action, high easter egg comic book show that Gotham was? Also probably not, but if you want a show that blends the energy of those two types of shows fairly well so far, you’d be hard-pressed to find something better.

                Led by a consistent Colin Farrell performance and the welcome addition of Cristin Milioti as his more ruthless foil, The Penguin promises to be a fun blend of comic book action and mob drama that might by your next favorite miniseries if it can follow-up on the many promises of its first episode. The next episode comes next Sunday (the 29th), and it should give us a better idea of the direction that everything’s headed. Here’s hoping it can come close to living up to the excellence of the film that inspired it.

Weekend Watch - Killers of the Flower Moon

                Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating and review. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is Martin Scorsese’s latest crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon. The film opened across the U.S. this weekend amid huge buzz for the prolific filmmaker’s return to the director’s chair. Based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, the film documents the Osage Indian murders of the 1920s, focusing on the perpetrators Ernest Burkhart and William Hale and one of the survivors, Mollie Burkhart. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest, Robert De Niro as Hale, and Lily Gladstone as Mollie, and also features Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, Jenae Collins, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, and Scott Shepherd in prominent roles. Let’s get into it.

Letter Grade: B+; if a three hour and twenty-six-minute runtime sounds daunting, this film will not be your cup of tea. The positives outweigh the negatives here overall, but it’s not a film without flaws.

Review:

                Martin Scorsese is back with another weighty true crime story with some of his favorite collaborators and new faces as well. This one takes us to the plains of Oklahoma, the land of the Osage in the 1920s, where vast oil reserves made the Native Americans one of the wealthiest people groups in the world before the wealth drew American settlers looking to use intermarriage and “accidental” deaths to steal that wealth away. It’s a story that begs to be told, and Scorsese feels like one of the better choices to tell it, honoring the heritage and culture of the Osage even as he focuses the spotlight on the white perpetrators. The three central performances carry the film’s hefty runtime, not really lightening the load but making it a more acceptable slog. Is the film 20 to 40 minutes longer than it could be? Probably, but I think most of the length comes from an intentionally plodding pace rather than an excess of unnecessary story moments. It would feel a disservice to cut much of the story, but a more typical Scorsese pace could have shortened things a bit and made it more easily marketable to a wider audience.

                Your take on the latest Scorsese film will most likely come down to how willing you are to bask in the corruption and deceit of William Hale and his cronies because Scorsese really wants you to take it all in – to witness just how far American greed is willing to go and just how many people it’ll walk over to make a profit. If you come in knowing much about the story, the slow pace could frustrate rather than engulf and leave you wondering why you agreed to sit for this long watching a single film whose outcome you already knew. If you don’t know much, there’s enough from moment to moment that keeps even the slow moments engaging as the web becomes more and more complex. I’m not sure how effective putting DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart as the film’s focus is for the goal of the film, since he’s almost too much of a yes-man to feel like the scathing picture of an American capitalist that Scorsese loves to portray as his leading hero/villains. De Niro’s Hale as the lead could have been a truly chilling look at American greed, and Gladstone’s Mollie could have provided more of that victimized minority perspective were she serving as the lead instead. As it stands, the story has impact because of how tragic and seemingly thoughtless most of the deaths were, but it doesn’t go a long way in offering any modern condemnation of continuing American exploitations in the name of “progress” and capitalism.

                As I mentioned above, the three leads drive the film, even if their characters don’t necessarily receive the proper amount of screentime, respectively. DiCaprio is on his A-game as the leading man, blending the affability of Rick Dalton with the sliminess of Calvin Candy and the greed of Jordan Belfort to produce the bumbling henchman that is this film’s leading man. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to put it as the actor’s best performance, but in combining his three best performances, the actor unlocks something unforgettably gray and discomforting in this film. Gladstone turns in a career-making performance as Mollie, offering the audience a quiet but pervasive look into the viewpoint of the victims of these crimes. It’s a slow-developing performance that percolates as the plot of the film does, hitting its peak in the third act when she finally knows as much as the audience does and delivers the deathblow to Ernest’s illusions of coming back from everything that he has participated in with no lasting repercussions. It is De Niro’s performance, though, that truly dominates the film. His portrayal of William Hale will go down with Ledger’s Joker, Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, DiCaprio’s Calvin Candy, and Waltz’s Hans Landa as one of the best villains of the 21st century. He’s a character that’s so chilling because he really believes that his actions are justified and that his “good” deeds excuse any evils and victimization that result from his machinations.

                With captivating performances from its three leads and a story that absolutely has to be told, Killers of the Flower Moon outshines an excessive runtime and a focus on the wrong character to insert itself into the upper echelons of films released this year. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, especially being as long as it is, but Scorsese’s filmmaking certainly hasn’t fallen off with this latest outing.