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Reviews
Vienna Blood (2019)
One episode in, and I'm torn
Warning - there are some minor spoilers as I can't discuss the series without giving examples which necessarily must refer to the story.
The very bad: Anachronisms and outright falsehoods about medical treatment.
The anachronism: ECT wasn't performed until 1938. Okay, forgivable, but:
The series seems to have done 'research' for ECT based on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Yet ECT is still used today, albeit with anaesthesia and muscle relaxants. It is a relatively safe and often beneficial last-resort treatment for severe depression, among other forms of mental illness.
The hero might have pointed out pain or the risk of broken bones, not just lectured his prof about cruelty. The intent was not to be cruel and there WERE conditions that responded to treatment.
In other words, if the standards of the public and this series towards ECT were applied toward surgery. nobody would have surgery today solely because in the past, surgery was done without anaesthesia (and also muscle relaxants.)
The quite bad:
The ending. Oh, dear. The villain was almost camp in his clunky dialogue, written with a great deal of condescension towards the audience (we need not just hints or allusions, a virtual two by four has to be applied to our heads.)
The characters: doctor character and his med school prof - oh please, the latter is absurdly stupid and backward, and his student, Liebermann, so insufferably smug and perfect and superior, I am almost starting to side with the prof.
Liebermann copping a stare at a patient when she is being undressed by nurses wasn't a foreshadow of a love story, it was creepy and made him unlikable.
The good.
Okay, so why the six. Because there is enough to make me want to see a second episode, it's a great premise, Vienna is an atmospheric city, and the period is an interesting time to examine. But yours truly has a short fuse and it is lit.
The Farewell (2019)
Nice, but it is Souffle, not Steak
The Farewell is a pleasant little film that you could take your mother to see, warm and in places, funny. Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina are fine actors. And it's not - for a change - about a comic action hero. But I would advise my fellow filmgoers to go with modest expectations, or risk disappointment. Film critics have fawned all over this film that just can't carry the weight of all that praise.
The supposed insights about the 'immigrant experience' would be familiar to any Air Force brat or for that matter anyone in North America who has been transferred or had to leave home to seek work. Homesickness, nostalgia for the way one's home town used to look like, grief over relatives whose funerals one may have been unable to attend, these are great themes to explore, but only if the filmmaker hadn't tried to insist that these are experiences specific to immigrants at all let alone Chinese immigrants.
Most unfortunately, the lie theme doesn't get explored beyond our being told that it is a good lie because it removes the emotional burden of dying from the patient. Awkwafina's character objects but never seriously challenges her family, say by asking them how stupid do they think Grandma is, that this lie won't succeed without Grandma's tacit collaboration? In which case, what is the point? There will be no sweet oblivion.
None of the characters asks or considers the question of who is best able to manage, not just bear, the burden of this 'Tree of Knowledge'. If Grandma is indeed about to enter palliative care, who can best direct that burden, a loving family or the patient themselves? Instead, one of the characters offers up the same cultural relativism chestnut, delivered in tones of such maddening condescension I wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen.
The not so compelling lie theme dispensed with, the film dissolves into a pile of irrelevance. Grandma is at least 15 years too young to be even a teenager during the Chinese civil war, but talks about it as if she were a veteran anyway. Wedding arranged for the pretext of bringing the family together to bid farewell involves a bride who is Japanese and the groom, Chinese. Given the long history of often bumpy relations between Japan and China, I doubt that the bride's ethnicity was chosen by accident, but it is one theme too many, it looked like it was thrown in just to try and make this film look more steak than souffle.
I left glad I'd paid $7 (Tuesday discount at my local theatre) to see it - no less, but no more.
Anne (2017)
Series one was near perfect, series two is forced in places
Unlike many reviewers I had no problem that the producers chose to add issues, including sexual issues, to the original book's themes. Where I feel the writers err is in the pacing of the introduction and development of the sexual issues. The writers also take on too many themes - season 2 proceeds as a bucket list of social issues to be addressed. Slow down, please. Let such new ideas unfold in a more natural manner.
[warning, spoilers]
Even in 1908, people were aware of men 'not of the marrying kind.' But they still struggled to understand homosexuality, because so little was understood of human sexuality at the time. It would have been refreshing for the writers to have honestly presented attitudes, even of fundamentally decent people like Marilla and Matthew, as requiring a lot of soul searching on those people's part to change. I don't mean the writers should ignore that gays were a fact in 1908, only that they should not misrepresent that society at large was slow to change, not because that society was stupid or evil, just cautious about proceeding on matters of which little was known.
I also found it confusing to have Anne, a preteen/teen girl who struggles to cope with fairly ordinary teenage problems at school, somehow able to have at one and the same time, profound insights into issues that challenged many adults of the period. She is shown as being automatically accepting, on no basis whatsoever. This wouldn't make her ahead of her time, only vapid.
In summary, I wish writers could refrain from manipulating us, the audience. it is one think to hint where you want us to go, and another to refuse to let us draw our own conclusions.
The series is otherwise marked by stellar performances, good production values, and writing that when it works, tones down some of the saccharine nature of the original, like salt to caramel.