Now Streaming: THE CALENDAR KILLER, PARADISE, YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN
We've got a killer, a dangerous future, a down-to-earth superhero, and secret agents this week.
The Calendar Killer
The film is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.
Clumsily dealing with the issue of domestic violence, The Calendar Killer goes overboard on toxic men.
Klara (Luise Heyer) is introduced when she wakes up to a bloody scrawled message: 'Your husband or your life. You choose.' The POV then switches swiftly to Jules (Sabin Tambrea), who is a volunteer on a helpline available to people afraid to walk alone at night.
This seems reasonable in the modern, bustling Berlin, and Jules is a reassuring voice. When he receives a call from Klara, though, his warmth is soon tested, as she sounds increasingly frantic.
Running 97 minutes, the film moves too fast to spoil. Then it makes another turn at the halfway point, after which things gets increasingly frenzied and increasingly preposterous. As I noted at the outset, the film has good intentions, but I found its method of delivery to be too outrageously unbelievable.
Directed by Adolfo J. Kolmerer, the film looks dark and gloomy. I just wish the story evinced more empathy for its victims, instead of brutalizing them over and over again.
(Note: the trailer below has English audio and English subtitles, but the film's original language is German.)
Paradise
The first three episodes are now streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney Plus elsewhere.
Created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), the show features excellent actors -- Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, Sarah Shahi -- in a near-future scenario in which 25,000 U.S. people take refuge under a mountain in Colorado from some sort of catastrophe. That includes the President (James Marsden), who doesn't survive the first episode, but whose murder will hang over the first season.
Because of the science fiction-y premise, and the actors involved, I was intrigued and stuck around for all three of the episodes that debuted earlier this week, though by the end of the third episode, it dropped quite a ways down my personal 'to watch' list.
It's the kind of show that would feel quite comfortable on a broadcast network of old, dusted with the fairy dust of a streaming service, which chiefly means it can have saltier language and a bit more thrusting in an improbable shower scene, in which the principals are more concerned with exchanging confidential information than in pleasuring each other.
On the main, it's much more about withholding information from the audiences, and is filled with inauthentic characters, who only approach believability because of the actors portraying them.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
The first two episodes of Season 1 are now streaming on Disney Plus.
The latest animated entry in the Marvel Universe uses an alternate timeline to freshen up Peter Park's high school years in Queens, New York. It feels very old-school and, simultaneously, quite modern and up-to-date. I like the animation style, too. (Read more in my personal newsletter.)
Ladies and Gentlemen: 50 Years of SNL Music
The documentary is now streaming on Peacock TV.
A frenzied trip down musical memory lane, the documentary employes blitzkrieg editing to jam as many acts as possible within its 128-minute run-time. There are good moments buried within the doc, but it certainly would benefit from a much shorter runtime with only the highlights of the highlights.
The Recruit S2
All 14 episodes of Season 1 and 2 are now streaming on.
As I watched the first episode of Season 2, which debuted yesterday, and is filled with stale popcorn, I started to wonder: why exactly did I watch Season 1? I can't recall, at all. The action and acting is routine, even perfunctory, and the "quips" are old school wearisome.
Noah Centineo stars as a new CIA agent who leaps into field work from great abandon and a reckless disregard for the consequences. Season 2 launches him into South Korea, where Centineo can show off his Korean-language skills and try to reconnect with a lost loved one, all while trying to save the problems of the world, I presume.
I barely made it through the first episode. Only 5 more episodes to go, but that sounds like an eternity, based on all the tired shenanigans and tricks like, "Ooh, whatever you do, don't let so-and-so see you," followed an instant later by the so-and-so seeing our silly protagonist and then coming to his defense when the silly protagonist provokes a bad guy by slightly bumping him in a crowded nightclub (?!) Yeah, and then the so-and-so more than ably engages in 'one against many' fight and, yeek, I realized the show is not for me.
On the other hand, if you're busy folding laundry one night, this might be the perfect accompaniment.
School Spirits S2
Season 1 and the first three episodes of Season 2 are now streaming on Paramount Plus.
Call it the Afterlife Empathy Club. Featuring a prevalence of extreme closeups, direct to camera, something I don't recall at all from watching Season 1 in 2023, the series returns with three episodes that are somewhat disjointed.
Picking up where the narrative left off two years ago is a dicey proposition, and it took all three episodes for me to piece things together again. Peyton List stars as Maddie, a high-school age woman who finds herself in the afterlife without knowing why or how she got there. Her purgatory confines her to the grounds of the high school where she was evidently killed, along with other high-schoolers who also died far too young.
Season 1 was powered by Peyton List's performance as her character sought answers, including why she could somehow make contact with Simon (Kristian Ventura), even though he still resides in the land of the living. Season 2 begins ... well, if you don't mind spoilers, Visit the official site where the ending of Season 1 is explained, and the premise of Season 2 is teased.
Honestly, it's the characters, and not the narrative, that speaks to me. Maddie and her friends, both living and dead, display an unusual degree of empathy for the feelings of others. Most shows about death and life and the afterlife and zombies and whatnot focus on the action and/or horror possibilities inherent in the theme.
School Spirits is one of the few that dives into the emotional pool, and though it can get treacly or manipulative, it also rings closer to the truth for me: death is an enemy, to be avoided at all costs, but you still must maintain your own personal integrity when dealing with such issues. And I'll leave it at that.
Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.
