Apple TV+ continues to be the place for solid shows that don’t seem to get much attention¹. Drops of God follows the two potential heirs of a deceased wine magnate’s estate—one, his estranged daughter; the other, his favourite protégé—as they compete in a series of wine-based challenges. Whoever wins will inherit a fortune, which fortune takes the form of an extensive wine collection. The premise sounds crazy, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that the story is adapted from a manga. The comic-booky feeling is even more pronounced when we realize that these people have a preternatural ability to identify the component flavours of wine just by smelling it, and that they must train to perfect their “powers” before the big “battle.” But throughout it all, the show has the gloss and high production value of a prestige drama. Attaching a serious tone to a hokey premise doesn’t usually work for me², but it does here!

A movie that I admire and respect more than I enjoy. It’s always nice to see an independent film receive such high accolades, including the Best Picture Oscar of 2024. I really don’t have any criticisms with it, and I think cast and crew did a great job.

It’s more a case of the film not matching my vibe, or maybe vice versa, that I didn’t have the right energy to fully enjoy the viewing experience. The first act, wherein Ani and Vanya have a whirlwind romance, is like watching a series of the most fun parties you’ve ever been to. As an introvert, though, no matter how great a party is, I’m still going to want to leave.

Once the conflict kicks in, and the adults who oversee Vanya’s life threaten to break the couple apart, the movie becomes a frantic comedy of errors. Characters are almost always yelling at each other. It’s funny, in a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way, but unlike that show, it’s turned up to 11 for a pretty big chunk of the movie. Larry David at least knew how to mix up the rhythm so that not every scene is a shouting match.

The final chapter of the movie was my favourite: it slows down and gives us a few reflective one-on-one moments between Ani and Igor, one of the “thugs” sent to enforce Vanya’s parents’ wishes. I would have liked the film a lot less if it didn’t have this epilogue, which makes the characters—and we, the viewers—think about everything that just happened, and what it all meant.

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Bad Sisters tells the story of five sisters, one of whom is married to a crappy husband. The other four sisters all hate him, and they hatch a plot to kill him. The show follows two timelines: it starts with the man’s funeral, and depicts the aftermath as insurance investigators dig into the suspicious circumstances of his death; and then, via flashbacks, we see the sisters’ plan(s) come together (or not).

The show is a delicate balance between comedy and drama. It has to make us root for murder, and it almost doesn’t work sometimes. The four sisters have really good chemistry, each likeable in her own way, and it’s often funny to watch them interact. But I think the greatest strength of the show is its depiction of the villain, JP. At first, he seems merely rude and disrespectful towards his wife (and everyone else), and I wouldn’t necessarily have described him as abusive for the first few episodes. But as his bad behaviour escalates, the show effectively redefines his belligerence as the tip of the iceberg, just a subtle sign of the deeper abuses going on.

The fate of JP is fully resolved in the first season, and it’s a satisfying story. There’s a second season, but after watching a couple of episodes, I noticed a significant drop in quality, and decided to quit. I think that the consequences of JP’s death tips the scale towards darkness, so that the light comedic tone is no longer convincing, and ends up feeling discordant and awkward.

Who do I have more of a crush on, Michael Fassbender or Cate Blanchett? I think it’s a tie.

He’s a spy. She’s a spy. They’re married. There’s a mole in the spy agency. He has to find out who it is. It might be her. The other four suspects are conveniently also paired romantically. What are the HR policies like at spy agencies? Emotional attachments are a huge risk to national security. Relationship discord, an equally huge risk. Fassbender and Blanchett, their relationship: solid. The others, not so much. I’m all for workplace romances, but with far-reaching, world-changing stakes like these, I’m not so sure.

He wears cool glasses throughout. I changed my mind. I think he wins.

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I’m not a parent. That ship has sailed for me, and there was a time when a twinge of envy would come over me whenever I encountered someone with children. A show like Adolescence takes that feeling of envy and replaces it with a deep appreciation for just how hard parenting can be.

The miniseries tells the story of a teenage boy who gets arrested and charged with stabbing and killing his classmate. It explores his motives, his school life, his relationship with the victim—a girl who he was involved with, in a confused teenage way—and especially, the effect of these events on his parents.

The current hype around this show mostly centres around the fact that each of the four 1-hour episodes is filmed in a single shot. I don’t have much to say about that aspect of it, other than kudos to the whole cast and crew for pulling it off. It’s truly impressive.

I recently caught up with the second season of Pachinko. The show follows the lives of a Korean family living in Japan, spanning from the 1930’s, when the main character, Sunja, was a young woman, all the way to the 1980’s, when she is a grandmother, and her grandson Solomon becomes the protagonist.

One of the main challenges that the entire family encounters is the discrimination that they face as a minority group, and it’s a fascinating to see how little this problem improves despite the decades of progress that has shaped the world around them. Somehow, they survive and thrive, but they end up going through life with a chip on their shoulder. Solomon, especially, uses his profession as a high-flying finance guy to make Succession-style deals and enact revenge against perceived cultural insults. It’s as if he’s getting back at all Japanese people for how they’ve treated his family through the years.

Kudos to the cast, who perform in both Japanese and Korean (and sometimes English). Not easy languages to learn, I’m sure. Speaking of the cast, though, one flaw that I see with the production of the show is that they don’t seem to age enough. The same actress plays Sunja from 1930-something, all the way to 1950, and she looks pretty much the same throughout. By the end of the season, one of her sons is a young man, and the two of them look like they’re the same age, which does make some dramatic scenes less convincing.

I’ll shout out one sequence in particular, where one of the characters lives through the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki. The blast itself is depicted only as a bright light, but the scenes covering the days before the explosion build tension in a cool way, by showing the date in big lettering on the screen. To emphasize the point, there are also conspicuously visible calendars on the wall in the background. It was a very effective way of building suspense.

Like many Apple TV+ shows, it seems like they have spared no expense in recreating the look of multiple historical eras, and I hope that their coffers don’t run out before they can complete the story in subsequent seasons.

Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.

The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”

The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.

Spoiler warning: Out of necessity, I have to reveal the plot in order to discuss my opinions of this film.

On the surface, this movie is fun to watch. It’s suspenseful and propulsive, and features a great performance by the lead actor, Willa Fitzgerald. However, I ended up disliking it after giving it a few minutes’ thought.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the US presidential election, which seems like the perfect time to watch this film. During my viewing, I held a question at the back of my mind: could America actually erupt into violence? It’s depicted so realistically in the film that sadly, I feel like the answer is yes. But also, the film avoids commenting on the specific political realities that would lead to such a scenario, which I think is to its credit. If its messaging were too true to life, I would be so filled with dread while watching it that I would miss the more personal story at its core.

The protagonists of the film are photographers who pride themselves on documenting the truth in a neutral way. As someone who dabbles in photography, I bought into the film’s insistence on the power of images. Visually, the film gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing iconic American imagery—e.g. a Christmas village, a small-town Main Street, the many monuments of Washington D.C.—with soldiers in battle. The action scenes are intense and appropriately scary. Ultimately, the movie shows the inevitability of war journalists becoming hardened and traumatized by the death that surrounds them, and makes you wonder if it’s worth it.

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