MikeKardec
One Too Many
- Messages
- 1,157
- Location
- Los Angeles
This is a Netflix show and I do not believe I had created any spoilers ...
We see far too many movies and TV series that are set in other times and reference popular culture a manner that is merely superficial if not completely counter productive. The great failing is trying too hard and being so cute that the shout out to earlier times and shared memory actually pushes the audience out of the experience and thus proves just how inauthentic the filmmakers can make things.
Stranger Things, hearkening back to the mid 1980s is NOT one of those shows! It somehow manages to channel the days of Eggos and La-Z-boys and Dungeons and Dragons and digital watches along with film and fiction by Spielberg and Carpenter and King and Scott and Dante and Reiner and Hooper and Koontz and Lucas and Hughes and Rami, while never really giving up its own claim on the time and place and pushing out of the willing suspension of disbelief. It touches on all this and yet never overtly winks at the audience or overplays it’s hand. Okay there might be too many up-to-date songs on the radio rather than oldies and a few too many foreign and upscale cars on the streets for rural Indiana. But those are trifling complaints. It never succumbs to that 'show me how (insert decade) you can make it' over indulgence that one finds elsewhere.
Some of its success is that it is as good, if not better than many of the movies it pays homage to and the homage-making is never a crutch. This is what those filmmakers in the '80s would have done if they’d been better at their jobs or had better support from the studios. These days TV can be made better than most features were then. Some of that is technology but much of it is vastly more competent directing. It’s rare to see a director struggle to deliver the right shots or pacing any more. And, of course, actors and acting as a skill are just BETTER these days. That is probably a numbers game, with more actors than ever before (by factors of 100 or 1000) the genius savants can be picked out and promoted but it’s also training; the diminishing of the Strasberg method and the elevation of many Meisner based programs, and coaching … quite a few actors now consult with top coaches all the way through a production.
Whatever, it’s fun to see ‘80s icons Wynona Rider and Matthew Modine but it’s even better to meet the kids playing these teen and tween roles, particularly Millie Bobby Brown playing a tragically venerable little girl with painful superpowers and balls of pure steel. Long time heavy, David Harbour also gets a chance to play a great every-man of action. As the detective involved in this paranormal case he seems not nearly as competent as you’d like a savior to be, yet he brings a “bad guy’s” intensity to his performance and you believe he’ll either pull it off or die trying. All that comes across with nary a bravado filled speech. It just what he’s a natural at … ferocious attitude. If he had played Chief Brody in Jaws (a part his role slightly resembles) the SPCA might have been called in to protect the shark.
The score is perfectly of the era synth … a nod to Jean Michele Jarre. A few sound effects are a bit reminiscent to Lost but generally these departments do their jobs well. The cinematography as well as the sound design are two areas that are not trying to look backward.
The best part is that it is not cynical, not ironic, not afraid to just “be” in a way too little entertainment is these days. Hollywood is all too often a force of cultural destruction. Sometimes this leads to interesting material but too often it lends a faux resonance to writing that is simply mediocre. Stranger Things doesn’t use the past to undermine the present as much as it just reminds us that no matter what we felt about the 1980s, from today's perspective they were heart-achingly simpler times.
For perspective The Americans is also a wonderfully accurate and wonderfully written look at the 1980s but it can only muster up the energy to peer back in time by being a show about Soviet agents posing as an average American family. Stranger Things captures that Spielbergian trait of being pure of heart … without giving in to the temptation to polish the characters or their community too brightly. Like many “cable” shows it’s better at portraying an average America than any of the glossy crud you’ll see on the Networks.
One way to verify a superior production is to check for superior work by the extras. Do they really a functioning part of the scenes or are they just props? ST succeeds in this category. Picking nits, the weapons and weapon use are a bit contemporary. It’s remarkable how much this has changed and how quickly in recent years. Armorers, stunt coordinators, prop men and directors all fail to get this stuff right. If the scary things in the series are not deadly enough it's only because it's a show that can (language excepted) work for kids too. The ending slips a bit in it’s not paying off Ms. Brown’s exceptional performance as well as could be expected in either action or emotional resonance but they’ll have time to make up for it … a second season is coming.
We see far too many movies and TV series that are set in other times and reference popular culture a manner that is merely superficial if not completely counter productive. The great failing is trying too hard and being so cute that the shout out to earlier times and shared memory actually pushes the audience out of the experience and thus proves just how inauthentic the filmmakers can make things.
Stranger Things, hearkening back to the mid 1980s is NOT one of those shows! It somehow manages to channel the days of Eggos and La-Z-boys and Dungeons and Dragons and digital watches along with film and fiction by Spielberg and Carpenter and King and Scott and Dante and Reiner and Hooper and Koontz and Lucas and Hughes and Rami, while never really giving up its own claim on the time and place and pushing out of the willing suspension of disbelief. It touches on all this and yet never overtly winks at the audience or overplays it’s hand. Okay there might be too many up-to-date songs on the radio rather than oldies and a few too many foreign and upscale cars on the streets for rural Indiana. But those are trifling complaints. It never succumbs to that 'show me how (insert decade) you can make it' over indulgence that one finds elsewhere.
Some of its success is that it is as good, if not better than many of the movies it pays homage to and the homage-making is never a crutch. This is what those filmmakers in the '80s would have done if they’d been better at their jobs or had better support from the studios. These days TV can be made better than most features were then. Some of that is technology but much of it is vastly more competent directing. It’s rare to see a director struggle to deliver the right shots or pacing any more. And, of course, actors and acting as a skill are just BETTER these days. That is probably a numbers game, with more actors than ever before (by factors of 100 or 1000) the genius savants can be picked out and promoted but it’s also training; the diminishing of the Strasberg method and the elevation of many Meisner based programs, and coaching … quite a few actors now consult with top coaches all the way through a production.
Whatever, it’s fun to see ‘80s icons Wynona Rider and Matthew Modine but it’s even better to meet the kids playing these teen and tween roles, particularly Millie Bobby Brown playing a tragically venerable little girl with painful superpowers and balls of pure steel. Long time heavy, David Harbour also gets a chance to play a great every-man of action. As the detective involved in this paranormal case he seems not nearly as competent as you’d like a savior to be, yet he brings a “bad guy’s” intensity to his performance and you believe he’ll either pull it off or die trying. All that comes across with nary a bravado filled speech. It just what he’s a natural at … ferocious attitude. If he had played Chief Brody in Jaws (a part his role slightly resembles) the SPCA might have been called in to protect the shark.
The score is perfectly of the era synth … a nod to Jean Michele Jarre. A few sound effects are a bit reminiscent to Lost but generally these departments do their jobs well. The cinematography as well as the sound design are two areas that are not trying to look backward.
The best part is that it is not cynical, not ironic, not afraid to just “be” in a way too little entertainment is these days. Hollywood is all too often a force of cultural destruction. Sometimes this leads to interesting material but too often it lends a faux resonance to writing that is simply mediocre. Stranger Things doesn’t use the past to undermine the present as much as it just reminds us that no matter what we felt about the 1980s, from today's perspective they were heart-achingly simpler times.
For perspective The Americans is also a wonderfully accurate and wonderfully written look at the 1980s but it can only muster up the energy to peer back in time by being a show about Soviet agents posing as an average American family. Stranger Things captures that Spielbergian trait of being pure of heart … without giving in to the temptation to polish the characters or their community too brightly. Like many “cable” shows it’s better at portraying an average America than any of the glossy crud you’ll see on the Networks.
One way to verify a superior production is to check for superior work by the extras. Do they really a functioning part of the scenes or are they just props? ST succeeds in this category. Picking nits, the weapons and weapon use are a bit contemporary. It’s remarkable how much this has changed and how quickly in recent years. Armorers, stunt coordinators, prop men and directors all fail to get this stuff right. If the scary things in the series are not deadly enough it's only because it's a show that can (language excepted) work for kids too. The ending slips a bit in it’s not paying off Ms. Brown’s exceptional performance as well as could be expected in either action or emotional resonance but they’ll have time to make up for it … a second season is coming.
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