Prime Video: I’m a Virgo
Writer-director Boots Riley’s superhero sociopolitical fantasy I’m a Virgo is so chock-full of playfulness and invention, it hardly matters that its politics are blunt and its ideas, if sometimes valid, are naïve. Virgo is a mess, but that’s not exactly a criticism — “mess” is in the show’s DNA. The seven-episode Prime Video original is shaggy fun, even for a viewer like me who is old, White and gay and definitely not the show’s natural target demographic.
Jharrel Jerome, Emmy winner for playing one of the teens in Ava DuVernay’s 2019 Central Park jogger series When They See Us on Netflix, is a teen again here. He’s Cootie, redefining the idea of growing pains at a height of 13 feet. Sheltered from the world in an Oakland compound built by his protective aunt and uncle (Carmen Ejogo and Mike Epps), he’s ushered into the outside world by normal-sized youths Jones (Kara Young), Felix (Brett Gray) and Scat (Allius Barnes). They introduce him to the joys of sitting around getting stoned and also the greasy pleasures and disgusts of fast food at Bing Bang Burger, a chain that represents one of the aspects of mass-market capitalism under attack here.
At Bing Bang, Cootie falls for employee Flora (Olivia Washington), who initiates him sexually in a sequence that employs some of the show’s most enjoyably sophomoric, low-fi scenes. (If you remember the sometimes cloying screen whimsy of director Michel Gondry, then you know a stylistic French cousin of Riley.)
A comic book lover, Cootie gradually comes to realize that his main hero, Hero — star of his own graphic novel series and a self-styled White urban vigilante in the real world — represents some of the worst aspects of modern life: economic, social and judicial. That Hero is played by the always welcome Walton Goggins, looking like a sun-dried, would-be rocker and giving Virgo an extra jolt.
Sometimes the show plays like a stoner comedy fused with an overfamiliar, magical-unicorn-gets-exploited-by-society plot. But stick around and Virgo will change its stripes again. That’s what can keep you watching its throw-things-on-the-wall philosophy. Enough things stick to keep you engaged.
::
APPLE TV+: The Crowded Room
The strategists at Apple TV+ clearly believed in their original series, The Crowded Room, starring everyone’s favorite Spidey, Tom Holland. But it’s a minor, dated, scientifically questionable curio that’s been inflated to 10 very slow weekly episodes that stretch on through July 28. Most viewers will figure out its big secret hours before the characters on screen do. Without spoiling too much, series creator Akiva Goldsman’s best known film, A Beautiful Mind, has a plot reveal very much in keeping with Room’s core premise.
It’s late 1970s New York City, and a young, unmoored man named Danny (Holland) is arrested for opening fire in a crowded plaza. He claims, though, that his housemate, Ariana (Sasha Lane), was the actual shooter. Problem is, police can’t find any sign of Ariana or the other housemate Danny mentions, a bruiser named Yitzhak (Lior Raz). Has Danny killed them? Or is something else going on? His bartender mom (Emmy Rossum) and stepfather (Will Chase) can’t explain what’s going on to a psychiatric grad student who’s brought in to interrogate Danny about the mystery. She’s Rya, and she’s played by Amanda Seyfried — an actor too good to have to play somebody so slow on the uptake.
The Crowded Room is the equivalent of retelling a concise gotcha flick like The Sixth Sense as a 10-hour epic. One other film comparison (spoiler alert) is when Sally Field starred in the TV movie Sybil in 1976 — that story took only a little more than three hours to tell. The book it was based on came out 50 years ago, and its presented facts have come under fire since then. The psychiatrist in that real-life story was also involved in a legal case that was made into the book The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes. In other words, everything old is new again. Only not.
::
NETFLIX: Black Mirror
Back for a sixth season after a four-year hiatus, the 2011 series Black Mirror returns with its creative wit and trend-predicting skills intact. Most of us have experienced how the great promise of the internet and social media not only soured but turned rancid. Creator Charlie Brooker’s anthology show pulls off the neat trick of confirming our (OK, my) conviction that things are hilariously terrible — but that they can always get worse.
That’s exemplified best by the first episode, “Joan Is Awful,” one of several of the stand-alone stories that happily bites the hand that streams Brooks’s prophetic, techno fever-dream series. Here, with perfect recreation of its look, sound and logo, Netflix becomes Streamberry, the source of our heroine Joan’s (Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy) existential woes. An IT exec, Joan goes through a normal day. She has to fire an employee (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri). She sees her shrink and complains about her passionless relationship with fiance Krish (Avi Nash) and feeling that “I’m not the main character in my own life story.” And she agrees to meet with an old flame (Catastrophe’s Rob Delaney). At home that night, she and Krish settle in, turn on Streamberry … and watch the events of her day enacted onscreen in “Joan Is Awful” with Salma Hayek playing … her, streaked hairstyle and all. This kicks off an accelerating series of events, balancing scatological sight gags with metaphysical questions.
The season’s remaining four episodes don’t hit quite the same peaks. But the mordantly grim “Loch Henry” (also cheerfully slamming Netflix and its reliance on quickie true-crime series), the maritally grim “Beyond the Sea” and the joyfully grim “Demon 79″ are great in their own ways. As for “Mazey Day,” starring Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz as a disillusioned Los Angeles paparazzo on the trail of a reclusive movie star (Alicia Vikander), it’s a stand-alone monster flick. If it doesn’t have much connection to the usual broadband concerns of the series, at a swift 43 minutes, it’s nasty fun.
::
DISNEY+ American Born Chinese
After a long career as a stunning physical actor in Hong Kong films, her emotional depths were finally recognized with her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once. So it only seems right to see Michelle Yeoh enshrined as a goddess in the enjoyable American Born Chinese.
Our main character is Jin (Ben Wang), a Chinese-American high schooler trying to just fit in like everyone else. His parents may speak with accents, but he’s a total California kid. No wonder it gripes him when school administrators saddle him with transfer student Wei-Chen (Jimmy Liu), just because the kid is from China. Well, sort of. In fact, Wei-Chen is the son of the Monkey King, a subject of the Jade Emperor whose rule of the Heavenly Realm is being challenged by the Bull Demon. (Just go with it; it makes sense when you’re watching.) Against his dad’s wishes, Wei-Chen has fled to earth. And he enlists Jin in the cosmic war.
That’s the cue for Yeoh, entering scenes as the Goddess of Mercy with a beatific glow and multiple arms — all the better to kick the crap out of the Bull Demon (Leonard Wu) in one of the show’s fun battles. American Born Chinese reunites Yeoh, sort of, with her fellow Oscar-winning costar from Everything, Ke Huy Quan. Here, he plays the Chenglish-speaking butt of all the jokes in an old, racist TV sitcom from the ‘80s, sampled repeatedly in the show to remind us of the bad-old-days of cultural representation.
Whether or not Quan and Yeoh ever share actual scenes in the series, I can’t tell you because I stopped watching after the third of the eight episodes. Why? Not because I didn’t like it, just that the mix of high school angst and high-flying fantasy seemed like something I’ve already seen many dozen times over. Still, I’ll probably finish it up sometime before the end of this hot summer.
::
MAX: Reality and Burden of Proof and Being Mary Tyler Moore
Three documentaries of very different styles are streaming on HBO — excuse me, the multichannel muddle that is now Max. Reality is technically a docudrama, since the film uses actors, performing to the verbatim transcript recorded on June 3, 2017, when federal agents knocked on the door at the Augusta home of NSA translator Reality Winner.
Here played by White Lotus’s Sydney Sweeney, when the agents (played by Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis) turn up, Reality is mainly worried about her barking dog, and the fear that her cat might escape the house. Only gradually does she realize they want to quiz her about a classified information leak, traced to her office and published on a news website.
Directing from her stage play This Is a Room, Tina Satter does a decent job of establishing and maintaining a low-level hum of anxiety as Reality slowly realizes the quiet, deep danger she’s in. Only near the end — in a jarring moment when we see the agents from the young woman’s POV, as laughing, Fellini-esque grotesques — does she lose control of her cool technique.
There’s also an unsettling coolness to the four-part documentary Burden of Proof. Filmed over many years, it’s the tale of a Virginia family torn in different directions by the 1987 disappearance of 15-year-old Jennifer Pandos. Her big brother Stephen was away at college at the time. But over the years, due to inconsistent stories from his parents, Ron and Margie, about what happened that night and their behavior in the days after she disappeared, Stephen comes to believe his dad murdered Jennifer, and his mother abetted him in the coverup.
Starting in 2016, director Cynthia Hill began to cover the case when Stephen sued his parents for the death of his sister. The documentary includes limited reenactments of what might have happened that night, testimony from the girl’s high school friends, and sometimes harrowing footage of police interrogations of Margie as Stephen goads her to deliver a confession she may not have to give him.
Where Burden of Proof gains its most unsettling power, and causes you to question your gullibility when watching all those true-crime shows on Netflix, is in the final episode. (And yes, like so many things these days, the doc could be even stronger if it were a little shorter.) All of the assumptions the episodes raised in us previously are upended, and truth remains a damned elusive goal.
A much more traditional documentary in the famous person retrospective category, Being Mary Tyler Moore reminds us of the subversive, sunny power of the woman who could turn the world on with her smile but was battling personal demons herself. (Difficult marriages, life-endangering diabetes, a growing affection for nighttime glasses of wine.)
If you’re as old as I am (and hey, congratulations!), you may remember her 1970s comedy as the anchoring heart of CBS’s Saturday night lineup. As Minneapolis news director Mary Richards, she made unmarried, professional life and feminism seem just matters of common sense rather than a threat to the status quo. She was adorably funny but could be a hell of a serious actor, too. (If you haven’t seen Ordinary People, prepare to be surprised.) It’s a joy to learn that Moore fell in later-life love, and for a long time, with a mensch of a much younger New York physician who had the audacity to have no idea exactly who America’s sweetheart was when they met. Good for them both.
OK, that’ll do it for this month. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind everybody that last summer’s feel-good, seriously wonderful The Bear is back for a second season. All 10 episodes are now streaming on Hulu. Some of my family members recently binged Beef on Netflix, so I was glad to rewatch it and enjoy its mix of comic insanity and, ultimately, grace. And though I’m late to the game, boy, is Prime Video’s Jury Duty a lot of sweet fun, or what?
Happy watching, everybody, and if you’re going on vacation, be safe.
::
Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming column here.
