The Hollywood Bowles

Admit it. You haven’t been doing the reading you should during The Great Thinning. Come oooooonnnn: You know the most serious consideration you’ve given to a book lately is whether it’s worth more as text or toilet paper.

Don’t feel guilty. We’ve been weaning off books since TV was invented in 1927. And the pandemic may mark the period historians note as the time we made Netflix the new American library system. Only $9.99 a month for a card, and all you need is a particular antenna for the boob tube.

As our parents and grandparents discovered in the glory days of Dewey Decimals, libraries are really just a magnifying glass for the casual stroller. The browser can spend hours poring over volumes of stories, sample a few pages or snapshots, deep-dive into an artist, binge on a collection of works.

So, too, is the streaming world. Particularly now, a collection of videos is akin to inheriting a storage bin. Occasionally, you’ll find that dusty Picasso, that discarded diamond, that priceless baseball card.

Or, in the streamers’ case, that TV show you’ve been meaning to watch and never have (see The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yaddy).

In my case, it was Community, the NBC sitcom that has developed a streaming cult following since moving to Netflix (as have their other Thursday prime-time shows, The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation). While I watched some or all of those shows, I never gave the sitcom about a community college a glance. Dan Harmon, the creator of the series, based the show on his time at Glendale Community College, where he took a Spanish class and bonded with the study group — just as in Community.

My mistake for not giving it a chance. Despite uneven writing and a collapse that made the final season unwatchable, Community feels a bit like discovering Infinite Jest or A Confederacy of Dunces. Both were masterworks whose young authors committed suicide. While Harmon never offed himself, he nearly committed career suicide when alcoholism and arguments on-set prompted his ouster by the fourth season. While Harmon ultimately returned, the show never fully recovered.

But what flashes of genius the show demonstrated in its prime. Like all entrants in the NBC Thursday comedy lineup, Community boasted a multi-cultural cast, largely unknown actors, and a double-dose of sardonic wit. NBC didn’t utilize sarcasm; it bathed in it.

Community, though, offered something additional, a component television rarely broaches: Earnestness. The exemplars were Donald Glover and Danni Pudi, who play students Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir, respectively.

Troy and Abed were the best TV duo since Starsky & Hutch. Theirs was a treehouse friendship, complete with secret handshakes, blanket forts and impossible cardboard carpentry. While both ostensibly pursued heterosexual relationships, Community made clear their first love was toward each other. I’d be hard-pressed to name another pair of male TV friends who are so outward in their love. Perhaps Bart & Milhouse?

Troy and Abed’s chemistry became apparent at the end of only the second episode, when they broke into a beatbox rap centered around their Spanish homework, as seen below. It’s brilliant wordplay, and the bit would become a touchstone throughout the series, underscoring Community‘s innate sweetness.

Not that Community didn’t have an edge. Chevy Chase, who was the biggest name on the cast, played a misogynistic, racist homophobe. And there hasn’t been as likable a scoundrel on screen since Royal Tennenbaum turned his family inside out in Wes Anderson’s sublime comedy film in 2001. It’s Chase’s best work in decades (though that may not be saying much, given his career arc of late).

Chase plays Pierce Hawthorne, an Archie Bunker with millions. The only thing he has more of on his hands than time is cash and boredom. He’s at his best — and Troy and Abed  their most innocent — in the near-perfect episode The Aerodynamics of Gender. Note the soft-gauze lens framing the trampoline, which takes religious symbolism here. The episode loosely assembles around a bouncy yard the students discover, but ends up being a skewering take on race, gender baiting and the limits of friendship, all while parodying Mean Girls and The Terminator.

The last two references are important, because Community was nothing if not meta. I hate that term, so popular among critics nowadays. But it would be hard to describe the show as anything but aware of itself, sometimes preciously. Community was so aware of the tropes and traps of the sitcom it couldn’t help but announce when it was employing either. If anything, the show was sometimes so keen on its devices the viewer couldn’t get past them to just enjoy the story.

Which, ultimately, marked the show’s demise. On-set patience grew thin. Chase and Harmon detested each other. Stars ascended. Regulars drifted to new projects.

At least we got to say goodbye. Unlike so many shows, the viewer can see  precisely where Community detached from the rails. In the fifth year, the brilliant episodes Cooperative Polygraphy and Geothermal Escapism, which aired back-to-back, officially bid adieu to Chase and Glover, respectively. And with them went the series’ bottled lightning.

It all might have been a bittersweet farewell ride, but Netflix has become something of a TV defibrillator. The Office and Parks and Recreation, for instance, have seen a ratings spike, especially under lockdown. Breaking Bad was such a streaming mainstay Netflix gave it its own movie, El Camino.

And last week, Harmon told reporters that “conversations are happening that people would want to be happening” about a Community movie, and that he’s “very, very excited about the coming months.”

In Community‘s case, there’s no reason to think that excitement is not sincere.

If Hollywood were still around, stuntmen would be the talk of it.

In March, Brad Pitt won an Oscar playing an aging stunt double in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. His real-life stunt double, David Leitch, went from the landing mat to the director’s chair to direct Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde. Keanu Reeve’s stunt double, Chad Stahelski, went on to direct the monster John Wick trilogy.

Add now Sam Hargrave, Chris Evans’ stuntman for the Captain America franchise, enters the fray with Extraction, Netflix’s latest original.

If there’s a common theme to the tone of stunt-double-films, it’s this. No stunt is too daring, no storyline too outlandish, including Extraction.

Consider its protagonist. Tyler Rake sounds like a Mad-Libs action hero name. When you add to the mix that this character actually, literally kills someone with a rake, it starts to veer into parody territory. That’s why it’s somewhat surprising that the film built around that wonderfully silly name, Extraction, is entirely sincere and also pretty fun.

Extraction  is a straightforward shoot-em-up about a jaded mercenary, Mr. Rake, played by Chris Hemsworth, who’s hired to save the 14-year-old son of a drug lord from another drug lord in Bangladesh. It doesn’t do anything to push the genre forward, but it’s better than you might think, existing comfortably somewhere on the action flick spectrum between Tony Scott and Peter Berg.

Much of that rests on Hemsworth’s (very large) shoulders. The Australian actor hasn’t had the easiest job finding solid roles outside of Thor. He’s always good even when the movie isn’t, and obviously has some tricks up his sleeves that belie his action-hero physique. But many of his leading man roles that don’t have anything to do with the God of Thunder have come and gone without much fanfare. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Extraction is Marvel-adjacent. It’s written by Joe Russo (one half of the Russo brothers who have directed a handful of Marvel movies, including Avengers: Endgame), directed by Marvel stunt coordinator  Hargrave in his debut and based on a graphic novel (Ciudad).

The graphic novel origins help explain “Tyler Rake,” but that name is about the extent of the comic book elements in the actual film. And, to be fair, Extraction even knows it’s ridiculous, hence the rake and the fact that the 14-year-old asset Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) walks up to the line of making fun of it at one point.

The film begins at the end, showing Tyler Rake (it just feels more right to say his full name) bloodied, battered and near-death on a bridge, having blurry flashbacks to some feet in the sand before cutting to two days earlier in Mumbai. (Don’t hate Extraction for its cliches, they’re just part of the fun).

It won’t shock you to learn that Tyler Rake is a bit of a loner who keeps his living quarters in shambles, but you get the sense that he always knows where the bottle of Oxy is. A woman (Golshifteh Farahani) comes to him with the job to save the kid, whose father is in prison, and Tyler Rake sets off to Dhaka to track him down. There, the criminal underworld plays out in broad daylight, with crime bosses, child soldiers, corrupt police and an overall vibe of instability populating the streets. Tyler Rake finds the kid easily enough, but then things start to get more complicated when he discovers that he’s not the only one looking for Ovi (and ready to kill to get him).

But don’t despair, Tyler Rake has about two hours of non-stop fight in him before he gets to that bridge and the blurry flashbacks. He’ll fight, and win, against anyone who comes in his way — even a group of kids. He doesn’t kill any of them, though. He just kind of injures and disables the “Goonies from hell.”

The word distraction has started to lose all meaning this deep into our home lockdowns, but there is a certain comfort in curling up with a big, silly action pic like Extraction. It reminds you of something you might have spent money on to see in an ice-cold theater on a hot summer day.

Here, in the stark luminescence of a worldwide pandemic, we can be honest with each other, human to human. And here’s the truth: Cat people are weird.

You know it. I know it. And Netflix sure as hell knows it: Over winter, the streamer had the documentary of the season with Don’t F*** with Cats, a terrific true-crime tale. Now, they have the series of spring with Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

The series kicks off with the crazy-cat-lady premise, and then which proceeds to prove it — and then some — over seven jaw-dropping episodes. Netflix has made a lot of noise with unscripted programming, but it’s going to roar with this beyond-bizarre docu-series distraction, which demonstrates that outlandish people who love filming themselves are a formula for TV that’s grrrr-reat.

It’s hard to know, frankly, where to begin with all the strange twists and turns, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin rightly assume that it’s easiest to work backward from the (almost) end: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, an eccentric keeper of tigers, lions and other big cats in Oklahoma who goes by the name “Joe Exotic,” allegedly having orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin, a woman who runs a facility called Big Cat Rescue, who had lobbied to shut down operations like his.After that, though, there’s a whole lot to chew on. Big cats, it turns out, are a kind of aphrodisiac, inspiring what can only be described as cultish devotion — including Joe’s marriage to not one but two men; another big-cat owner, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who is basically a polygamist; and Jeff Lowe, who comes into Joe’s orbit later and brags about using exotic pets as a come-on to find partners for threesomes.But wait, there’s more: The colorful characters that Joe attracts to work for him (including one who loses a limb to a tiger attack); Joe’s desire to create his own media kingdom, enlisting a former Inside Edition correspondent, Rick Kirkham, to oversee his TV efforts; and finally, Joe’s forays into politics, running for president before mounting a libertarian bid for governor of Oklahoma, despite being a little unclear on what a libertarian actually is.Finally, there’s Baskin, who would seemingly be the voice of reason in all this, objecting, as she does, to people housing and trading in dangerous cats. Still, she finances those efforts largely through the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who disappeared under the kind of mysterious circumstances that even a Dateline NBC producer might consider too good to be true.Because the big-cat owners are showmen (beyond the zoo, Joe fancies himself a country-and-western singer), there’s a whole lot of vamping for the cameras. They also tend to document their actions extensively, which makes the occasional use of reenactments here feel especially gratuitous.Still, even by the standards of reality TV — a genre populated by exhibitionists and those seeking their 15 minutes of fame — Tiger King is so awash in hard-to-believe oddballs that lean into their image it genuinely feels like a Coen brothers movie come to life, the kind of thing any studio would return to the writer saying the screenplay was too over the top.During the final chapter, one of Joe’s employees says there’s “a lot of drama in the zoo world.” That’s about the only thing that’s understated in Tiger King, which — even amid the current glut of true crime — is the kind of binge-worthy game that’s almost impossible to resist.

Netflix is a data-driven dance floor, an algorithmic treehouse . The company  monitors the viewing habits of its 158 million subscribers so closely that it not only knows what you watch, but when you watch it, how much of it you watch, the trends that are most likely to hook you —  even the thumbnail images most likely to convince you to watch a new series. Its breadth is both impressing and daunting.

Don’t F**k With Cats is a case in point: Netflix has analyzed the data and deduced that what the world needs more than anything  is a true crime documentary series about obsessive internet users and cats.

What a genius move. What a home run. What a no-fail combination of everything that everyone likes, bundled up together in perhaps the most high-profile film about cats ever made (besides Lion King).

The story of Don’t F**k With Cats doesn’t really matter; you’d watch it even if you thought – as I initially did – that it was going to simply be an America’s Funniest Home Videos compilation of cats clawing people to shreds during attempted baths.

However, the masterstroke here is that the narrative is simply unbelievable. And – this should be said upfront – it’s incredibly upsetting. This aspect can’t really be overstated. There are moments that are viscerally harrowing. The story begins with a video uploaded to YouTube that graphically depicts the torture and murder of two small kittens. You don’t see the video – or any subsequent similar videos – in the documentary, but there are plenty of Grizzly Man-style reactions nevertheless. One is by a senior police officer who ends up reduced to tears. It is a violently distressing display of human depravity. If you’re even slightly queasy about this sort of thing, I’d seriously recommend giving it a pass.

Nevertheless, the story is incredible. An anonymous user uploads the kitten video, and it appalls a group of Facebook users so strongly that they use every tool at their disposal to track him down. They parse the video frame by frame for something – anything – that will give them a clue to the killer’s whereabouts. Plug sockets and cigarette packets are scrutinized. A specific blanket is tracked down through eBay. The expertise of an incredibly niche online vacuum cleaner forum is consulted. Metadata is cross-referenced with Google Maps. This is the hive mind at its most clever.There are elements of Don’t F**k With Cats that play out like the film Catfish, if Catfish had any real stakes. But Cats also takes time to explore the darker impulses of the amateur detectives. The fate of one falsely identified suspect is genuinely horrible to witness, and key members of the investigation repeatedly ask themselves whether they were solving a crime or simply egging on a violent criminal. This is the hive mind at its worst. That the film spans the spectrum of the hive, usually by examining hive members, is a canny gesture. That is fair and balanced reporting, my colleagues.

One key member – a woman named Deanna Thompson – is the de facto narrator of the series. As you’d expect from someone as Very Online as her, she’s incisive and witty, and quick to pull the threads together in a dynamic way.

But that’s arguably the biggest problem with the series. This is a show with a jokey title and a self-aware narrator that splashes around in some of the worst human behavior imaginable. As soon as the horror of the cat videos subsides, we’re off on a wild goose chase of reverse image searches, Google Street View sweeps and fake identity databases. And then we learn who the murderer is, and that his murders are about to escalate beyond cats. We meet the family of his victim, and the lurching duality of the series threatens to become almost untenable.

Still, it is beautifully presented and the final episode includes a flourish of bow-tying not seen since the climax of The Usual Suspects. But it still makes me deeply uneasy that a man who committed an awful crime purely to gain notoriety has now been dragged out of obscurity to be celebrated in a buzzy Netflix show. At least Don’t F**K With Cats’ filmmakers are aware of this. Hives are just too riveting — even malformed one — to look away.