Category: Emmy Nominee/Winner

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin join Judy Garland for a televised special. I was mostly interested in watching this to see Judy perform after that awful Judy biopic. It’s interesting to see all three performers after they’ve all long honed their craft and they’ve obviously all figured out what it means to be a Performer. But the real draw is to see Judy. She’s obviously a bit tired and world-weary at this point, but still capable of bringing out the big guns when necessary and it’s fabulous to see her perform. Frank and Dean are just window dressing in comparison. 

The story of a declining small Maine town is told through the experiences of its residents, particularly those of resigned restaurant manager Ed Harris. The cast that was somehow assembled here is incredible (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joanne Woodward, Helen Hunt, Paul Newman in his last role), but somehow the story does not offer enough for the talent assembled. It mostly meanders back and forth through the past and present with one of its many side stories standing out particularly for its incongruousness. It’s that story that takes center stage towards the climax in ways that really don’t age well in recent times.

Director W. Kamau Bell delves through Bill Cosby’s entire career to try to come to terms with contrasts between Cosby’s positive public persona and the horrors he committed behind closed doors. While not experiencing quite the same gut punch that Bell might have felt as a Black man, I have also struggled with the details of Cosby’s case. I grew up on the lessons taught during Fat Albert and the uplifting portrayal of an upper class inner-city Black family on The Cosby Show; they both mark positive experiences in the entertainment consumption of my childhood. Giving many of Cosby’s victims a chance to speak, but also some of his, albeit not strong, supporters to provide their insights, Kamau offers an unexpectedly balanced view into Cosby’s career though if anyone wanted to look closely, it seems the signs were always there and it is obvious Cosby used the public’s perception to further his predatory behaviors. In the end, there are no answers on how to rectify feelings for someone who did some really great things in life but is also undeniably a monster despite me hoping somehow this miniseries could have provided some.

Obviously influenced by the career of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady and current Secretary of State Sigourney Weaver eyes a second run for the White House, juggling her political aspirations with the demands of her messed-up family. I had gone into this miniseries feeling that the premise along with a cast that also includes Ciarán Hinds, Ellen Burstyn, and Carla Gugino would have to be compelling. Instead, it’s a fairly standard nighttime soap opera, focusing more on family melodrama than the politics and power of its main character. The production feels set up for a multi-season arc, but not one I would have been interested in pursuing.

Told mostly from the perspective of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (portrayed by the great William Hurt), this film chronicles the 2008 financial crisis, particularly the interactions between the government and the banks. With an incredibly stacked cast, this somehow came across more accessibly than other films I’ve watched about the crisis. It helps that the various lectures trying to put things in layman’s terms were kept in the general flow of the narrative. It also doesn’t pretend at all that the darts thrown blindly at the problem did anything more than put on a temporary band-aid on it, setting up for bigger and worse issues festering and swelling underneath.

Bill Nighy, a lonely bachelor and assistant to the chancellor of the Exchequer, meets the much younger Kelly Macdonald in a London café. When he spontaneously invites her to accompany him to the G8 summit in Reykjavik, it puts his career at risk but also spurns him to aspire for something better. The relationship doesn’t completely work and the politics, which seems the real purpose of the film, are really heavy handed, but Nighy incredibly conveys the complexities of his character and Richard Curtis’s writing provides greater depth to a fairly typical romance.