2015 Best Picture Rankings

Every year, after viewing all the Best Picture nominees, I rank them based on my assessment of their worthiness for the Best Picture award.  Note that this is not a prediction of who will win, but rather a statement of how I would vote if I could and how I'd rank the also-rans.

This was an odd year in that while the films split pretty cleanly into two groups (strong and weak contenders), but it was extremely difficult to rank order within those groups.  If you were to ask me tomorrow (or perhaps in five minutes), I might completely rerank films 5 through 8 or films 1 through 4.  
I would note that if I were to have free rein at adding nominees, both The Danish Girl and Ex Machina would be added to this list.  I think The Danish Girl would fit solidly at number 5 in the list, while Ex Machina would fit somewhere in the lower half.

8. Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a solid, personal tale of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish lass who is sponsored to immigrate to America in 1952.  Once there, this shy, lonely girl who seemed to have no future in Ireland blossoms into a young lady who finds love and a career.  As with most immigrants, she adapts to her new home and becomes your prototypical American (though still sporting that brogue).  Unfortunately, tragedy occurs and she's forced to return to Ireland for a period of time.  The choice she must make between staying in her old home or returning to her new home frames the headline conflict of the film.

A view of Eilis's love life.  Note the lack of resemblance to the guy she's cuddling with in the picture further above.

Unlike other years where I've questioned the worthiness of my last place selection, Brooklyn certainly deserves consideration.  It has a strong script that manages to be both hysterically funny and grippingly dramatic, its leads are solid-to-great (Saoirse Ronan will have an extraordinary career if she'll just keep away from Stephenie Meyer adaptations), and it's beautifully shot.  The arc that Eilis transits is a classic one and is well-handled and acted.  

The reason Brooklyn places last in this list is that it is the least remarkable of the films nominated this year.  It breaks no new ground either technically or in storytelling, it can't be considered among the best of its genre, and the story itself is not profound.  That's not a knock on it as a film (I highly recommend it for anyone), but it is the reason it places eighth in these rankings.

Plus, at least one of these Irish girls sounds like she's from Vancouver.

7. The Martian

This just goes to show that the Oscars are not about rewatchability.  I loved The Martian, both the book and its adaptation, and have watched the movie at least a dozen times by this writing.  It is extremely entertaining and technically well done.  So why is it sitting all the way down at number seven in my list?

It's certainly not a punishment for making space travel fun again.

Part of the issue is that it's a little lightweight.  The book is light on personal conflict with a plot focused firmly on the problem of getting Mark Watney safe from being stranded on a desolate planet.  The movie follows that model, but cuts out a lot of the danger Watney went through in the novel.  It's done in the interest of time (and probably budget), but it robs the film of a heightened sense of danger.  Similarly, other situations, like the habitat depressurization and the quest to make the rover survivable, gets more attention in the book so that the reader is more aware of the inherent dangers than the viewer is.  As a result, the film version boils down to a single question: can NASA resupply or rescue Watney before he starves?  While that drives the film action into an easily-understood narrative, it makes a lot of the Watney's activities seemingly filler rather than recognizing the hazards he's actually facing.

It also results in the Ares crew and NASA support staff seeming more relaxed than they should be (or were in the book).  These folks are competent, confident experts in their fields, but in many cases were making things up as they went along, just like Watney was.  The film does not attempt to capture that, which again would have heightened the feeling of drama.  That's what causes separation between this and Apollo 13.

C'mon, guys, try to be a little more excited about this.

6. Mad Max: Fury Road

The latest Mad Max film has reason to be included in the discussion of greatest action movie of all time, and it's right up there with the second installment of the series, The Road Warrior.  The leads put in solid performances, the action scenes are stellar, and the visuals are stunning.  For these reasons, it earned its Oscar nod, even though many of the audience members who joined me in a Best Picture showcase questioned its inclusion.  So why is Fury Road in the bottom half of my list?  The answer lies in considering it outside of the action genre.

Gas is scarce in the future, yet there's not a Prius in sight.

Fury Road is a dystopian vision, a world that's gone insane after a nuclear war.  Against this backdrop, Max, driven to a new level of madness by the ghosts of his failures, finds himself captured and at the mercy of the society built around the despot Immortan Joe, who centers himself in a cult of personality in which his followers blindly trust his every statement and decision, no matter how harmful or wasteful, a sort of Donald Trump for the post-apocalyptic set.  This is taken to an extreme, though, and one has to wonder how this society has managed to continue to exist at all given how foolish and unreasonable the actions they take are.  As a result, the viewer is somewhat forced to just look at this as a fantasy or alien world rather than accept it as a dystopian possibility to learn from.

And while the direct leads perform well, the rest of the cast is largely weak.  Filling your cast with models and professional wrestlers is not exactly a strategy you should use for eliciting strong performances, and this is no exception.  Neither is giving your characters names like Rictus Erectus (just one step away from Biggus Dickus).  

All of this drags Fury Road back from the precipice of being a Best Picture-winning movie.  Instead, the filmmakers should pat themselves on the back for producing a solid action movie and get to work on the inevitable sequel.

Hopefully one with fewer skin problems.

5. Room

It seems like every year there's a Best Picture nomination from an unlikely, non-mainstream source.  It's often an independent film and for some reason it often features a precocious child or ingenue.  Past examples include Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter's Bone.  Room is this year's entry in that lineage.

Jack has lots of friends, including stove, wardrobe, and egg snake.

Five year old Jack lives in Room, which encompasses his entire universe, with Ma, his young mother.  They're periodically visited by Old Nick, who spends time with Ma while Jack hides in the wardrobe.   Room is told in three acts, the first one introducing Jack, Ma, and their Room; the second showing the planning and execution of their escape; and the third showing the aftermath, which ends up being less straightforwardly happy as one might think at first blush .Having the film narrated by and told from the perspective of Jack is smart, as it provides a better understanding of how people can accept horrible situations, especially ones they're born into.  Those of us who live in the real world realize pretty quickly what's going on, and it's horrific.  But for Jack, who's never experienced anything else, this is just life.

Being held captive in a shed is no reason not to keep your chakras balanced.

 Preventing Room from making the leap into the top contender category is largely a set of technical shortcomings.  The script, which is magical whenever Jack speaks or Ma talks with Jack, but it can get a little clunky when the adults start talking to each other.  The film also needed a better villain, as Sean Bridgers plays Old Nick as just a random creep as opposed to the monster this film deserves.  The movie also wastes the greatness that is William H. Macy by giving him and the other supporting adults little to do most of the time.  Still, it's deserving of its nomination, and Brie Larson has earned her support for a Best Actress statue.

4. Bridge of Spies

Bridge of Spies is classic movie making and what you'd expect from a Steven Spielberg film, especially one starring Tom Hanks, the Jimmy Stewart of our time.  Hanks plays James B. Donovan, an insurance attorney who was also a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.  The film, set at the height of the Cold War, tells the story of how Donovan was asked to defend captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel before eventually becoming embroiled in a negotiation of the exchange of Abel for the release of downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.  Caught in a three-way struggle between the US, the Soviet Union, and East Germany (who is trying to make a name for itself on the international stage), Donovan manages to irk the Soviets, East Germans, and his CIA handlers by upping the stakes and trying to also get the release of imprisoned grad student Frederic Pryor as well.  Not that having people angry at him is a new thing, given how most Americans thought him a traitor for defending Abel (and taking the job seriously) in the first place.

It's never clear exactly how much danger Donovan is in throughout, but one can assume a lot.

Bridge of Spies breaks no new ground either in moviemaking or storytelling technique, but it's absolutely solid from top to bottom.  Featuring a script from relative newcomer Matt Charman and the Coen Brothers, Bridge is well acted throughout and with high production values.  Hanks inhabits the strong moral center of Donovan just as he has with the many other characters with strong moral centers he's played in his career.  The film makes you almost admire the convicted spy Abel, played by Supporting Actor nominee Mark Rylance with preternatural calm.  And the stark contrasts drawn between life in Cold War America and post-World War II Berlin (particularly East Berlin) are striking (in particular, the witnessing of Berliners shot while trying to climb The Wall to escape is called upon later when a returned Donovan watches kids jumping from yard to yard in the row homes along his commute).  Bridge offers nothing new but does everything well, and as a result, I would not be upset if it won Best Picture, even if it's ranked only fourth by me.

Though I am somewhat annoyed by the lack of nomination for Hanks.

3. Spotlight

The thing that's stunning about Spotlight is that at the end, after you've applauded and gotten your emotions back into check, is the realization that you've spent the past 129 minutes watching people do nothing than pretty much talk.  That's how good of a movie it is, and how powerful a story it tells.

Seriously, all the visual highlights will be meetings and conversations.

Spotlight tells the story of a team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe who, at the behest of their new Editor in Chief (played by Liev Schreiber), begins looking into the potential cover up by the local archdiocese of a child molesting priest.  As the Spotlight team (editor Michael Keaton and reporters Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James) starts its investigation, they begin to uncover a rape and molestation problem (and related cover up) that is far, far larger than they imagined, growing larger with each rock overturned.  Their effort to gather the facts needed to produce sufficient evidence for an expose in a city dominated by the Catholic Church provides the crux of the drama.

The film is a journalistic procedural, an All the President's Men without the parking garage meetings, but one with significant heart.  This isn't just any story these journalists are unraveling: it's the tale of countless lives destroyed by those allegedly tasked with saving the city's souls.  Spotlight will continually build your anger at the conspiracy seeping throughout the archdiocese and the army of lawyers it retains while having you cheer each little victory the Spotlight staff wins on its way to the truth.  It's a love letter to investigative journalism at its best, something that is occurring far less frequently with the rise of blogs and the perpetual cycle of hot takes that produces.  Spotlight is both technically stellar and an important movie, meaning it merits serious consideration for Best Picture.

It even adds action by having the cast walk while conversing.

2. The Revenant

This may be stunning, but I did not pick The Revenant as my Best Picture.  It will probably win, and deservedly so, but if pressed, I put it just below The Big Short.  Why?  Because though it's an absolutely gorgeous film that's well acted, makes strides technically, and maintains a sense of urgency and peril throughout, I'm not sure exactly why the movie exists as it does.  It's a great movie.  I'm just not sure if it's an important movie.

It does have a better villain than banks and greed, though.

Revenant, based incredibly loosely on real life events, follows the travails of fur trader and scout Hugh Glass, who gets mauled by a bear, watches his son be killed, and is left for dead by members of his company.  Glass drags himself along, eventually healing (partly with the help of a Native American he comes across) enough to get back to camp in search of the men who left him, famed frontiersman Jim Bridger (though still young at this point) and John Fitzgerald (who was the one who killed Glass's -- fictitious -- son).  Throughout, he and the company who left him are attacked, harassed, and threatened by members of the Arikara tribe who are given a fictional reason for their attack to make their cause more noble.  To keep himself alive, Glass is forced to do a number of disgusting or painful things to avoid starvation, infection, and other threats, though oddly enough none of them are as disgusting and painful as what the real-life Glass did to survive.  Eventually, Glass catches up with Fitzgerald, sparking a kill-or-be-killed combat in the snow that never happened.

It's a beautiful movie that's well acted and gorgeously shot.  Technically, it's a marvel.  The bear sequence alone is stunning, but so are the various tracking and action shots that were made in difficult outdoor settings.  The hallucinations and dreams that Glass has during his various fevers are contemplative and not jarring.  The film holds together well and advances the state of the art.  But the question is why the movie had to be made, especially when it diverges from the actual real life story so often and so widely.  The result is a movie that is longer than it needs to be and tells a sprawling yet specifically personal story.  I think with a few different creative choices, The Revenant would be hailed as an example of perfect storytelling.  Everything I've heard points to it winning Best Picture, and I won't begrudge it one bit, but it falls just short for me.

It will also probably earn DiCaprio his first Oscar as well.

1. The Big Short

The Big Short is my pick for Best Picture, and it wins it for three critical reasons.

First, it's technically solid.  The acting is sharp on all fronts, and this is a huge cast of highly talented actors, including past Oscar winners and nominees like Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, and Melissa Leo.  The script sizzles, even though it at times takes on some highly technical content as it drags you the viewer through enough economics and finance to understand what's happening as the Housing Bubble rises and collapses, along with the American and global economies.  The plot bounces along, keeping you as confounded by the greed that you see happening on the screen as the characters themselves.  It's an absolutely outstanding movie from the perspective of craftsmanship.

Christian Bale almost auditions for the lead in a remake of Rain Man.

Second, it tells an important story.  The Housing Bubble and the trading of and speculation on collections of sub-prime mortgages should have been easy to spot and at least mitigate some of the impact of, but the machine took off uncontrolled.  The Big Short is the story of some of the people who were smart enough to notice this and work to at least profit from it, even if they could do nothing to thwart it (nor in many cases were they inclined to thwart it).  This is recent history, and a big lesson that needs to be learned in order to prevent another global recession despite the banking industry's attempts to regain those "good old days".  This makes The Big Short an important movie, which also supports a nod for Best Picture.

Mark Baum here, wondering if you banking types have all lost your fucking minds.

For the final reason, let's go to Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

Thank you, darling.  It's quite simple, really.  The Big Short also adds to the state of the art storytelling.  Are you as sick as I am of supposedly "historical" films taking extreme liberties with the facts (I'm looking at you, The Revenant)? Well, Short handles that by having the characters stop and break the fourth wall -- that means they turn and look at you the audience -- and explain what happened in real life even though you won't be seeing that on screen because it takes too long or is too convoluted or whatnot.  Also, the film tackles some pretty heady stuff, so instead of trying to shoehorn explanations into the dialogue, they throw it over to a quick explanation told in simple terms by a familiar celebrity who will entertain you while doing it.  Both of these are advances in storytelling that help improve the quality of the film and will hopefully be adopted or adapted by others.  This makes The Big Short the only nominee this year to hit the trifecta of being technically proficient, telling an Important Story, and making advances to the art of film making or story telling.  It's that simple.  Now get out of my bathroom, you wanker, before I call security!

And there you have it.  The Big Short, my Best Picture for 2015.

Ten More Movies That Need to Be Made

When I last did a list like this, I mentioned I had more ideas.  As it turns out, I had a lot more, so this will most likely become a recurrent post.  Here's what I had to say before, and it still holds true:

I don't know about you, but I'm a little fatigued by all of the sequels and series reboots we get year after year these days.  There's a bounty of characters, works, and topics that have either yet to see the silver screen or haven't seen it in quite some time.  Below are a selection of ten I'd love to see get picked up by a studio with the right script, director, and cast. 

I'm discounting any source that I've seen recent announcement of it being developed into a film, so obvious choices like Sandman, Good Omens, Old Man's War, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and The Lies of Locke Lamora are not included (even though chances are we'll never see most of them actually made). 

1. The Black Company

What's it about?  The Black Company is a band of mercenaries in the employ of the evil empire of The Lady, commissioned to wipe out a rebellion led by the last remaining good wizards in the land.  As captured by their physician/historian Croaker, the Black Company win many battles against poor odds until they, too, begin questioning their mission.  What will happen when they finally decide to break away and earn The Lady's fury?

Why it could work!  In an era where Game of Thrones has shown that mystical politics and war can succeed as popular entertainment, The Black Company series by Glen Cook is ripe for adaptation as either a movie franchise or as a replacement miniseries once Thrones ultimately concludes in a couple years.  It is a large scale epic featuring character turns, unexpected deaths, and grand crescendo battles, which today's audiences pretty much expect from such tales.

2. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

What's it about?  Starting July 4, 1908, the Chicago Cubs played an epic 40 day long game with All Stars from the semi-pro minor league Iowa Baseball Confederacy at Big Inning, Iowa that eventually led to the collapse of the Cubs as a championship club and the destruction of the town of Big Inning.  Or maybe this didn't happen.  The only person who remembers this game is Matthew Clarke, who had been struck by lightning and may be making up all of this.  However, when Matthew dies in a bizarre foul ball incident at a game in Wisconsin, his son Gideon suddenly acquires this knowledge of the game.  But he does his father one better, actually managing to travel back in time to witness the game and its manipulations by the native magics wielded by the local Black Hawk Nation tribe in an attempt to recover their lost lands.  Along the way, President Theodore Roosevelt stops by to pinch hit (he strikes out with a big stick) and Leonardo da Vinci shows up to claim he was the one who invented the game of baseball.  Eventually the game ends after 2,614 innings (though saying how would be spoiling it).  Needless to say, the second game of the planned double header was canceled.

Why it could work!  Maybe you missed the parts above about the Chicago Cubs, Black Hawk tribal magic, Teddy Roosevelt, time travel, and da Vinci.  This was W.P. Kinsella's followup novel to Shoeless Joe, which was adapted into Field of Dreams, a movie you may have heard about.  A skilled screenwriter will need to tame the more fantastical elements of Kinsella's lyrical writing, but just as with Field of Dreams, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy offers an exploration of multi-generational family dynamics set against a backdrop of baseball and mysticism that can be utterly rapturous if done correctly.

3. The Greater Journey

What's it about?  Over the course of almost a hundred years, generations of American artists and thinkers travel to Paris to find their art, their vocation, and themselves.  Samuel Morse paints The Gallery of the Louvre and crosses paths with James Fenimore Cooper before returning to the US and inventing the telegraph.  Elizabeth Blackwell trains to become the first female doctor in the US.  Mary Cassatt perfected her craft and participated in the beginnings of Impressionism.  Throughout, the city of Paris marches forward through history.

Why it could work!  This would probably be best as an HBO miniseries rather than a theater-released movie.  In any event, Greater Journey is an incredible tale capturing the evolution of Paris throughout the decades, but told through the eyes of Americans, making it much more easily accessible to a modern US audience.  In addition, the individual stories of the people who made Paris their home temporarily are compelling in themselves.  With a stellar cast and good production values, this could be a great piece of art on a weekly basis.

4. An Ada, Countess of Lovelace/Grace Hopper biopic

What's it about?  In the 1830s and 1840s, Ada, daughter of Lord Byron, strikes up a working relationship with Charles Babbage after becoming fascinated with Babbage's work on computational machines.  Her notes on a method of calculating Bernoulli numbers on Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine has caused her to be named history's first programmer.  In the 1940s, Naval Reserve Lt. Grace Hopper, PhD, joined work on the Mark I electro-mechanical computer, eventually joining the UNIVAC team after the war, where she wrote the first programming language compiler.  By the end of the 1950s, she helped define the COBOL programming language that shaped business applications for decades.  She would advocate for the US Department of Defense to shift from large mainframes to networks of computers and pioneered formal testing of software.  She would eventually make the rank of Rear Admiral.

Why it could work!  We've seen biopics of Alan Turing and Mark Zuckerberg and Hollywood keeps going to the Steve Jobs well, but we've seen scant mention of the contributions of women to computing, so why not combine the stories of two of computing's best known female pioneers?  It seems odd to try to combine the two time periods into a single movie, but if a movie about Julia Child and a whiny blogger can earn Oscar buzz, surely this can be done well.

5. Cryptonomicon

What's it about?  In a two-generational story, mathematicians at Bletchley Park and a unit from the US Marines go about finding creative ways to cover up the fact that the Allies have broken Axis codes while in modern times, their descendants work to lay communications lines in the Philippines and search for buried gold.

Why it could work!  As dense as the book is, it's simultaneously taut and sweeping.  The characters are engaging, and both the intellect-oriented Waterhouses and the action-oriented Shaftoes are well-drawn characters.  The settings and contexts of both generations will be familiar to most movie-goers (though the modern storyline will need updating, as technology has passed it by somewhat).  Overall, it's the work be Neal Stephenson that best lends itself to screen adaptation.

6. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

What's it about?  Dirk Gently is a detective who believes in the interconnectedness of all things, so when he runs into Richard MacDuff while searching for a cat, Gently takes MacDuff's case, despite the fact that MacDuff didn't realize he had a case to take.  Along the way, time travel, the ghost of a long-dead alien responsible for life on Earth, and a religious robot all come into play.

Why it could work!  Hollywood has already attempted The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with middling success, why not try this out?  Seriously, it's just demented enough to work if given the right writer and director.  For some reason, Edgar Wright comes to mind.

7. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

What's it about?  Two thieves, one a giant barbarian, the other a small former mage's apprentice, stumble into each other while pulling the same robbery.  They hit it off and decide to partner up.  After an initial tragedy puts them on the run, they share many an adventure, always getting themselves into scrapes that their wits and their swords must get them out of.

Why it could work!  Warner Brothers has already optioned The Lies of Locke Lamora, a modern day series that hearkens back to Fritz Lieber's twosome, so why shouldn't someone make movies out of the originals?  There's enough material for an entire movie franchise, but without the serial nature that would require a studio to commit to a specific number of movies.  And given the books were a true buddy adventure, the franchise could be attached to almost any pairing of youngish actors with good rapport.  Chris Helmsworth and Tom Hiddleston would be amazing together in it.

8. Either: An All-Star Heist Flick Featuring the Greatest Actors of Our Time OR a Documentary on How Production of That Movie Imploded

What's it about?  De Niro!  Pacino!  Hoffman!  Washington!  Day-Lewis!  Hanks!  These are some of the most beloved and well-nominated actors of recent decades.  Why not put them all into the same movie, give them a taut script featuring a team of elite experts attempting to pull off an amazing theft before retiring, and let them go at it!  How could it fail?

Why it could work!  The beauty of it is, so what if it does fail?  Roll cameras while they're rolling cameras!  Interview the cast about the film process throughout production.  Understand who doesn't like whose interpretation of The Method.  Is someone seemingly not pulling their weight?  Egos getting in the way?  Are fists and shot glasses about to fly?  Great!  It can be an Oscar-winning documentary instead of a box-office heist movie.

9. Niebla

What's it about?  Boy meets girl.   Boy asks girl to marry him.  Girl leaves boy at altar.  Boy decides to kill himself.  Before committing suicide, boy seeks out advice from the writer of an article on suicide.  Turns out the writer is the author of the story that the boy is a character in, and he says the boy is not allowed to kill himself.  Boy says, "You're not the boss of me!"  Then things get weird.  

Why it could work!  This would never be a Hollywood blockbuster, but based on the novel by Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla would have the chance to earn the right director (both Spike Jonze and Terrence Malick come to mind) the obligatory Best Picture nomination.  Especially if they leave the eulogy given by the dog at the end of the book.\

10. One Hundred Years of Solitude

What's it about?  Seven generations of the Buendía family pass since their patriarch founded Macondo, the utopic city of mirrors, on a riverbank in Colombia.  Every member of the family appears destined to find grave misfortune at some point.  An encrypted text may hold the secret to the family's travails, but can the family break the code before it's too late?

Why it could work!  Gabriel García Márquez's novel is stunning, combining magical realism with a sweeping generational saga.  The only reason it's not already been made into a film is that the author never gave anyone the rights to adapt the book.  It would take a deft hand to guide the adaptation of the book, but in the right hands, this could be a Best Picture winner.  Think Life of Pi except as a soap opera set in the jungle.

A Quick Look at New Fall Shows

The Muppets

When the show is introducing a bacon and frog legs love triangle, it's not a good sign.

I was excited about The Muppets.  I truly was.  The characters are near and dear to my heart and represent a significant part of my childhood, but what I was most excited about was the prospects of the Muppets reintroducing their elements of unabashed farce and absurdism back to prime-time television.  Unfortunately, while the new show does bring back those cherished characters, it hamstrings them with an all-too pedestrian (for this age of television) format.  

Instead, we have a slow-moving show that is trying too hard to be The Office, Arrested Development, or Modern Family, this time a workplace "comedy" about the goings-on behind the scenes at Miss Piggy's late night talk show.  Rather than over the top parody and complete non sequitur, we instead are subjected to yet another show taking its comedy from ironic juxtaposition and subtext rather than direct action.  While this works fine for the human members of the cast, it's a clumsy comedic mechanism for puppets.

So much wasted potential of great classic characters.

The result is a toned down Muppet show that pales in comparison to past efforts.  Most of the characters are muted. Gonzo now pitches lame sketches rather than attempting outrageous stunts and all-chicken musical numbers.  Animal plays a puppet version of Denis Leary's over-the-hill rocker character from Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll.  Sam the Eagle is still a tightass, but is limited to brief appearances as a network censor.  Only Kermit, Piggy, and Fozzy get much productive screen time, and even Kermit's and Piggy's are mostly wasted on a terrible breakup subplot, as if we could or should find their love lives interesting.  Fozzy has some good moments in a traditional sitcom role of a guy dating out of his culture and attempting to impress his bigoted future in-laws, but even then the laughs are of the low-hanging fruit kind and mostly work because of the number of humans involved to add some (scant) subtlety to the interactions.

That's a celebrity sex tape no one is waiting for.

Verdict: If this were any other show, I'd probably dump it now.  But I care about these characters, and I will stick around to see if they can find their stride.

Minority Report

I'm glad they consulted Stark International for upgrades to their smart hologram technology.

I hate to say it, but I think Minority Report is my favorite of the new fall shows, and it's the one primed for a quick ax, posting dismal ratings for its season premiere.  Picking up from a little down the road from where the movie left off, Minority Report features a world in which the PreCog program has ended, police are back to trying to figure out who committed crimes after the fact, and the freed precognitives try to find a place in the world for themselves while fearing recapture and imprisonment.

While finding adventure.  And cleavage!

This mixture results in a police procedural with sci-fi trappings, and in that sense it works well. Future Washington, DC is interesting.  The impossible happens and DC gets an updated Metro system that looks actually efficient.  Many of the memorials are lit up and may harbor giant LED screens.  The Nationals have finally made it to a World Series after more than 50 years of existence.  The Simpsons are celebrating their 75th season.  And the Washington football team have been renamed the Red Clouds which is only slightly insensitive (seriously, a logo of a rain cloud with war feathers?).

Redclouds?  It's like they asked themselves, "What could make folks wish they still had the old racist name?"

Stark Sands is very engaging as Dash, one of the three precognitives freed from government control at the end of the PreCog program.  There's something a little off with Dash, but not enough to make him unrelatable, and he's so earnest that it's hard not to like him.  Meagan Good stars as Lara Vega, a detective who desperately wants to prevent crime and who wears her cleavage like a badge.  Most of the rest of the cast are ciphers still, though Wilmer Valderama surprisingly doesn't suck as bad as one would think playing a police lieutenant bucking for captain no matter who he has to screw over in the process.

Seriously, is she auditioning to play Power Girl?

The pilot checks all the classic pilot episode boxes.  Some modern shows like Lost or How to Get Away With Murder play around with the pilot format by steadfastly refusing to check one of more of the boxes, but not this show.  Introduce the characters and give each of them a little room to show their personalities and motivations?  Check.  Explain the world that the show takes place in?  Check.  Establish the status quo relationships among the characters?  Check.  Provide an example of the standard kind of storyline and episodic plot sequence we'll see each week?  Check.  Set up the overarching uberplot?  Check.  Everything's there.  It's really too bad no one was watching.

Verdict: I'm definitely tuning in, but I don't know how long they'll give me.

Blindspot

I don't think that will fit in the overhead luggage bin.

Blindspot's conceit as a show orbits solely around its big mystery (just who is this amnesiac woman, and why was she tattooed, made to forget everything, and dumped in Times Square?), because it certainly can't lean on the personalities of its characters, only one of which (Rob Brown's Ramirez) really shows much of one.  Jaimie Alexander, who breathed life into the potential cipher that was Lady Sif, is not nearly as interesting here as the scared amnesiac with a hero complex and the skill set to match.  Sullivan Stapleton (who for some reason gets top billing in the IMDB cast listing) plays a gruff, stoic FBI agent as if he were a poor man's Liev Schreiber (and no one needs a poor man's Liev Schreiber, not even poor men).

Seriously, doesn't he look like he should be narrating a documentary or trying to free The Hurricane?

This is a show which is already triggering very unhelpful questions in my head.  For example, it's clear both from the pilot and the previews of the rest of the season that the FBI unit will be attempting to stave off disasters at the last second frequently led by clues found in Jane Doe's tattoos.  But she's covered in them, and each tattoo appears to be a clue to a separate impending disaster -- how are they managing to unravel the clues in the right order?  Are they just getting amazingly lucky?  The show appears to be built on a house of cards, but I'm willing to give them an episode or two more before making that call.

Verdict: Hanging around for at least another couple episodes.

Scream Queens

Work faster, damn you!

I was willing to give this Ryan Murphy show a shot because I have a soft spot for Glee and while I never got into American Horror Story, I had heard good things.  Oh, how I wish I had given this a miss.  This was easily the worst of the shows I sampled this week.

The first problem with the show is that 90% of the characters are completely unlikable while the other 10% are boring to the point they could be replaced with houseplants.  I get that there's a certain pleasure to making characters in horror tales awful so that you don't feel too broken up when they die, but the trick is to not make them so insufferable that you're rooting for the killer to strike more quickly.  I'd paint these one-dimensional characters as caricatures if it didn't ignore the fact that most caricatures have some depth of truth behind them.  Instead, we have a gaggle of postmodern Mean Girls with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, a deaf woman who shouts at everyone to speak up (because that gag didn't get instantly old when used on Glee), a geeky girl in a neck brace who out-weirds everyone, the Glenn Beck of militant lesbians, a host of ultimate dimwitted bros, and, as proof that Ryan Murphy's never met a black person he couldn't turn into a walking stereotype, a black girl who starts every sentence, "Giiirrrrll, ....".  I had to check to see if Keke Palmer's character was named Shamiqua, but it's instead Zayday, because that's much better.

Look!  It's a TLC lyric!

Even that mess of a cast of characters could be managed if the show itself was interesting, but it moves slowly, the scares are non-existent, and the comedy is bland and unintelligent.  Ariana Grande dies in the pilot in a scene that I'm sure was meant to be cute but was so poorly thought out that it should have anyone in the "Don't go into the basement!" crowd throwing heavy objects at the screen.  The killer actually shows up at one point on a riding lawnmower when all of the pledges are conveniently buried up to their necks (why?  because plot!), but chooses to kill only one.  And not to play with his food -- there's zero explanation given in story or visuals as to what the killer is doing, other than skulking around and seemingly taking advantage of only one out of every ten to twenty opportunities to kill.  About 70 minutes of the two hour premiere had passed when I finally pronounced the show dead and deleted it from my DVR.

I still lasted longer than she did.

I'm sure this was meant to be a pastiche of the Scream movies, but the execution just goes to show there's only one Wes Craven and one Kevin Williamson, and without a doubt they're both rolling over in their graves despite the fact that only one of them is currently dead.  

Verdict: Kill it!  Kill it with fire!

Heroes Reborn

Ah, the teen years, when even having super powers doesn't keep the bullies at bay.

I enjoyed the first season of Heroes, lost interest part way through season 2, and then watched maybe a couple of episodes from season 3 and skipped season 4, which I just discovered exists.  Still, I've enough affection for the early days of the series to give Heroes Reborn a try.  

Much like the original series, Reborn twists several storylines that are at least separated in space around an axis of "Hey look!  Super people!"  In this case, all of humanity has been clued into the existence of evos (short for evolved humans, which isn't going to make small-minded normals hate you at all).  And because of a huge disaster at a peace rally (shades of Star Trek VI!), evos are hated and hunted.  If the metas of Heroes all thought they were screwed in the original series, they hadn't seen anything yet.

Perhaps most interesting of the storylines in this series revolves around Miko, a young Japanese woman whose father is missing but who can warp into a video game using the katana he left her in a secret compartment of her home.  Becoming a video game character is not exactly a logical superpower nor a good fit with the rest of the storylines, but I found that I could probably just watch a show based entirely on this without any of the other plots hanging around. 

This plot should have its own show.  Or movie.  Probably starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

Other plot lines involve Noah Bennett trying to figure out what happened at the peace rally and mourning the death of his daughter who, despite having Wolverine-level healing powers, sure does seem to be in danger of dying an awful lot.  Robbie Kay (Peter Pan from Once Upon a Time) is a high school kid who can  teleport things who tries his hardest to keep his powers hidden, which of course means he accidentally exposes himself to someone in almost every scene he's in.  There's also a family of Latin American evos living in Los Angeles who don't know that any of the other family members are evos until one brother exposes his identity as LA's luchador evo avenger to another brother just as he dies.  Zachary Levi also plays a normal who lost his son at the Odessa peace rally catastrophe and has become an evo hunter/killer, though in the pilot he starts to learn more about what happens to evos and may at some point become sympathetic.  

But for the moment, he has facial hair, so villain.  I've watched this series before.

At the moment, Heroes Reborn has the right amount of energy.  Here's hoping it doesn't lose its way like the original series did.

Verdict: Giving it a few more episodes.

Quantico

At least they spelled FBI right.

Quantico is clearly cribbing from the How to Get Away with Murder cheat sheet.  Take a group of largely unlikeable characters, mush them together into a situation where they have to interact with each other all the time, then wrap it up in a mystery where one of the cast members is a bad guy all the while pulling back enough onion layers to show not everyone is hopelessly evil.  The problem with this tack is that it's really easy to dislike lawyers, but it's a little jarring to be asked to dislike everyone in the FBI.

The real reason to watch Quantico has nothing to do with plot or script.  Priyanka Chopra, who stars as FBI recruit Alex Parrish, is mesmerizing to watch.  Her character swings wildly from sensationally competent to overwhelmed with a moments notice, but throughout it's hard to take your eyes off her.  Whether that's enough to keep the show afloat while the creators figure out how to produce a show that's not brain dead, we'll have to find out.

It's at least enough for me.

One has to guess that the FBI didn't officially sanction the show, because it paints them in a less than stellar light.  It appears that every single recruit at the academy has a dark, damaging secret, none of which appear to have been found out by the folks whose job it is to investigate and detect.  Besides Parrish, you have the gay guy who probably isn't really gay for some reason, the woman of Arabic descent who's actually two women sharing her dorm room (don't ask), the Mormon missionary who ends up killing someone in the pilot because he thinks he's about to be outed for getting an underage native girl pregnant and subsequently dead (don't ask), the recruit who's actually an agent pretending to be a recruit so that he can "investigate" one of the other recruits (though so far this investigation has entailed having nasty sex in the back of his SUV), the blonde girl who lost her parents on 9/11 and carries around a chunk of their plane (because that doesn't send up any red flags at all), and the legacy recruit (do they really have those like they do in fraternities?) who manages to fail at everything as a recruit other than get one of his classmates killed (he was really good at that).  For some reason, the FBI suspect one of these people as the mastermind behind the biggest terrorist attack on domestic soil since 9/11.  I'm sure the FBI was just jumping with joy over this show.

Spoiler Alert: at least one of these characters is dead by the end of the first hour.  And you really won't care.

Verdict: I have little hope of this getting better, so as soon as watching Priyanka Chopra becomes dull, I'm gone.