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GM is eating Ford's dustJuly 24, 2014: 1:57 PM ET
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney, Abbott Laboratories and AbbVie, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.
Corvette or Mustang? Silverado or F150? Cadillac or Lincoln?
Auto enthusiasts can debate whether GM or Ford makes better vehicles forever.
But when it comes to Wall Street, there is no dispute. Ford (F) is in fourth gear. GM (GM) is in reverse. Don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Both companies reported their second-quarter results Thursday morning.
GM drove its Chevy to the levee, and the levee was dry. And by levee, I mean profits. The quarter was weighed down by $1.2 billion in costs tied to its massive recall problems. Earnings missed forecasts and shares fell more than 3% as a result.
Related: GM recalls 718,00 more vehicles
Meanwhile, Ford investors could bust out in a celebratory rendition of Mustang Sally. (Ride, Sally, ride!) Profits and sales topped forecasts and the company also notched its first profit in Europe since 2011. The stock rose slightly on the news.
So what should investors do now? Stick with the proven winner that is Ford or bottom-fish with GM?
Related: Full coverage of the GM recall
There are some compelling reasons why GM may look more attractive than Ford.
The stock is cheaper. GM is trading at less than 8 times 2015 earnings forecasts compared to Ford's price-to-earnings-ratio of more than 9.
Warren Buffett is a fan. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) owns 30 million shares of GM. (Although that is down from 40 million shares at the end of 2013.)
And the Oracle of Omaha recently had his daughter buy him a new Caddy from a Nebraska dealer. Buffett then wrote an effusive letter of praise to GM CEO Mary Barra about the dealer.
The worst of the recall woes may be over. Speaking of Barra, it is worth noting that she seems to be doing a solid job of steering GM through the recall crisis.
And even though earnings for the quarter were disappointing, sales were still up from a year ago.
Related: GM to pay victims at least $400 million
That's a good sign for the company. It means that despite all the negative press, consumers are still buying GM cars and trucks.
Management change at Ford raises questions. Ford has a new CEO. The widely respected Alan Mulally has retired. Will Mark Fields continue to keep the company on track? It's a legitimate question for investors.
But here's why I think Ford is still going to be a better stock for the long haul.
Fields is a Ford veteran. Investors shouldn't be that nervous that Mulally is pursuing other opportunities -- like serving on the board of Google (GOOGL).
Fields has been with the company since 1989. This should be a seamless transition.
Related: New Ford CEO gets 14% raise
And on the off-chance that Ford faces a big recall nightmare of its own, wouldn't it be better to have someone fully equipped to deal with the problem? I think one reason why GM isn't in worse shape now is because Barra is a GM lifer and knows the company inside and out.
Ford is still the more respected name with Wall Street. Ford didn't need a bailout/bankruptcy like GM and Chrysler did.
To some, GM will ALWAYS be tarred with the unfortunate nickname of Government Motors. Nobody jokes about Ford's F ticker symbol standing for Federal.
Ford's sales should grow faster than GM's. The slight premium that Ford shares have over GM seem worth it when you look at the growth potential for the two companies.
Ford's sales are expected to increase by 7% in 2015 and 5% in 2016. Analysts expect GM's revenue to rise just 3% next year and 2% in 2016.
I love the 80s. Ford is really firing on all cylinders. Sterne Agee analyst Michael Ward noted in a report Thursday morning that the company's pre-tax profit margins in North America were the highest since the second quarter of 1987. He thinks the stock could hit $20. That's 12% higher than the current price.
So Ford still looks to be the best of Detroit's Big Three from an investment standpoint. You can buy Chrysler via the very thinly traded U.S. shares of Fiat (FIATY) or invest in the local shares trading in Italy. For what it's worth, they're actually cheaper than GM and Ford, trading at 7 times 2015 profit forecasts.
Then again, the cream of the U.S. auto market might be Tesla (TSLA) -- especially if you think Elon Musk is the 2014 version of Henry Ford as opposed to Preston Tucker. Tesla's growing more rapidly than everyone. Of course, the stock is also insanely expensive.
But that's a column for another day. Next Tuesday in fact, barring other big breaking news. Tesla reports its second-quarter results on Thursday July 31. So a preview early next week will be timely.
Reader Comment of the Week. Facebook (FB) is at an all-time high after reporting a redonkulously strong quarter.
Tech editor David Goldman and I joked that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was guilty of selling the company short by merely referring to the results as "a good quarter" in the earnings release. That prompted these tweets from a former CNNMoney investing writer.
Alas, the Wall Street Journal is owned by that other Murdoch company: News Corp. (NWSA). So even if my parent company Time Warner (TWX) succumbs to the urge to merge with Fox (FOXA), then we would not be reunited. (And it feels so good.) Of course, there's that whole issue of Fox probably needing to sell CNN too.
It's all so confusing. You should just check out this segment about it from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart .... that features me! (Erin Burnett and Brian Stelter are on too. As is former CNNer Ali Velshi.) The Time Warner segment starts at about 5 minutes and 20 seconds and I'm on at about the 6:45 mark! Thanks, Comedy Central!


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subset: commoncrawl


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Review: Hung: Season Two
During the first season of Hung, creators Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin searched for a way for novice pimp Tanya (Jane Adams) to package her near-accidental ho Ray (Thomas Jane). These were both desperate people (he a soon-to-be-laid-off gym teacher, and she a poet-turned-temp proofreader), but that didn't make them experts at the world's oldest profession, nor was the show content to let their sad-sack attempts be the only punchline for this dark comedy. Instead, about halfway through, Hung decided to let it all hang out, branding Ray as a holistic healer (of sorts), and prostitution as sex therapy for lonely women.
The second season of Hung turns that therapy back on Ray. Early on in the first episode, "Just the Tip," Ray struggles to perform with a pregnant woman, at least until Tanya advises him to embrace the memories that are holding him back by pretending that he's fucking his ex-wife, Jessica (Anne Heche). It works, at least until the second episode ("Tuscon Is the Gateway to Dick"), when Ray realizes that he may be standing in the way of the client's reconciliation with her husband, and he can't be that guy. Ray's co-pimp, Lenore (Rebecca Creskoff, a brilliant, all-business addition to the cast), doesn't share Tanya's touchy-feely motives though: When he chalks up his reluctant performance to the connection between his dick and his brain, she tersely replies, "Then sever the tie." Given that drama really takes place between the dick and the brain (in the heart), Burson and Lipkin are right to build up Ray's humanity, just as they are right to increase the push-and-pull between a newly empowered Tanya and the cruel alpha-dog Lenore.
And, boy, things are quickly getting intense. Tanya and Lenore seem to be comically coexisting when they compare their business plan to a famous Diego Rivera mural. Tanya sees needy hands, Lenore sees new services, like fisting. (Despite the subject matter, the humor feels surprisingly sophisticated.) But in the explosive third episode, "Mind Bullets," Tanya's getting cutthroat advice from cool, experienced pimp Charlie (Lennie James), surprising even herself as she steals Lenore's dog, spitting out, "Bang, bang, bang, motherfucker!" And by the fourth episode, "Sing It Again, Ray," Lenore's acquiring a metaphorical leash for her ho, by sidling up to Jessica, slyly sabotaging any hopes Ray has of rekindling even a nonsexual relationship with his ex-wife.
It's an unwritten rule, but when writing about a gigolo, you need to have a lot of balls in the air, and Hung keeps throwing more in there. For instance, Jessica's nebbish husband, Ronnie (Eddie Jemison), wants her to give him a baby; meanwhile, her two teenage kids are trouble enough: Darby (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) is hanging out with "Fat and Proud" protestors, and Damon (Charlie Saxton) keeps trying to rebel against labels. It's a bit heavy-handed to have Damon piss on home plate, but this isn't exactly a subtle show (Tanya at a poetry slam: "You can't fuck me, because I'm already fucked"), it's a show about how we deal with our naked truths. Burson and Lipkin haven't quite found voices for all these characters (it could take a few pointers from United States of Tara), but it's getting there.
In fact, Hung grows more penetrating with every episode. There are still throwaway scenes (like between Ray and the rich neighbor whose having an affair with him), but they contribute to the way in which Ray is coming to terms with his lifestyle. When his kids tell him that he'd pick on them too if he was in high school, he brings Tanya closer to his family, as if to prove that he's not just a jock and that he knows "interesting" people. Jessica has also grown this season: Now that we've seen some of the former cheerleader's flaws, it's easier to like her. This is especially true when Jessica and Ray go bowling together; it's a rekindling of the old "date night"—even if the new husband, the kids, and the snarky Polish mother-in-law come along.
At heart, Hung is a show about loss. Dramatically, a Great Recession packs more of a punch than a Great Depression: These characters haven't lost everything, so they've still got choices—and the corresponding consequences—to deal with. The show is surprisingly earnest and hopeful, an example of how good things can come out of bad circumstances. For years, HBO has been billing itself as "Not Just TV." Hung can now proudly call itself "Not Just Sex."
Cast: Thomas Jane, Jane Adams, Anne Heche, Eddie Jemison, Sianoa Smit-McPhee, Charlie Saxton, Rebecca Creskoff, Gregg Henry Network: HBO, Sundays at 10 p.m. Buy: Amazon
Review: The Third Day Leans Heavily on Mystery at the Expense of Human Drama
Much of the show's drama pivots around how successful it will be at slowly pulling back the curtain.2.5
The premiere episode of HBO's limited series The Third Day, in which a man fighting off sadness and potentially madness finds himself on a mysterious island just off the English coast, goes longer on mystery and mood than it does on plot. The feel of the series is richly atmospheric, filled with oversaturated colors and quaint cottages that would make for a nice weekend getaway were it not for the inhospitable, antagonistic, and slightly cult-ish locals. Despite the show's unsettling backdrop, though, the circular nature of the story keeps any appreciable amount of tension from building over the course of the five episodes were made available for review.
The first episode throws a lot at the audience before even getting to the island. Sam (Jude Law) is a raggedy-looking guy who volleys quickly between moods. First there's inchoate fury, as he screams into a phone about money being stolen from an office, and then irredeemable and inexplicable sadness, as he collapses by the side of a stream. Snapped out of his chaotic collapse by the sight of a teenage girl, Epona (Jessie Ross), hanging herself from a tree in the woods, he saves her life and drives her home, even as she murmurs, "They'll kill me."
Epona lives in a self-contained island community called Osea that's accessible only for a short time each day when the ocean tide uncovers a Roman-era causeway. Once there, Sam is flooded with conflicting sensations. The first is that it all feels somewhat familiar, even though as far as he knows his only connection to Osea is his grandfather being stationed there during World War II. The second is a low kind of foreboding that will be well-known to viewers of many a horror movie about urbanites stuck in remote locations. Sam knows something is amiss about this strange place with its quasi-pagan traditions and its people's alternating suspicion and over-friendliness toward outsiders, but he somehow conveniently keeps missing the short windows of time when he could just drive back to the mainland.
Triangulating a creepy space located somewhere between Ari Aster's Midsommar, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, and the TV cult classic The Prisoner, The Third Day works hard to not give too much away while still trying to pull viewers in. It's a difficult act, given that Sam's manic behavior and the show's intentional and often fairly clichéd attempts to blur the lines between reality and fantasy make it somewhat difficult to invest in what happens to him.
Generally more engaging are the side characters who start popping in to further confuse an already muddle-headed Sam, including the ever-bickering Martins (Paddy Considine and Emily Watson), the cosmically mismatched pair who run Osea's one pub and ricochet from suspicious to trustworthy in an instant. Jess (Katherine Waterston), an American researcher doing work on the island's traditions both ancient (Celtic bacchanals, sacrifices, and the like) and newer (a Burning Man-like festival designed to drum up tourism), is ostensibly the standard alluring woman of mystery but has grim secrets of her own that mimic Sam's dark past.
Like the stories that The Third Day appears on its surface to be emulating, much of the drama here will ultimately pivot around just how successful it will be at slowly pulling back the curtain until its final reveal. The series is certainly committed to the slow burn, with too much of its running time given over to Sam's punchy befuddlement as he tries to separate dream from reality. Further slowing down the momentum is the show's structure: The first three episodes (gathered together as "Summer") are separated from a second set of three ("Winter"), in which another outsider (Naomie Harris) traps herself on Osea by a single linking episode ("Autumn"), which is planned to screen live from London in early October.
The Third Day works best when it's not teasing out this or that secret about Osea and its cagey inhabitants. A strong undercurrent in which characters wrestle with their grief keeps wrenching the story away from its somewhat ambling mystery plot. Sam is given one of the show's most impactful lines when he tries to explain the sadness he carries: "Pain doesn't work that way, you can't share it…agony is bespoke." Although Osea is studded with gothic signposts that should be warning characters like Sam away from the place, as the series continues it zeroes in less on the horror elements and more on the more quotidian and human conflicts that keep threatening to tear the island apart. Though viewers may stick with The Third Day to the end to discover what Osea's deepest and darkest secrets might be, its human drama is more compelling than any suggestion of the unworldly.
Cast: Jude Law, Katherine Waterston, Paddy Considine, Emily Watson, Naomie Harris, John Dagleish, Nico Parker, Freya Allan Network: HBO
Review: We Are Who We Are Perceptively Homes in on the Malleability of Boundaries
The series concerns itself with boundaries between the different cultural standards of young adulthood.3
With his loud clothes and bleached hair, 14-year-old Fraser Wilson (Jack Dylan Grazer) sticks out on the U.S. Army base where he lives. He spends much of the first episode of director and co-writer Luca Guadagnino's We Are Who We Are in animal-print shorts long enough to function as pants, being restless and fidgety and a detached nuisance in that post-adolescent sort of way, taking pictures of people inside classrooms or running through the middle of a basketball game between recruits. One of his mothers, Colonel Sarah Wilson (Chloë Sevigny), has been put in charge of a garrison in Italy, so they—he, Sarah, and his other mom, Maggie (Alice Braga)—have relocated from New York, to Fraser's dismay.
Especially when its yoked to Fraser's perspective, the series makes the base feel vibrant and alive, given the Altmanesque use of overlapping conversations and diegetic music. Peripheral characters are always conspicuously doing things in the background, like buying food or running drills. The boy seems volatile and strange, in ways perhaps explained by the sensory overload of his POV; he's an observer and there's almost too much to observe, with dialogue and actions often carrying on out of frame. Fraser feels compelled to center himself in his own world, doing things like balancing precariously on a bridge railing or intruding on Italian homeowners sewing outside, though sometimes he allows himself to be guided by new acquaintances, like fellow army brat Britney (Francesca Scorsese).
When the second episode of the series replays many of these same overlapping events from the perspective of Caitlin Harper (Jordan Kristine Seamón), the repetitions don't feel gimmicky so much as a natural result of the show's densely packed structure. Conversations that were tangential and difficult to follow for the easily distracted Fraser are given clearer focus due to Caitlin's more confident, pensive demeanor. She's already familiar with the environment, having been at the base long enough to form a friend group that includes other teens like Britney and Caitlin's high-strung brother, Danny (Spence Moore II). And with the additional perspective, throwaway lines from the first episode take on new meanings. For example, Sarah's remark to Jenny (Faith Alabi) about respecting faiths other than the base's dominant Christian demographic gains a patronizing quality when we learn that Jenny is Danny's mother and that he's experimenting with the Islamic faith that she left behind, seemingly at the behest of her domineering husband, Richard (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a. Kid Cudi).
Of the four episodes made available to critics ahead of We Are Who We Are's premiere, the other two sync up more traditionally as Caitlin and Fraser begin to spend time with one another. Being the new kid on the base, Fraser lacks any of the preconceptions of Caitlin's friend group, so he becomes an ideal confidante for her experiments with gender expression. Going by just "Harper," Caitlin tucks her long hair beneath a hat and hits on Italian girls in town, while subtly rebuffing guys elsewhere with a quick, "I don't speak Italian."
The series concerns itself with boundaries and the way they blur, namely the differing standards of young adulthood between Italy and the base that technically functions as the United States. In one scene, Britney drags Fraser to the beach because he's allowed to drink off base. By spotlighting this interplay, the series emphasizes how we create so many of these boundaries ourselves, whether in our own heads, through procedures, or in accordance with society at large, along lines of political affinity, relationships, and sexuality.
The most significant boundary separation in the series, then, is the one between childhood and adulthood, which is hardly a rigid one. Accordingly, the kids sometimes seem wise and mature and accepting beyond their years only to fly off the handle and engage in that distinctly teenage brand of solipsism, where the people around you don't matter nearly as much as you and your own feelings. They're able to be pretentious and profound on entirely their own terms, rather than seeming like mouthpieces for middle-aged screenwriters. They leave atrocious messes in their wake, badger a lot of people, and act downright annoying, which feels true and honest in a broader sense than the occasional small detail that rings false. They have the space to change, while the adults ruminate on the decisions—the marriages, the jobs, the beliefs—that they've long since committed to. We Are Who We Are explores a world that's opening up to these kids just as it is, in many ways, preparing to snap closed.
Cast: Jack Dylan Grazer, Jordan Kristine Seamón, Chloë Sevigny, Alice Braga, Spence Moore II, Kid Cudi, Faith Alabi, Francesca Scorsese, Ben Taylor, Corey Knight Network: HBO
Review: I May Destroy You Boldly Dissects Notions of Sexual Assault and Consent
The series draws one of the most nuanced portraits of sexual assault ever depicted on TV.4
In "Ego Death," the final episode of the British comedy-drama I May Destroy You, actress, writer, and series creator Michaela Coel confidently defies convention and, with it, any expectation that the events of the series, like life, can be tied into a tidy knot. Privileging character over plot, I May Destroy You has no need for the kinds of melodramatic reveals on which other cable dramas like Big Little Lies rely, and it proves no less revelatory on that front.
Coel draws one of the most nuanced portraits of sexual assault and its psychological fallout ever depicted on TV, and along the way captures the milieu of Black millennial Londoners with precise and vivid detail. For all the lived-in verisimilitude of its world, though, I May Destroy You also smoothly incorporates psychologically subjective and allegorical elements: The bar in which Arabella is assaulted is called Ego Death (a perfect summation of the consequent disintegration of her identity), and the book on sexual assault that she's writing throughout the series is likely an in-text reflection of the creation of I May Destroy You itself.
In the first episode, "Eyes, Eyes, Eyes, Eyes," we join the Ghanaian-British Arabella (Coel) as she returns to London from Italy, where she's been working on a follow-up to her published collection of social-media musings, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial. Or at least that's what she's told her literary agent (Adam James) and financier (Natalie Walter), as the trip was actually motivated by a visit to her on-again, off-again beau, Biagio (Marouane Zotti), who remains noncommittal about their relationship as she departs. Back in London, she's welcomed by her group of steadfast friends, including Simon (Aml Ameen), who convinces her to suspend her all-night scramble to finish her book draft and join him at the Ego Death.
There, Arabella's drink is spiked and, as she later comes to remember and even more slowly comes to accept, raped in a bathroom stall by an unknown assailant. Brief point-of-view flashbacks to the attack that recur throughout the series complement Coel's larger fascination with the role that memory and its interpretation play in the formation of identity. Longer, structural flashbacks in many episodes challenge our perspective on Arabella's present and often serve to undermine our presumptions about victimhood and blame.
Hardly a cowed victim, but shaken and traumatized, Arabella reevaluates and rebuilds her life after her attack. It's been said that the world is revealed in breakdown—that you don't know how a car works until your carburetor fails. Arabella's assault forces her and her closest friends, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), to examine their own sexual encounters, relationships, and histories, leading them to disconcerting conclusions about the various roles they play in relation to each other and their sexual partners.
Similar to its exploration of the multiple dimensions of a person's identity, I May Destroy You depicts the different forms that sexual assault can take, not all of it as immediately readable as Arabella's violent rape, and not always committed by obvious villains like the man (Lewis Reeves) in Arabella's flashbacks. The series delivers an illustration of how someone can be violated even after consent is given: We repeatedly see men use deception to get people in bed, or deploy it once they've already starting hooking up. Kwame finds it impossible to process his own sexual assault, personally or legally—in part because the justice system proves to have even less infrastructure for dealing with the rape of gay men—and diverts his anguish into a distasteful act of sexual mendacity. Terry comes to rethink a threesome she ostensibly opted into, whose circumstances we explore in a flashback to her and Arabella's first trip to Italy.
But Coel isn't simply out to demonstrate the many variations of sexual assault in the manner of a sex education video; rather, I May Destroy You examines how sexual, racial, and gender exploitation weave themselves into people's identities and attitudes. Episode three, "Don't Forget the Sea," crucially plants the seed of the unexamined tension within Arabella and Terry's friendship. As in almost any long-term close friendship, both have committed inconsiderate slights against the other, but, as two black women in a sexist and racist society, such petty affronts come with high stakes. Allowing her characters to respond imperfectly to each others' crises, Coel foregrounds the importance of forgiving individuals within a broken society—daringly including among the forgiven characters who have unambiguously crossed a sexual "line spectrum border" (the title of the show's eighth episode).
I May Destroy You doesn't define its characters through moral dichotomies. Episode six, "The Alliance," poignantly explores the tangled social hierarchy that gives a measure of institutional power to white girls, but also can allow black boys to assert a form of male privilege, as a flashback to a racially and sexually charged incident that occurred when Arabella was in high school blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. And the tenth episode, "The Cause the Cure," presents what's probably the show's most moving representation of the yin-and-yang influence that loved ones can have on the course of our lives, juxtaposing Arabella's realization of a truth about her beloved father (Yinka Awoni) with her processing of her and Terry's own betrayals of each other's sisterly trust.
Arabella's circuitous route to recovery feels deeply personal, but at the same time, her story touches on more universal aspects of life for someone of her gender, race, and age. At once hyper-local and global in its concerns, I May Destroy You feels eminently contemporary, a necessary artistic distillation of a distinctly modern form of life. With the series, Coel gives voice to a generation of black and brown millennials whose realities don't reflect the fantasy of a post-racial, post-feminist society that many have tried to wish into being.
Cast: Michaela Coel, Weruche Opia, Paapa Essiedu, Aml Ameen, Marouane Zotti, Harriett Webb, Stephen Wight, Natalie Walter, Adam James Network: HBO
Review: HBO's Lovecraft Country Confronts the Evil Lurking Beneath American Life
The series eclipses its source material in capturing the omnidirectional dread of Lovecraftian horror.3
The horror of Lovecraft Country, Misha Green's adaptation of Matt Ruff's 2016 novel of the same name, is at first all too real. Set in the 1950s, it introduces Korean War veteran Atticus "Tic" Freeman (Jonathan Majors) as he returns to his hometown of Chicago after receiving news of his father's (Michael Kenneth Williams) disappearance. Left a note pointing to the man's possible location in a Massachusetts town called Ardham, Tic journeys across 1950s Jim Crow America with an old friend, Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), and his uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance), a travel agent who contributes to a guidebook, similar to The Negro Motorist Green Book, of safe places to eat and lodge for Black roadtrippers.
The first episode of the series generates much dread from Tic, Letitia, and George passing through towns as white people turn their heads in eerie unison and police cars seemingly materialize out of nowhere. Close-ups of the white walls of a diner that was previously welcoming of Black customers reveal scorch marks that were barely painted over, telling us all that we need to know about how the locals here felt about integration. Cops pull out their guns the moment they set eyes on Tic and his associates, and conversations between the main characters and white people are marked by eye-averting submissiveness and fear. In fact, when the other shoe finally drops and the monsters we expect to encounter in an H.P. Lovecraft story finally materialize, the additional layer of terror heaped onto the protagonists is somewhat offset by the relief of seeing some of their white tormenters become prey.
As Lovecraft's influence on horror continues to grow in the decades since his death, artists have attempted to reckon with his racism and xenophobia, namely by recognizing that the pagan cults and corrupted humanoid monsters that make the author's work so chilling also provide insights into his pathological hatred of the Other. Lovecraft Country understands that in a world filled with underground occultists who wield strange power, such groups aren't made up of tired and huddled masses, but of folks in the upper echelons of wealth and authority. If anything, the racially and culturally diverse people whom Lovecraft saw as social pollutants would be the most routine victims of these organizations—second-class citizens whose disappearances would never be investigated by the powers that be.
The series has its share of CGI monsters, from many-limbed creatures to undead spirits, but its most compelling visual scares involve the cold framing of remote manors owned by cult leaders like Samuel Braithwhite (Tony Goldwyn) and his daughter, Christina (Abbey Lee). These individuals, with their Aryan features and stiff countenances, never betray any emotion or urgency, for they know that they live in a world where they can have whatever they want. And their sense of superiority informs Lovecraft Country's most blackly comedic moment, when Christina objects to Tic comparing their group to the KKK by saying, "My father and his associates would never fraternize with the Klan. They're too poor."
The first five episodes of the series made available to press branch out from the central plotline to cover such topics as haunted houses and body transformation, which allows Lovecraft Country to change up its scares as well as broaden its allegorical range. The realistic harassment suffered by the Black residents of a boarding house in a white neighborhood, for example, is thrown into even sharper relief by the mutilated ghosts who stalk its halls. And throughout these episodes, characters encounter gruesome objects connected to the order that hunts them, reflecting the long history of slavery and Manifest Destiny.
Green makes some significant changes to the novel, but her most rewarding come in the form of the extra time she devotes to tracking the emotional fallout of the characters' experiences, not only in relation to the horrors they witness, but the everyday degradations they suffer. One can see, for example, how an older man like George is so deeply inculcated in a racist system that, even at the height of his fear, he remains obsequious around whites. Comparatively, there's something rousing, and more than a little funny, in seeing Tic and Leti so addled by the unearthly terrors they face that they become less dutiful in abiding by the mores of Jim Crow. Eventually, they begin to lash out at harassing whites, who are so used to the power dynamics of American society that they're almost too stunned at the backtalk to be enraged by it.
Early in the first episode, a woman riding next to Tic on a bus to Chicago sees that he's reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter novels and expresses her disapproval of such a work with an ex-Confederate for a hero. "Stories are like people," he says. "Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You just try to cherish them and overlook their flaws." The old woman responds: "Yeah, but the flaws are still there." That exchange could be the thesis of Lovecraft Country, which eclipses even its source material in capturing the all-encompassing dread of Lovecraft's fiction while at the same time confronting head-on the most problematic aspects of his writing. The author feared America becoming infected with evil that would sink it asunder, while Green's series operates from the opposite point of view: that evil was integral to the nation's creation and that it must be fought, however futilely, to be overcome.
Cast: Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Aunjanue Ellis, Abbey Lee, Jada Harris, Michael Kenneth Williams, Courtney B. Vance, Jordan Patrick Smith Network: HBO
Review: In My Skin Is a Bitingly Poignant, If Cluttered, Coming-of-Age Story
Though it doesn't provide room for a fully formed character arc, the series is driven by its performances and mordant humor.2.5
Sixteen-year-old Bethan Gwyndaf (Gabrielle Creevy), the protagonist of Hulu's In My Skin, has a lot going on in her life. She's the only responsible member of her household, essentially acting as caretaker for her bipolar mother, Trina (Jo Hartley), and constantly at odds with her layabout, alcoholic father, Dilwyn (Rhodi Meilir). And she's often the only voice of reason among her best friends, Travis (James Wilbraham) and Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar), who seem to always get into trouble whenever she's not around. She's also nursing a desperate crush on Poppy (Zadeia Campbell-Davies), the popular girl at school.
Bethan is a compulsive liar, so obsessed with fitting in at school that she spins elaborate stories of a home life filled with cultural activities and fancy renovations to cover for the reality that she spends much of her time taking care of Trina and tracking down Dilwyn. Her obsession with crafting a perfect external image of herself makes it impossible for her to form emotional connections with anyone, even people who genuinely care for her. Travis and Lydia, for example, want to support her in the same way she supports them, brushing off their questions about her family life and never even letting them inside her house.
Bethan is smart and sensitive, and Creevy makes the character, with her conspiratorial smile and natural aversion to being told what she can and can't do, easy to like—even as Bethan frustratingly and steadfastly refuses to let anyone in. In My Skin's Welsh-born creator, Kayleigh Llewellyn, based Bethan and Trina on herself and her own bipolar mother, and there's a lot of raw emotion in the interactions between the two characters, ranging from tender and loving to harsh and hurtful. The short-tempered Dilwyn, inspired by Llewellyn's late father, has no patience for Trina's unstable mental state, leaving her to wander the streets or tying her to the radiator to make sure she stays in the house. Her parents' combative dynamic often leaves Bethan stuck in the middle of them, attempting to play peacemaker.
As volatile as Bethan's family relationships can be, In My Skin still has plenty of humor, emanating from Bethan's biting wit and frequent flights of imagination, during which she casts herself as the romantic hero in Poppy's life, as well as a poet whose words are illustrated with perfume commercial-style images. Bethan's occasional voiceover narration is an inconsistent element of the series, but her self-aware commentary is a welcome counterpoint to her infuriatingly self-sabotaging behavior. While having Bethan explain her inner thoughts can easily become a narrative crutch, In My Skin could have benefited more from Bethan's reflective observations, which give us a deeper understanding of her often impulsive decisions.
All the more important since the first season's five half-hour episodes don't provide enough room for Bethan's arc to fully take shape, moving her only a short way down the path toward maturity and ending just as she's starting to assert herself at school, harnessing her way with words to run for student body. Her relationships with her fellow teens remain stunted, and her potential coming-out journey takes a back seat to her need to care for Trina and insulate her from trauma. Llewellyn isn't afraid to confront the dark elements of Bethan's life—the way poverty, mental illness, homophobia, and substance abuse combine to weigh her down. That her personality shines through at all is both a testament to Creevy's performance and the character's determination to make a better life for herself, however misguided.
That personality is what drives In My Skin, and Bethan's self-sufficiency is a big part of what makes her so compelling. No matter what delusion or altercation Trina involves her in throughout the show's first season, Bethan always comes back, taking on a responsibility that she never asked for and shouldn't have to handle on her own. If she doesn't always know how to balance that responsibility with everything else going on in her life, at least she's approaching every new setback with appealingly mordant humor.
Cast: Gabrielle Creevy, James Wilbraham, Jo Hartley, Poppy Lee Friar, Zadeia Campbell-Davies, Rhodri Meilir, Alexandra Riley, Di Botcher, Aled ap Steffan Network: Hulu
Review: Peacock's The Capture Wears Its Topicality Impersonally on Its Sleeve
The series sucks the juice out of its pop-cultural reference points, failing to mine our current nightmares on its own terms.2
Ben Chanan's The Capture wears its topicality on its sleeve, principally concerning the CCTV security cameras that monitor London's streets and which number in the hundreds of thousands, averaging out to one camera per dozen or so people. The casualness of the cameras' presence throughout the Peacock series is unnerving, suggesting how easily privacy can be annihilated with little in the way of pushback from the populace.
Chanan's concerns, though, aren't existential ones, as he's fashioned a murder mystery that laboriously connects modern surveillance to social media, war crimes committed in the Middle East, rising notions of fake news, and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden—all of which are referenced explicitly in the show's dialogue. Weirdly, the sociopolitical Easter eggs often feel beside the point, serving as window dressing for an impersonal game of cat and mouse.
Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) is a British soldier accused of killing a member of the Taliban during a tour of duty in Afghanistan after the man had already surrendered. Surveillance footage from a body camera seems to validate this assertion, until Shaun's bannister, Hannah Roberts (Laura Haddock), establishes a lag between the audio and the video feeds of the footage, casting doubt on the evidence. Shaun, Hannah, and others celebrate his acquittal at a local pub, after which the two kiss on the street, pointedly in view of a CCTV camera. She leaves, never to be seen again. When footage surfaces of Shaun hitting Hannah and dragging her out of the camera's sight, he denies any involvement, but he's immediately accused of a second crime that's supported by theoretically objective evidence.
This is all essentially setup, and Chanan threatens to stuff his concept up to the breaking point of contrivance. Investigating the case is Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), a brilliant and ambitious detective inspector with a stereotypical taste for stylish jackets and a penchant for playing by her own rules. Her superiors and peers castigate Rachel for her drive, which scans less as an acknowledgement of sexist double standards than as Chanan's need to define his characters by signpost dialogue. Shaun eludes Rachel, who's convinced of his guilt, until she begins to uncover a wealth of evidence that connects Shaun's two murder investigations, as well as a celebrated case in which Rachel foiled a potential terrorist attack.
The twist-a-minute The Capture is compulsively watchable, but we've seen much of this before. In addition to 24, which similarly pulled the rug out from under its audience with endless, sometimes ingenious reversals, The Capture also recalls Andrew Davis's The Fugitive, as well as seemingly every jargon-laden investigative crime show on TV.
Shaun and Rachel are ciphers with stock backstories, and the show's dozens of other characters often fit into easily recognizable archetypes, from the jealous sidekick to the estranged, earnest wife, to the icy authority figure with shady motives. As the latter, Detective Superintendent Gemma Garland, Lia Williams acquits herself better than much of the rest of the cast, commanding the screen with seeming ease. And in a small, mysterious role, Ron Perlman revels in a sense of understatement, suggesting a bored, bureaucratic comfort with authoritarianism that's both eerie and funny.
What The Capture doesn't have is the sense of violation that made 24 such an unmooring experience in its best seasons. That show's protagonist, Jack Bauer, was a charismatic hawk who did things that most people to the left of Dick Cheney would find monstrous. Kiefer Sutherland allowed you to see the humanity and the savagery of Bauer, which rendered the character all the more disturbing. Whatever its faults, 24 is a distinctive, authentic reaction to the political atrocities that marked the post-9/11 world.
By contrast, the violence of The Capture is just noise to further the plot. Even the notion of doctored surveillance footage has been examined before and more artfully, especially in Philip Kaufman's atmospheric Rising Sun. A newer element of our surveillance state, social media, is mentioned obligatorily but is barely explored. The Capture sucks the juice out of its pop-cultural reference points, failing to mine our current nightmares on its own terms.
Cast: Holliday Grainger, Callum Turner, Laura Haddock, Cavan Clerkin, Ginny Holder, Barry Ward, Ben Miles, Peter Singh, Lia Williams, Sophia Brown, Ron Perlman, Famke Jansen Network: Peacock
Review: The Optimism of Japan Sinks: 2020 Leads to a Curious Emotional Remove
The show's reticence to dig into hopelessness and pain leaves its admirable optimism to feel strangely artificial.2.5
The latest adaptation of Japanese science-fiction writer Sakyo Komatsu's 1973 disaster novel Japan Sinks comes to us in animated form, overseen by prolific director Masaaki Yuasa at Science Saru, the studio he co-founded. The Netflix series wastes little time dishing out the apocalyptic imagery promised by its title: Soon after a low-level earthquake hits Japan, a stronger one follows, causing buildings to crumble and pound bystanders into a gory paste beneath the rubble. The Earth vomits gas and magma, and the ground violently splits open, only to be jammed back together into new, alien configurations.
Rather than the scientific and political perspectives of Komatsu's novel and its previous adaptations, however, Japan Sinks: 2020 takes a markedly more personal viewpoint of the mixed-race Muto family and the companions they pick up along the way. Coupled with some surprisingly spare and soothing music on the soundtrack, the depictions of the family's early reunion suggest a defiantly optimistic take on the large-scale disaster story, a focus on togetherness and a celebration of the human capacity to adapt even amid utter turmoil. In one scene, the Muto patriarch, Koichiro (Masaki Terasoma), uses colored lights to illuminate some trees the way he once did at their ruined home, guiding the family back together.
As bodies rain from the sky, though, Japan Sinks: 2020 shows its teeth. Characters die in sudden, jarring ways, disorienting the viewer in a similar fashion to these travelers whose only option is to press forward on an island that can offer them no refuge. Throughout the series, these characters are mostly defined by archetypal qualities, with new ones introduced almost as soon as others are lost. This gives the Muto clan's odyssey something of a mythic quality as they make their way through symbolic destinations, from an open, seemingly empty grocery store to a community that practices kintsugi, a Japanese art of pottery repair.
The show's limitations become apparent when it slows down midway through the season, no longer relying on the pure momentum of its plot twists and striking images of environmental devastation. When Japan Sinks 2020 actually allows space for us to absorb the characters' deaths, you may feel as if there's little to mourn. With a few exceptions, they're primarily vehicles for shock and dire twists of fate rather than people to empathize with.
Yuasa's prior Netflix series, the gonzo Devilman Crybaby, injected some disarming positivity into its own increasingly bleak premise, and in a way that made its tragedies feel even more devastating. But the optimism of Japan Sinks: 2020 doesn't function quite the same way since, here, it's the overriding ethos, with characters who are more than willing to come together despite catastrophe and pain and displays of self-interest like nationalism.
While this idea is noble, the series moves on from the tragedy of these characters' lives so quickly that we never get a sense of the totality of their grief. The result, despite no shortage of daring escapes, is a disaster story whose harried pace and reticence to grapple with hopelessness and pain renders it artificial, keeping us at an emotional remove.
Cast: Reina Ueda, Tomomi Muranaka, Yuko Sasaki, Masaki Terasoma, Kensho Ono, Umeji Sasaki, Nanako Mori Network: Netflix
Review: Little Voice Is a Twee, Navel-Gazing Depiction of Creative Struggle
Created by Sara Bareilles and Jessie Nelson, the series positions its protagonist as a bastion of artistic purity.1.5
As the first episode of Little Voice begins, aspiring singer-songwriter Bess King (Brittany O'Grady) is still traumatized from being laughed off stage after attempting to perform one of her original songs. Bess's fragile ego is a major impediment to the launching her music career, and it takes the rest of the season for her to just feel truly comfortable on stage again, a pretty meager payoff considering it takes nine episodes to reach that point.
Bess's friend and manager, Benny (Phillip Johnson Richardson), assures her in a later episode of the series that artists are meant to be moody, but Bess goes beyond that, as she's an entitled, ungrateful narcissist, petulantly pushing away friends and family if they don't conform to her arbitrary moral standards. Even worse, there's very little about her supposed talent that could justify the behavior that Benny excuses on the basis of artistic brilliance.
Created by singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles and filmmaker Jessie Nelson (who previously collaborated on the Broadway musical Waitress), Little Voice positions Bess as a bastion of artistic purity, first asserting that she writes songs only for herself, and later fending off industry figures' attempts to have her record songs written by other people or compose music for others. When she gets a chance to record in the legendary Electric Lady Studios, she rebuffs suggestions from a jaded engineer (Luke Kirby) and her guitarist, Samuel (Colton Ryan), to make changes to one of her songs, and both men later acknowledge that she was right.
But there's little sense that Bess has anything of importance to say with her music, which at one point she describes as "Alessia Cara meets Carole King" but just sounds like Sara Bareilles B-sides. Her precious piano-driven dirges all sound the same, which makes it tough to feel the intended emotional impact of songs often written in response to the events of a particular episode. O'Grady, who was a regular on Fox's musical drama Star, has a clear, resonant voice, and it's easy to envision her as a mainstream pop singer, but Bess's songs always sound smooth and polished, which contradicts their supposed purpose as messy personal statements.
The audiences arrives at an understanding of just how messy Bess's personal life is through a tedious dramatization of love triangle that puts her in the middle of two bland, sensitive hunks. She first connects with video editor Ethan (Sean Teale), who works in a storage unit next to the one that Bess rents as a practice space (the series emphasizes her financial hustle with jobs as a bartender, dog walker, music tutor, and busker, but she somehow affords rent for both a storage space and half of a gorgeous New York City apartment). Of course, Ethan has a girlfriend, and Bess is later romantically drawn to Samuel, but both men mostly pine from the sidelines while Bess strings them along for the entire season.
Being inconsiderate and presumptuous seems to run in Bess's family, and the show's most frustrating character is her mentally disabled brother, Louie (Kevin Valdez), who lives in a group home but constantly relies on Bess for every pretty much everything. Louie is obsessed with Broadway and even has his own catch phrase ("Wonder of wonders!"), and his relationship with Bess is meant to display her compassion and dedication, but it mostly just proves that she's incapable of holding him accountable for his behavior. Just as Bess seems to expect her friends to cater to her every shift in mood, Louie expects the same from his sister.
Their relationship comes off as a codependent nightmare, and Louie's blind faith in Bess's talent is as misguided as her indulgence of his every whim. At one point in the series, a music executive condescendingly describes Bess's music as "darling." While that's intended as a dubious insult, it captures the twee, navel-gazing tone of Little Voice.
Cast: Brittany O'Grady, Phillip Johnson Richardson, Colton Ryna, Sean Teale, Kevin Valdez, Luke Kirby Network: Apple TV+
Review: HBO's Perry Mason Examines Power and Faith Amid a Fog of Decay
The series is gory and dour with a bone-deep cynicism, but it's also optimistic in its own small way.3
A dead baby appears not five minutes into HBO's reboot of Perry Mason. Left on a rail car at Angels Flight in Los Angeles, the child's eyes are stitched open in hopes of fooling the frantic parents just long enough for the kidnappers to abscond with the ransom money. The grotesque image is certainly far from the show's last, but it functions as a statement of purpose: Creators Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald intend to grit up the world of Erle Stanley Gardner's criminal defense lawyer, who was most famously depicted on the CBS television series starring Raymond Burr that aired from 1957 to 1966.
The new Perry Mason is set in 1932, and at the outset, the eponymous character is a private investigator, and hardly the respectable kind. Paired up with the sardonic Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham), he's not above taking illicit photos of a movie star at a studio's behest, hoping to prove a morals clause violation. Matthew Rhys brings a thick haze of disillusionment to his character, who wears a lot of stubble and an expression of perpetual weariness. Reconceived in the mold of reluctant prestige TV heroes, Mason is a man adrift, with few opportunities during the Great Depression, and so he tries (unsuccessfully) to squeeze his employers for more cash, though he still misses out on paying the child support he owes.
Mason's lawyer pal, E.B. Jonathan (John Lithgow), brings him in to work with E.B.'s associate, Della Street (Juliet Rylance), on the kidnapping case. The law jabs an accusatory finger at the grieving parents, Matthew and Emily Dodson (Nate Corddry and Gayle Rankin), leaving the defense to contend with dirty cops and cover-ups in addition to following a trail of money that loops through the local evangelical church. A lot of the story beats are the usual stuff of noir, with people you can't trust mixed up in systems you can trust even less, but the series uses its central case and characters to tug at the different threads of a rich societal tapestry, deftly posing questions about religion, race, sexuality, and gender roles as the world unravels.
Amid dramatic courtroom monologues from E.B. and various scenes of Mason probing crime scenes, the case quickly becomes a media circus. Reporters mob the courthouse steps alongside throngs of protestors howling for blood; the Dodson kidnapping captures the imagination of the public because, despite multiple scenes that show people gasping at others dropping profanities, their interests run toward the morbid and the salacious.
The spotlight throws marriage dynamics into sharp relief, with Emily Dodson vilified on the stand for displaying sexual agency or disinterest in a husband who keeps her in the dark about their finances. Any guilt or shame over their child's death on her part is framed as a confession in the eyes of the vicious, grandstanding district attorney (Stephen Root). Reactions from the main characters and the general public depict a wider culture of apathy, bigotry, and especially misogyny amid an economic downturn that stokes everyone's most desperate instincts for survival. The show's world is a richly rendered fog of decay and hopelessness; people who can make a living do so off secrets, as with E.B.'s questionable financial records or the compromising photos that Mason develops at his dead parents' desolate farm.
The public hungers for escape, and they get it from the movies, sensational newspaper stories, or from the sense of community provided by a religion that demands their money and devotion in return. They fixate on violence, on victims and victimizers as expressions of their own powerlessness, while others take whatever small power they can, under whatever label. Officially, Della Street is E.B.'s secretary, but it's immediately clear that the scatterbrained old-timer couldn't run the office without her, as she empathizes with and advocates for women like Emily in a way that the men often don't. Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), who goes on to be a frequent investigator in Mason's employ, is here reconceived as a black cop, an outsider in a system that wants little to do with him beyond what it can use. He becomes disillusioned with his place in that system, as the other characters similarly confront their own powerlessness.
Perry Mason's concern with power is most clearly seen in Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany), who gets to stand on the evangelical church's stage and theatrically preach, her position as the church's mouthpiece sometimes clashing with the moneymen who run the place behind the scenes. The show's focus on religion can be strained at times, as the church subplots feel tangential to the main case, but its prominence clarifies Perry Mason as a series that's also about faith, religious and otherwise. Here, faith is eminently vulnerable, often taken advantage of by charlatans but also necessary to keep a person going—a faith in humanity to look beyond societal conditioning and the corruption snaking its way through every angle of civilization. Faith isn't always rewarded. The series is gory and dour with a bone-deep cynicism, but it's also optimistic in its own small way, an origin story that chronicles how its characters find a means to fight rather than serving as dejected, disgusted observers.
Cast: Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk, Shea Whigham, Tatiana Maslany, John Lithgow, Gayle Rankin, Stephen Root, Lili Taylor, Nate Corddry Network: HBO
Review: Season Three of Search Party Embraces a More Madcap Sensibility
Season three rivals its predecessors in its intoxicating blend of bleak cynicism and irreverent comedy.3.5
The third season of Search Party, the exceptionally nimble dramedy created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, returns after a hiatus of two and a half years but begins right after the events of the second season's finale. Dory (Alia Shawkat) has just been arrested for the murder of her quasi-associate and ex-lover, Keith, and as a cop takes her mugshot, she chuckles at something he says—resulting in a beguiling portrait of Dory, wearing dark red lipstick, with one eyebrow raised and a roguish half-smile fixed on her face.
The ever-ravenous press and public latch on to Dory's mugshot, turning her and the legal case against her and her boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds), into a national spectacle. The series, in turn, takes a gripping dive into Dory's psyche, sharply revealing how her place in the spotlight magnifies her anxieties. In contrast to the defining visual of Search Party's first two seasons—a tracking shot of Dory, which prioritized her reactions and impressions over the stimuli eliciting them—season three often depicts her in faux news reels and talk-show clips. Rather than centering Dory as she moves through the world, these sequences freeze her in a still image, embodying her objectification at the hands of the media frenzy. The alienation she feels as tabloid fodder eclipses what she once felt as an aimless personal assistant.
But Dory is far from powerless, as she's remarkably adept at steering the narrative of both her life and the trial. One of her most formidable feats is a television interview alongside her estranged parents (Jacqueline Antaramian and Ramsey Faragallah), which successfully presents the illusion of a unified front. And she seems to like the attention, as when she humors the paparazzi posted outside her apartment, or when she melodramatically regales the partygoers encircling her at a friend's wedding with tales of fame's woes.
Search Party's earlier seasons found joltingly dark humor in the absurdity of four clueless, sheltered, relatively young adults playing detective and then committing and covering up a murder. This season rivals its predecessors in its intoxicating blend of bleak cynicism and irreverent comedy, but embraces a more exaggerated, madcap sensibility. Recognizing that court is an inherently theatrical space—and a magnet for outsized personalities—the series drops Dory down the rabbit hole and surrounds her with near-unbelievable weirdos. Bob (Louie Anderson), Drew's lawyer, spouts a wonderful blend of banal aphorisms and pulpy zingers. "Oh, this city," he drones upon arriving in New York from Chicago, "so much chaos out there." And Bob is joined in court by two other similarly odd and hilarious attorneys: Cassidy (Shalita Grant), Dory's rookie lawyer, and the overzealous prosecutor, Polly (Michaela Watkins). The trial, shepherded as it is by a trio of clowns, drives the season's tonal shift as it quickly devolves into a circus-like farce of shoddy evidence and shaky testimonies.
Dory and Drew's friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) are back, but where past seasons deepened their outwardly shallow personalities, this season frequently relegates them to inconsequential, if funny, subplots. The treatment of Portia is particularly disappointing: Previously, a surprising acuity flickered within her, but the series tosses that potential nuance aside, doubling down on the ditzy obliviousness at her surface.
Ultimately, though, the simplicity of the non-Dory narratives is of a piece with the trajectory that Search Party has outlined over its run thus far. The series is Dory's story, told in an obsessive manner as befits her swelling narcissism. And the strangeness of the trial hints, perhaps, at the world as seen through Dory's eyes—and as tinged by her growing delusion. Dory is prone to hallucinations and fantasies, and her mental state only worsens under the psychological toll of the trial. At one point, Drew wonders if Dory's claims of innocence are just a legal strategy, or if she really believes that she didn't do anything.
And she's still keeping her greatest secret—that she killed April, the neighbor who knew about Keith's murder—but Drew is on to her. That Dory remains at least slightly sympathetic throughout all this is a testament to the subtle expressiveness of Shawkat's performance. Dory's torn emotions course through Shawkat's face; the character's survival instincts flash in her eyes when she's cornered, when her control of situations starts to falter.
Rare are the moments, however, in which Dory's power is truly at risk of slipping. One of the season's most striking shots embodies her insidious influence on those around her. Dory, Portia, and Elliot sit and lie down in a line, playing with each other's hair; Dory combs Portia's while Portia runs her fingers through Elliott's. Drew is opposite them, on the couch. They're all quiet, thoughtful, reflective. But Dory, with Portia's hair in her hand, resembles a puppet master. As the camera slowly zooms out, the moody electronic soundtrack kicks in, an echo of Dory's unceasing calculations. Aspects of the blocking recall Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam: Drew's no God, but Elliot stretches out like the first man—and Dory is behind both him and the woman closest to him, plotting, the serpent just off-canvas.
Cast: Alia Shawkat, John Reynolds, Meredith Hagner, John Early, Shalita Grant, Michaela Watkins, Louie Anderson, Raphael Nash Thompson, Clare McNulty, Brandon Micheal Hall, Claire Tyers, Christine Taylor Network: HBO Max
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text:
N.J. man pleads not guilty in Etan Patz case
NEW YORK (AP) — The man charged with killing a 6-year-old New York City boy who was infamously abducted in 1979 pleaded not guilty Wednesday, while his lawyer insisted his confession to police was false.
Pedro Hernandez, 51, wore a gray sweatsuit and answered "not guilty" at the hearing in the case of Etan Patz, whose disappearance helped spawn the movement to publicize cases of missing children.
"My client had no motive and no history," defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said outside court.
"There is a serious question as to what happened in May 1979," Fishbein said. "There is no crime scene. There are no witnesses to a crime."
Fishbein also noted a body was never recovered.
He said that Hernandez confessed falsely after seven hours of questioning by police, and that he is still under medical and psychiatric care.
"My client is not happy that he is in jail," Fishbein said.
Fishbein said he would seek to dismiss the case because the only evidence is his client's false confession. Under state law, a confession can be enough to convict someone as long as authorities can establish a crime occurred and the confession is reliable.
But if the case does go forward, Fishbein said the defense will revolve around his client's mental state, though he isn't pursuing an insanity defense and Hernandez was found mentally fit to stand trial.
An insanity defense would mean acknowledging he committed the crime but arguing that he was too psychologically ill to know it was wrong. Hernandez didn't kill Etan and made a false confession because of his mental problems, among other factors, Fishbein said.
"The only part that mental disease plays in this case is its role in the confession," he said before the court date.
Psychiatric exams of the jailed Hernandez have found that he has an IQ in the borderline-to-mild mental retardation range, his lawyer has said. Hernandez also has been found to suffer from schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by hallucinations, according to his lawyer.
The defendant's wife and daughter attended the hearing but did not speak to reporters.
Etan's disappearance led to an intensive search and garnered huge publicity. His photo was among the first put on milk cartons, and his case turned May 25 into National Missing Children's Day.
Hernandez was a teenage stock clerk at a convenience store when Etan disappeared on his way to school on May 25, 1979. Hernandez was a married father with no criminal record and living in Maple Shade, N.J., when police approached him based on a tip this year. The tip came after federal authorities and police dug up a basement in the neighborhood hoping for clues, putting the cold case back into the limelight once again.
Investigators say Hernandez told them he lured the boy into the convenience store with the promise of a soda. According to police, he said he led the child to the basement, choked him and left his body in a bag of trash about a block away.
Etan's parents, Stan and Julie Patz, have been reluctant to move or even change their phone number in case their son tried to reach out. They have not commented.
Etan was declared legally dead by his father more than a decade ago so he could sue convicted child molester Jose Ramos in the boy's death. Ramos was found responsible — a ruling made because he didn't entirely cooperate with questioning during the lawsuit — and Fishbein could seek to make that a factor in Hernandez's defense.
Ramos, now 69, had been dating the boy's baby sitter in 1979 and was the prime suspect for years, but he was never charged. He repeatedly denies having anything to do with Etan's disappearance.
Ramos was later convicted of molesting two different children. He completed a 27-year sentence last month but was immediately arrested upon his release from a Pennsylvania prison, because authorities said he had given them a false address for where he'd be living.
Ramos is currently jailed in Pennsylvania on charges of failing to properly register as a sex offender under Megan's Law immediately after he was released earlier this year from prison.


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Instead of hitting the bar after work, why not try something new? We found five relaxing pau hana happenings.
(page 1 of 5)
1. Stargazing at the Hokulani Imaginarium
Learn about constellations, the moon's cycles and orbiting planets while viewing the night sky. The stargazing takes place the second Wednesday of each month inside the 66- seat Hokulani Imaginarium, a high-tech planetarium and multimedia facility. The imaginarium is part of the Windward Community College campus. Education specialist Krissie Kellogg will be on hand to help identify constellations and keep the audience up to date on celestial happenings, such as meteor showers or eclipses. "Each show is different because the sky is constantly changing," says Imaginarium manager Nancy Ali. Wednesday, May 12 at 7 p.m., $3, 45-720 Keaahala Road, aerospace.wcc.hawaii.edu.
Did You Know?
The dome of the 66-seat Hokulani Imaginarium (Hokulani means "starry heavens" in Hawaiian) is 40 feet tall, or about four stories high. It also serves as the planetarium's screen.


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We saw Michael's tube training trick with Truman and decided to give it a go with Velli (Sun) and Dac (Jenday)
Seen here is Michael's Truman doing the trick as he explains it:
So far so good with Velli. She's still a bit hesitant, but we only have to target her through the tube once and she gets the idea. Dac will do it with targeting, but is still warming up to the idea and usually just watches Velli from one of our shoulders.
Seen here is Velociflaptor running through the tube:
It took a couple of weeks of just leaving the tube next to their cage and a couple of sessions before they reliable approached the tube.


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Now there are all sorts of way to collage based on it's definition of "An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color. An assemblage of diverse elements." I like that definition, I have always liked to paste or glue diverse elements!
The three projects that I included were a card, an ATC and a tag. All the supplies came from the wonderful and sometimes scary Retro Cafe Art.
Hope you enjoy a good scare this week.
take care, gerri
|"You are scaring me" Tag


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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A recovery in the housing market and strong growth in consumer wealth will help jump-start the U.S. economy later in 2013, said Larry Summers, a former adviser to President Barack Obama.
Summers, considered a possible candidate to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke when his current term ends next year, said a further boost would come from an increase in U.S. energy production
"There are no certainties, there are enormous risks and there are some substantial problems but ... the American economy is coming back," Summers, Obama's top economic adviser until November 2010, told a conference in Jerusalem on Wednesday.
"Barring a major shock from abroad, U.S. growth will move to the 3 percent range by the end of the year and will accelerate from that because the housing sector, which is only 4 percent of the economy but more than half of the business cycle, has turned decisively."
The Fed projects U.S. economic growth of 3.0-3.5 percent in 2014.
Obama this week hinted that he may be looking for a new Fed chief, saying Bernanke has stayed a lot longer than the current chairman had originally planned.
Bernanke, who has tried to nurse along the ailing U.S. economy since the 2008 financial crisis, is widely expected to step down when his second term as chairman expires at the end of January.
When asked whether his various speeches this week in Jerusalem were a form of lobbying for Bernanke's job, Summers told Reuters: "Absolutely not. Absolutely not."
He declined to comment on whether he was interested in the post.
Housing prices have risen 10 percent over the past year, partly as an excess of housing capacity has swung to a shortage, said Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council in 2009-2010 and treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton.
He said consumer wealth was pushing historic highs as house prices and asset prices have risen.
U.S. fiscal policy is also improving as steep government spending to boost the economy has slowed while tax income has grown, he said. At the same time, public sector employment will likely rise, in a reversal of the past few years.
Still, "there is no question that the U.S. requires further fiscal adjustment", Summers said. "If Congress takes no further action, according to conservative projections, the U.S. debt-GDP ratio in 2015 will be lower than it is now in 2015 and in 2020, it will be lower than in 2015."
Health care costs are estimated to be $1 trillion less over the next decade than was the case two years ago, in part due to Obama's measures, he said.
"So, the budget deficit situation is less serious," he said.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer; Editing by Alison Williams)


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Shop Volunteer - Swansea Shop
- Recruiter
- Location
- Swansea
- Salary
- Voluntary
- Posted
- 09 Apr 2019
- Closing date
- 09 May 2019
- Ref
- Contact
- British Red Cross
- Industry
- Charities, Charity & volunteering support
- Hours
- Part time
- Contract
- Temp
- Listing type
- Course
Shop Volunteer
Location: Swansea Shop
About the role
Are you the face of British Red Cross fundraising?
Our shop volunteers are the first point of contact for customers when they enter our shops. You will be a welcome greeting for all customers providing assistance and ultimately helping increase donations.
You will provide invaluable help through the running of the shop, keeping it stocked and attractively displayed. You can get involved as much or as little as you like by: sorting out stock; putting your own stamp on the shop displays or getting trained in order to serve customers at the till.
Being part of a huge fundraising effort is very motivating, you provide the best service possible by representing the British Red Cross to the local community and raise as much money as possible for the organisation. You even get a 20% discount on donated goods.
About the Team
Helping people in crisis begins at your local charity shop.
Full of gifts, clothes and even the odd vintage gem, our 330 shops across the UK are home to over 6,500 volunteers and 700 paid staff. Our team is bright and bubbly, and we love meeting people from all walks of life.
Our aim is to serve every customer with a smile, and to make sure everyone that visits us has a great experience. We're always aware that every penny raised in our little shop goes straight to helping someone in crisis.
Typical tasks include
- Serving customers, taking cash and proving good all-round customer service
- Unpacking and pricing stock
- Working on window and shop displays
- Keeping the shop tidy, clean and well organised
- Interacting with the general public
About the person
We are looking for:
- Someone with good interpersonal,communication and teamwork skills.
- Someone with the ability to work alone and unsupervised as required
- Someone with the ability to lift and move stock safely
What We Offer:
- Support to develop your retail skills through our in-house retail Volunteer Journey training and our e-learning facility so you can represent the Red Cross with confidence.
- Meeting and working with warm and friendly like-minded people
- Reimbursement of reasonable out-of-pocket expenses whilst volunteering (by prior arrangement with the shop manager).
- A 20% discount on donated goods.
- Being a volunteer for the British Red Cross means that you can proudly say you are part of the world's largest humanitarian organisation, and one of our 13 million volunteers across the world.
Here's a little bit more about us...
The British Red Cross help anyone, anywhere in the UK; get the support they need if crisis strikes.
From hiring a wheelchair or dealing with loneliness, to adjusting to life in a new country - we're there when you need us. Our goal is to connect human kindness with human crisis.
We're part of the global Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and we believe in the power of kindness.
Our organisation was born out of a desire to bring help without discrimination. Impartiality and neutrality have been central values for the Red Cross since we started.
We support a huge range of people and we recruit for a diverse workforce - including disabled and ethnic minority candidates. This is to contribute to the breadth of experience we need to respond to people in crisis.
For further information, please call 01792 464 532
Connecting human kindness with human crisis


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- Home
- CVEs with nessus.description==From Red Hat Security Advisory 2012:0135 : Updated java-1.6.0-openjdk packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section. These packages provide the OpenJDK 6 Java Runtime Environment and the OpenJDK 6 Software Development Kit. It was discovered that Java2D did not properly check graphics rendering objects before passing them to the native renderer. Malicious input, or an untrusted Java application or applet could use this flaw to crash the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), or bypass Java sandbox restrictions. (CVE-2012-0497) It was discovered that the exception thrown on deserialization failure did not always contain a proper identification of the cause of the failure. An untrusted Java application or applet could use this flaw to bypass Java sandbox restrictions. (CVE-2012-0505) The AtomicReferenceArray class implementation did not properly check if the array was of the expected Object[] type. A malicious Java application or applet could use this flaw to bypass Java sandbox restrictions. (CVE-2011-3571) It was discovered that the use of TimeZone.setDefault() was not restricted by the SecurityManager, allowing an untrusted Java application or applet to set a new default time zone, and hence bypass Java sandbox restrictions. (CVE-2012-0503) The HttpServer class did not limit the number of headers read from HTTP requests. A remote attacker could use this flaw to make an application using HttpServer use an excessive amount of CPU time via a specially crafted request. This update introduces a header count limit controlled using the sun.net.httpserver.maxReqHeaders property. The default value is 200. (CVE-2011-5035) The Java Sound component did not properly check buffer boundaries. Malicious input, or an untrusted Java application or applet could use this flaw to cause the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to crash or disclose a portion of its memory. (CVE-2011-3563) A flaw was found in the AWT KeyboardFocusManager that could allow an untrusted Java application or applet to acquire keyboard focus and possibly steal sensitive information. (CVE-2012-0502) It was discovered that the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) implementation in Java did not properly protect repository identifiers on certain CORBA objects. This could have been used to modify immutable object data. (CVE-2012-0506) An off-by-one flaw, causing a stack overflow, was found in the unpacker for ZIP files. A specially crafted ZIP archive could cause the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to crash when opened. (CVE-2012-0501) Note: If the web browser plug-in provided by the icedtea-web package was installed, the issues exposed via Java applets could have been exploited without user interaction if a user visited a malicious website. This erratum also upgrades the OpenJDK package to IcedTea6 1.10.6. Refer to the NEWS file, linked to in the References, for further information. All users of java-1.6.0-openjdk are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which resolve these issues. All running instances of OpenJDK Java must be restarted for the update to take effect
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|Last (major) update


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Upcoming Events › Drone technology
Events Search and Views Navigation
Upcoming Events › Drone technology
Collectively, the Business Solution Centres (BSCs) play host to or promote over 160 local business and networking events each year, with the majority being free for you and your staff to attend. Events cover a range of areas from business start-up seminars and networking opportunities through to topical workshops including sources of funding, pensions, cyber security and digital marketing.
- No matching events listed under Drone technology. Please try viewing the full calendar for a complete list of events.


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Rates of change in surface temperatures during a martian day indicate differences in particle size in and near "Bonneville Crater." This image is the fifth in a series of five with color-coded temperature information from different times of day. This one is from 4:39 p.m. local solar time at the site where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is exploring Mars. Temperature information from Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer is overlaid onto a view of the site from Spirit's panoramic camera.
In this color-coded map, quicker reddening during the day suggests sand or dust. (Red is about 270 Kelvin or 27 degrees Fahrenheit.) An example of this is in the shallow depression in the right foreground. Areas that stay blue longer into the day have larger rocks. (Blue indicates about 230 Kelvin or minus 45 Degrees F.) An example is the rock in the left foreground.
See PIA05927 for a sequence of all five frames.


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Dhyāna Yoga (yoga of meditation) is one of the four branches of yoga described in The Bhagavad Gītā, together with Karma Yoga (yoga of action in the world), Jnāna yoga (yoga of Wisdom and intellectual endeavor), and Bhakti Yoga (yoga of devotion to God). Dhyāna is also found in Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras. According to tradition, Bodhidharma brought his lineage school of a line of dhyāna masters from India to China. After a unremarkable meeting with a Chinese ruler in the south of the Country, Bodhidharma went to the north at a Shaolin Temple, until several disciples found him.
With growing importance and independence, the lineage school that was attributed to Bodhidharma became known as the "Chan" school in China. Huineng is the most influential figure in Chinese Chan who is considered the sixth in line of the founders of the school. He is credited with firmly establishing Chan Buddhism as an independent Buddhist school in China.
Dhyāna was very important for the Mahāyāna tradition. Being the fifth of six perfections (pāramitās), is translated as meditation, or meditative stability. In China, dhyāna was originally transliterated as chan-na, then shortened to chan. Dhyāna, usually under the related term of samādhi, together with the second and sixth pāramitās are known as the threefold training of Buddhism: śīla, dhyāna or samādhi, and prajñā. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, one has to be effective in all three studies.
When Buddhism was brought to China, the Buddhist masters tended to become more focused or primarily adept in one of the three studies. Vinaya masters specialized in the monastic rules of discipline and the moral precepts (śila). Dharma masters in the wisdom teachings of the sūtras and Buddhist treatises (śāstras). Dhyāna or Chan masters specialized in meditation practice and states of samādhi. Monks would often begin their training under one kind of master, such as a vinaya master, and then transfer to another master, such as a Dharma master or a dhyāna master, to further their training and studies. At that time there was no separate Chan school.
Zen is a dynamic Buddhist school, where the lives and examples of its practitioners are more important than an academic approach based only on studying texts. This approach makes easier for Chan than for other Buddhist schools to adapt to the "here and now", and so Seon will grow more and more online.
This post is part of Zen: from China to cyberspace free booklet. You can download for free the whole book here


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There's no end to our love for cars, any more than there's an end to roads, or speed, or the joy of driving. But 51 reasons seems like a decent start.
The rolling wallop of Can-Am cars in Turn Five at Road America, clobbering you in the chest so hard you momentarily forget to breathe.
The mind-melting shriek of a modern F1 car.
The lean pops of a Weber carburetor as it spits back through open throats.
The mineral tang of hot brakes.
The heavy clunk of a Hurst shifter in a Sixties Camaro.
The caustic, dangerous, and physical impact of nitromethane exhaust.
The mustiness of tired wiring.
The cloying bitterness of a worn engine.
The groan of old English leather.
We love cars.
51 reasons is a good start, but it's not enough. There are always more.
So, what are your reasons?


text: Since I'm just now stepping past 2002 message posts on the 'CCA forums (well ok, this forum and the last one that Steven S. saved from oblivion with a lot of tedious taskwork - woulda been more messages by now had the club kept it's first and 2nd forums and not nuked 'em, but them's the breaks, as it were - anyway...) and onto 2003 with this post, it occurs to me it might add a bit of flair to the forums if they were to display icons of various BMW model number badges to correspond with a member's number of posts and display that marker with a member's avatar that's shown with messages posted by a member.. Maybe something like this, although I think maybe a black & white line drawing would be much more the way to go, I just crudely cropped a pic of a trunk badge from a red 2002 here - less than the desired ideal aesthetic, methinks - Perhaps something like the following: # msgs | (model trunk badge displayed to represent number of forum posts) 3 messages, you get 3.0, from the E3, give folks somethin' just for getting started. 135 (from the E82) 250 (Isetta) 300 (from the 2nd-generation Isetta) 320 (from the E21) 325 (from the E30) 328 (did the 30's-era BMW's have number badges? If not, perhaps use the E36) 330 (E46) 335 (E92) (Yeah, I know folks might zip right through 'em once they've made 320 posts, can't be helped since those are pertinent model numbers, what can ya say) 435i (new 4 series coupe, whatever body-code that is) 501 (from the "Baroque Angel", assuming it has a number badge) 507 (the Goertz classic) 528 (from the E28) 530 (from the E12) 535 (from the E34) 540 (E39) 545 (E60) 550 (F10) 600 (last & largest Isetta) 635 (E24) 700 (umm, you know 'em) 735i (E23) 740 (E38) 750 (E32) 760 (E65) 850 (E31) 1000 = M1 (Since "M" is the Latin equivalent for 1000, let's say Mx1 = 1000, from the E26 M1 supercar) 1500 1600 1800 (all 3 from the appropriate 'Neue Classe' models) 2002 (obviously) 2500 (E3) 2800 (E3) 3000 = M3 (E30 M3) 3200 (early-mid 60's 3200 CS coupe) 4000 (M4) 5000 (E28 M5, might as well go with the first M5 badge) 6000 (E24 M6, again giving priority to the first M6) Not sure quite where to go after that, although it may be awhile before anyone gets that far - if past history is any indication, the forums will be changed, archived and then nuked again long before anyone has a chance to get half that far along, but perhaps this iteration will have a bit more permanency than the prior club forums - time will tell. I tried some small model pics for icons, but too small to be discernible - presumably model trunk badges in a small size might be more easily seen. Sugestions, anyone?