#and the entire seance is so fucking funny. has me in tears

[cadykeus-clay]

there is truly nothing funnier to me than the all work no play ghost hunting episode

[deathfrisbeeinthetardis]

i love you by billie eilish but it's playing while ryan is driving a car to their haunted destination and shane is sleeping on the other seat and ryan may be pining a bit. suddenly it starts raining and shane's face scrunches up so ryan just puts some hoodie as a blanket over his friend and shane relaxes again.

This made me cry at 9 am in the morning so here’s a drabble  :’)))

Shyan week day 3: Togetherness

as it gets dark

The road stretches before him and Ryan’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, blinking his eyes hard in a vain attempt to stop the aching there. The tires hit a bump and the half-empty cup of coffee in the console sloshes. 

He spares a glance at it, weighing warmth against some more extended consciousness. 

Shane makes a soft noise in his sleep, and Ryan looks up at where the other man had curled up in the passenger seat, a fleece blanket thrown over his lap, his head tucked into the nook between the seat and the window. 

Shane looks young like this, the shadows under his eyes smoothed over in the semi-dark. A smile tugs at Ryan’s mouth, and then he’s swallowing down the cold liquid left in the styrofoam cup. The bitter taste lingers even with the milk he had dumped in, and he almost wishes it was something stronger, something that would dull the ache in his chest. 

It’s not like you can just tell your best friend you love him. 

Especially when that best friend’s already taken. 

‘It’s not trueTell me I’ve been lied to’

Ryan fastens his eyes back on the empty road, they shouldn’t be far now. There’s a low silky song playing on the radio, fingers that had given up guitar years ago forming patterns against the wheel as if he could pluck he melancholy cords out of the car. 

The rental does that well enough on its own. 

There’s really no use thinking about it. He’s seen how Shane looks at Sara. He knows she’s the one for Shane, he can see it in the way they are around each other, the comfortable silence and shared glances, the twinning expressions of adoration when they pet their demon of a cat. He has no right going in any direction that is even vaguely between them, he’d never do that to the two people who had only ever been there for him when he needed it. 

It was the two of them that took him in after the breakup, letting him tag along on their outings and half-dates just so he could get out of his apartment and breathe easy, so he could see their merriment and remember what it is to be happy again. 

Sometimes he permits himself to look, when he’s sure no one would see. And each time what he sees makes him ache more, knowing that she offers Shane the sanctuary and comfort in ways that Ryan never could, not while he could live with himself.  

He looks at you like that too, he hears, and it may as well be the devil and his conscience combined. 

Would it be better if he hadn’t ever met Shane, he wonders. If he had never gotten to know and bond with the kind funny man that always takes the care to make the people around him comfortable. The man who indulges him and his supernatural beliefs and follows his lead until Ryan drives himself to the edge of overexposure, who would then become the support Ryan needs. If he had never gotten himself into this complicated tangle of emotions, had fallen so completely.

No. 

Ryan wouldn’t give those years up, he’ll take the pain, damn it. 

He shouldn’t mess with what they all have, he doesn’t have the right to. He could more than live with the strangely spectacular friendship that’s already in place. Why tamper with perfection, right?

’ Up all night on another red eyeI wish we never learned to fly’

The first splatter of rain against the windshield startles Ryan, and because not everywhere can be nice like California, it’s pouring within minutes. The running water filters the road markings back at him in their distorted yellow glow under the headlights. His view of the outside world blurs.

And so does everything in the car. 

’ Maybe we should just tryTo tell ourselves a good lie ’

It’s the song, Ryan thinks, wiping at his face furiously. He’s always been an emotional son of a bitch, and this one is stupidly on the nose. 

Shane’s face scrunches up in his sleep, the blanket coming a little short in covering his lanky limbs. For all that Ryan startles easily, the big guy’s actually the lighter sleeper of the two, but when eyes open before they should, Shane can always find his way back to comfort in the darkness. And Ryan, well. 

They’re driving through the last stretch of country before reaching the town, and it’s all open fields on either side of the road with no sign of humanity. Ryan knows the crew isn’t far behind them, can see their headlights around corners and turns, but it feels like its just the two of them passing through the darkness.  

It takes him a few careful seconds of maneuvering, but he manages to shrug off his hoodie, reaching over to drape it over Shane. Warmth curls in his chest when the other man’s face relaxes, even when the chill air rushes to meet all his newly exposed skin. 

He keeps his eyes on the road, it’s just the song, he tells himself. 

‘I don’t want tobut I love you’

Ryan’s fingers tremble against the wheel, and he grips it tight. 

Ryan watches Shane sleep, he almost always does in these haunted places. The sight soothes him, knowing that he’s not alone here, though it’s not like Shane would be much help if a ghost tried to murder them. 

A few pencils lie on the floor next to them, tools of a bygone age that they had tried to use in a knock off seance hours before. Ryan creeps an arm out from the warmth of his sleeping bag and picks one up, twirling it in his fingers. If he moves it just right, it spans the height of Shane’s head perfectly. An idea pops up in his overactive brain. 

He’s not sure what insane surge of energy prompts him to do it, but he finds himself tracing Shane’s face, the eraser of the pencil ghosting over the other man’s skin in a barely-there touch. It’s almost like asmr, and Ryan feels his heartbeat in his fingers, steadying for what feels like the first time tonight. 

’ There’s nothing you could do or sayI can’t escape the way, I love you ‘

The fucking song’s stuck in his head now, the low woeful tune playing in a loop in his head, every word stabbing at his mind. He turns his mental back on it, blocks it out with the care he takes to trace the pencil, again and again. 

A largish hand comes out of nowhere to clasp his, and Ryan lets out a yelp. Then Shane’s looking at him through bleary eyes. 

“Jesus man.” Ryan says. Shane lets go of his hand after a second, and Ryan shuffles it back against his chest. The unexpected contact burning into his skin. “A little warning next time?”

“Mmm, I thought you were a spider,”

“And your first instinct is to grab it?” Ryan asks, incredulous. 

“Well, yeah.” He can hear the smile in Shane’s voice, see the flash of teeth from his sleepy grin. “Can’t sleep?”

“Yeah.” Ryan admits. It’s far from the first time this has happened, why the fuck is he still embarrassed?

Because it’s Shane, his mind supplies. 

Shut up, Ryan thinks. 

“C’mere.” Shane murmurs, disentangling an arm from his sleeping bag so Ryan can tuck himself close. They’re plenty experienced at keeping themselves comfortable in these places and Ryan’s not cold, but the solid warmth of Shane at his side is something to hold onto in the dark. 

“It’s okay Ry, I’ll protect you from the demons.” 

Shane settles again, soft steady puffs of air glance across Ryan’s face. They’re a bit close, maybe too close while both of them are on their backs, anyway. Ryan’s body is stiff where it presses against Shane through two layers of sleeping bags, and he doesn’t dare move. He matches his breaths to Shane’s. 

“That’s it, I’m right here.” Shane’s hand rubs small circles into Ryan’s shoulder, and his face is so close. 

That’s the moment Ryan chooses.

He chooses and it’s dangerous and entirely unreasonable, but he’s got just enough fear and sleep deprivation and an ever-looming sense that the world might just lose it very, very soon that he doesn’t care for a split second. 

Shane’s lips are soft against his own. 

Too bad reality’s a real bitch sometimes, by the time he regains his brain, it’s already done. Ryan jerks back. 

’I don’t want to, but I love you.’

“I’m so sorry.” He whispers, eyes stinging. He should be watching Shane’s face, he’d always been bad at reading the big guy but at least it could have helped. But the shadows swallow them whole in this room and Ryan’s not brave enough to make out Shane’s expression through it all. 

His breaths are coming fast again, there’s going to be a hitch in his voice soon, “I’m sorry, Shane. I didn’t mean to, fuck what is wrong with me–”

“Ryan, Ry stop.” 

Shane’s hands grip his shoulders and Ryan shudders out a breath, “I’m sorry.” he repeats. 

“Don’t be.” Shane’s voice is rough, like he’s having trouble breathing too. He brings a hand down to tilt Ryan’s head towards him, “I’m not sorry.” He enunciates, eyes searching. 

“But Sara–”

“Sara knows.” Shane swallows and he almost looks shy, “She’s, uh, rooting for us, actually.”

“She is?” Ryan chokes out.

“We care about you, Ry, both of us.” Shane pauses, and Ryan feels their eyes meet in the dark. “We’d like to be more, if you’ll have us.”

The air is stuck in Ryan’s throat, it seems too good to be true. He manages a jerky nod, a tear slipping down his face. 

Slowly, Shane reaches out and wipes it away. 

“We can talk more about this when we get back, just, sleep now. I’ve got you.” Shane settles his chin on the crown of Ryan’s head, and Ryan can feel the vibrations of his voice. He makes an effort to count his breaths, slowing them down. 

One, two, three–

A ting sounds from the corner of the room, and Ryan jolts. 

“It’s just the radiator, shh.” 

Four, five, six, seven, eight–

I love you.

[theconservativebrief]

Maniac, a new, darkly comic Netflix miniseries starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, is the rare project that I like both more and less the longer I think about it.

By the time it reaches the midpoint of its 10 episodes, the series is one of the more confident and assured examples of what I call “Big Moment TV,” where every episode involves some jaw-dropping visual or conceit that’s meant to send you to Twitter to buzz, “Did you see that?!”

And as directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the genius (and newly minted James Bond director) behind everything from the wonderful 2011 Jane Eyre to the visuals of the first season of True Detective, those moments really land. I wanted to go to Twitter to talk about them, except that would have been a violation of my screener agreement with Netflix.

And yet there’s something so calculated about Maniac. There’s rarely the thrill of the unexpected, which is tough to explain in a series that longs, deeply, to provide the thrill of the unexpected. Every time the story would shift, or enter another genre entirely, or let the actors play other characters than the ones they came in as, I would nod and say, “Sure. Makes sense!” Which is not what I think anybody involved was going for.

Some of that stems from performance (Hill is a fine dramatic actor but maybe not the guy you want sublimating all of his live-wire energy to play a depressive), and some of it stems from the storytelling, which is a wackadoodle pastiche of “mind-fuck cinema,” in which the movies ask you to question reality and wonder what’s going on and so on.

But not only have you seen the basic dramatic beats of Maniac over and over again, but Maniac takes great pains to explain to you, at every turn, what’s going on, how the characters feel and think about it, and what those crazy, trippy visuals could mean. It’s a mind-fuck movie so unconfident in its ability to fuck with you that it follows up every big reveal or jaw-dropping mindscape with a moment that seems to ask, “Did you see what I did there?”

This probably already sounds like a bunch of ideas thrown together in haste, which don’t really cohere. It is, and it isn’t, and to explain why, I’m going to have to spoil the show almost in its entirety, so follow me after the massive spoiler warning to talk about why it’s easy to remain interested in Maniac but hard to become truly invested in it.

The rise of Big Moment TV has been driven by two factors. The first is that TV storytelling has grown more complex in terms of serialization, but the second is that lots of people still kind of half pay attention to what they’re watching, because they’re doing chores or playing a game on their phone or whatever. So if you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and there’s a big, bloody death or something, that jars you out of whatever other thing you’re doing and forces you to pay attention.

But, increasingly, these sorts of shows feel driven less by the whims of their characters than by the whims of their creators. Game of Thrones went from a show that made you feel the weight of every death to a show that wantonly killed characters without much regard to emotional resonance or storytelling sense. And that’s, ultimately, part of the fun of that show, but it took it from a must-watch to a fun show that often struggles to reach its potential.

But Big Moment TV has increasingly evolved to a point where it’s less about a big death or a big plot twist and more about anything unusual that will get you talking on Twitter, as I explored in this article about The Magicians and Legion. And those two shows form useful comparison points for Maniac, with its occasionally fascinating, occasionally awkward attempts to fuse Big Moment TV, over-explanatory mind-fuck pastiche, and what amounts to falling asleep in front of Netflix. (It was an early adopter of Big Moment TV, lest we forget House of Cards’ entire storytelling ethos.) All while the algorithm randomly shuffles through things it thinks you might like.

(And really do turn away at this point if you want to remain unspoiled about this series, because knowing the premise of this show could potentially ruin it.)

The story focuses on Annie (Stone) and Owen (Hill), two 20-somethings struggling with barely repressed trauma and other mental conditions in a near-future New York where everything, including friendship, has become a part of the gig economy. You can even sell your likeness for various ads and stock photos, as Annie has done, which means that when Owen bumps into her at a purported pharma trial for a new drug, he both feels he already knows her and fears he’s hallucinating her. (He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, see.)

In one episode, Owen and Annie become stuck in some sort of espionage thriller. Netflix

Anyway, the drug trial turns out to be a complicated procedure designed to put people through a sort of psychological boot camp, where in stage one they relive their greatest trauma (the loss of her sister for Annie; a suicide attempt — that might not have even happened — for Owen), attempt to better understand the roots of their psychological issues in stage two, and then confront those issues and their trauma in stage three, in hopes of healing and moving on.

The trial is overseen by a group of people cosplaying as the characters erasing Jim Carrey’s memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, including Justin Theroux, the dryly funny Sonoya Mizuno, and (I swear I am not kidding about this) Sally Field playing a depressed computer.

The bulk of the series involves what happens when a mechanical malfunction results in the fusing of Owen and Annie’s subconsciouses, which results in them essentially entering an anthology series. Across five of the season’s 10 episodes, they play different characters, in different genres, following what amounts to Fukunaga’s syllabus for a “history of American indie film” class. There are suburban capers, and an extended (kinda awful) journey through a gangster/crime movie tale, and a story where Owen becomes a hawk. (That last one’s a lot of fun!)

This is, I think, a pretty compelling way to explore two characters who seem paper-thin at first. By having Annie and Owen journey through both of their subconsciouses at once, the show could theoretically fill in details about these people’s core beings while still allowing for plenty of action and adventure. Seeing Annie as a Long Island housewife trying to steal a lemur, or as a con artist interrupting a seance, or as a half-elven ranger in a generic fantasy kingdom gives us different sides of the actual Annie’s persona and lets Stone have a lot of fun.

But I could never escape the feeling that the show’s weirdness was less an organic investigation of two people in crisis and more a mechanism designed to keep me watching. The journeys that Annie and Owen take through their brains feel assembled more from other movies and TV shows than from genuine psychological exploration.

On a show limited only by the human imagination (at least in theory), these adventures stay frustratingly earthbound. They’re “imaginative,” in the manner of a college student who’s carefully cultivated her persona out of bits and pieces of other personas she’s seen elsewhere, rather than authentic.

The strange facility where Owen and Annie bond is a weird setting unto itself. Netflix

It feels a little churlish to complain about this, because watching Maniac is a lot of fun. I sat down intending to watch a couple of episodes one day and ended up watching seven, because I really did want to see what would happen next. The writing staff — led by Patrick Somerville of The Leftovers fame — has given real thought to the story of all 10 episodes as well as the story of each episode, which leads to fun journeys through the various genre pastiches the writers come up with. (I loved the Long Island-set crime caper, which felt straight out of a Coen brothers movie.)

But I could never get past the stage where I was enjoying the show’s considerably gorgeous surfaces to access some deeper level. And then after watching the finale, I read a quote from Fukunaga in a recent GQ profile of him, and something clicked. He said:

Because Netflix is a data company, they know exactly how their viewers watch things. So they can look at something you’re writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it’s a different kind of note-giving. It’s not like, Let’s discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s argument is gonna win at the end of the day. So the question is do we want to make a creative decision at the risk of losing people. …

There was one episode we wrote that was just layer upon layer peeled back, and then reversed again. Which was a lot of fun to write and think of executing, but, like, halfway through the season, we’re just losing a bunch of people on that kind of binging momentum. That’s probably not a good move, you know? So it’s a decision that was made 100 percent based on audience participation.

Now, listen, the notes-giving process in Hollywood is important. I’m not somebody who rails against notes, or thinks they ruin the creative process or tear down impeccable works of art. But something about letting a computer give those notes speaks to why Maniac, ultimately, felt less human than human to me, why it always seemed like it was assembled more than it was a deeply felt passion project for anyone. And, indeed, the series is based on a Norwegian show of the same name, and the various genre pastiches look a lot like other Netflix shows if you squint, and every single actor feels specifically chosen to appeal to a very specific demographic.

This would almost feel like Netflix snarkily commenting on itself if the show didn’t take itself so seriously. The fact that it turns into a genuinely sincere story of how Owen and Annie come together to better each other’s lives in the last few episodes is either the bold swing that saves the enterprise or a case of too little, too late. I’m more in the former camp than the latter, but it’s not hard for me to imagine talking myself out of that stance.

And yet there’s something kind of beautiful about a series that applies the dull plotting of most other TV shows — all life-and-death stakes and, “We’ve gotta get to the [plot device] before they do!” numbness — to two emotionally damaged people trying to heal. There’s a bravado here that I can’t write off, even if I never felt like the show went deep enough to turn either Owen or Annie into anything more than ciphers, despite all of the self-analyzing monologues both deliver in an attempt to sell their complexities.

Whatever complaints I have about the show, then, might be a part of its commentary on a world where our mental horizons are so often occupied by stories we’ve heard elsewhere. If you and I somehow had our subconsciousnesses fused, and then went through a series of adventures in dreamspace together, wouldn’t it be more likely that those adventures would be drawn from the movies and TV shows we had watched than something wildly original?

Maniac isn’t weird enough to really achieve what it wants to, but it does say something — however accidentally — about how reality is already weird enough. Maybe that’s why we’re so content to live inside the dreams of others.

Maniac is streaming on Netflix.

Original Source -> Netflix’s Maniac, with Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, is either too weird or not weird enough

via The Conservative Brief

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/netflixs-maniac-with-jonah-hill-and-emma-stone-is-either-too-weird-or-not-weird-enough/

Netflix's Maniac, with Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, is either too weird or not weird enough

Maniac, a new, darkly comic Netflix miniseries starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, is the rare project that I like both more and less the longer I think about it.

By the time it reaches the midpoint of its 10 episodes, the series is one of the more confident and assured examples of what I call “Big Moment TV,” where every episode involves some jaw-dropping visual or conceit that’s meant to send you to Twitter to buzz, “Did you see that?!”

And as directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the genius (and newly minted James Bond director) behind everything from the wonderful 2011 Jane Eyre to the visuals of the first season of True Detective, those moments really land. I wanted to go to Twitter to talk about them, except that would have been a violation of my screener agreement with Netflix.

And yet there’s something so calculated about Maniac. There’s rarely the thrill of the unexpected, which is tough to explain in a series that longs, deeply, to provide the thrill of the unexpected. Every time the story would shift, or enter another genre entirely, or let the actors play other characters than the ones they came in as, I would nod and say, “Sure. Makes sense!” Which is not what I think anybody involved was going for.

Some of that stems from performance (Hill is a fine dramatic actor but maybe not the guy you want sublimating all of his live-wire energy to play a depressive), and some of it stems from the storytelling, which is a wackadoodle pastiche of “mind-fuck cinema,” in which the movies ask you to question reality and wonder what’s going on and so on.

But not only have you seen the basic dramatic beats of Maniac over and over again, but Maniac takes great pains to explain to you, at every turn, what’s going on, how the characters feel and think about it, and what those crazy, trippy visuals could mean. It’s a mind-fuck movie so unconfident in its ability to fuck with you that it follows up every big reveal or jaw-dropping mindscape with a moment that seems to ask, “Did you see what I did there?”

This probably already sounds like a bunch of ideas thrown together in haste, which don’t really cohere. It is, and it isn’t, and to explain why, I’m going to have to spoil the show almost in its entirety, so follow me after the massive spoiler warning to talk about why it’s easy to remain interested in Maniac but hard to become truly invested in it.

The rise of Big Moment TV has been driven by two factors. The first is that TV storytelling has grown more complex in terms of serialization, but the second is that lots of people still kind of half pay attention to what they’re watching, because they’re doing chores or playing a game on their phone or whatever. So if you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and there’s a big, bloody death or something, that jars you out of whatever other thing you’re doing and forces you to pay attention.

But, increasingly, these sorts of shows feel driven less by the whims of their characters than by the whims of their creators. Game of Thrones went from a show that made you feel the weight of every death to a show that wantonly killed characters without much regard to emotional resonance or storytelling sense. And that’s, ultimately, part of the fun of that show, but it took it from a must-watch to a fun show that often struggles to reach its potential.

But Big Moment TV has increasingly evolved to a point where it’s less about a big death or a big plot twist and more about anything unusual that will get you talking on Twitter, as I explored in this article about The Magicians and Legion. And those two shows form useful comparison points for Maniac, with its occasionally fascinating, occasionally awkward attempts to fuse Big Moment TV, over-explanatory mind-fuck pastiche, and what amounts to falling asleep in front of Netflix — an early adopter of Big Moment TV, lest we forget House of Cards’ entire storytelling ethos — while the algorithm randomly shuffles through things it thinks you might like.

(And really do turn away at this point if you want to remain unspoiled about this series, because knowing the premise of this show could potentially ruin it.)

The story focuses on Annie (Stone) and Owen (Hill), two 20-somethings struggling with barely repressed trauma and other mental conditions in a near-future New York where everything, including friendship, has become a part of the gig economy. You can even sell your likeness for various ads and stock photos, as Annie has done, which means that when Owen bumps into her at a purported pharma trial for a new drug, he both feels he already knows her and fears he’s hallucinating her. (He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, see.)

In one episode, Owen and Annie become stuck in some sort of espionage thriller. Netflix

Anyway, the drug trial turns out to be a complicated procedure designed to put people through a sort of psychological boot camp, where in stage one they relive their greatest trauma (the loss of her sister for Annie; a suicide attempt — that might not have even happened — for Owen), attempt to better understand the roots of their psychological issues in stage two, and then confront those issues and their trauma in stage three, in hopes of healing and moving on.

The trial is overseen by a group of people cosplaying as the characters erasing Jim Carrey’s memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, including Justin Theroux, the dryly funny Sonoya Mizuno, and (I swear I am not kidding about this) Sally Field playing a depressed computer.

The bulk of the series involves what happens when a mechanical malfunction results in the fusing of Owen and Annie’s subconsciouses, which results in them essentially entering an anthology series. Across five of the season’s 10 episodes, they play different characters, in different genres, following what amounts to Fukunaga’s syllabus for a “history of American indie film” class. There are suburban capers, and an extended (kinda awful) journey through a gangster/crime movie tale, and a story where Owen becomes a hawk. (That last one’s a lot of fun!)

This is, I think, a pretty compelling way to explore two characters who seem paper-thin at first. By having Annie and Owen journey through both of their subconsciouses at once, the show could theoretically fill in details about these people’s core beings while still allowing for plenty of action and adventure. Seeing Annie as a Long Island housewife trying to steal a lemur, or as a con artist interrupting a seance, or as a half-elven ranger in a generic fantasy kingdom gives us different sides of the actual Annie’s persona and lets Stone have a lot of fun.

But I could never escape the feeling that the show’s weirdness was less an organic investigation of two people in crisis and more a mechanism designed to keep me watching. The journeys that Annie and Owen take through their brains feel assembled more from other movies and TV shows than from genuine psychological exploration.

On a show limited only by the human imagination (at least in theory), these adventures stay frustratingly earthbound. They’re “imaginative,” in the manner of a college student who’s carefully cultivated her persona out of bits and pieces of other personas she’s seen elsewhere, rather than authentic.

The strange facility where Owen and Annie bond is a weird setting unto itself. Netflix

It feels a little churlish to complain about this, because watching Maniac is a lot of fun. I sat down intending to watch a couple of episodes one day and ended up watching seven, because I really did want to see what would happen next. The writing staff — led by Patrick Somerville of The Leftovers fame — has given real thought to the story of all 10 episodes as well as the story of each episode, which leads to fun journeys through the various genre pastiches the writers come up with. (I loved the Long Island-set crime caper, which felt straight out of a Coen brothers movie.)

But I could never get past the stage where I was enjoying the show’s considerably gorgeous surfaces to access some deeper level. And then after watching the finale, I read a quote from Fukunaga in a recent GQ profile of him, and something clicked. He said:

Because Netflix is a data company, they know exactly how their viewers watch things. So they can look at something you’re writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it’s a different kind of note-giving. It’s not like, Let’s discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s argument is gonna win at the end of the day. So the question is do we want to make a creative decision at the risk of losing people. …

There was one episode we wrote that was just layer upon layer peeled back, and then reversed again. Which was a lot of fun to write and think of executing, but, like, halfway through the season, we’re just losing a bunch of people on that kind of binging momentum. That’s probably not a good move, you know? So it’s a decision that was made 100 percent based on audience participation.

Now, listen, the notes-giving process in Hollywood is important. I’m not somebody who rails against notes, or thinks they ruin the creative process or tear down impeccable works of art. But something about letting a computer give those notes speaks to why Maniac, ultimately, felt less human than human to me, why it always seemed like it was assembled more than it was a deeply felt passion project for anyone. And, indeed, the series is based on a Norwegian show of the same name, and the various genre pastiches look a lot like other Netflix shows if you squint, and every single actor feels specifically chosen to appeal to a very specific demographic.

This would almost feel like Netflix snarkily commenting on itself if the show didn’t take itself so seriously. The fact that it turns into a genuinely sincere story of how Owen and Annie come together to better each other’s lives in the last few episodes is either the bold swing that saves the enterprise or a case of too little, too late. I’m more in the former camp than the latter, but it’s not hard for me to imagine talking myself out of that stance.

And yet there’s something kind of beautiful about a series that applies the dull plotting of most other TV shows — all life-and-death stakes and, “We’ve gotta get to the [plot device] before they do!” numbness — to two emotionally damaged people trying to heal. There’s a bravado here that I can’t write off, even if I never felt like the show went deep enough to turn either Owen or Annie into anything more than ciphers, despite all of the self-analyzing monologues both deliver in an attempt to sell their complexities.

Whatever complaints I have about the show, then, might be a part of its commentary on a world where our mental horizons are so often occupied by stories we’ve heard elsewhere. If you and I somehow had our subconsciousnesses fused, and then went through a series of adventures in dreamspace together, wouldn’t it be more likely that those adventures would be drawn from the movies and TV shows we had watched than something wildly original?

Maniac isn’t weird enough to really achieve what it wants to, but it does say something — however accidentally — about how reality is already weird enough. Maybe that’s why we’re so content to live inside the dreams of others.

Maniac is streaming on Netflix.

Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/21/17884512/maniac-netflix-review-emma-stone-jonah-hill

[theconservativebrief]

Maniac, a new, darkly comic Netflix miniseries starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, is the rare project that I like both more and less the longer I think about it.

By the time it reaches the midpoint of its 10 episodes, the series is one of the more confident and assured examples of what I call “Big Moment TV,” where every episode involves some jaw-dropping visual or conceit that’s meant to send you to Twitter to buzz, “Did you see that?!”

And as directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the genius (and newly minted James Bond director) behind everything from the wonderful 2011 Jane Eyre to the visuals of the first season of True Detective, those moments really land. I wanted to go to Twitter to talk about them, except that would have been a violation of my screener agreement with Netflix.

And yet there’s something so calculated about Maniac. There’s rarely the thrill of the unexpected, which is tough to explain in a series that longs, deeply, to provide the thrill of the unexpected. Every time the story would shift, or enter another genre entirely, or let the actors play other characters than the ones they came in as, I would nod and say, “Sure. Makes sense!” Which is not what I think anybody involved was going for.

Some of that stems from performance (Hill is a fine dramatic actor but maybe not the guy you want sublimating all of his live-wire energy to play a depressive), and some of it stems from the storytelling, which is a wackadoodle pastiche of “mind-fuck cinema,” in which the movies ask you to question reality and wonder what’s going on and so on.

But not only have you seen the basic dramatic beats of Maniac over and over again, but Maniac takes great pains to explain to you, at every turn, what’s going on, how the characters feel and think about it, and what those crazy, trippy visuals could mean. It’s a mind-fuck movie so unconfident in its ability to fuck with you that it follows up every big reveal or jaw-dropping mindscape with a moment that seems to ask, “Did you see what I did there?”

This probably already sounds like a bunch of ideas thrown together in haste, which don’t really cohere. It is, and it isn’t, and to explain why, I’m going to have to spoil the show almost in its entirety, so follow me after the massive spoiler warning to talk about why it’s easy to remain interested in Maniac but hard to become truly invested in it.

The rise of Big Moment TV has been driven by two factors. The first is that TV storytelling has grown more complex in terms of serialization, but the second is that lots of people still kind of half pay attention to what they’re watching, because they’re doing chores or playing a game on their phone or whatever. So if you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and there’s a big, bloody death or something, that jars you out of whatever other thing you’re doing and forces you to pay attention.

But, increasingly, these sorts of shows feel driven less by the whims of their characters than by the whims of their creators. Game of Thrones went from a show that made you feel the weight of every death to a show that wantonly killed characters without much regard to emotional resonance or storytelling sense. And that’s, ultimately, part of the fun of that show, but it took it from a must-watch to a fun show that often struggles to reach its potential.

But Big Moment TV has increasingly evolved to a point where it’s less about a big death or a big plot twist and more about anything unusual that will get you talking on Twitter, as I explored in this article about The Magicians and Legion. And those two shows form useful comparison points for Maniac, with its occasionally fascinating, occasionally awkward attempts to fuse Big Moment TV, over-explanatory mind-fuck pastiche, and what amounts to falling asleep in front of Netflix — an early adopter of Big Moment TV, lest we forget House of Cards’ entire storytelling ethos — while the algorithm randomly shuffles through things it thinks you might like.

(And really do turn away at this point if you want to remain unspoiled about this series, because knowing the premise of this show could potentially ruin it.)

The story focuses on Annie (Stone) and Owen (Hill), two 20-somethings struggling with barely repressed trauma and other mental conditions in a near-future New York where everything, including friendship, has become a part of the gig economy. You can even sell your likeness for various ads and stock photos, as Annie has done, which means that when Owen bumps into her at a purported pharma trial for a new drug, he both feels he already knows her and fears he’s hallucinating her. (He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, see.)

In one episode, Owen and Annie become stuck in some sort of espionage thriller. Netflix

Anyway, the drug trial turns out to be a complicated procedure designed to put people through a sort of psychological boot camp, where in stage one they relive their greatest trauma (the loss of her sister for Annie; a suicide attempt — that might not have even happened — for Owen), attempt to better understand the roots of their psychological issues in stage two, and then confront those issues and their trauma in stage three, in hopes of healing and moving on.

The trial is overseen by a group of people cosplaying as the characters erasing Jim Carrey’s memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, including Justin Theroux, the dryly funny Sonoya Mizuno, and (I swear I am not kidding about this) Sally Field playing a depressed computer.

The bulk of the series involves what happens when a mechanical malfunction results in the fusing of Owen and Annie’s subconsciouses, which results in them essentially entering an anthology series. Across five of the season’s 10 episodes, they play different characters, in different genres, following what amounts to Fukunaga’s syllabus for a “history of American indie film” class. There are suburban capers, and an extended (kinda awful) journey through a gangster/crime movie tale, and a story where Owen becomes a hawk. (That last one’s a lot of fun!)

This is, I think, a pretty compelling way to explore two characters who seem paper-thin at first. By having Annie and Owen journey through both of their subconsciouses at once, the show could theoretically fill in details about these people’s core beings while still allowing for plenty of action and adventure. Seeing Annie as a Long Island housewife trying to steal a lemur, or as a con artist interrupting a seance, or as a half-elven ranger in a generic fantasy kingdom gives us different sides of the actual Annie’s persona and lets Stone have a lot of fun.

But I could never escape the feeling that the show’s weirdness was less an organic investigation of two people in crisis and more a mechanism designed to keep me watching. The journeys that Annie and Owen take through their brains feel assembled more from other movies and TV shows than from genuine psychological exploration.

On a show limited only by the human imagination (at least in theory), these adventures stay frustratingly earthbound. They’re “imaginative,” in the manner of a college student who’s carefully cultivated her persona out of bits and pieces of other personas she’s seen elsewhere, rather than authentic.

The strange facility where Owen and Annie bond is a weird setting unto itself. Netflix

It feels a little churlish to complain about this, because watching Maniac is a lot of fun. I sat down intending to watch a couple of episodes one day and ended up watching seven, because I really did want to see what would happen next. The writing staff — led by Patrick Somerville of The Leftovers fame — has given real thought to the story of all 10 episodes as well as the story of each episode, which leads to fun journeys through the various genre pastiches the writers come up with. (I loved the Long Island-set crime caper, which felt straight out of a Coen brothers movie.)

But I could never get past the stage where I was enjoying the show’s considerably gorgeous surfaces to access some deeper level. And then after watching the finale, I read a quote from Fukunaga in a recent GQ profile of him, and something clicked. He said:

Because Netflix is a data company, they know exactly how their viewers watch things. So they can look at something you’re writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it’s a different kind of note-giving. It’s not like, Let’s discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s argument is gonna win at the end of the day. So the question is do we want to make a creative decision at the risk of losing people. …

There was one episode we wrote that was just layer upon layer peeled back, and then reversed again. Which was a lot of fun to write and think of executing, but, like, halfway through the season, we’re just losing a bunch of people on that kind of binging momentum. That’s probably not a good move, you know? So it’s a decision that was made 100 percent based on audience participation.

Now, listen, the notes-giving process in Hollywood is important. I’m not somebody who rails against notes, or thinks they ruin the creative process or tear down impeccable works of art. But something about letting a computer give those notes speaks to why Maniac, ultimately, felt less human than human to me, why it always seemed like it was assembled more than it was a deeply felt passion project for anyone. And, indeed, the series is based on a Norwegian show of the same name, and the various genre pastiches look a lot like other Netflix shows if you squint, and every single actor feels specifically chosen to appeal to a very specific demographic.

This would almost feel like Netflix snarkily commenting on itself if the show didn’t take itself so seriously. The fact that it turns into a genuinely sincere story of how Owen and Annie come together to better each other’s lives in the last few episodes is either the bold swing that saves the enterprise or a case of too little, too late. I’m more in the former camp than the latter, but it’s not hard for me to imagine talking myself out of that stance.

And yet there’s something kind of beautiful about a series that applies the dull plotting of most other TV shows — all life-and-death stakes and, “We’ve gotta get to the [plot device] before they do!” numbness — to two emotionally damaged people trying to heal. There’s a bravado here that I can’t write off, even if I never felt like the show went deep enough to turn either Owen or Annie into anything more than ciphers, despite all of the self-analyzing monologues both deliver in an attempt to sell their complexities.

Whatever complaints I have about the show, then, might be a part of its commentary on a world where our mental horizons are so often occupied by stories we’ve heard elsewhere. If you and I somehow had our subconsciousnesses fused, and then went through a series of adventures in dreamspace together, wouldn’t it be more likely that those adventures would be drawn from the movies and TV shows we had watched than something wildly original?

Maniac isn’t weird enough to really achieve what it wants to, but it does say something — however accidentally — about how reality is already weird enough. Maybe that’s why we’re so content to live inside the dreams of others.

Maniac is streaming on Netflix.

Original Source -> Netflix’s Maniac, with Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, is either too weird or not weird enough

via The Conservative Brief