Reviews

What I liked most about the show was the sense of movement and travel that runs parallel to the exchange between Seinfeld and the guest, a fairly unique feature for a talkshow. Unfortunately, in the early episodes there's a lot of irksome, even at times nauseating, camera jitter as the production staff works to nail down the format. On the other hand, as the talkshow matures, the editing of music and image becomes fairly sophisticated, some might even say stylistically overdone.

The rapport Seinfeld has with the guests is mostly ok. There's of course a lot of fake guffaws from host and guest alike to wade through, though dotted among them, here and there, are some funny lines, like when in the episode with Martin Short, Seinfeld defines a "schnorrer" as someone who picks out all the cashews from the mixed nuts. One perplexing episode was the one featuring Bridget Everett. As Seinfeld reminds his audience many times, as host, he can pick anyone he wants for his show, but it's a standout episode for how little conversational pith there is. One can search on Reddit for a discussion about the episode. After reading that and re-watching the episode, I wondered if it was a set-up of sorts- that Seinfeld's intention all along was to prod his old antagonist, who's name is, now famously, bleeped out.

I thought the key strengths of this film lie in the cinematography and editing. The editing rhythm, and by that I mean the pacing and clever nature of the scene juxtapositions, is sustained very well throughout the runtime. This contributes greatly to the noirness of the piece.

The film also does an effective job of positioning itself within the sub-genre of what might be called the "urban Western," with some key character gestures and aspects of setting, like a horse riding arena and what appears to be an illicit arboretum. In addition, there are a couple well-crafted references to the passing of the Old West and with that the Western into oblivion. "Ballerina" is a good title, referring, as it very well might, to the agile way the film contributes to more than one genre simultaneously.

I thought this was structurally quite inventive. The typical narrative show or film takes great pains to avoid making reference to itself as a show. It manufactures a memetic arena of pretend, which the viewer hopefully finds immersive and believable. On the other hand, shows that do "go meta," making the narrative at least partly about the making of the show itself, can often seem overly structural, uneventful and tiresome. Here, Anderson uses a hybrid approach in which the film's two-dimensional set design presents the show as theater. Also, the show's protagonists recount the story as a series of verbal images, much as one would encounter if one were reading a book. Their words and the ultra-stylized set design serve as prompts for viewers to conjure up the world of the story in their own minds. Of course these prompts, especially the visual ones, do urge the viewer to imagine the story in a particular way, but they never seem (nor try to seem) more than what they are- props, like one finds in illustrated works. I think the viewer, here, is being invited to participate in the story telling ritual in a way that is more active, more self-aware, than in the typical film production. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of film, so I can't say if Anderson has created a novel approach, but I found it thoughtful and engaging.

The show's photography and editing were key contributors to the novel intrigue, atmosphere and tension sustained throughout much of the series. Unfortunately, in relying so heavily on musical underscoring, the show often distracted the viewer from appreciating such finely wrought visual description.

Also, thematically, I thought that the writers, at the show's midway point, were left with the challenge of clarifying why Kim winds up with Jimmy, what motivates her to be with him and do some of the other things she does. I think the writers' attempts to meet this challenge fell short. At the least, more development was needed showing their early camaraderie as mailroom workers. If done right, this would have been more clarifying than the brief glimpse we get at Kim's mom, which, frankly, seems like an obvious stop-gap, a clumsy attempt at filling a glaring hole in the script.

A central theme of the documentary explores how a killer's crimes took shape in direct response to his "audience"-- a group of self-styled sleuths chasing him via the internet.

The show is also about how the drama surrounding any one murder case replicates itself ad nauseam in infinite regress-- in journalistic accounts, movie dramas, in internet sleuthing... in THIS show, the very show you're watching. In this way, it showcases some of the factors at work, both social and psychological, in the production mill of murder narratives. This is made even more complex by the fact that the show's creators are injecting a good bit of suspense and intrigue into their own portrayal of events, whipping up a sort of noirish excitement to stimulate the audience, many of whom are armchair sleuths. As theater, it's certainly not as macabre and ghoulish as that orchestrated by the featured villain, but, to me, it runs afoul of the taboo of clouding the tragedy of a real murder with the artifice of entertainment.

This show has inspired me to write an homage to Hazlitt called "On the Pleasure of Using the Fast-Forward Button." I didn't watch a show (which, incidentally, is usually categorized as "sci-fi/horror/suspense") so much as wade through a swampy morass of moral theater.

A major flaw of this show (and I suppose its progenitor), is the characters rarely serve to punctuate the suspense with crisp dialogue. They're participants in an excruciatingly drawn-out ritual, a slow-witted seesaw of confessional handwringing played out for the congregation of an as-yet unnamed nondenominational church.

This film is a perfect illustration of the whimsical selective processes at work in film production. It also shows how applying a patina of cinematic gloss through principle photography and editing can be done in spite of a lame script.

Films like this call to mind Mamet's play, Speed the Plow. You might think (obviously, in a spasm of naiveté) that the vetting process at a major platform such as Netflix would guarantee the winnowing of film chaff. Not so. It appears used car salesmen of the more unconscientious sort haggle over the tariff of entry.

I initially wrote "Film School Dreck" as my title for this entry, but on second thought I thought it too complimentary, as no doubt is my 3-star rating.

This was a sprawling production, easily one the most sprawling ever done within the context of TV. On the one hand, the writers (et al.) managed to sustain audience interest through their chosen development of characters and various subplots. On the other hand-and this is bound to happen in the course of producing a show over so long a period and through so many stages of plot--the show was far from consistent in both its self-selected, and ever-changing, criteria for what counts as "realistic" and its atmosphere, which varies from gritty realism to nostalgia-drenched lyricism to a pseudo-surrealism. The show often indulged itself by dabbling in the latter two when snapping out of particular exchanges among the characters to wider pans, often accompanied by music. This isn't a terrible thing, in itself, though after bouncing back and forth a few times, one starts to get a kind of cinematic whiplash, and the contrast of view afforded by the two types of vista emphasizes the soap-operaish mundaneness of dialogue and imparts to the broader sweeps a music video kitsch.

Several reviews among these pages point out how much the show changes after the first couple seasons. It goes from having the energy of 16mm vérité, coursing along an engaging arc of narrative (think of those first hospital scenes, the CDC fiasco, the farm footage that was both romantic and horrific), to getting bogged down in character worship. The show gradually became a vehicle for showcasing character. If that's your thing, then you probably quite like where the show wound up. For me, that intriguing, almost poetic, early atmosphere is sacrificed for what amounts to mediocre, and worse-yet, repetitive, dialogue.

A grisly production. The effects, particularly when town scenes look like models sitting on an animator's desk, are often subpar. Rather than try, again and again, to create wide views of districts in Tokyo, sans the populace, the creators might have done more through the subtlety of suggestive framing, thereby prompting the audience to contribute more through their own imagination. With a different approach to visuals and editing, this could have been an atmospheric, haunting viewing experience. Instead, the clank and din of the show's overly literal graphics served up grotesqueries, but little beauty. A production with a much smaller budget could have made use of a warehouse for a few days and served up less of an emetic.

There's an interesting visual grammar at work in The Terrorizers, consisting of its approach to framing, movement, and pacing. The film is one of the better demonstrations of how images can serve as the basis of a conceptually rich experience. People and objects, because of how they're framed, because of the moment at which we encounter them and because of the light in which they're cast, evoke an atmosphere. In The Terrorizers, even a normally prosaic, and ignored, thing like, say, a staircase or foyer, is imbued with aching suggestiveness.

The words "art" and "artist" are thrown around a lot through the course of the show, but the hoops the contestants are asked to jump through seem more focused on showcasing craft, on facility with technique and materials. Often, the show careens into the carnivalesque, as the hosts and producers crack the proverbial whip, demanding the glass makers produce baubles that dazzle within a few hours.

What's equally disappointing is how much the show mimics Top Chef phrasing related to contestants, challenges and decision preamble. It seems the writers grabbed a Top Chef script and replaced food references with those about glass. The tightness, or stinginess, of the editing further imparts to the show a cheap, almost tawdrily mercantile gloss.