What I'm Watching: Pokémon Concierge, Wonka, True Detective: Night Country, and More

On six movies, five shows, four articles, two podcasts, two books, and one new year.

Jan 16, 2024

Kali Reis, Jodie Foster, True Detective: Night Country, HBO

NOTE: Pending a platform change in response to Substack’s unethical policies, this newsletter is currently not offering a paywalled version. All upcoming issues are free until we blow this popsicle stand.

After a brief hiatus, we’re back. Here’s a quick rundown on everything I’ve watched, read, and wrote about recently:

The shows:

The new True Detective slaps in a way that I never expected True Detective to slap again. The three episodes of the Alaska-set revamp I’ve seen so far are in kinship with the show’s great premiere season in a lot of ways, from the gruesomeness and folk horror underpinnings to the dream-like existential dread to the attention to atmosphere as much as plot. With a focus on missing and murder Indigenous women, a showrunner whose work I adore, and a juicy, genre-bending premise, I’m already all in on True Detective: Night Country.
When I was visiting family for the holidays, my goddaughter showed me Netflix’s Hilda, a sweetly spooky and empowering kids’ show that’s anchored by fun picture book-style animation and a warm voice performance from Bella Ramsey. The rare kids’ show that I actually want to watch straight through, whether I’m babysitting or not.
I randomly binge-watched one of Apple TV’s early shows, Defending Jacob, with a friend recently and was way more into it than I expected to be. The series takes a page out of the books of too-slow-burn murder mysteries of years past (The Killing, The Night Of) but it does something tricky and clever by keeping its cards close to its chest throughout its eight episodes. With some memorable performances (Michelle Dockery is a standout) and a willingness to sit with its own ambiguity, it’s an interesting conversation starter – with more than one character whose culpability we’re left to assess.
As a very casual MonsterVerse fan, I was a grump about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters early on, but I think the last three episodes of the show’s first season stuck the landing in a pretty tremendous way. Mari Yamamoto’s Keiko is the MVP of every scene she’s in, though Kurt Russell gets some great moments in the end, and the show’s monster sequences look surprisingly satisfying, too.
Stop-motion series Pokemon Concierge is exactly what it sounds like: a short stop motion animation show about a hotel with Pokemon guests. It’s cute! It’s quaint! I wish Pokemon were real!

The movies:

I kicked off my Criterion Challenge (I’m doing it completely out of order) with one classic I have no excuse to have missed up until now: The Third Man. The famed late-40s noir was nothing like I’ve always expected it to be, but I really enjoyed it – especially the jaunty camerawork and Orson Welles’ devilish performance.
Also on the agenda for first watches: Bull Durham, the Kevin Costner-Susan Sarandon rom-com about a girl who blesses a minor league baseball team with good luck by hooking up with one player per season. It’s a wild but perfectly late-eighties premise, and the movie (which is a lot of fun) makes the most of it. This might be the most surprised I’ve ever been to find out a script was penned by a man.
The Vietnamese documentary Finding Phong is a hidden gem I’m glad to have discovered on Kanopy. It’s a confessional-style doc about a trans woman on a path to gender euphoria, complete with an incredulous family, supportive friends, and a deep sense of who her future self will be. There’s some tough stuff on display here, but it’s all specific and true to Phong’s ultimately lovely story.
I surprised myself by kind of loving Wonka, the offbeat musical prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It may have helped that I went in with low expectations, but I admit I was swept up in the magic of the weird world of Willy Wonka as imagined by Paddington director Paul King. The movie didn’t keep me charmed throughout (its antics got tiring in the third act), but Timothee Chalamet’s performance did, especially when he showed glimpses of Gene Wilder’s manic energy. Every time I see this kid act, I’m somehow surprised all over again that he’s so good at his job.
The Iron Claw has already fallen out of award season conversations, and that’s a shame because it features some of the most raw, emotional scene work of the past year. Zac Efron is as captivating as everyone says he is, and the film’s last few scenes will haunt me forever — though I do find myself wondering if the movie’s commitment to its own sadness made it a bit shapeless.
Sleepover movie night with the nine-year-old in my life means watching the movie she picks, which in this case turned out to be the deeply weird family film Trolls Band Together. Admittedly, I’ve never seen the second Trolls film, so I spent most of this flick confused about the lore of its world (there’s a band that’s just like NSYNC but then there’s also actual troll NSYNC?), its wild voice cast (Eric Andre, Daveed Diggs, Kid Cudi, Patti Harrison, Andrew Rannells), and its bizarre sense of humor (it has a bondage joke and multiple Yellow Submarine-inspired trip sequences). I don’t know about this one, y’all…

The reads:

Last week, I finally finished Burn it Down, Maureen Ryan’s blazing and expansive investigation into what the hell is wrong with Hollywood and how to fix it. This book is pretty dense and probably too inside baseball for most anyone who doesn’t work in or adjacent to the entertainment industry, but if you do, it’s essential. This isn’t just a close read of instances of abuse or toxicity in Hollywood: it’s an incredibly well-researched and detailed look at a series of deeply broken systems – complete with an impressive section about how to fix them.
Alan Sepinwall wrote about the finale of The Curse for Rolling Stone, and articulated everything I’ve been too annoyed to even try to figure out how to say about this show.
Letterboxd’s 2023 year in review is a beautifully designed, data-driven (but also clearly lovingly crafted) in-depth look at what the movies were like last year. I could get lost looking at this.
I was so honored to see that blogger Krissy Murphy included the episode of This Ends at Prom that I guested on in her annual roundup of the best podcast episodes of the year!
Speaking of 2023 blog wrap-ups, my friend Catt’s creative superlative awards for the year are always a goddamn delight to read.
What’s everyone’s first read of the new year? As you might have guessed, mine was chosen by my goddaughter, who read the whole thing out loud with me. It was the surprisingly harrowing graphic novel I Survived The Great Chicago Fire, 1871, which continues the grand tradition of “kids’” books that are only really for kids insomuch that they have a kid protagonist. An intense read that made me thankful for my smoke detector!

Odds and ends:

The podcast Ghost Story gripped me for a full day recently, and I have a feeling I know a lot of people who would love it just as much. It’s a well-crafted and well-rounded hybrid series that’s part family history, part ghost story, part true crime. It’s also as much about family legacy, cultural Britishness, and the impenetrability of confirmation bias as it is about actual ghosts.
True Detective: Night Country has me more excited to write about TV than I have been in months! I’m kicking off my coverage with a deep dive into the show’s surprising but pitch-perfect theme song choice.
I am once again getting on my M*A*S*H soapbox, this time to talk about the show’s faux-documentary episode and the single wildest TV-related anecdote I have ever heard. Seriously, whether or not you’ve seen M*A*S*H you should click that second link, because it’s a truly bonkers story I think about all the time.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Heidiworld, a colorful and impassioned retelling of the scandalous rise and fall of “Hollywood madam” Heidi Fleiss. There’s a lot to like here, from research rabbit holes to an array of guest stars, but at ten episodes, the show is stretching a bit beyond my attention span.

Thank you all for giving me a week off that I was too overwhelmed to even realize I had taken. I’m currently about 3 weeks out from getting on a plane to Scotland, and with the help of a small army of friends and family, most of the logistics and big stuff related to the move has been settled. With that being said, I do expect a few more hiccups as I finish getting where I’m going, so please forgive me if any of the coming newsletters end up a day or two late.

With all that out of the way, I’d love to ask the question I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages. What are you watching lately? What are you listening to, reading, or obsessing about? Reply and let me know! In the meantime, here’s a picture of me at the Critics Choice Awards last night. It’s a good thing I picked a long dress, because my legs are covered in bruises from packing all my stuff into a U-haul the day before.