Mikeylito

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Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix team for an unconventional comic book movie about a man and a city’s descent into madness. There has been some discussion that this isn’t a comic-book movie, but it undeniably is. It is an origin story.

Arthur Fleck is a devoted son. He lives with his mother, but he is not dependent on her. Rather, he takes care of her, and he does it by working as a clown for hire. His job takes him to various places: for example, a music store going out of business and a children’s hospital. Arthur also suffers from a (real-life) condition, which causes him to laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate times. So much so that he carries a card that can explain it to people when he cannot.

The construction of the story is masterful and subversive, and it requires the audience to think and deduce some of the action going on before them. Phoenix’s performance is nuanced and skilled. It captures some of the cartoon-like nature of The Joker without it being cartoony. In some form, you respect Fleck’s struggle, and then he shocks you with his behavior. In a sense, Fleck has a code, and until the very end of the film, he never violates it.

To tell you more would spoil the experience.

Rated R by the MPAA for strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images, Joker is the best comic book film with that rating since Logan. I highly recommend it.

Disjointed is the perfect name for this comedy series. There are some good things and quite a few bad things. Let's start with the good things.

Disjointed brings Kathy Bates back to series television. She plays Ruth Whitefeather Feldman, the owner of Ruth's Alternative Caring, a medical marijuana dispensary in a California strip mall. Ruth is a cannibis advocate, cannibis lawyer and a cannibis user. (You probably should be, too.) She has an adult black son, Travis (Aaron Moten), who she apparently abandoned for a while and who consequently went on to business school and got a degree. There's an assortment of other oddball characters either employed by the dispensary or who hang out there. I'll get back to them.

Veteran comedy director Jim Burrows is aboard for the pilot and a few of the episodes as well. That's a good thing, too.

The other great thing is that the show has a great opening credits sequence. It's various scenes of Reefer Madness juxtaposed with the tune Jack, I'm Mellow as sung by Trixie Smith. Enjoy it while you can though because beyond the first two episodes, you won't see it again. Apparently, the only thing the producers think is important is that it's a Netflix original series produced by Warner Bros. After the first two episodes, they "literally" fast-forward through the opening credits to get to the action.

Of the six episodes that I've been able to get through as of this writing, there have been a couple of story arcs already. In these first few episodes, Ruth tries to get Travis together with Olivia (Elizabeth Alderfer) to have "butterscotch babies." Jenny, the tokin' Asian, has dropped out of medical school and hasn't told her parents, Pete, the grower of Ruth's various strains, is revealed to be quite aware of what's going on around him, despite his laid-back nature. The most fascinating regular is Carter, a vet and Ruth's security guard. He has an interesting arc as well. He has PTSD, which manifests itself in animation. However, his problems are dispensed with by getting him to smoke his first joint.

There's several recurring characters who hang out at the dispensary as well including an always-high couple named Dank & Dabby, Ruth's nemesis, Tae Kwan Doug and a housewife depressed by her domestic situation.

The problems I have with Disjointed are many. It's uneven. It's kind of done in the style of UHF or The Groove Tube, if you've seen those. There are story arcs, but there are also sketches and commercial parodies and product placement masquerading as commercial parodies. It's all kind of ... disjointed. Despite all that, it's still structured like a network situation comedy, filmed before a live audience, with fade-to-black spots for real commercial inserts. It's as if Chuck Lorre hopes to sell the show to actual syndication one day.

And, is that Aaron Moten's real voice?
By episode 3, he started to sound like one of The Chipmunks.

However, the biggest problem I have with Disjointed turns out to be the one reason I wanted to watch it: Kathy Bates. It's not Ms. Bates, it's her character. Ruth is not a nice person. I really want to like her, but the more I watch her, I really don't. That's why it's been a struggle to get through these first ten episodes.

Disjointed is being presented in two parts by Netflix. Part One, episodes 1-10 were released now. Part Two, episodes 11-20 will be released in 2018. Currently, it has a 5.9 rating on IMDb, a 14% Rotten Tomatoes score, a 50 RT Audience score, a 43 Metacritic score and a 2.9 user score on Metacritic.

This is one of the best TV shows of all time.

I can count on one hand the number of compelling TV shows that have a beginning, a middle and an end. From the first episode, Welcome to Camelot to the last, Goodbye to Camelot, Third Watch was intriguing, true to life television for the entire six seasons of its existence.

Forewarned is forearmed. This is a television series where it doesn't necessarily get solved by the hour's end, where main characters die and good doesn't always triumph over evil. This is the original series that tells the stories of the first responders of the city of New York. Making it even more compelling was it was broadcast during the time of the September 11th attacks. The series weaves reality into its universe and shows us how those events affected its characters. The fact is by the time you reach those storylines in season three, you'd expect nothing less from this series which treated you like an adult from Episode 1.

From some of the creative minds that brought you ER, Criminal Minds and SouthLAnd, I highly recommend this rare series. If you can find it, don't binge it. Savor it. Treasure it. Enjoy it.