Mr Robot - 'View Source', 'White Rose', 'Mirroring' and 'Zero Day'

"Find someone to be your honest self with. Bullshit."

Okay; a final wrap up on Season 1 of Mr Robot. Once more, I'm eschewing the evocative titling of the episodes for ease of typing.

'View Source' brings Elliot to the brink as he reflects on his meeting with Shayla, and the fact that she hooked up with Vera in order to supply him. Was this a business move or the first step in a friendship between broken soulmates? We'll never know now, but it provides that extra spice to Elliot's feeling of responsibility for her death. He finds himself wishing people were easier to read, and wondering if actually anyone would want that, and ultimately admits to his psychologist, although released from his sessions, that he hacks into people's lives in order to understand them.

Elsewhere, Angela cuts a deal to invalidate the evidence against Terry Colby in exchange for the ammunition to successfully sue EvilCorp over the Washington Township spill. Although still shot small and vulnerable, Angela finds her force here, rebuffing Colby's indecent propositions and calling his bluff; she knows that he needs this as much as she does. Meanwhile, Tyrell invites his successful rival's wife to the roof for revenge sex and murders her, seemingly on impulse. Tyrell has always been an odd balance of rigorous self-control and something dark and subterranean at his core. The morlock is out of the box here, both in the killing itself and his less-than collected flight afterwards.

Wait. What?

In 'Whiterose', Darlene arranges a meet with the eponymous head of the Dark Army. To Elliot's surprise, it's him going to the meeting, not Mr Robot. Whiterose turns out to be a time-obsessed... I'm not sure what to say here. Is White Rose transgender? A crossdresser? Something more complicated? Actually, that's probably a more complex question than this appearance has time to answer.

Anyway, that's White Rose, and most importantly Elliot learns why the Dark Army backed out. Elliot fatally underestimated his boss, Gideon, who as well as being a genuinely good human being is a bit of a sly old fox, setting the server they need for their hack as a honey pot to trap future hack attempts. Get rid of the honey pot and the hack is on, forcing Elliot to directly betray his boss.

Angela goes to her ballet session - yeah, that's apparently how she keeps that figure - where she hooks up with her old buddy Darlene and... WHAT! Yeah; Angela and Darlene are like besties or something, and we soon learn why. Before that, Tyrell continues to unravel. The cops show up at his house and his wife Joanna buys time by breaking her own waters with a fork. Brutal, but for the first time in two episodes no supporting female characters are fridged, so there's that.

Darlene, excited that they're going to pull off the hack of all time, admits her love for Elliot, but is horrified when he tries to kiss her. "Did you forget again?" she asks. "Did you forget who I am?" And he did, but remembers that she is his sister. With raging paranoia he berates and assault us, his imaginary friend, before trying to find out who he really is and realising that he is a ghost (in informational terms, rather than like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense.) All he finds are childhood photographs of his family, including his father. Mr Robot.

I really like these two. As much as I'm enjoying Mr Robot itself, I'd watch
the hell out of their PI spin off.

In 'Mirroring', Mr Robot - aka Elliot's dad - takes him on a journey of discovery to explain who he is. While Tyrell is getting fired from his job and put on final probation with his family (the baby survives, thankfully,) Elliot and his father return to their family home, where dad once pushed Elliot out of a window; or maybe Elliot jumped. Anyway, now Elliot pushes dad out of a window. Darlene goes to Angela - who has quick ESafe and been offered a potential job at EvilCorp, who admire gumption and have already made enough on the interest from their panic fund to cover whatever the class action suit makes them pay out - for help finding Elliot and they follow his trail to the house, and then to the local cemetery. Here, Dad promises Elliot that he will never leave him again, only for Angela and Darlene to ask who Elliot is talking to.

Oh-ho! we the audience crow, for we knew it, didn't we. And at once Elliot rounds on us again. "Did you know?" he demands of his imaginary so-called friend.  "You're going to make me say it, aren't you?" he accuses, and then does. "I am Mr Robot."

Darlene takes him home and goes to fill his prescription, but then Tyrell shows up and demands to know what's what, demanding in on the revolution.

Oooh.

Which leads to 'Zero Day', where Elliot wakes from a heartwarming flashback of his dad teaching him that crime is wrong, but less wrong than being a dick, to find him self in Tyrell's SUV two days after the end of 'Mirroring', with the world's financial sectors going to hell around him. Where is Tyrell? What actually happened? Elliot doesn't know and for once, neither do we, although we learn that the hack was launched without the rest of fsociety, that Tyrell has vanished and that Angela works for EvilCorp's PR department now, beginning with watching a senior VP blow his brains out on television. The CEO is unfazed, assuring her that the might of EvilCorp will prevail.

Whiel fsociety burn the drives then throw a party to celebrate (and nadger the forensics of their HQ) and the world gets high on the end of debt, Gideon struggles vainly to plan for tomorrow and Elliot is browbeaten by Mr Robot and hallucinations of his mother and younger self into accepting his part i all of this. Go home, watch the beautiful chaos you've created.

And there's a knock at the door.

After the credits, White Rose - as a man - goes to a party at the CEO's house. The CEO claims to know who did this.

So, that was Season 1 of Mr Robot, a series that is like nothing on Earth. It's a little fridge-happy and so far the female characters have been pretty peripheral, but there's a lot of promise for Angela, Darlene and Joanna Wellick to take a strong role in Season 2. It's a series short on out and out villains, with the Wellicks and the other EvilCorp executives flawed and human, selfish but not actually evil in an absolute sense; no worse than Krista the psychologist's boyfriend who cheated on his wife and abused his dog, then turned around in the last episode and made Elliot out to be some agent of darkness who ruined his life from nothing. The grittily realistic hacking and depiction of a cyber-obsessed world where every thought is tweeted or consigned to a blog and every transaction is in some sense virtual make for compelling viewing. The awkward framing and uncomfortable silences of the series were as eloquent as the dialogue, and the performances are universally excellent, with each character's expressions and body-language spot on.

Roll on Season 2.

The Blacklist - Series 1

This picture demonstrates one of the key flaws of The Blacklist, to whit that Megan Boone so often looks inappropriately bored.

After a decades long manhunt, FBI most wanted fugitive Raymond Reddington walks into a Federal Building and surrenders. Having become one of the foremost fixers in the international criminal community, with a vast network of informants and specialists for all occasions, Reddington has also compiled a list - the titular Blacklist - of the people he deems to be truly beyond even his highly distorted moral code. He is willing to help the FBI bring these people down, but only on his terms, and only if he is allowed to work with Agent Elizabeth Keen.

A major breakout hit, The Blacklist is a slick conspiracy drama featuring a tour de force performance from James Spader as Raymond 'Red' Reddington, the Concierge of Crime. By turns charming and terrifying, all affable, folksy anecdotes or cold, harsh threats, he is never less than compelling, with his monologue on his goals in life garnering particular attention, and rightly so.

Unfortunately, The Backlist is at its core a two-hander, and Megan Boone as Elizabeth Keen doesn't have the same effortless assurance, and only partly because Keen as a character lacks Reddington's absolute self-confidence. For the dynamic of the relationship - which is primarily that Reddington chips relentlessly away at the bedrock of Keen's life - to work there has to be some parity to begin with, and it is just a little lacking (Season 2 has an even less assured Keen and a slightly more comfortable Boone, and benefits from it.)

The supporting cast is solid ranging up to good, with a strong core team. Parminder Nagra provides some confusion as a CIA agent with a completely unexplained English accent, but she's a good actress, so okay. Notable cameos from Peter Stormare and Alan Alda playing sharply against type enliven the second half of the season.

The Blacklist has a definite ambition to be gritty, and in pursuit of that makes a very conscious decision which results in unfortunate implications; specifically, Season 1 kills a lot of its female characters. In fact, it pretty much kills all of them except for Keen, and while it never revels in its violence against women, it does get to the point that it feels as if it's taking a certain pride in being willing to have female characters brutally murdered.

Overall, Season 1 of The Blacklist has been a good series with moments of excellence, although in all honesty I think only the monologue really compares with the very first scene of Red's surrender. It picks up the pace a lot after a slightly sluggish first half and starts developing its arc. It remains to be seen whether it can maintain its pace following the unveiling of Kaise Soze expy 'Berlin' in the finale - there is a reason why The Usual Suspects ends with the reveal - but Season 1 was strong enough to give me hope.

American Hustle

The hair! The clothes! The hair!

Irving Rosenfeld (Bale) is a jobbing conman who has worked his way up from the bottom of the pack after seeing his honest father ground down by bad people. He hits gold when he meets Sydney Prosser (Adams), a dancer whose turn as English aristocrat Lady Edith Greensly allows the pair to pull off increasingly high profile art and loan scams. Their life is complicated by Rosenfeld's estranged wife Rosalyn (Lawrence), who holds custody of their son over him, and then further when FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Cooper) catches them in a scam and ropes them in to help him get more arrests in exchange for immunity.

When the original operation offers the chance to net first Mayor Carmine Polito (Renner), then members of Congress and the Senate and a substantial mob operation represented by Victor Tellegio (Robert De Niro), Richie starts to lose control. Obsessed with his own glory as an agent, and with 'Lady Edith', his growing ambitions threaten to spiral the scam into something that can not survive its own weight. With Irving's growing admiration for and friendship with Polito and Rosalyn's relationship with a mobster, the stage is set for disaster, or for the con of the century.

American Hustle is loosely based on the real-life Abscam operation conducted by the FBI in the late 70s and early 80s, but that's mostly background. The dramatic core of the film is the relationships between the protagonists, both professional and personal, and the lies that they tell to each other and themselves. The lies in this movie are almost characters in their own right, in particular the big one, the scam that begins with an attempt to hook an art fraudster and grows into a monster than can not be tamed. "No more fake shit," Prosser pants in her entirely false English accent while deflecting DiMaso's advances in a nightclub toilet cubicle. That's the quintessence of the movie, right there; lies, sex and squalid glamour.

Renner's hair in this movie can only truly be appreciated in
profile.

The script and story are good, but the film really triumphs on the strength of its look and its cast. The faded glamour of the 70s/80s divide is everywhere. Bright clothes clash with a grimy backdrop, the collapsing promise of the American dream as elaborate and unconvincing a pretense as Rosenfeld's extraordinary comb-over. The cast put in note-perfect performances as slightly grotesque versions of the real figures involved in Abscam, and every aspect of the production design evokes the era as something extraordinary and almost alien to a modern eye.

American Hustle is not a tightly-plotted scam picture in the mould of The Sting or Ocean's Eleven; the Abscam plot is more of a bar on which to hang the personal drama, and while there are twists they are not the point. It's a film about lies and love and above all about what is fake and what - if anything - is real, and a damn good film at that.

Fargo

"There’s a fellow once, running for a train, and he’s carrying a pair of gloves, this man. He drops a glove on the platform, but he doesn’t notice. And then later on, inside the train, he’s sitting by the window and he realizes that he’s just got this one glove left. But the train’s already started pulling out of the station, right? So what does he do? He opens the window; he drops the other glove onto the platform. That way, whoever finds the first glove can just have the pair."

Fargo is not based on the Cohen Brothers film of the same name, so much as it is inspired by it. This TV series makes the same (spurious) claim to be based on real life events, and is set in Minnesota, in this case in the small town of Bemidji. It also matches some of the original's beats, but with a shift of emphasis and an entirely different cast of characters.

The core drama revolves around four individuals: Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) is a weak, put-upon man whose inability to take action or responsibility catalyses a cascade of death and destruction through his chance interaction with Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), a whimsically malevolent hit man who is basically the Devil. On the side of the angels are Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) and Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks).

The series blends dark humour with a disjointed, almost Zen-like sensibility. At least half of the questions that are asked by characters in the series are answered with a riddle in the manner of a Zen koan, most of which are never really explained. As much as it takes its beats from the film Fargo, it is also highly reminiscent of Twin Peaks, but with a tighter and more coherent plot.

The characters are the real strength of the series. Lester's transformation from cringing weaking to reptilian killer is impressively realised, and mirrored in Gus, who spends most of the series seeking to atone for letting fear dictate his actions. Molly is a sheer joy, a strong, principled and courageous character, and one of the most real looking women on television. And then there is Malvo, the star power of the series, a gleeful and apparently indestructible monster who slides away from detection with a combination of luck, brutal efficiency and ruthless intimidation.

Now, here's the thing that I think I love most about Fargo. Twenty years ago, you couldn't have made it. Eighteen years ago when the film was new (feel fear, dear readers), you probably couldn't have made it. Ten years ago, not a chance. I like Fargo not just because it was very good television, but because it is part of a wave of shows which take risks and do something a bit new. We live in an age where for every quirky cop procedural there's a Breaking Bad or a sumptuous HBO historical or fantasy epic, and while that produces its fair share of expensive codswallop, it means that shows like Fargo or True Detective are getting made.

So, Fargo; put it on your rental lists if you missed it.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and 47 Ronin

Because that sort of pairing is just how I roll. Okay, in truth I went to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Hannah and Arya a week or so back, and 47 Ronin with my friend Jon yesterday, but I would rock that double bill if the opportunity presented itself.

Ben Stiller's incarnation of James Thurber's protagonist is, like Danny Kaye's earlier interpretation, at first an ineffectual daydreamer, but later engages in real adventures which sublimate his need to fantasise. Intelligent, skilled, but unappreciated by his new bosses, Mitty finds himself tasked with locating a missing photo negative which photo-journalist Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) has recommended for the cover of the final print issue of Life magazine. At first an apparently simple task, Mitty's attraction to his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) prompts him to adopt the search as a quest, which in turn pushes him to abandon his humdrum existence and to live the kind of adventures he has been dreaming of.

The film is a triumph of the underdog travelogue for the middle-aged and underappreciated. In refusing to separate fantasy and reality by on-screen cues, the film almost threatens us with an unrealised reveal that none of the positive parts of Mitty's life are real, but this only makes the eventual validation of his adventures and his final, soft-spoken takedown of the evil asset stripper who has tormented him throughout more heart-warming.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is never laugh-out-loud funny, but has a gentle humour which won me over completely, despite initial reservations. While he can be abrasive as an actor, Ben Stiller plays Mitty with a genuine likability he has increasingly displayed of late, and the supporting cast are all solid. Wiig is an especially good fit as Mitty's love interest, both bringing a similar gentle strength to Mitty's own, and flying the flag as an attractive older woman in a main romantic role.

Speaking of stand out female roles, do we all remember Mako Mori in Pacific Rim? Hold onto that, because I'd rather think of Rinko Kikuchi in that role than in 47 Ronin, and you probably will as well.

The film tells the story of the 47 Ronin, the samurai of Lord Asano who avenged his death in defiance of the Shogun's command after Asano was forced to commit seppuku for striking another daimyo. In the original tale, this happens because Asano is young and rash and Lord Kira is a dick; in the film Asano is old, revered, and bewitched.

The leader of the ronin is Oishi (played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who has an honourary MBE for his King Lear with the RSC, by the way); that's him in silhouette at the bottom of the poster. Given Lord Kira's alliance with a heterochromial witch, he recruits Asano's adopted weirdo half-breed might-be-some-sort-of-demon, Kai (Keanu Reeves), who can see through witchcraft and is all sorts of badass.

Joining Kai and the witch on the poster are skull tattooed English bloke, who has one line, and big metal samurai dude (giant Englishman Neil Fingleton is, for some reason, credited as 'Lovecraftian samurai'), who has none.

What follows is pretty much the story of the 47 Ronin, just with added monsters, witches and Keanu Reeves.

Rinko Kikuchi plays the witch, in a role where everything about the character - her hair, her clothes, her expression, her voice - basically screams sex. You know how in Pacific Rim Kikuchi wore a sculpted body suit and still looked serious? In this film, even when she shapeshifts into a fox, it's clear that this is a fox who is no better than she ought to be. It's not subtle, and placed against the other female characters - Oishi's wife, a stoic and dutiful samurai bride; and Asano's daughter, Kai's love interest, who is painfully virtuous and lovelorn - it is clearly intended to make her seem bad, which is kind of disappointingly conservative.

The fight scenes are well done, and when it's not being all weird the film has a good handle on the story it's telling. It's a shame it seems to feel the need to spend so much time dwelling on Kai's past, his magical powers, and his doomed romance with Lady Asano, and the funky-flowing-cloth and snake-haired witch, instead of getting to the meat.

Also, Tadanobu Asano is so clearly channeling Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's smug-snake performance as Shang Tsung that when Tagawa's name came up in the credits I almost wondered if he as aging backwards or something.