goldbarn

With an average imdb rating of over 8.5, Dark is one of the top-recommend sci-fi shows on Netflix, next to Black Mirror, so does it live up to the hype? Kind of, but it has too many design flaws to fully recommend:

1) tedious repetition and depressing atmosphere: events and conversations are serially repeated with little variation, the settings never really change, and characters lack a sense of agency and free will, giving the series a very depressing and monotonous atmosphere. It's all by design, but this monotony reaches a psychological breaking point for the viewer at the start of season 3.

2) complicated web of relationships: imagine keeping track of the relationships between 4 generations of 3 separate yet biologically-related families, involving more than 20 people. Your social working memory will be overtaxed.

3) constantly shifting timelines: as the show progresses, the timelines are constantly shifting, every 5-10 minutes, making it tiresome for the viewer.

4) false messianic characters: we are told explicitly that certain characters are special and pre-ordained to save the world, which turns out to be a farce when you realize by the end that any other character could have done the same.

5) unconvincing sci-fi: good science fiction makes us imagine a world where technologies unknown to us could technically exist, respecting the laws of physics or at least most of them. The technological devices in this show are unconvincing as we don't really learn anything about their origin and how they work.

6) philosophically dull: the show graces us with philosophically ambiguous statements (and conversations) such as "everything and everyone is interconnected" and "the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning", which make sense by the end of the show, but they don't tell us anything interesting about our own world. The show does however makes us think about and question our free will.

If I had to rate the seasons separately it would be 8, 7, and 6, in that order.

My rating system: 10-classic (top 10 all time), 9-excellent (top 100), 8-very good, 7-good, 6-average, 5-mediocre, 4-1 unwatchable. 8-10 are "fully recommended", 7 is reserved recommendation.

Much like JFK's assassination, the Great National Bank Robbery of 1959 is shrouded in mystery, the first being whether the robbery did in fact take place (or was instead fabricated to justify the purging of undesirable party members), and the second concerning the motives for the robbery. Here, Caranfil depicts the robbery as a real event symbolizing an act of resistance against a communist regime that has failed to live up to its ideals. It's an idealistic plotline that molds the protagonists into crafty anti-establishment heroes, and that's fine in principle, but I don't think he manages to convey his story convincingly.

The main problem is that Caranfil empowers his protagonists to the point where it becomes difficult to feel pathos for them. Rather than endowing them with a tragic backstory to make their suicide mission believable, he depicts them as privileged party members who live care-free and suffer from existential boredom more than anything else. And although their fate is ultimately in the hands of the authorities, they always seem to be in control of the situation: they plan and execute the heist without a hitch, knowing that they will get caught; they laugh at the authorities during their trial, and they make a mockery of the film shoot without getting reprimanded.

As far as authenticity is concerned, it also doesn't help that the director chose an English-speaking cast and portrays communist Romania as a rather idyllic setting (granted the late 1950s were a more liberal era than what came afterwards). That said, I give him credit for at least shooting it in Bucharest and having the actors pronounce the Romanian names accurately.

To be fair, it's not a terrible movie from any technical standpoint (acting, set design, cinematography, etc.) and I found it both genuinely funny and cringy, because you can't overlook the absurdity of 1950s Romanians speaking English with British accents (note: if you enjoy that, I recommend the 2017 TV-series Comrade Detective). But my impression is that the director missed a golden opportunity to create a black comedy that is both tragic and comic, choosing instead to shoot a light-hearted parody.

Given unprecedented access to the Zappa family archives, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Winter has managed to put together the most insightful biographical documentary about Frank Zappa to date, which is no small feat considering the hours of footage he had to pour through.

The overarching theme is one of an aspiring composer who is constantly moving from one musical idea to the next, while trying to maintain total artistic freedom amidst commercial pressures. One who is willing to spend most of his hard-earned money on paying professional musicians to perform his increasingly complicated compositions, just so he could get the satisfaction of listening to his own work. This circularity struck me as rather poetic--playing music to earn the money needed to record and hear your compositions.

We also get some unique insight into Zappa's perfectionism and workaholism and how it affected his family and peers. Zappa is described as a "slave to his inner ear", whose measure of success is "how close did you get to the realization of the idea that you first heard the first time you heard it". In other words, his professional satisfaction derives from realizing his ideas exactly the way he hears them, which ironically makes musicians (humans) an imperfect vehicle for these ideas and leads Zappa to ditch them in favor of the Synclavier.

Much to the ire of Zappa fans, the documentary glosses over most of his 70s and early 80s albums, but then again, it's important to keep in mind that the main focus is Zappa's personality and evolution as an artist rather than his music per se. I, for one, would certainly welcome a much longer documentary or perhaps series that explores his musical journey from one album to the next. We just have to be patient and hopeful that more will be coming.