TheVictoriousV

We should all be thankful that Tim Burton's Wednesday series didn't come out back when all of us were on Tumblr. Can you imagine the barrage of gifs posted by the most annoying person you know, pretending that this version of Wednesday Addams is "totally me", even though the "me" in this scenario gets panic attacks trying to order at McDonald's by themselves?

Released in two chunks (because Netflix is beginning to realize that dropping a season of TV all at once isn't generally that good for a show's longevity/buzz -- if only there was a way they could give us one new episode per week), the new season is largely an improvement upon the first.

Right off the bat, it's nice to finally be seeing more of the other Addamses aside from Wednesday herself (a better-than-ever Jenna Ortega) -- Isaac Ordonez's Pugsley has ascended to main character, for one, and as it turns out, the actor's pretty good. Luis Guzman and Catharine Zeta-Jones continue to work well as Gomez and Morticia, although they don't seem quite as violently in love as Gomez and Morticia ought. The previous season featured Christina Ricci in a nod to the 1990s Addams Family film series; Season 2 contains a similar special appearance. Speaking of charming call-backs, Burton himself returns to the realm of stop-motion horror in one of the season's best sequences (easily).

I liked the newer characters more this season, as well; Steve Buscemi is a hoot as always, Emma Myers as the bubbly Enid is still delightful, and especially entertaining is Evie Templeton as a creepy yet adorable admirer of Wednesday's.

At worst, this show feels like a fan fic -- specifically a crossover between The Addams Family and some CW superhero crap or Miss Peregrine spin-off that never got made. At best, it looks and sounds excellent, but seeing as we had to wait three years for eight episodes (and the characters, many of whom are supposed to be children, inevitably look visibly older), Wednesday is one of many recent shows that put into question whether TV shows need to be as grandiose and expensive as they are these days, especially when so much other content takes up time and resources in the interim. (You will have seen many a baffled tweet about the difference between the production/release schedule of stuff like Stranger Things and Euphoria vs that of, say, the original run of The X-Files.) With shows like Severance and Andor, I understand (considering the WGA strike delays or not). With this, eh.

Even as David Cronenberg films go, The Shrouds is peculiar, and has been met with more affronted reactions than possibly any film he's made during his distinct, half-a-century-long career.

Created as Cronenberg himself was processing the death of his wife, it involves a piece of tech that lets mourners view a "live" AI rendition of their deceased loved ones' rotting corpses (the film explores loss in terms of losing not only the soul, but also the body of someone you love), created by a widowed millionaire who is supposedly meant to be an avatar of Cronenberg (played by Vincent Cassel because, hey, wouldn't you also cast yourself with one of the sexiest actors of French cinema if you could?) and who goes on to pursue a sexual relationship with his dead wife's twin sister (Diane Kruger plays both roles).

Such irksome images and concepts aren't unexpected in a David Cronenberg film (as usual, it goes deeper than many films that pretend they're aping him; many simply stop at shallow body-horror squick), but many of the reviews ask some variety of this question: What does it say about Cronenberg that he, ostensibly, chose to express his OWN grief about his OWN wife in this manner?

This may be why many other reviews view this film as a sordid Big Tech commercial, the idea being that we, on some level, are supposed to yearn for such a technology as this. And that wouldn't be a hard sell in the age of AI resurrections (see, for example, the Parkland shooter victim who was digitally reanimated by his parents and programmed to tell us how to vote). I am not convinced that Cronenberg meant to say that, but the Tesla product placements certainly make it a feasible reading. Will Musk get ideas?

People who call this boring, I don't understand. (I was more bored by 2022's Crimes of the Future, whose admittedly fascinating themes weren't done any favors by its mumbly cast.) The Shrouds is talky and sometimes quiet, yes, but I'm betting you will get something out of these performances -- especially if you indeed find them as downright Wiseau-ian as the absolute harshest critics. For me, the heavy lifting was done by the score, an electronic ambient soundtrack by Howard Shore (how unexpected) that kept me hypnotized even during the most boringly shot and colorless scenes -- which, I'm sure, look that way For A Reason. It gets messier, yet also funnier, as it progresses.

Take all of this for what it's worth, I say. See it, and then decide if this is Cronenberg's Killers of the Flower Moon or his Megalopolis -- and if that is a bad thing.