No Good Deed is a series streaming on Netflix. It exemplifies state-of-the-art limited series narrative on cable. The six episode show gestures a bit toward comedy but, in effect, is a melodrama involving family secrets, unresolved trauma, and, ultimately, reconciliation. It's warmly acted by Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano as a married couple in the throes of selling their family home, a mansion by Midwest standards located in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles. The asking price for the home is a million dollars, although because of a housing shortage, some buyers are willing to offer as much as an additional $200,000 above the listing. There are really two concurrent narratives in play -- the show's mild and satirical comedy involves the antics of couple's gay realtor and the various people who bid on the home: there's a soap opera star with trophy wife, a lesbian couple, and a worthy Black family. The show's melodrama involves a family tragedy -- three years before the house was put on the market, the couple's college-age daughter accidentally shot and killed her own brother (she thought he was a burglar). The young man was stealing baubles from his father's construction sites (Romano plays a contractor) and was killed while wearing a ski mask and entering his own home. (In fact, this homicide turns out to be the result of other factors not involving the young woman.) The couple have covered-up the shooting, albeit unsuccessfully, by enlisting the aid of the contractor-husband's ne'er-do-well brother, a penny-ante criminal. The show begins well with some sharply observed and witty vignettes involving the real estate market and potential prospective buyers. Lisa Kudrow's character is a former concert pianist whose hands now shake and who is unable to play, mostly, it seems, from her grief relating the death of her son. The pianist thinks her son is communicating with her through some faulty wiring in the house that causes a light to flicker when she addresses questions to it. There's a shocking moment of bloody violence near the end of the first episode that is very well-staged, unexpected, and raises the stakes for the whole enterprise.
The show features some impressive if ultimately pointless scenes in the home's infrastructure -- the camera careening through electrical conduits, or heating vents, or, in one scene, the plumbing system. I think this showy effect is supposed to demonstrate that the house is a sort of entity that is alive, a character, as it were, in the program. It may be that the agitated camera movement signifies the perspective of the ghost, that is, the dead son. Many shots in the show are made from idiosyncratic camera-angles suggesting that the characters are being spied-upon -- this gives parts of the show a sort of horror film vibe. The plotting is ingeniously and, by and large, plausible; in fact, the narrative is carefully designed and the story is well-organized, if anything too well-organized: nothing is left to chance and the story feels plotted with within an inch of its life.
Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano are excellent. Old-style sit-com actors of this sort excel in telegraphing their emotions in a readily legible manner and, because the audience bears some affection for them, they are compelling and their plight seems poignant. The soap opera actor, in a Gehry-style post-modern house, and his scheming wife are roles also expertly acted -- these parts are played by Luke Wilson and Lia Cardenelli respectively. Wilson seems well-meaning but befuddled -- he's not too bright. His vicious wife deploys her breasts like weapons of war; she's scary and effective as a venomous narcissist who will not be denied. (In true sit-com didactic style, she gets her comeuppance in a spectacular way). No Good Deed is reasonably entertaining, sharply written, and effectively produced -- it's economically made and not too long for the subject matter. The plot seems to flow organically from the materials. There's nothing special about this limited series and it's not distinctive in any real way, but it's a diverting entertainment.
Carry-on is a Netflix movie about one-hour and fifty minutes long. It's also handsomely produced, with good production values, and a good cast -- Justin Bateman is excellent as a blandly murderous terrorist; he acts like a nice guy and speaks in a reasonable way in a conversational tone of voice but, unfortunately, he's scheming to implement mass murder. (The part requires some athletic exertions, lots of wrestling and boxing, and Bateman to put it bluntly seems too old to accomplish this stuff; the hero played by Taron Edgerton also spends about half of the movie running at high-speed through jetways, parking lots, and corridors in the airport -- it's exhausting just to watch this guy sprinting around.) The story involves a mild-mannered low energy TSA agent (Edgerton) working to screen passengers at the security gates at LAX. This TSA agent, the show's every man hero, gets swept into an intricate plot to unleash Russian nerve-gas on a passenger plane bound for Washington D.C. The movie's breakneck pace is interrupted about 2/3rds of the way through the story to explain the rationale for the plot -- this is completely unnecessary and a waste of time: the valise containing the nerve agent in canisters attached to some sort of detonator is what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, just an instrument to put the plot in motion and we really don't give a hoot about why the bad guys are scheming to kill a bunch of people. (An overfastidious approach to narrative requiring elucidation of the bad guys' motives was a feature of Black Doves as well and weighed down the plot with pointless exposition.) In Carry-on, the villains are those all-purpose go-to bad guys, American defense contractors who want to protect their profit margins by triggering an all-out war with Russia or some other belligerent power. The villains' have contrived an immensely elaborate and overly intricate plot to plant the nerve agent on a plane. The scheme involves holding innocents hostage, all sorts of surveillance, and, at least, two additional armed confederates who have to be disposed-of as the story advances. There are also a number of hapless minor characters who end up as collateral damage. When a villain with a massive sniper-rifle has to shoot people or threaten to shoot them, he always immediately finds his targets among the many thousands of people hustling through the jetways and terminals -- how he accomplishes this is not explained
Carry-on exploits the traveling public's anxiety about airplanes and terrorism and purports to provide its viewers with an inside look at the functioning of both an major airport (with its back corridors and labyrinthine luggage handling equipment) and TSA. These detail are interesting and provide some neat locations for the various fistfights and shoot-outs required by the plot. The action takes place, more or less, in real-time on Christmas Eve with the terminal crowded with nervous and petulant travelers. The film's pace is accelerated and breathless. This fast-pace is necessary to keep the audience from considering the film's various manifest improbabilities, You can't suspend your disbelief high enough to avoid suspicions that the film's plot is fundamentally contrived, ludicrous, and implausible. However, violent events succeed one another so swiftly and with so little respite that the viewer perceives generally that none of this makes any sense, but doesn't have time to reject these absurdities outright or work out objections to the narrative -- you are still brooding on previous blunders even as new ones follow in fast succession.
There are two stand-out sequences in Carry-on -- the first is a violent, no-holds-barred fight between an FBI agent and a killer in a car speeding along the highway. The action is filmed entirely within the car with our perspective on the traffic whizzing by and adjacent crashes on the highway glimpsed through the windshield of the vehicle -- it's an interesting approach to a pretty standard action-film trope (the hand-to-hand fight in a vehicle knocked out of control by the desperate combat.) The second bravura sequence is a big chase and battle among the gloomy chutes and ladders of the airport's vast luggage-handling system --there are multi-layers of conveyors connected by ladders and side chutes and the fighting takes place across this hellish maze. The movie is good mindless entertainment, pushes all the right buttons, but it's ultimately just a popcorn movie with no aspirations to anything othersthan providing a quick, if highly unlikely, thrill to the audience -- the equivalent, in other words, of junk food.
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