Stranger Things - Season 3

She's baaack!

Along with all the analogies to '80s movies (including Alien - which is a bit meta since our Winona had a part in Alien 4-Resurrection). And remember when everything was about how much we hated the Russians? That's there too.

This season was a lot more of the same. Lots of danger, lots of monsters, lots of wondering why these people still live in Hawkins.

Maya Hawke as
code-cracker Robin

The best part of this season was the not-so-subtle message on the importance of learning another language. This is a slight digression since Our Noni was not involved in the Russian-language storyline, but it is a very important facet of the story for us. In public life and even on university campuses -- including our very own -- it has become common to treat the learning of a second or third language with disdain. The difficulty the characters have in finding a speaker of Russian is one part of the lesson; the heroism of a character willing to apply rudimentary language skills is equally important.

This season can be summed up best by our (Indiana) friend Ben who posted this transcript of a conversation he had with his teenage daughter on Facebook:

Daughter: Doesn't Mrs. Wheeler ever wonder where her other kids are?
Ben: It's the 80s. They're fine.

We were fine. And our parents knew that we were always at the mall. It's where we worked, played, and dated.

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

Destination Wedding

Pam's review was succinct, and uttered as soon as the credits rolled:

"God, That was tedious!"

She asked Perry (our dog), "Wasn't that tedious?" And Perry did not disagree.

I had not thought of it that way, but yes, this RomCom was as tedious as it was predictable.

And yet... And yet, I said, I can maybe write just a bit more about it.

Image: IMDb

We have written quite a bit on this blog about Our Noni's long comeback. Following her very public shoplifting conviction, she took a lot of roles that we deemed beneath her. When she finally re-emerged, it took her some while to make the transition from her angsty adolescent persona to something more appropriate to her age (and ours -- she is 8 years younger than we are, but gaining on us).

She rediscovers her teenage cynic as Lindsay, a profoundly reluctant wedding guest, who falls in with Frank, who is equally reluctant and even more cynical. A dozen people are credited in this film, but only these two have speaking roles. (Four additional actors deserve credit in our opinion -- the passengers seated directly in front of Lindsay and Frank who never even flinch at their antics.)

Remarkably, our protagonists are shown at the wedding and all of the pre- and post- doings that have become standard in certain circles -- without their presence being noticed by anybody in the wedding party.

In lieu of direct interaction with the wedding's participants, the audience is treated to 90 minutes of patter about the wedding and related topics. At times, Lindsay and Frank echo Veronica and J.D., cloaking their growing romantic attraction in witty banter about the absurdity of the romance. At other times, they are channeling the front-row gang of Mystery Science Theater, popping off witty one-liners at the expense of those in the main show. This includes ageism, homophobia, transphobia, and inappropriate language regarding intersex individuals.

Some of the wit is genuinely witty, but the overall effect is tiresome, as the writers laboriously move through the inevitable three steps of any romantic comedy produced for a U.S. audience.

The IMDb entry mentions that this was filmed in ten days. That seems about right for what was essentially a two-person play, long on banter and short on plot or character development.

Final Verdict: one croquet ball

Stranger Things 2

The first season of Stranger Things was tidily wrapped up, so there really was no reason to have a second season. It was, therefore, a stunning feat that the second season was better than the first. All our favorite characters returned (except, alas, poor Barb) and some new ones rounded out the cast.

Our Winona played the role of the ever-anxious single parent Joyce Byers with the necessary intensity, even as we see her character let her guard down a few times with Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour). The Stranger Things project may be the first one in which Ryder has settled in as a thoroughly post-adolescent actor. A younger Noni so thoroughly embodied a series of roles as a brooding, sardonic teen that she and her audiences have had trouble letting go of that persona. (Example: we still sometimes call her Noni.) As the anxious mother of teens, Joyce Byers has made a clean break with Veronica.

Good spooky stuff.

Final Verdict: Four croquet balls

Alien: Resurrection

We saw this film some years ago and felt almost the same way about it as we did about Black Swan. We really didn't want to watch this crappy film again, but it had been so long since we'd seen it that we couldn't write about it without watching it again and we did recall that at least it didn't make us squirm uncomfortably for its entire duration, something we can't say about Black Swan. 

Sigourney Weaver reprises her role as Ripley (really her clone), and as the title indicates the nasty alien is also resurrected.

I was surprised to see that Joss Whedon was one of the writers. This was clearly before he found his groove with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It appeared there was some attempt at levity, which actually might have worked if it hadn't been so subtle but it didn't come off well at all. The story was hard to follow, as was keeping the good guys and bad guys straight. Our Winona does have a special surprise twist to her character (no spoilers here, though).

It gets two croquet balls instead of one simply because it passes the Bechdel Test. Sigourney Weaver and Our Winona actually have several conversations, including the last words of the film.

Final Verdict: Two croquet balls

Golden Globe Puzzlement

This being a completist blog, we could not resist reviewing Noni's latest oeuvre, an impromptu bit of video captured at the 2017 Golden Globes. Unlike most of our reviews, this one allows us to capture the entire performance within the blog itself. In fact, it is taking me longer to write this post than it took her to complete the work.

As explained in Us Weekly, she is responding to co-star David Harbour's speech accepting their award for Stranger Things (see our review). She seems to be equal parts surprised, confused, and enthused. I must admit I share her confusion, having heard only this snippet. The flying pizza version provides an alternate explanation of her expressions.

From the Globes we learn that Our Noni's greatest work is with a script and time to craft her characters. When she prepares, she can do great work. Catching her off-guard does not yield great results, as borne out elsewhere in the evening, when she was invited to gush about her old pal Christian Slater. Although Heathers remains her best work, memories of it did not inspire great off-the-cuff conversation. In fact, both of us compared this red-carpet moment to the kinds of interviews we hear from professional athletes right before or after a big game. Their talents are on the field, just as hers are on the screen.

Final verdict: 2 croquet balls for distractingly quirky gestures, because 3 balls means "good enough for non-fans," and some of my friends have made clear online that this does not meet that standard.

Stranger Things - an 80s-gasm

Pam writes:

James and I had different views on this one. I doubt I would have watched past the second episode of this mini series if it weren't for the fact that Our Winona was starring in it. James was more interested from a D&D perspective, and will write about that below. It did keep my attention from literary, and nostalgic standpoints, but the story itself really didn't pique my interest. The show takes place in the magical year of 1983 (the year James and I met). It has some cool, 80's props and plays on a lot of '80s film motifs, starting with Poltergeist. We also picked up themes from ET, Stand by Me, Firestarter, The Goonies (honestly, I cannot understand why so many people love that film), with a sprinkling of Fast Times at Ridgemont High thrown in. 

Natalia Dyer as Nancy and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan in some ways echo
the Heathers characters of Winona and Christian Slater. 

I did like that there was a juxtaposition of the horror show meme in which the virgin always survives. In this upside down story the virgin (Barb, who the directors must have modeled on my sister's yearbook photo) is made toast while her best friend (Nancy Wheeler) gets busy (and survives to tell the tale). I also really want to believe that Nancy's character was named for the best friend in that great American novel, Judy Blume's Are You there God? It's Me, Margaret, the character I would have voted "most likely to be the first to lose her virginity".

The show also made good use of the "four smart friends motif" in which there are two white boys, one black boy, and one white girl. Well done Duffer Brothers.

The Four Musketeer nerds. Not sure which one would have been James.

James writes:
Pam is right -- I liked this miniseries more than she did, and Dungeons & Dragons had something to do with it. I was thrilled to find D&D featured in the very first scene.  It brought me right back to those days when -- several years older than these kids -- I played for hours on end, sometimes five days a week. I did not realize until hearing Ethan Gilsdorf's interview on Radio Boston that the D&D scenes were a Spielberg reference; I thought they were just a reference to my adolescence. (Free new word I just invented for nostalgia lovers: adolreference -- things relating to one's long-ago teenage years.)

In our recent Noni's Return post, we set the context for Noni's role in this series, the first in which she plays a mother that is not a "mom" in the way that word is generally used these days. In his Salon article about this series as a nostalgia trip, Ethan Gilsdorf hints at why this role may have been so successful for her -- she plays a mother from an analog era, before the launch of helicopter parents. This seems a better fit for her than some mothering roles set in the present would be.

Millie Bobbie Brown shines as Eleven.

In addition to Ethan Gilsdorf's article and interview about nostalgia in general, we read an interesting article about the props in particular. Writing for Wired, Tim Moynihan describes the care taken in buying or making all of the props used in the series on a budget of just $220,000. The film is set during that brief window in telephone history when it had become possible to buy phones (not an option when I was a kid), but not yet impossible to buy a rotary phone. The props people could have reached out to my family. Perhaps because my grandfather worked for the "real" telephone company, this is not just the phone of my youth; it is the phone I still use when visiting my grandmother.

Final Verdict: Four balls


Pam did not like this much more than a three-baller, but we agreed that ties are decided in favor of Noni. And we agree that her role in this was strong.

Noni's Return

On the occasion of her latest project -- the Netflix series Stranger Things -- the Margy Rochlin of the New York Times offers the story of Winona's gradual comeback from an unfortunate incident that coincided with the doldrums that affect many women in her field. She points out that her Saks arrest came just at the

"sell-by date for many actresses in Hollywood. I went from weirdo teenager to pixie waif to them not knowing what the hell to do with me."

In the spreadsheet where I keep track of her work and our ratings of it, I have a gray line across 2001, and can show that by our lights, her roles have not been quite as good. The possible reasons are several, all of which are discussed in this article. We agree that her work had improved recently, perhaps as Hollywood has begun to solve the what-to-do-with-her riddle.

We look forward to the new work. Stay tuned for our review....


Preview of Stranger Things