Eliana Willis

Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Genre’“Which genre is this?”“It’s reality, man.”Let’s get that absolutely atrocious exchange out of the way now, because it was one of the few bum moments in this week’s episode, the best of the season so far. “Westworld” had spent much of the past few hours teasing out the idea that ordinary people are like hosts in their own world, tethered to a sophisticated algorithm that not only predicts their fate but also goes a long way toward engineering it. The reality, man, is the chaos that inevitably erupts after humans have been freed from their own loops and allowed to make real choices, rather than submit to a numbing illusion of having them.The third season has been unfolding like a mirror version of the first, only now it’s the humans who are unknowingly locked into an automated and carefully managed routine. And much as with Dolores and other key hosts in the first season, change starts to happen the moment they achieve self-awareness. Companies like Incite have an interest in controlling the masses with the private information they’ve stolen from them, which is the natural endgame to what Delos intended with the Forge. The more a corporation could anticipate — and, better still, dictate — consumer behavior, the more it could manipulate mankind to serve whatever ambitions it might have.There’s a lot of talk about how the system in 2020 serves the billionaire class; in the future, with men like Engerraund Serac pulling the strings, its serves the trillionaire class.Yet the situation isn’t so cut and dried. It’s easy enough to decry a system in which people are at the mercy of a deathless algorithm. But this episode begins with a young Serac and his brother witnessing the leveling of Paris and everyone they knew and loved. “Humankind was hurtling toward extinction,” explains Serac, so whether God existed or not, He wasn’t doing enough to keep oblivion at bay. Another omniscient being would have to be created to replace God, and the Serac brothers make it their life’s work to get it done. Serac may be the villain of the season, corrupted by monstrous hubris, but his starting point was the basic survival of the species. That’s an idealistic goal if there ever was one.The episode proceeds elegantly along two main tracks. One tells the story of the Seracs and Liam Dempsey Sr. as they build the spherical AI deity known as Rehoboam, and the other follows Dolores, Caleb and a kidnapped Dempsey Jr as they take action to dismantle it. Serac is the key player across both subplots because he has a strong interest in keeping anyone else from accessing the deeper layers of Rehoboam. He may be fairly accused of enslaving his fellow man with his creation — and, more diabolically, of editing out the behaviors of those anomalies who threaten it — but his predictive model isn’t optimistic about what will happen to the world if it weren’t under strict supervision.Caleb is one of those anomalies, which is why Dolores has deputized him for the fight, but the episode heavily suggests questions about his own identity. In a pitiful bid to escape his captors, Dempsey Jr. injects Caleb with the party drug “Genre,” which works a little bit like the experimental gum in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” only with movies instead of meals. Each stage prompts him to see the world through a new filter, like the black-and-white of postwar noir or the glossy romance of “Love Story.”The show doesn’t do enough visually to reflect the change in filters: Music cues for films like “Apocalypse Now” and “The Shining” anticipate a shift in the action that never quite arrives. There’s too much on the agenda to fuss over Caleb’s addled perspective.But the fight over Rehoboam does yield some thrilling futuristic action, as Dolores and Caleb blast their way through an ambush by Serac and his goons. A heat-seeking rocket launcher and a detonated motorcycle provide most of the pyrotechnics, but the show adds a little bit of symbolism to the spectacle by questioning how a driverless vehicle might figure into a car-chase sequence. In this future, citizens have ceded control over their own destination: They no doubt get escorted where they want to go safely and efficiently, but the system can turn them from passenger to prisoner at any time. That’s the trade-off.But there are, as Serac explains in the opening narration, “flies in the ointment,” and he hasn’t found a big enough swatter yet. A facility that Serac builds to “edit” the behavior of human anomalies, including his own brother, looks conspicuously similar to the glass enclosures in the Mesa where technicians do their tinkering with the hosts. The Delos brass were always confident that they could restore and reprogram the hosts to bring them back to compliance. How’d that work out for them?Paranoid Androids:The pre-credits scene in which Serac meets with a world leader has shades of “Minority Report,” with Rehoboam anticipating a pocket of unrest that isn’t perceptible to anyone yet, including the would-be separatists. But it’s not just a predictive algorithm. Serac has the ability to manipulate currency and agitate the masses on his command, which is corporate power imagined to its greatest extreme.As Caleb’s mercenary buddies, Lena Waithe and Marshawn Lynch are out there living the John Carpenter dystopian sci-fi-action movie I’d love to see.“Westworld” is still maxing-out on run times, but a shorter and more streamlined eight-episode season has made a world of difference in terms of pace. There’s far less philosophical spinning-of-the-wheels than in previous seasons.“In every projection, the world came unglued.” The Serac brothers learn that God doesn’t have it easy.A subway train full of people learning exactly when and how they’re projected to die definitely seems livelier than the usual dead-eyed commute. More peripheral glimpses of their “bubble of agency” would be welcome. More

What’s on TVIT CHAPTER TWO (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. Stephen King fans welcomed the director Andy Muschietti’s film adaptation of the 1986 novel “It” in 2017. That led to led this sequel, which picks up 27 years after the events of the first movie. The seven friends of the Losers Club reunite in their picturesque town of Derry, Me. All have seemingly moved on from their traumas involving It — the supernatural killer that takes the form of Pennywise the clown (Bill Skarsgard) — except for Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), who has been obsessively researching ways to stop It for good. Flashbacks of the friends’ encounters with It resurface from years ago, and each of them have to confront demons that were long buried. Some critics praised the cast — which also includes Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, James McAvoy, Jay Ryan, James Ransone and Andy Bean — but said the scares are underwhelming.[embedded content]THE CLARK SISTERS: FIRST LADIES OF GOSPEL (2020) 8 p.m. on Lifetime. This new biopic of the Clark Sisters follows the release of their first album in 11 years, aptly titled “The Return.” The Grammy-winning gospel group originated in Detroit in the early 1970s and has been credited for bringing gospel to the mainstream. “First Ladies” packs in a whole lot of story: It chronicles the sisters’ rise to fame and the troubles that came with it, starting with their early days, when they were led by their passionate yet demanding mother, the choir director Mattie Moss Clark (Aunjanue Ellis). Gospel fans will recognize hits like “You Brought the Sunshine” and “Is My Living in Vain.” And the movie boasts some star power: Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige and Missy Elliott are among the executive producers.SAVED BY THE BARN 10 p.m. on Animal Planet. Sure, the title of this new series may be cringe-inducing. But the premise is heartwarming. The show follows Dan McKernan, a former tech employee who quit his six-figure job to convert his family’s farm in Michigan to a “sanctuary” for rescued barnyard animals that have suffered abuse and neglect. What better way to forget the current state of the world than to indulge in scenes of goats frolicking in the sun.What’s StreamingTHE AMERICAN NURSE (2014) Stream on Kino Now; rent on Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. Nearly every night, New Yorkers have been coming together to clap for medical professionals on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak. This touching documentary by the filmmaker Carolyn Jones is a similar gesture, an ode to nurses who put their patients first on a daily basis. The movie follows five workers in different settings. Among them is a nurse who runs a prison hospice program and another who looks after wounded soldiers. Each of the stories will tug at your heartstrings. The film is available to stream for free on Kino Lorber’s streaming platform, Kino Now, until the end of May. More

“Have you ever cringed so hard, you could feel your DNA strands unraveling?”Why yes, Will Arnett, many times — especially watching “Memory Hole,” your tedious survey of pop-culture train wrecks on the new streaming platform Quibi.Quibi, which debuted with more than 40 series on Monday, offers content that is designed for phones and comes in pre-sliced chunks of under 10 minutes each. (The name stands for Quick Bites.) Admittedly, I started my exploratory binge with one bad choice after another. Whether it was “Gayme Show!,” “Singled Out” or Chrissy Teigen’s downright painful “Chrissy’s Court,” everything on my initial watch list felt like one of those guys who, for whatever reason, overcompensate with giant cars, biceps or guns: pitched way too big, as if desperately trying to escape the phone’s confines.But things improved once I navigated away from the reality shows and into the “movies in chapters,” as Quibi calls its serialized features. And the documentaries included several worthwhile selections, as well.Here’s a list of nine good shows from the debut lineup — Quibi-good, if not necessarily good-good — that you may want to sample during the platform’s 90-day free trial. (After that it’s $4.99 per month with ads, $7.99 without.)‘&Music’Watch it here.This documentary series looks at the support system behind musicians: The mixing engineer MixedByAli and the rapper YG explain their relationship, as do the light director Gabe Fraboni and DJ Martin Garrix among others. This won’t be news to anybody following the music scene, but the show is good at describing in quick strokes how music stars’ careers are made of distinct building blocks.‘Dishmantled’Watch it here.To win $5,000, two cooks must recreate from scratch a dish that has been blown out of a cannon and into their faces. “Dishmantled” is as close as American TV gets to a Japanese game show: preposterous, messy and loud-loud-loud. Its host, Tituss Burgess, and a rotating cast of judges (including Jane Krakowski and Daniel Levy) look into who came closest to the original dish and crack semi-wise. Numbing at first, the show does have a certain nutty charm once you get used to it.‘I Promise’Watch it here.This documentary follows the first year of I Promise, the public school for at-risk youth that LeBron James created in his hometown, Akron, Ohio, in 2018. The show could easily have devolved into celebrity back-patting, but it is insightful and touching. In confronting systemic problems, it also provides a necessary counterbalance to Quibi’s patronizing and at times infuriating “Thanks a Million,” in which celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Kevin Hart and Aaron Rodgers each donate $100,000 to initiate a series of benevolent acts.‘Most Dangerous Game’Watch it here.Liam Hemsworth’s character in this series, Dodge, is in debt and terminally ill, and his wife is pregnant. Volunteering to raise money by becoming the target in a human hunt suddenly becomes a valid life choice. Yes, this is yet another variation on the enduring “human-hunting” concept. Yes, the serialized movie squanders four installments to finally get Dodge on the run. And yes, Hemsworth’s acting barely squeaks above bare minimum (though it’s fun to watch Christoph Waltz run circles around him in their scenes together). But I kept coming back for more, so mission accomplished.‘NightGowns’Watch it here.The “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour provides the soul behind “NightGowns” — both the live revue of that name and this series tracking the backstage action. Velour ventures onto the fantastical side of drag, making imaginative use of projections and costumes, and she encourages the other participants, who include Sasha Colby, Vander Von Odd and the drag king K. James as they develop their performances. The series documents the often obscure inspiration behind the acts, like the 1920s drag aerialist Barbette, and the work required to pull them off. But beyond the art, the series also documents community building. This is among the most life-affirming shows you could find on any platform.‘Run This City’Watch it here.As soon as we meet the cocky, smarmy Jasiel Correia II in this documentary series, we start rooting for his demise. He’s just that kind of guy. In 2015, Correia was elected mayor of Fall River, Mass., at the ripe age of 23. A few years later, he was indicted on charges of fraud and extortion. Executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, the show follows Correia’s rise and fall like a slo-mo car crash. It is both sobering and infuriating.‘Shape of Pasta’Watch it here.Foodie travelogues are popular because they hit two aspirational sweet spots at once: eating and scenery. Here, the California chef Evan Funke, who looks like a soft-spoken extra from “Sons of Anarchy,” investigates obscure pasta shapes in various Italian villages. Each episode is dedicated to a different type, with Funke consulting local nonnas. The best part, besides watching pasta being made and then eaten, is how preposterously serious Funke is about it all: “Her pinkies are just on the outside, holding in the edges,” he observes, or: “More pressure? It’s a little awkward.” You don’t say.‘Survive’Watch it here.Nominally, the star attraction in this movie is Sophie Turner, who played Sansa on “Game of Thrones.” But the real draw is the effortlessly charismatic Corey Hawkins, from the short-lived “24: Legacy” spinoff. They are the only two who survive their plane’s crash, and they must make their way back to civilization — if they’re lucky, without resorting to cannibalism. Underneath its glossy exterior, “Survive” is a cheap and efficient B movie, just the way we like ’em.‘When the Streetlights Go On’Watch it here.This crime thriller could have felt like reheated leftovers, having been in the works for years. But it’s not bad at all. Set in the summer of 1995 — cue nostalgia for those happy post-grunge days — the show revolves around the killing of queen-bee Chrissy (Kristine Froseth) and her English teacher-slash-completely inappropriate lover, Mr. Carpenter (Mark Duplass). At times, “Streetlights” strives for a “Blue Velvet” vibe about a small town’s dark underbelly, but it completely lacks that film’s perversity. Still, it’s worth a look because of its ace ensemble, which also includes Queen Latifah, Tony Hale and Chosen Jacobs. More

The drama “Tigertail,” directed by Alan Yang, an Emmy-winning writer known for TV hits like “Master of None” and “The Good Place,” arrives on Netflix this weekend at an unfortunate time.Based on Yang’s own family story, the film follows Pin-Jui (played by Tzi Ma), a Taiwanese man who leaves his girlfriend to immigrate to New York in pursuit of prosperity. The film is told in flashback as Pin-Jui, divorced with two grown children, reflects on his journey. It was supposed to have a simultaneous theatrical release that was canceled amid the coronavirus pandemic.In an interview, Yang talked about his own family’s immigrant experience and releasing a film about it during a time of widespread xenophobia and racism toward Asian-Americans. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.[embedded content]To what extent is this film an autobiographical story?It’s very personal. It’s inspired by my family and especially my dad’s story. But I left enough room for imagination. There’s a lot in the movie that I made up and filled in the gaps and tried to make it into a compelling and emotional cinematic experience. Not just listing the beats of what happened to my dad — that’s not how you generally make an entertaining movie.You clearly had to talk to your father about his immigration story to come up with this script. What was that like for you, getting him to open up?It’s a pretty common experience for Asian parents to be on the quiet side and be reserved and be taciturn. And it’s alluded to in the movie. I think it’s a cultural thing in some ways, as well as a generational thing.For me, making the movie brought me closer to my parents, quite frankly. We haven’t always had the most open relationship. And I think part of that is because of their upbringing and the way they raised me as well. Asking them questions about the movie was a great way to actually learn more about them.I ended up taking a trip to Taiwan with my dad. And that was so inspirational and influential in the movie. Very much like Angela, the daughter in the movie, I hadn’t gone back to Taiwan since I was 7. Just the look on his face and seeing how he interacted with people and the way he spoke Taiwanese with cabdrivers — it just really crystallized what the movie could mean in my eyes.The movie focuses on Pin-Jui’s relationship with Angela. It alludes to a son, who never makes an appearance. Why did you scrub yourself out of the picture?Well, in some ways, Angela (played by Christine Ko) is a proxy for both me and my sister. There are a couple reasons to make the character a daughter. In some ways the movie is about Pin-Jui and his relationships with the four most important women in his life: his mom, the woman he loved, the woman he married and, finally, his daughter.I also wanted to lightly allude to the fact that not just in Asian-American families, but in many families, I think the daughter often has a more difficult time. There’s many cases of the son being the golden child and he can do no wrong. So I thought it was a little bit more realistic and a little bit more interesting to have it be a father-daughter relationship.From “Master of None” to “The Good Place,” your past works have generally been comedies. “Tigertail” isn’t funny. Why take on a serious tone for your directorial debut?Quite honestly, it was just the story I was most excited about. So I started thinking about this story, these characters. And it became clear pretty early on that this would be a drama, the sort of restrained drama I had seen in Taiwanese films like “Yi Yi” [by Edward Yang] and “A City of Sadness” [from Hou Hsiao-hsien]. That sort of measured drama without melodrama, being able to express a broad range of emotions without resorting to sentimentality. I guess you could see it as a pivot, but it wasn’t a conscious one in my mind.What were some of your other influences? I saw hints of Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love.”There was definitely, as I mentioned, an Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien influence. But yes, there’s absolutely a Wong Kar-wai influence in those flashback scenes in Taiwan, right down to the wardrobe.One of my favorite aspects of the movie is that I tried to take all of these influences and use these techniques that I had seen in these classic Asian films and apply them to an Asian-American story. In a way, it’s using classic techniques to tell a modern story that I hadn’t seen before.What’s the role of language in the film?It might be the only movie with Taiwanese, Mandarin and English, all in about equal portions. Language really is sort of built into the theme. The older generations — people my grandma’s age — speak Taiwanese. Generally people my dad’s age speak Mandarin and Taiwanese, and obviously people my age who were born in America speak English.So we have scenes where the grandma is speaking to the dad in Taiwanese and he’s speaking Mandarin back to her. Oftentimes in my household, my parents would speak to me in Mandarin, and I would speak back to them in English. So that to me is in some ways emblematic of, frankly, our inability to communicate with each other.I know it’s a very on-the-nose metaphor, but that’s kind of what the movie’s about. There are barriers to our communication, and oftentimes we’re not able to express exactly how we feel. Part of that quite simply is verbal.These are particularly strange times for Asian-Americans, who have been targets of hate crimes. How do you feel about the timing of your movie release?It’s a weird and very disappointing time. Maybe I’m incredibly naïve, but I kind of thought in 2020 we were somewhat past overt racism in the streets. It’s obviously still out there.I can’t say that I have the solution, but I hope that the movie can be some small source of comfort and it can give people 90 minutes of something to watch that they can connect to and be entertained by. I hope the Asian-American community embraces it because it’s very much a love letter, not just to my own family, but to every family that’s gone through this experience.So it’s certainly a difficult time, but I think in a sadly ironic way, it might be a perfect time for the movie. More

LONDON — It may seem unlikely that a country known for being buttoned-up would turn to a man dancing in a multicolored unitard for reassurance and inspiration. Yet each morning recently, about 1.6 million people in Britain have been tuning in to watch Mr. Motivator, real name Derrick Evans, on a BBC program called “Healthcheck U.K. Live.”Mr. Motivator, who gained fame here in the 1990s encouraging people to flex and thrust with him on morning television, is a part of the BBC’s current efforts to cater to a population under lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic.This is what the BBC is designed to do, said Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s head of content. In a time of need, the public broadcaster is doing everything it can to cater to and unite the population, she said. In recent weeks, this has taken shape as a new slate of programming that offers escapism and education — and workouts, too.Viewers are turning to the institution, nicknamed “Auntie” for its staid and reliable reputation, for support and entertainment. The BBC said its viewer numbers in the last three weeks were 24 percent higher than the year before, and it had increased its share of overall viewers. More than a third of television viewing in Britain in the last three weeks was on BBC platforms, according to Enders Analysis, a research firm.Its role helping the population grapple with a world muted by the pandemic has started to pacify the BBC’s critics — a reversal in fortune when the public broadcaster started the year defending itself against attacks from both sides of the political divide and facing serious questions from Boris Johnson’s government about the future of its funding.Although audiences might be joining him for some squats, the current popularity of Mr. Motivator is more akin to “comfort food,” said Richard Broughton, the research director at Ampere Analysis, a media research firm. More

What’s StreamingTHE GOOD FIGHT Stream on CBS All Access. “Who’s president?” Diane Lockhart, the high-powered lawyer played by Christine Baranski, asks at the start of the new season of this legal drama. The response may surprise you, as it does her: Hillary Clinton. The former first lady has been head of state for three years, and everybody but Diane knows it. “Diane, are you micro-dosing again?” asks Marissa Gold (Sarah Steele). So begins a surreal Season 4 premiere, in which Diane wakes up in this new alternate reality, which she adjusts to gratefully. Followers of the show, a spinoff of “The Good Wife,” will know that the alternate political landscape is a dream for Diane — the show began with her numbed by the inauguration of Donald Trump — but it turns out that this other reality isn’t as rosy as she might have imagined.LES MISÉRABLES (2019) Stream on Amazon. Montfermeil, a commune near Paris that Victor Hugo used as a setting for his novel “Les Misérables,” is the main backdrop of this drama, set in contemporary France. The movie, from the filmmaker Ladj Ly, centers on tension between police and residents in Montfermeil. At its core is a trio of cops sent to retrieve a lion cub stolen from a traveling circus by a local teen. Their violent handling of the assignment leads to a popular uproar. In his review for The New York Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that Ly “shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.”What’s on TVSWORD OF TRUST (2019) 8:30 p.m. on Showtime. Two women walk into a pawnshop to hawk a Civil War-era sword. Marc Maron is behind the counter. That’s the setup of this most recent feature from the filmmaker Lynn Shelton. In it, Maron plays a sarcastic Alabama pawnshop owner who teams up with the women (played by Jillian Bell and Michaela Watkins) and his younger assistant (Jon Bass) to find a buyer for the sword, which turns out to be highly valuable to online conspiracy theorists. “The humor has a persistent goofy streak, but what sticks to the ribs is the poignant stuff,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times in 2019. “Maron’s long monologue explaining how his character came to own the pawnshop is not only one of the best pieces of acting he’s done, but it’s a performance highlight of the year.”GOLDFINGER (1964) 8:30 p.m. on BBC America. The death of Honor Blackman, an English actress, was announced on Monday. See her lead a team of pilots and judo-flip Sean Connery in this James Bond blockbuster, based on Ian Fleming’s novel of the same name. BBC America is showing it after Connery’s first two Bond films, “Dr. No” (1963) and “From Russia With Love” (1964), which air at 3:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. For some non-Bond Fleming, see “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968), a musical adaptation of Fleming’s children’s book, airing on TCM at 11:45 p.m. More