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    ‘The Franchise’ Review: Cutting Marvel Down to Size

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    A new HBO comedy takes a jaundiced look at the making of a second-rate superhero film.The new HBO series “The Franchise” satirizes the making of a superhero movie by a fictional movie studio that is Marvel in all but name. (The actual fictional name is Maximum Studios.) Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent, is Marvel’s bitter rival in the superhero field, so you might expect the show to offer an extra measure of savage mockery.But the eight half-hour episodes (premiering Sunday), while nominally dark and sardonic, do not have anything approaching the visceral pleasure that the genre they are spoofing can often provide. “When you make movies like this, but good, there’s nothing better,” the beleaguered first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), says in one of the show’s few moments of genuine feeling.The movie-within-the-show, a second-tier effort called “Tecto,” is clearly not one of the good ones. “The Franchise,” somewhat perversely, operates on the same tepid, clichéd level as the production it is supposed to be mocking.More could have been expected. The show’s creator, Jon Brown, wrote for “Succession” and, way back, for the barbed British comedy “Misfits.” And the list of executive producers includes the accomplished veterans Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci. Mendes directed the first episode, and his touch can be seen in an early three-minute shot that follows Daniel as he walks through the cavernous set of “Tecto,” putting out fires (and encountering many of the other central characters). It is a virtuoso moment that nothing else in the show approaches.Iannucci, of course, is a specialist in the specific sort of satire “The Franchise” undertakes: the acidic depiction of institutional vanity, insecurity and ineptitude. But the vitality of Iannucci creations like “The Thick of It” and “Veep” is exactly what the new show is missing. It has more in common with Iannucci’s most recent show, the scattered outer-space cruise comedy “Avenue 5,” on which Brown worked as a writer and producer. (The sinking-ship metaphor that underlies “The Franchise” was explicit in “Avenue 5.”)“The Franchise” leapfrogs through the 117-day shoot of “Tecto,” named for its hero, an off-brand Thor (Billy Magnussen) who wields an invisible jackhammer. Each episode finds Daniel and the power-hungry third assistant director, Dag (Lolly Adefope), confronting crises drawn from the musty archives of the Hollywood backstage comedy and then tweaked to fit the world of contemporary big-money filmmaking. Bowing to commercial reality means product-placing Chinese tractors; last-minute rewrites are driven by protests over the studio’s “woman problem”; a temperamental director melts down because Martin Scorsese accuses the studio of killing cinema.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Coup!’ Review: Pandemonium in a Pandemic — No, Not That One

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      In this obvious satire set amid the 1918 influenza, a wealthy, muckraking reporter hires a new chef who disrupts the estate’s hierarchy.The cook, a thief, a wife and her lover — in “Coup!,” these familiar players rub shoulders not in an elite eatery, but in a seaside manor.The film, written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, is an energetic satire of pandemic-era bourgeois hypocrisy. Its supposed innovation, though, is to set its quarantine-based rogueries a century before Covid, when another pandemic — the 1918 influenza — spurred familiar waves of business closures, resource shortages and desperate fears of contagion.It is amid these disasters that we meet the liberal journalist Jay (Billy Magnussen), his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), and their two children. The family is sheltering from the disease on their island estate, where domestic personnel tend to the cooking, cleaning and nannying. The help treasure their siloed haven, until Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), a new chef from the mainland, suggests that the staff deserve better working conditions.The movie seeks to pit Jay — a narcissist pretending to report from the ravaged mainland while being cosseted by staff — against Monk, a blue-collar worker. “Coup!” exaggerates the men’s difference by making Monk a swashbuckler (his dangly earrings evoke Captain Jack Sparrow) and Jay a pacifist, vegetarian and out-and-out drip.As Monk lifts the veil enshrouding the estate’s hierarchy, he also emasculates Jay in the eyes of the household. This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.Coup!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Review: In ‘Made for Love,’ She Can’t Get Him Out of Her Head

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      In this techno-satire, a woman tagged with a chip by her mogul husband tries to break the (block)chains of love.Cristin Milioti has claimed a curiously specific character niche: woman escaping from twisted sci-fi trap. In the “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister,” she was programmed into a simulation by her creepy boss. In last year’s “Palm Springs,” she and Andy Samberg puzzled out how to break free of a time loop that stuck them in a vicious “Groundhog Day” rom-com cycle.In “Made for Love,” a light-handed and dark-minded comedy of technology, control and gaslighting whose first three episodes arrive Thursday on HBO Max, the snare is all in her head.As in physically. As in implanted. As in a microchip.Hazel Green (Milioti) received this unwanted hardware upgrade from her husband, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who runs a world-dominating tech company. (Feel free to play around with the first vowel sound in “Gogol.”) For 10 years, they’ve lived in a gilded cage — or rather a gilded cube, a virtual-reality environment called the Hub, secluded from the messy outside world, with eternally perfect weather and a dolphin sporting in the swimming pool.And for 10 years, Byron has grown more devoted. Too devoted. “Have your wife review her biometrically recorded orgasms to better optimize them” devoted. Finally, he decides that he loves her — and his technology — so deeply that he and she will become “Users One” of his new product, Made for Love, which makes couples into two-person neural networks, their brains digitally connected. No more secrets, no more miscommunication, no more private thoughts.Who the hell would want that? you might ask, a question “Made for Love” raises but doesn’t entirely answer. For the purposes of the story, what’s important is that Byron wants it and Hazel emphatically does not. This impels her to fly the cube, a madcap and violent escape with Byron watching from behind her eyeballs. (Turns out he implanted only her chip, not his: “I had to read your diary first to know if I could let you read mine.”)Based on the novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting, a writer and producer on the series, “Made for Love” plays out as a screwball action satire, which likely makes its chilling premise — patriarchy and techno-utopianism as two sides of the same chip — go down easier than it would as a straight drama. (Christina Lee of the mordant “Search Party” is the showrunner; other producers include Patrick Somerville of Netflix’s “Maniac,” with which this shares a skeevy-dystopian vibe.)The metaphors are never far under the surface here, like Byron and Hazel’s double-finger wedding bands, reminiscent of tiny handcuffs. And when Hazel seeks help from her widowed father, Herb (Ray Romano), she finds him having taken up a committed partnership with a sex doll — sorry, “synthetic partner” — named Diane. Their one-way relationship is an echo of what Byron is trying to make Hazel into, a wife machine, but it’s also oddly tender and respectful.“Made for Love” is hardly subtle, and its cautionary tech tale has been told repeatedly in “Black Mirror” and elsewhere. But it’s playful and funny and almost momentum-driven enough to get away with hand-waving away its many implausibilities. Among those is the question of why Hazel, presented as a wily, resourceful skeptic, would have been swept off her feet by Byron, who from their first meeting throws up enough red flags for a giant slalom course.The casting helps put this over. Milioti, with her charm and anime eyes, is an almost too-perfect rom-com-lead type. (She broke out on TV as the title figure in “How I Met Your Mother.”) But she smartly plays against that type in stories that subvert expectations. Her Hazel is cunning, feral and sardonic on the lam; in flashbacks to her married life in the Hub, you can almost hear her scream behind her 10,000-watt smile.Romano, meanwhile, may be one of the few actors you could introduce in bed with a humanoid sex toy, whom he dresses in his dead wife’s clothing, yet have your viewer think, “You know, this seems like a complicated guy who’s been through a few rough patches.”And Magnussen, given the broadest of the central roles, pushes Byron’s zealotry past tilt. Inept at most human relationships, Byron has funneled all his emotional capacity into Hazel, out of both passion and the gamifying impulse to get the all-time high score on his marriage. He’s the epitome of both the obsessive Wife Guy and the hubristic Tech Guy, and he makes plain the connection between the two types.He’s also pitiable, insofar as a billionaire with godlike powers can be. “I am the only person who actually loves you!” he pleads to Hazel. “Objectively!”But it’s Milioti who gives the season’s first half (I’ve seen four episodes of eight) its adrenaline. “Made for Love” is a loopy jolt to the cortex that demands a high tolerance for absurdity. What grounds it is Hazel’s journey from kept woman to action hero, determined not to be a character in somebody else’s love story. More