Quick Hit Critiques

Some (hopefully) brief and (hopefully) informative Critical Commentary  to aid you in your viewing and reading pleasure.  I present them to you in alphabetical order.

This new novel opens as follows:

"Someone will die here this morning, at this suburban train station. It will happen in the next five minutes when the 7:06 to London Victoria arrives."

Ilona Bannster then describes five random people on the platform and tells us that it is one of these five who will die: a mother and her unruly child, and old lady, a young man with a gambling problem, and a gruff and quasi-obnoxious businessman.  Between amazingly suspenseful real time descriptions of the events taking place on that train station platform over the course of the next five minutes, Bannister gives us the back story for each of them.   She lets you, the reader, whom she addresses in the second person, decide who you think will be the one to die, how that person will die, and whether or not that person deserves such a fate, or shall it befall one off the others.

It is a most interesting and somewhat unique way to tell a story. I found it to be a really good read and give it Three Grandstander Stars.

"Five Star Weeknd" is an eight part mini-series streaming on Peacock based on a best selling novel by Elin Hilderbrand.  It stars Jennifer Garner as a social media influencer specializing in food, cooking and baking, and the fancy presentations thereof.  In the opening of the first show, we see police arriving at her door to inform her that there has been a terrible accident and that her husband did not survive.  We then flash forward six months, and Garner, still struggling with the grief of this devastating loss, is planning a weekend retreat at her lavish - and  do mean lavish - Nantuckett beach house.  The guests for the weekend will be four women from various stages of her life: her oldest friend who is like a sister to her, a college friend, a woman from the "Moms' group" (yeah Garner has a college age daughter that spices up the mix a bit further), and a woman whom she has never me but with whom she became friends after the she reached out to Garner after her husband's death via Garner's enormous social network of followers.  Each of these four ladies are determined to help Jennifer G. get through her grief spiral, but each of them are also carrying some  burdens of their own as they arrive for the meticulously planned weekend.

Yeah, it's a real soap opera, but  Garner's castmates Chloe Sevigny, D'Arcy Cargen, Regina Hall, and Gemma Chan assure that this is a high quality soap opera.  Each of the eight episodes are about 45 minutes in length so it requires a time commitment, but Linda and I binged it in three sittings.

On a serious note, the story also makes some telling points about how people deal with grief and the interactions of families (Garner and her daughter in this case) as they struggle to come to grips with this unbearable change in their lives.  If you know me, you know why this aspect was of special interest to me.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

When a young woman's mother dies, her two older brothers receive the bulk of her estate (she was fairly wealthy self-made entrepreneur), and she is left with series of DVD's that her mother recorded before she died and a "life list" of things to do that the young woman made when she was only twelve or thirteen.  The DVD's instruct young Alex that she needs to complete this life list within twelve months, and only them will she receive her as-yet-to-be-disclosed inheritance.

Some of the things on the list are silly:  do stand-up comedy, get a tattoo, play one-on-one with a New York Knick.  Some are quite serious: become a good teacher, make peace with your father, find true love.  

Sofia Carson, an actress with whom I was not familiar, was thoroughly charming in the role of Alex, as was Kyle Allen, another unfamiliar, to me anyway, actor as the young lawyer who serves as executor to Mom's will.  The mother was played by Connie Britton, the only actor in the movie that I knew.

The movie was somewhat predictable.  I mean, you knew within the first twenty minutes how the "true love" part was going to resolve itself, but there were enough meaningful parts of the movies that made it well worthwhile, especially the performance of Miss Carson.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

Christopher Nolen's, arguably one of today's most important and influential film directors, "The Odyssey" will no doubt be the biggest movie of the summer of 2026.

It is big.  It is sweeping. It is no doubt a piece of brilliant movie making, and it is based on a classic tale that is over 3,000 years old.

It will also no doubt receive critical acclaim and will probably garner a passel of Oscar nominations.

I give you all of that, and will concede that it is a great piece of film-making.

But it's not a movie for me.  Just couldn't get into the story, and man oh man, is it violent.  Lots of people die in lots of very gruesome ways in this one.

I did like how the story of the Trojan Horse was depicted, though.

It is also 2 hours and 52 minutes long.  In fact, this was me saying good-bye to Linda as I left for then theater last Friday morning:

Two Stars from The Grandstander.

I have been aware for some time that the producers of "The Big Bang Theory" were planning a spin off of that show that would feature the character of Stuart Bloom, the owner of the comic book store, played by Kevin Sussman, as well as the characters of Stuart's girlfriend Denise, Bert the geologist, and physicist Barry Kripke.

Before I go on, allow me to make some observations about the original show.  I come by these because we spend just about every weeknight watching at least one rerun of The Big Bang Theory. (1) While Sheldon Cooper and his eccentricities were the coming hub around which the show revolved, he was also a real jerk.  Even his fellow nerd scientists would never have put-up with his bullshit in real life and they probably would have punched him out early on. (2) Penny and Stuart, and maybe Bernadette, had the funniest lines over the course of the series. (3) Among all of the scientists and geniuses, the smartest person among all of them was Penny.

Okay, back to the spin-off series.  It debuted as a series on HBO Max this week and we watched the first episode last night.  It is a sci-fi story of a post apocalyptic multi-verse that resulted from some experiment conducted by Sheldon, Leonard, and Howard that went horribly awry.  It is now up to Stuart, of all people, to try to set things right and restore order to the world.

We didn't like it.  We will not be watching future episodes, and we were barely able to get through episode one.  If the producers of TBBT wanted to milk some more money out of the cash cow that was the original series, God bless them, that's the American Way, I suppose, but this sure wasn't the way to go about it.

One-half Star, just for the effort, from The Grandstander.