Meh: "Star Trek: Lower Decks" and "An American Pickle"
Craig and I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the cartoon that’s supposed to be the funnier, raunchier, cartoon partner of actual Star Trek, and ultimately it didn’t grab me. I could really feel the effort of all the jokes, and the script required far too much yelling and talking really quickly, as if those two things together make things funny. The writers’ genuine love of Star Trek shines through, but ultimately it seems like the they were struggling to balance that love with the humour a show like this needs. Maybe the quality of the comedy will pick up, but once the first episode was over, neither Craig nor I had any desire to continue. (Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall’s got a more thorough review of Lower Decks, if you want more details.)
Star Trek: Lower Decks is available on CBS All Access in the U.S., and on Crave in Canada.
As well, we watched An American Pickle, a Seth Rogen movie based on a short story by Simon Rich, about an Eastern European immigrant named Herschel (Rogen). who works in a pickle factory at the beginning of the 20th century. He accidentally falls in a vat and is pickled for 100 years, and when he wakes up in 2020, the only family member he has left is his great-grandson Ben (also Rogen), an app developer who happens to be the same age as Herschel. Some of the jokes early on are pretty good, Succession’s Sarah Snook shows up in a much-too-small part, and the film obviously doesn’t take itself too seriously (at times I wondered if Simon Rich just used the story as an excuse to mock Williamsburg for a while). The film ends in a more sentimental way that isn’t badly acted, just an odd tonal shift that I’m not sure is entirely earned. Not terrible, not great! An amusing-enough way to kill 90 minutes, but honestly, I think Simon Rich’s short story is much better. (The New York Times’ A.O. Scott liked it a little more than I did, I think.)
An American Pickle is available on HBO Max in the U.S. and Crave in Canada.
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