The Morning Show - TV Review

Starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carell, Billy Crudup, Mark Duplass, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nestor Carbonell, Karen Pittman, Bel Powley, Desean Terry and Jack Davenport.

An interesting timely approach. In the wake of Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, this examines what it's like for a Today-like morning program that has to deal with the fallout when their main male anchor (Steve Carell) is fired for sexual misconduct. Jennifer Aniston plays the head female anchor who was barely holding it together when the scandal broke, and Reese Witherspoon is a small-town reporter who has one of her stories go viral and gets an opportunity to join the show. Made me think of what it was like for Savannah Guthrie, Gayle King, Norah O'Donnell, etc. 

Fantastic cast, with Billy Crudup the Emmy-winning stand-out as the network executive who seems to like the chaos and may or may not want Aniston to fail so he can fire her and get a clean slate of leads on the show. 

The genius of casting Carell for this part is that he has this lovable persona and he's famously one of the nicest off-camera guys around. So to see him as this character be accused of these things, it makes the viewers secretly deep down hope some of these accusations are false.

The pace of the season is expert. When I take it as a whole, you can see the creators had a grand idea from beginning to end how this was going to go. Some actors in there seem like they don't have a lot to do and then the episode comes where we see just how important their role is in the grand scheme of things.

I'm very interested to see where Season 2 goes from here. With COVID, production was delayed and the season was rewritten to incorporate that into the show, but it should be out before the end of 2021. It's on AppleTV.

Alien Covenant - Movie Review

Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Egojo, Amy Siemetz, Jussie Smollett and Callie Hernandez.
Written by John Logan & Dante Harper.
Directed by Ridley Scott.

★★★

This is a sequel to Prometheus, while still being a prequel to Alien, and while the familiar xenomorph does show up, along with the face-grabber, this is still more in the vein of Prometheus.

At the end of that movie, the survivors Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and David (Michael Fassbender) set out to find the home planet of the Creators, the large white creatures that apparently designed the aliens. We eventually learn their fate in this movie.

Meanwhile a colonalization crew aboard the Covenant is headed for a new planet to colonize, but they receive what may be a distress signal from a different, habitable planet that they were unaware of. The captain dies in his hibernation pod due to malfunction, and the second-in-command Oram (Billy Crudup) doesn't seem to be up to the job. Daniels (Katherine Waterston) is his backup, and she happens to be the wife of the now-dead captain. This crew of 14 decides to explore the new planet, and if they like it, they may use it to settle as their new home instead.

And on that planet, they meet David.

Now the Prometheus crew has their own synthetic with them named Walter. Fassbender plays both, and he does a great job of making them two complete characters. We can always tell who's who when David cuts his hair to match Walter's. (Which seems a little weird that no one questions it.)

It features some pretty gory deaths once the action kicks in, aliens bursting out of people's chests, backs, and mouths, and then when the main alien grows to its usual height, more people die in body-shredding ways. This movie filled in some holes that Prometheus left, and it's still very open for another film, which director Ridley Scott plans to be the final bridge between these prequels and 1979's Alien.

My biggest problem with this is the giant fluxuations in continuity, as far as how quickly these aliens incubate and grow. Remember when John Hurt had that thing on his face for 24 hours before it let go, and it took a few more hours before something burst out of his chest? This one has a face-grab to chest-burst in about one hour. And I can't say it was that scary. It's monster-movie fun, with a Hammer horror flavor to David, but the first two movies may never be topped.