Winona’s trip back to the 1980s
Stranger Things 2 19 episodes, available Friday
IT seems strange to think it has only been a year since Stranger Things arrived with almost no fanfare — and then, within days of Netflix releasing the first season online, became one of 2016’s most talked-about series, more popular even than behemoths like Making A Murderer. Created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, the first season of the sci-fi/horror series paid homage to Stephen King novels and 1980s classic Steven Spielberg and horror genre films, while telling a story about super-powered paranormal beings, secret government agencies, small-town American kids and a dark dimension known as “the Upside Down”. Even more than the nostalgia buzz, the series won viewers over with its many tantalising mysteries — not all of which were explained by the end of the initial eight episodes. The creators of the show have heralded these coming episodes as a sequel rather than a mere second series — and the trailer hints that the nostalgia will be amped up; the action kicks off at Halloween 1984 which gives them plenty of horror and cultural material to work with and, of course, while the young actors are the real stars here, we also see the return of one of the original 1980s teen queens: Winona Ryder.
Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold (2017)
Available Tuesday THERE can be no doubt Joan Didion was one of the more compelling figures of New Journalism and 1960s American counterculture and her deft, dry prose and what Vogue called “cool bitch chic” made her a legend of the 1970s literary scene in LA.
There might be an argument then for first going back and re-reading some of her work, but this documentary — a hagiographic portrait of the writer by her nephew, actor Griffin Dunne — feels slightly unnecessary.
The first reason for that would be that Dideon was herself a fearless and omnivorous documentarian of her own life; The Year Of Magical Thinking evokes her grief at the loss of her husband, for instance, far better than Griffin’s mawkish scenes on the subject. There is also a sense that there is an over reliance on stock footage here — but things are rather saved by interviews with Didion herself, now spindly with age but still cool-eyed and imperious and able to summon more insight in one laconic quip than Griffin does with all his own artistry.
Wanted, Seasons 1 and 2 12 episodes, available Tuesday
THIS is kind of like Cagney & Lacey, with bits of Taken with Liam Neeson and a dash of Thelma & Louise. It was a massive hit a few years ago in Australia, where it is set, and revolved around two ordinary women (Geraldine Hakewill and Rebecca Gibney) a supermarket employee and an office worker — who find themselves fighting a criminal enterprise.
It’s as violent at times as a Quentin Tarantino film but has nonetheless earned warm praise from the likes of The Guardian for installing such believable female heroines into a ‘gender blind’ script. At times the dialogue can feel a little cheesy and some viewers might baulk at the body count but if you like an action series with warmth, this might be worth a punt.
6 Days (2017)
Available now BEN Affleck has made the wrong kind of headlines recently but there can be no doubt his movie, Argo, effectively demonstrated that films based on real-life events can be every bit as tensely unpredictable and thoroughly entertaining as their entirely fictional counterparts. Only intermittently does 6 Days, a re-creation of the events surrounding the 1980 hostage-taking attack on London’s Iranian Embassy come close to Argo’s intrigue. On March 30 of that year, as the siege of the US Embassy in Tehran was closing in on its sixth month, heavily armed Iranian Arab gunmen stormed the Iranian Embassy in South Kensington and threatened to begin systematically killing all 26 hostages if their demands weren’t met. Screenwriter Glenn Standring portrays the ensuing standoff from the point of view of three main characters — hostage negotiator (Mark Strong), who is steeped in tactics, TV reporter (Abbie Cornish) and an SAS guy (Jamie Bell) ready to eventually lay siege to the building. The actors can’t be faulted but correct pacing is needed for viewers to really feel the tension.