Ricky reconnects with humanity
Take Your Pills (2018) Available Friday
It’s fitting, perhaps, that Netflix would mark the week of Mother’s Day with the release of a film about the new ‘mother’s little helper’. Not Valium, this time, but Adderol and Ritalin, which were once known primarily as “a cure for excitable kids” but have now become the scourge of adults in middle-class America, any place where “the need to succeed” slams into “not enough hours in the day”.
This documentary focuses on the history, the sociology and the pervasiveness of cognitive-enhancement drugs in our “amped-up era of late-stage-capitalism”. At times, as you might suspect, it’s a little bombastic, but it does shed light on an epidemic that sometimes flies under the radar (we’ve heard lots about the opioid epidemic but relatively little about this problem.) It’s also executive-produced by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter Christina and her mother Maria Shriver, who has previously made interesting documentaries on Alzheimer’s and low-wage workers.
Ricky Gervais: Humanity Available Tuesday
For a while there, it did seem as though some people were a little down on Ricky Gervais’s humanity. After he hosted the 2016 Golden Globes, his jibes drew mixed reviews and certainly didn’t go over well with the superstars whom he skewered. Then there was Derek, his series about a mentally disabled man, which again seemed just a little close to the bone. The line between irony and gratuitous offence seemed thinner and thinner for him.
In this, his first stand-up special in nearly a decade, he fully hams up the “I’m really not nice, but you like that about me” aspect of himself, channelling the affected grandiosity of David Brent himself. At one point, he tells the audience to “shut the f **k up” and another time, compares himself to Jesus but says that he is even better because he actually turned up. He also doesn’t know why he called this special Humanity, because he’s not a fan. Where is the real Ricky and where is the persona, is as always, hard to tell but it’s worth wading through the off-notes because, at times, he’s at his funny best here.
Benji (2018) Available Friday
Pop culture trivia: with the exception of the 1990s, every decade since the first appearance of Benji in the 1970s, has seen the release of a movie devoted to the screen’s most adorable puppy.
A modern-day retelling of the classic, this story of Benji follows one orphaned puppy and Carter and Frankie, two mischievous New Orleans schoolkids who strike up a friendship with the tenacious street dog. When danger befalls them and they end up kidnapped by robbers who are in over their heads, Benji and his scruffy sidekick come to the rescue.
How they get a dog to do what looks like facial expressions should possibly remain a mystery but this is good, heartwarming fun for kids. And keeping the generational link, it’s actually produced by the son of the guy who created the original Benji back in the bellbottom days.
Riverdale, Season 2 24 episodes, available weekly on Thursdays
Riverdale — Netflix’s dark retelling of the classic Archie comics — loves to subvert its squeaky-clean origins and that might be part of what has made it such a huge hit for the streaming giant.
Maple syrup is a front for heroin, Miss Grundy is a beautiful 20-something, and the humble all-American town where the whole thing is set is plagued with murder, adultery, and addiction.
And now, in its second season, the perfect, blond Cooper family is corrupted after the arrival back of their eldest son, Chic. In the comics, Chic Cooper and his girl-next-door sister Betty are both wholesome. But the Riverdale version of Betty isn’t so easygoing: she suffers from an unnamed mental illness that manifests as self-harm and sexual sadism.
She’s not the only Cooper kid with a darkness. Older sister Polly has twins with her dead boyfriend — and cousin — Jason Blossom. And now there’s Chic, with his own internal closet full of curiosities, the contents of which are far more nuanced and mysterious than what his siblings or mother could ever guess.