Is this the final hurrah for Kimmy?
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Season 4 Available from Friday
ONE of Netflix’s longest-running comedies, the story of a young woman (Ellie Kemper) rebuilding her life after 15 years underground as the prisoner of a cult leader has been rich with whimsical silliness from the beginning.
As Kimmy’s world has become bigger, the characters who surround her have only become stranger over the seasons. Season 4 begins right where Season 3 ended, with Kimmy getting a job at a tech start-up following her expulsion from her Ivy League university. Like every season, the show has its eye on world events, but while there were reports that the #MeToo movement would dominate the action, it’s more subtly written in than you might expect.
However, as winsome as this show remains, it’s starting to show its age. When this originally premiered, it was celebrated as an empathetic portrait of recovering from trauma that also still managed to find room for the funny. In 2018, that journey has started to feel played out
My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman: Howard Stern Available from Saturday
IN a clip from this interview, radio host Howard Stern remembers his many interactions with Donald Trump before he became president. In particular, he recalls Trump’s unsettling way of rating the appearance of his daughter, Ivanka, whom he rated far higher than Angelina Jolie among the “great beauties” of the world.
On one occasion, Stern said, he asked Trump for his personal list of the “great beauties” in the world. With a straight face, Stern said, Trump replied, “First of all, the great beauties are not actresses… Anyone who works in the entertainment industry, really, I’ve only seen 6s and 7s.” Stern came back with his opinion that Angelina Jolie should be at the top of any such list. “Seven,” Trump scoffed. “Really, why?” Stern responded. “You know who’s a great beauty? My daughter, Ivanka. Now she’s a 10!” Expect this and more great stuff from these two personalities — Stern and Letterman — who in some ways are like oil and water.
Tig Notaro: Happy To Be Here Available now
TIG Notaro first came to our attention as one of the writers and performers on Amy Schumer’s acclaimed and brilliant Comedy Central series. The skits that involved her were based largely around her cancer.
Now, in the last year she’s had two different documentaries come out. Showtime in the US aired the first of these, called Knock Knock, It’s Tig, which followed Notaro around the country as she did house concerts for groups of people in small-town backwaters and even a cornfield.
She followed up with a sometimes mawkish documentary about her cancer. And here she opens up about marriage, motherhood, and her newfound fame with an outlook bereft of any of the cynicism that one might expect of her. Tig has repackaged her past’s trauma into a tightly written, silly, and self-confident set about her lovely present. She’s literally happy to be here.
The Revenant (2015) Available now
DIRECTOR Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to his Oscar winner Birdman is another astonishing piece of filmmaking, moving from the tumult of Broadway to the untamed wilderness of 1820s America. An epic true story of revenge and redemption, it stars a shaggy Leonardo DiCaprio as frontiersman Hugh Glass, who’s mauled by a grizzly bear — a scene breathtaking in its savagery — while scouting on a fur-trapping expedition along the Missouri River.
Mutilated but alive, he’s then left for dead by treacherous trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, giving another performance of handsome menace), which spurs him on a gruelling 200-mile trek to take retribution. DiCaprio bares his soul in an Oscar-winning performance of agonising honesty and intense emotion. This is majestic cinema and a technical tour de force.