ARE THEY ANY GOOD?
From a J-Lo tear-jerker to a dark thriller starring Bond villain Christoph Waltz ...
50 STATES OF FRIGHT First of 14 ★★★✩✩
An AnThoLoGy of scary stories apparently inspired by urban myths from all over the U.S. The opener comes from Michigan and is the first of a trilogy of episodes called The Golden Arm, in which a lumberjack asks his high-maintenance wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan (from the American version of house of Cards), to help him fell a huge tree.
Unfortunately, it topples in the wrong direction, trapping her right arm. She’s in agony and there’s blood everywhere. The only way of saving her life is for him to grab an axe and, well, you know what.
Evidently this will turn into a horror story, though there’s nothing supernatural about the opening episode — it’s just very messy. It’s slickly done, though, and made me want to see more. The director is Sam Raimi, who made three Spider-Man films for Marvel. Quibi has attracted some proper filmmaking talent.
THANKS A MILLION First of ten ★★✩✩✩
An ALMoST heroically silly and contrived variation on the chain letter, as Jennifer Lopez in a reallife documentary finds ten celebrities each to give $100,000 to a person who has made some kind of difference to their lives.
The proviso is that every lucky recipient must then give half of that money to someone who has in turn helped them, and so on, creating what J-Lo calls ‘a chain of gratitude and kindness’.
So each seven-minute episode starts with the celebrity bestowing their munificence in the form of wads of dollars. It’s a magnificent slab of emotional kitsch, and J-Lo kicks it all off by rewarding a hispanic girl with cerebral palsy and her mum, who came backstage at one of her shows and inspired her with their ‘strength’.
Worth seeing, if only to decide whether you approve. And also to watch for the tiny winces of distress as people are given $100,000, then promptly told they have to part with half of it.
DUMMY
First of ten ★★★✩✩
BILLED on the Quibi website as a ‘raunchy’ and ‘mature’ comedy, this stars Anna Kendrick as Cody, whose boyfriend Dan (Donal Logue) is a much older Emmy-winning screenwriter.
The pair have a lively sex life, but when she finds a suspicious lone sequin on his bed, he confesses he has a private fetish involving a life-size doll.
Cody takes this news in her stride — ‘Is she hotter than me?’ — but when Dan’s snoring wakes her in the night she looks for the doll and finds her in a cupboard.
The doll is definitely a ‘her’ rather than an ‘it’ because she can talk. her name is Barbara. And, like Cody, she’s funny. In due course, the two will become friends. ‘I got news for you, babe,’ says Barbara, ‘we’re all sex dolls until we topple the patriarchy’.
THE STRANGER First episode of 13, ★★★★✩
A GooD Quibi drama must discard certain cinematic conventions. There is no time for scene-setting and The Stranger abides by those new rules.
In the first episode, Uber driver Clare (Maika Monroe) is on her way to pick up a fare. We learn that she’s a Kansas girl, an aspiring writer new to LA.
In the background, The Mamas & The Papas are singing California Dreamin’, and she appears to have landed her own California dream when the friendly passenger (Dane Dehaan) she collects from a mansion in the hollywood hills asks if she’d like to have dinner with him.
no sooner has she agreed than he tells her that it wasn’t his mansion, that he’s just murdered the family who lived there, and that she will suffer the same fate unless she can entertain him with a really great story. yikes!
MOST DANGEROUS GAME First of 13 ★★★★✩
ALL these bite-sized dramas have to cram a lot of story into ten minutes or less, then end on a cliffhanger. Liam hemsworth and Christoph Waltz (Bond baddie Blofeld in Spectre) star in this thriller about a cash-strapped athlete with a terminal illness who is desperate to provide for his pregnant wife and their soonto-be-born son after his death.
This leads Dodge (hemsworth) to ask a shady but suave businessman (Waltz) for a loan. The Waltz character refuses, but says that if the aptly-named Dodge will agree to be the target in a life-or-death hunting game for his rich clients, all his financial needs will be met. A recent film, The hunt, had a similar narrative. But that wasn’t very good. This looks rather better. FLIPPED First of 11 ★★★★★ on ThE basis of the opening episode, this might be the pick of Quibi’s original comedies.
It begins with a misanthropic husband and wife both losing their jobs on the same day. Cricket (Kaitlin olson) is fired by her boss at a DIy store for being rude, while her drama teacher husband Jann (Will Forte) is let go for insisting that the next school musical should be his own creation about a terrible factory fire instead of Guys And Dolls.
Licking their wounds, they see a home-improvement cable channel is looking for hosts. That becomes their goal, but in future episodes they end up entangled with gangsters. Also featuring Andy Garcia and Eva Longoria, Flipped is a proper hoot.