‘Invincible,’ Twyla Tharp hit the screen
Are you ready for “Invincible”? Streaming on Amazon Prime, the cartoon series is based on a character created by Robert Kirkman. On one level, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) is just your ordinary moody teen. He’s bullied in the corridors, makes dumb small talk with his friend and seems powerless around girls.
But his real hang-up is that his dad, Nolan (J.K. Simmons), is Omni-Man, the most powerful in a pantheon of heroic guardians forever solving crimes and protecting civilization from evil. Well past puberty, but not quite a man, Mark worries that his superpowers might never kick in. Until they do.
Sandra Oh provides the voice of his strenuously normal mother, Debbie. The cast includes dozens of voices, including those of Seth Rogen, Mark Hamill and Zachary Quinto.
The two-dimensional animation seems almost purposefully retro and unremarkable, recalling the old “Fantastic Four” Saturday morning series from the 1960s. Only that show unfolded in short bursts, appropriate to its young, sugar-saturated audience. The pilot episode of “Invincible” runs 47 minutes long.
Far from the hyper-violent fun of vintage cartoons, it bogs down in the melodrama of adolescence and mother/son bonding.
Everybody got misty watching Clark leave Mom back in Smallville in the 1978 “Superman,” but his origin story was dispensed with rather quickly. In their efforts to indulge a Comic-Con besotted culture, the makers of “Invincible” seem to have forsaken the real superpowers available to storytellers: editing, brevity and faith in your audience’s perception and intelligence.
› The “American Masters” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) documentary “Twyla Moves” profiles prolific modern dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, whose work ranges from the downtown New York underground to performances scored by the Beach Boys, David Byrne, Frank Sinatra and Billy Joel and work on director Milos Forman’s 1979 adaptation of “Hair.”
The film bounces back and forth among a 2020 effort to present a collaborative dance piece via Zoom and ancient videotapes of the loft art scene of the 1960s and flashbacks to her unlikely pairing with Russian ballet master and political defector Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Accompanying the final credits is a scrolling list of Tharp’s many creations presented over five decades. There’s so much content, it reads like an old K-tel record commercial. Far too much to assess in a short documentary.
This “Masters” allows for no dissenting voices, unless you count her son (now an assistant), who felt overshadowed by her busy schedule. Or Tharp herself, who can always find imperfections. Choreographers are used to total control.
› The free streaming service All Arts presents a 10-film festival: “Afrofuturism: Blackness Revisualized.” Ranging from feature-length documentaries to short films, the series explores an exciting genre of fiction and art drawing on African culture and myth as well as science fiction and speculative fantasy.