San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
TV moms have superhuman power, too
Instead of braving the crowds for mimosas and brunch specials this Mother’s Day, maybe ask your mom over to watch some great momcentric shows streaming now on Netflix and Disney+ where the matriarchs handle — with grace and often humor — extraordinary circumstances.
Nicole Warren, ‘Raising Dion’
It’s tough to be a single mom, especially when your son has superpowers.
Nicole Warren (Alisha Wainwright) is jobless when her husband dies, leaving her to raise their son Dion ( Ja’Siah Young) alone. When Dion begins manifesting magical abilities, exploitative forces swoop in to try to use him. Wainwright is marvelous as Nicole, always mixing an understandable degree of maternal anxiety with strength and tenderness.
By the end of the first season, Nicole is almost as much of a superhero as her son, a role she grows into even more in the second season. Few superhero stories truly show the support necessary for the people who love them to exist in their world, but “Raising Dion” manages it with love and care.
Watch it: Streaming on Netflix.
Camila Noceda, ‘The Owl House’
If you have LGBT children, odds are they are stomping around the house mad that “The Owl House” got canceled. It’s a shame because the series was truly great about both LGBT representation and its depiction of loving parents.
Camila Noceda (Elizabeth Grullon) is the mother of protagonist Luz (Sarah-Nicole Robles), a hyperactive teenager who trains to be a witch after
stumbling into a realm full of magic. Camila is loving and fiercely protective, and she backs up the latter trait with a baseball bat. More than anything, she strives to understand her quirky daughter, changing course the second she realizes staying in the human world could do damage to Luz.
Watch it: Streaming on Disney+.
Muneeba Khan, ‘Ms. Marvel’
Over on the Marvel side of the superhero world, we get Muneeba Khan (Zenobia Shroff ). After her Avengersobsessed daughter Kamala (Iman Vellani) finds a family heirloom that gives her powers, Muneeba is initially hesitant to support her. The family already faces discrimination for being Pakistani Muslims in New Jersey, and she worries that Kamala will be in danger as the
government begins cracking down on meta-human activities.
But as stern as she might be, she treats Kamala with love and respect. Once she finally accepts that the new Ms. Marvel
is here to stay, she whips up one of the best superhero costumes in the entire MCU.
Look for Mama Khan to reappear in the upcoming film “The Marvels” this summer.
Watch it: Streaming on
Disney+.
Hilda Spellman, ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’
Not all moms are birth mothers, and no one proves that more than Hilda Spellman (Lucy Davis). She and her sister Zelda (Miranda Otto) take in their niece Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) after she loses her parents. While definitely a witch, Hilda leans toward the cottagecore side of the dark arts, and can usually be found in her garden or kitchen.
That doesn’t mean she’s someone to be trifled with. There’s a chilling scene in which she blatantly poisons someone who threatens Sabrina, an act the antagonist doesn’t see coming because of Hilda’s soft, shy personality. She is always on hand to comfort her niece through the strange things that happen over the course of the show, and a perfect example that anyone who properly cares for a child can stand in as a mom.
Watch it: Streaming on Netflix.
Joyce Byers, ‘Stranger Things’
There are good moms. There are great moms. And then there is Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder).
Over four seasons, Joyce has braved everything from other dimensions to Soviet Russia to help her family. This responsibility involves a surprising amount of kooky craft projects. While not the easiest mom to live with, thanks to a somewhat intense personality, there’s no doubt that she has her kids’ backs. Even when things are darkest (and things do get very dark in Hawkins, Ind.), Joyce has the hope and strength to keep things going.
Watch it: Streaming on
Dear Mick: I usually go to Rotten Tomatoes to learn if a movie is any good. And I give more credence to what the critics say than the viewers. Is that a reliable way to evaluate movie quality?
Robert Wolfson, Tiburon Dear Robert: Rotten Tomatoes is a great way to get a consensus of critical opinion in a matter of seconds. Of course, a consensus gives equal weight to wrong opinions and right opinions, so averaging doesn’t always work, especially with a widely misunderstood masterpiece like “Vox Lux,” which received 37% from the audience and was rated 62% on the Tomatometer.
Yet, the movie and TV review-aggregation site often works well enough.
The alternative is to read a lot of movie reviews. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll get to the point where you’ll develop a sixth sense, where you can read one review and know if you’d like something, even if the critic hated it.
Dear Mr. LaSalle: Why in this world would anyone care about John Lennon’s temporary breakup with Yoko Ono? You’ve wasted an entire page on a story that barely merits a footnote to a footnote.
Michael Biehl, San Francisco
Dear Mr. Biehl: If you identify what you’re referring to as the footnote in your analogy — and the footnote to the footnote — I think you’ll realize that what you’re saying isn’t right.
We’re talking about John Lennon here, one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century, and what you’re calling a footnote is the 18-month period he spent separated from Yoko Ono. Lennon’s entire American career lasted only 17 years, minus the five years he spent in semi-retirement from mid-1975 to mid-1980. So those 18 months represent about 13% of Lennon’s entire productive life and 25% of his solo career. Is a sizable portion of a great artist’s creative life insignificant?
As for the footnote to the footnote, I assume you’re referring to his girlfriend May Pang, who lived with him and is now the best informed living witness to that whole time. Pang is telling the truth about a period that was mischaracterized and discounted for years. I don’t think that’s nothing, unless you believe that writing about the arts in general is inconsequential. That’s a case that could be made, but I wouldn’t make it. I doubt you would, either.
Dear Major Mick: What puts a comedy into the category of farce, and would you name a few films that fit into this particular genre?
Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma Dear Major Robert: In farce, the humor is broad and often callous. In a straight comedy, the characters usually know that they’re funny.
In farce, they never know they’re funny. In farce, we’re invited to look at people and events from the outside, as though they were absurd. There’s little sympathizing or identifying with characters. Rather, we’re invited to see them as part of a ridiculous spectacle, with the implication being that what we’re seeing has broader implications, that life is ridiculous or absurd.
A lot of people don’t like farce, either because they don’t like the essential heartlessness of it, or they’re confused by it. But it’s one of my favorite genres, and one of the two — along with opera — that best replicates the experience of how we respond to the world internally.
Basically, opera expresses how you feel when something happens to you, and farce expresses how you feel when something happens to a stranger. (For instance, if you fall through an open manhole, it’s a tragedy. But if someone else does, it’s slapstick.) Good examples of farce in film are “Duck Soup,” “The Producers,” “Little Murders,” “Sleeper,” “Love and Death,” the 1970s “Pink Panther” movies, “This is Spinal Tap,” “Ruthless People,” “Old School” and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.”
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.