The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Midwife’ relevant; ‘Loop’ drags
Ode to TV during the pandemic shutdown, mostly stolen from Elizabeth Browning:
⏩ There are timely previews this pandemicera weekend. To continue the British theme, there’s the ninth-season premiere of “Call the Midwife” on PBS Sunday, March 29, at 8 p.m., which includes an echo from the past relevant to the present.
This is a show that many male viewers will (judging by what guys talk about) eschew, with its scenes of pregnancy, women’s health and emotional stories about earnest midwives in 1960s Britain.
But we’re TV Anglophiles, and despite the scenes of water breaking and childbirth, there’s something about this show that draws you in every time. It’s earnest, for one, and thought-provoking.
In the opener, the medics and midwives of Nonnatus House are dealing with an abandoned baby and a fresh set of problems (also sadness, as Winston Churchill has just died). An old enemy returns to town when cases of diphtheria resurface in children. There is a search for contacts of a child who has contracted the disease, with a mention of vaccination and booster shots.
“It can live in sawdust for 14 weeks,” the doctor says about the contagion, coincidentally mirroring our own concerns these days about infectious disease.
⏩ The fair-to-middling new drama series
“Tales From the Loop” premieres on Amazon Prime Friday, April 3, based on the narrative art book with the same title by Simon Stålenhag.
Stålenhag’s paintings and stories take place in an alternate version of Sweden in the 1980s and ’90s, primarily in the countryside of Mälaröarna, a string of islands just west of Stockholm. The opener finds a young girl trying to find her missing mother, who supposedly works at the nearby Loop, a large and mysterious particle accelerator set partly underground in the countryside.
The shows moves deliberately as the girl meets a town boy and his family who may be tied to the project. She also finds out her missing mother doesn’t work at the Loop. The tone is a little dark and, yes, loopy, as children explore and engage with abandoned robots, vehicles and machinery while creatures wander the roads and fields.
The show purports to address the many ways developing technology and nature can create havoc and wonder in our world, along with an impact on the next generation. Rebecca Hall, Duncan Joiner and Jonathan Pryce star in the opener, which has a nice “Twilight Zone” twist but moves a bit too slowly to recommend.
⏩ Younger viewers will find it perplexing and sad that the new film “The Banker,” which premiered March 20 on Apple+, the subscription video-on-demand service, was inspired by real events. That means the country was so racist in the 1960s that black businessmen had to hire a white guy to be the (fake) owner of the business they were starting. But it makes a good story.
The film focuses on pioneering businessmen Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), who concoct a risky plan to take on the establishment of the era by trying to help other African Americans have access to banking and real estate — without signaling who’s really in charge.
While the white man, played by Nicholas Hoult, poses as the wealthy face of their gowing real estate and banking enterprise, Garrett
and Morris pose as a janitor and a chauffeur. It gets dicey when the federal government hears about the arrangement and threatens to take them down.
⏩ New documentary “The Scheme” adds insult to injury for NCAA basketball fans. Capping a March with no on-court madness, the two-hour HBO documentary “The Scheme” delivers a swat to the glory story of NCAA basketball at 9 p.m. Tuesday, March 31.
The film looks at the two-year undercover FBI probe of basketball corruption that hit the headlines on Sept. 26, 2017, with the
arrest of executives at Adidas and assistant coaches at major college programs.
“The Scheme” starts and stays with a basketballsavvy 25-year-old named Christian Dawkins, who went from a kid from a basketball family in Saginaw, Mich., to a prospect scout, recruiter, “runner” for a high-powered agent and linchpin in a scandal that eventually would place him in a hotel suite surrounded by FBI agents with guns drawn and a warrant for his arrest.
The way big money pollutes most wholesome endeavors is ultimately under
the microscope here, and participants tell their stories unapologetically. That’s because the NCAA clings to amateurism in college sports while others see ethical issues with the billion-dollar machine that is big-college sports controlling the lives of often-poor, unpaid athletes. The film is a bit long but it moves with the aid of actual surveillance audio and video. At the very least, it’s something fresh about sports during a time of none.