Ken and Robin Consume Media: Skeleton Crew, A Real Pain, and the Occult World of Song Collection
January 21st, 2025 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
The Pinnacle
The Hop Pickers (Film, Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Rychman, 1964) As their high school class fulfills its summer duties as harvesters of the titular beer ingredient, a nonconforming intellectual (Vladimír Pucholt) competes with a virile striver (Milos Zavadil) for the attentions of an independent-minded beauty (Ivana Pavlová.) Infectiously charming swingin’ 60s musical comedy with a dissident text and gay subtext celebrates youth rebellion from the other side of the Iron Curtain.—RDL
Recommended
All You Need Is Death (Film, Ireland, Paul Duane, 2023) Two song collectors (Simone Collins and Charlie Maher) track down an ancient Irish song for its alchemical power but unleash a deadly curse. This occult world of folk song collection, with its selfish gurus and dodgy money-men, could fuel a whole Unknown Armies campaign. The great thing about this movie is that, even on its threadbare budget, it lives up to its terrific high concept and manages some genuine shocks along with the creeping horror.—KH
David Lynch: the Art Life (Film, US/Denmark, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Jon Nguyen, 2016) Lynch works on his visual art and narrates the events of his life from boyhood to Eraserhead. Intimate arts documentary shows that his work’s layering of bucolic Americana and bubbling darkness is wholly autobiographical.—RDL
A Real Pain (Film, US, Jesse Eisenberg, 2024) In tribute to their recently deceased Holocaust survivor grandmother, two cousins, one (Eisenberg) uptight and settled, the other (Kieran Culkin ) gregarious but volatile, join a Jewish history tour in Poland. Culkin takes a star turn in a dialogue-driven indie dramedy that astutely refracts its two-hander structure through a chorus/ensemble.—RDL
The Return of Munchausen (Fiction, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, 1927) Deposited by a mischance in the early 20th century, the famed adventurer and fabulist Baron Hieronymus von Munchausen accepts a lucrative mission from the British Foreign Office to visit the USSR incognito and report back. Only a liar may tell the truth in this absurdist satire of the early Soviet Union, which went unpublished until glasnost.—RDL
Skeleton Crew Season 1 (Television, US, Jon Watts, 2024-2025) Quartet of hoverbike-riding kids on technologically sheltered coin-minting planet discover a buried spaceship, accidentally blasting off into danger, with a scheming pirate (Jude Law) as either their protector or exploiter. Fast-moving, structurally coherent, with new, interesting antagonists, recognizably in the setting but untethered to the Skywalker narrative line, and just plain fun, this show leaps over all the pitfalls of recent Star Wars television.—RDL
Good
The Accountant (Film, US, Gavin O’Connor, 2016) Genius forensic accountant on the autism spectrum (Ben Affleck) unleashes his hidden other side as an ultra-efficient killing machine when his latest client targets him and one of their own employees (Anna Kendrick) for elimination. Entertaining action thriller devotes a surprising amount of B-plot time to its hero’s backstory, as if setting up a series, which it has finally spawned, with a second installment due in 2025.—RDL
A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery Season 1 (Television, UK, BBC, Michael Chapman, 1987) Adapts three of the four Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries featuring his love light, mystery novelist Harriet Vane, the most successful self-insert in fiction. Harriet Walter is note-perfect as Vane; Edward Petherbridge makes the most of his strong physical resemblance to Wimsey, though he plays Lord Peter less energetically than Ian Carmichael did. The adaptations start very strong (Strong Poison), then good with flashes of greatness (Have His Carcase), but end with an odiously cut and compressed Gaudy Night missing nearly all the Oxford business that elevates the source novel.—KH
Roman Special Forces & Special Ops (Nonfiction, Simon Elliott, 2023) After defining his “special forces” terms (elite, selective, special skills and esprit de corps, operate beyond friendly lines, deniable) Elliott runs through a number of candidate forces in the Roman army from late Republic to early Byzantium, concluding that only the exploratores truly fit the bill. More details on their (few) known missions, and less padded history of the Empire and its foes, would have improved the book, but it’s good to see the comprehensive assessment.—KH
