L'Agence

The English title for the French show L'Agence is "Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties." It's a reality TV show about a family that deals in super-luxurious real estate from Paris. They live in an Art Deco house that belonged to André Malraux. Olivier and Sandrine Kretz have four sons; the youngest is still in school but the other three all work for the family business from home. We get to see the interiors of some fabulous properties, ranging from a castle outside Paris to a variety of swanky apartments with terraces, views of "monuments" like the Eiffel Tower, and dressing rooms as big as the bedroom, called "le dressing." We meet some of their clients, but also get to see them hold a wedding for son Martin and Eve the mother of their two children, a surprise 60th birthday party for Olivier, a kite-surfing expedition, and their reactions to the news the Martin and Eve have decided to go live for a year in Lisbon so that Eve can pursue a project as an architect. The show is as much about the family itself as about their business. I enjoyed the guided tours of the luxury homes, and hearing French. It remains to be seen if they will film another season, but I gather the show was a hit in France.

Succession

 I just finished watching Succession. It was grim and funny.  One of the funniest scenes is about the butter. My family was in the restaurant business and this is, in fact, a version of something I heard:

and then there is cousin Greg:

Sweet Magnolias

Just watched the first season of Sweet Magnolias on Netflix, a small-town romance based on the novels of prolific romance author Sherryl Woods. Three best friends, their marriages, children, romance and small-town shenanigans. Complete fluff but competently executed with a cliff-hanger season ending. I like the young actors. The principal cast includes a lot of talent; the actress who plays Dana Sue was the star of Drop Dead Diva, a show I enjoyed years ago. I don't know what Lifetime or Hallmarks shows are like, but this had a little bit of a Gilmore Girls vibe.

La cocinera de Castamar

La cocinera de Castamar is sort of Upstairs Downstairs meets Bridgerton in Bourbon Spain under Felipe V. Not as good as Versailles. Overall it is charming, but there are lots of little issues of plausibility or continuity that kept me from really enjoying it. The romance between the Duque de Castamar and his cocinera doesn't generate a lot of heat, in part because she mostly has to stay in the kitchen so we're not given a lot of interactions between the two to explain how he is so smitten with her that he is ready to renounce his wealth and titles.  He's supposed to be the king's right-hand man but he spends a lot of time in his carriage going back and forth to court. When he finds out that his mayordomo has been spying on him for the queen, he just lets it slide. The grand estate is an easy walk to a tavern filled with ruffians so that the conniving maid Beatriz can skip out of work and conspire with El Zurdo without any consequences at work. When the evil marqués outs the gay characters, he does it with hand-drawn folletos that must have been printed somehow, but how so fast? How did various characters conceal pistols until the opportune moment?  How did the kitchen prepare food for the staff as well as for the masters?  People recover from their wounds in no time at all. Apparently a little soup with sherry is just the trick to stop a miscarriage. Any time we see a shot of the courtyard that same guy is feeding the chickens. The ending was hasty. In spite of these crabby complaints, I did enjoy the Spanish (the dub is horrific) and watched the whole thing. The series is based on a novel that was a bestseller, and has been a great success in Spain.

Valeria soundtrack: Rigoberta Bandini

The Spanish series Valeria's second season is up on Netflix. I watched the first one some time last year, but watched it again because I had forgotten most of it. It's romance fluff set in Madrid with great costumes and production design. It makes liberal use of a soundtrack of both English and Spanish songs to comment on the action. The end of the second season featured a song by the catalana artist Rigoberta Bandini, "Perra," that really caught my attention. It turns out that they had used another of her songs as well, "In Spain We Call It Soledad." Immediate flechazo, I had to go look for her songs on Spotify and Youtube. She has only put out singles so far, not an album yet, but that may be because she is very busy as a writer/voiceover actor/director all-around-creative-person. I sent the songs to my daughter and it turns out she had already heard them, and recommended her videos to me as well.

Here's a mini-concert:

 

The song "Perra" is great, and so is the video:

Word of Honor

 Just finished watching 36 episodes of Word of Honor, a Chinese drama that was extremely popular this spring. It's part of the wuxia genre, and also a BL romance that managed to get past the censors. So much of it went over my head, such as the use of poetry in the dialogue, but it had a lot of complex characters in the secondary characters as well as the OTP. This review (in two parts) gives some background on the production and the genre. There's so much that the translations cannot even begin to convey. Here's an explanation of the multiple meanings of the characters' names:

For All Mankind

For All Mankind is one of the best TV shows I've seen in a long time.  What if the first man on the moon was a Soviet cosmonaut? What if the Soviets put a woman on the moon first, and Nixon decided we had to do the same? What if there was a space race with moon bases? What happens when an arms race expands to space? The show combines the technological events of the space program with a focus on the families of the astronauts and the folks of NASA: the test pilot culture, Werner Von Braun, a young girl whose family crosses over from Mexico, high-ranking NASA officials living as closeted gay and lesbians, under scrutiny by the FBI. The cast and production are up to the task and the special effects are outstanding. The finale episode of season two was gripping and gut-wrenching. I can't wait for season three when we go to Mars in the '90s!

The costume designer Jill M. Ohanneson talks about designing for the late sixties and seventies settings of the show:

Pose

 I'm in the middle of season two of Pose right now. I watched the first season, then took a break while I was in Spain. I had started it a while back but didn't get through the first episode because I found the tone a little jarring, but this time around I don't have a problem with the declamatory style of some of the actors, and I love the ballroom sequences. Let Trixie and Katya give you the run-down:

Legendary

 I finished watching the second season of the show Legendary on HBOMax. A reality competition show that pits ballroom houses against each other for a trophy and $100,000, it draws on the legacy of the documentary Paris Is Burning and the series Pose as mass media productions that draw on a culture that started as an underground phenomenon.  The show will end with its third season, and has been noteworthy for casting transgender actors in several roles. I love the voguing and runway performances in Legendary, and the opportunity to get a glimpse of the passions of the house members. The costumes, which are created around the themes for each episodes balls, can be really creative, and the design and make-up crews don't always get the credit they deserve. Each house is represented by five members, with a house mother or father, and four children. The houses themselves are much larger.  I'm less enthusiastic about the judging which can be erratic.The MC is Dashaun Wesley who is himself a voguer, and judge Leiomy Maldonado is someone I had watched perform on YouTube videos of her battles. Both of them were part of a voguing crew called "Vogue Evolution" that participated in America's Best Dance Crew.  While many are happy to see voguing and ballroom culture reach a wider audience, some have been critical of the way a reality competition reframes what happens in the balls, with more emphasis on dance and less on some of the other elements like runway or posing. And the participation of judges from outside the ballroom world has been criticized. Some feel that they aren't qualified to judge if they aren't themselves from the ballroom community. Others see them as participants who bring an outsider's perspective to the competition which has its own value. Each week there is a guest judge as well, and some have been better than others. Like any dance competition show on TV, including So You Think You Can Dance, or America's Best Dance Crew, what you see on TV isn't a faithful recreation of dance practices in their social or even competitive spaces, and show producers lean on tropes of personal stories to try to create fan interest in participants. But there is something about dance that can often transcend the limitations of such a format, so I end up watching the shows anyway (but I truly can't abide Dancing With the Stars because of the way it has become a rehabilitation vehicle for reprehensible characters).

Like many, I thought that season two's Haus of Tisci should not have gone home as soon as they did. When asked in an interview what she had learned during her season, Mama Jia of the House of Tisci said, "This is not ballroom. This is television."

Shadow and Bone

 Just watched a TV series on Netflix, Shadow and Bone,  based on a YA fantasy series by Leigh Bardugo (also incorporating elements of her Crows series). Inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones are made in the reviews.While it's not great, it's still entertaining in a tropey kind of way. This first set of episodes is based on the first book in the trilogy, and we have yet to see (officially) if the series will be renewed, so we're left with big cliffhangers. I like the characters from the Crow books the best.

Top Chef season 17

 During my pandemic year, I watched 16 seasons of Top Chef. That's a lot of salmon, scallops and ceviche. Now I have discovered that last year there was a season 17 All Stars, in which all of the chefs were returning contestants--I remember all of them! Season 18 is the most recent one, and I will have to wait until it gets put on hulu to watch it.

I really really miss going out to a good restaurant and having a complete indoor dining experience. So many restaurants have closed, and the few meals I have had with take-out or outdoor dining have just not been that good. Yesterday and today, my mother and I had lunch outdoors at two restaurants on Fillmore street--a burger joint and a fish place. Both of the meals were way overpriced, but at least my fish and chips meal had decent french fries, unlike the burger place's sad mealy fries. But they were not chips! I want wedge style hand-cut chips, not skinny little frites. The fish however was perfectly cooked with a light delicious batter, a good dipping sauce, and a perfect little cole slaw side dish. I will go to Berkeley Bowl and get the ingredients for a cole slaw. 

I've already been spoiled as to who wins season 17, but that's fine.

The Great Pottery Throwdown

 I just finished watching season one of The Great Pottery Throw down, another one of the British makers' reality competition shows. Like the Great British Bake Off, the show highlights the contestants' struggles with the material rather than with each other, and that's why we love it. That, and judge Keith Brymer Jones' tears of joy when one of the potters does something really pleasing. "It's brilliant! absolutely brilliant!"

Shtisel

I started a TV series on Netflix called Shtisel, an Israeli show about a family in an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community in Jerusalem. Shtisel is (mostly) a sweet show, showing the daily life and struggles of its characters. There is little to no mention of wider conflicts in Israel; the show keeps us fully immersed in the Haredi milieu, and doesn't bring up issues of how the Haredi are perceived by other Jews in Israel. We are charmed by Akiva, the youngest son of the patriarch Shumel. The warmth and strength of strong family ties are evident. Food is present in almost every episode. But we also see the toll taken on girls and women by pressure to marry early, to have many children, with men who don't support their families, and the bald and normative sexism of everyday life. Akiva is meeting prospective marriage partners, but scares one off by telling her that they'd have to live with his father. He then becomes attracted to a widow, who is described as a tough microwave dinner that has already been eaten by others. He impulsively agrees to marry a spoiled "princess" and causes an uproar when he tells her father he doesn't love her, resulting in a broken engagement. Now he is damaged goods as well. His sister Giti's husband ditches her and her five children with no notice, leaving her to struggle to support them all while concealing this family shame. She stubbornly refuses money from her father even as she conceals her husband's desertion. Her oldest child, daughter Ruchami, witnesses her mother's struggles and despises her father, writing letters to her brothers in his name to help conceal his callous cowardice as well. She's the character I find most compelling but all of the women on the show are well portrayed; we see how they navigate their narrow circumstances with strength and imagination. I'm half way through the first season and enjoying it so far. 

Update: finished all three seasons! Lots to think about as to how much stubbornness and fierce willpower seem to make people willing to persist with marriages that are undertaken after just a few meetings. I'm sure things are exaggerated for TV, but one side-story is about how Tovi, who is working as a teacher while taking care her young kids and her husband who is a scholar, has to overcome prejudice just to get a drivers license and a car that will make her life easier. Her husband gave up an opportunity to sing with a band, a dream he'd had and that his wife had encouraged, because he was afraid it would lead him to become dissatisfied with his life.

Several stories in the third season involved lying, whether it was to avoid criticism by the community, or lying to family members to manipulate them into a course of action. Ruchami lies to her doctor and her husband to get her IUD removed and gets pregnant in spite of the fact that surrogacy is an option (albeit involving more lying with a set of fake pregancy pillows) and that it will put her life at risk. Are we supposed to admire her because she so fiercely wants to get pregnant herself? Gitti and Libbe lie to their son about finding/not finding the woman he'd met by mistake at a marriage meeting so they can have him meet the one he was supposed to encounter, because the first woman's family is from North Africa; the son has also lied to the woman he was engaged to, while pursuing the first woman he met. Whoops!  Akiva hastily marries a woman he hardly knows so he can lie to the social welfare services who are (rightly!) concerned that his drinking had led him to rely on a feckless friend to pick up his infant daughter at daycare--only to have him bring the wrong child. Even though the mistake was quickly corrected, Akiva was out of control and needed to make changes. The marriage turns out to be to a woman with a major mental health issue that she did not tell him about. We feel sympathy for her, but her approach to conflict is to lie down and stop answering her phone. In the end we see them moving in together, despite the fact that they still barely know each other and knowing that her father-in-laws attitude toward her problems is viciously bigoted. The scoundrel uncle Nuchem lies to the woman he is supposed to marry so that he can try to finagle half of her money from his brother who has received it as a charitable donation for his school. We already knew he was a weasel--she should run the other way! I came away with the sense that a lot of what people do is try mightily to live within rigid precepts in ways that make dishonesty a constant resource, the way Shulem begins to smoke immediately after being told that he has a momentary reprieve from his angina. People connect to the characters' complexity.

Great interview with three of the actors:

Behind Her Eyes

 Did not see that coming!

Watching: My Brilliant Friend

I'm on episode five of My Brilliant Friend on HBO and it's an incredibly faithful adaptation of the book, so far.  The acting is uniformly terrific, and the materiality of the locations, the objects, the clothing, is all as important as the action and the communication of the characters.

I'm fascinated by the way the characters switch between Neapolitan dialect and standard Italian. One side of my mother's family was from Gesualdo, about 90 kilometers from Naples.I asked her why she doesn't like the books and she more or less refused to tell me until I've finished them. I have the second volume, The Story of a New Name, from the library.

Here's a great little interview with the costume designer, Antonella Cannarozzi, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work on I Am Love with Tilda Swinton.

I have been rewatching seasons 1-2 of Mozart in the Jungle because I want to watch seasons 3-4, and I needed to remember what happened. I'm enjoying it again. It makes me want to go to New York, Mexico City, Havana...and to listen to all the music they feature. I also want to finish it and cancel my Amazon Prime subscription before the free trial is over because I'm trying to be principled and boycott Amazon although I rejoined it to get some BTS-related deal or other.

currently watching...

Chinese drama:
Tribes and Empires (56/75) better than Game of Thrones. In spite of some major script deficiencies, there are many terrific and subtle performances from most of the cast. I'm not always a fan of the cdrama historical fantasies, but this one has been consistently worthwhile.

Korean dramas:
Just Between Lovers (8/16) current crack. LOVE Junho, so glad he won an award. This is one of the ones that feels emotionally real.

Money Flower (16/24) makjang-a-palooza! but with Jang Hyuk and strong supporting cast, especially Jang Seung Jo, I'm hanging in there to see what grotesque plot twist comes next.

Master in the House (1/?), new variety show with Lee Seung Gi, Yook Sung Jae from BtoB
(who was so good in Goblin), Yang Se Hyeung, and the gorgeous Lee Sang Yoon aka Dimples, who was so damn good in that airport melodrama.

Hwayugi (3/20) terrific, but marred by production disasters. Hong Sisters so snappy dialogue, lots of ghosts and horror, Journey to the West character comedy.

I'm Not a Robot (20/32) absolutely silly but still charming. I have enjoyed Chae Soo Bin in all her big roles this year.

Jugglers (8/16) mostly fun. but I'm running out of steam. Not sure if I'll keep watching. Choi Daniel is entertaining, and the supporting cast is great, but the writing---so much meh.

Bravo My Life (36/60) This drama is so bad, so very bad in so many ways! The set design, the directing, the music choices, most of the writing. And yet... the cast really is chewing the scenery with this trope-y makjang-a-rama, especially Yeon Jung Hoon (uri vampire prosecutor), Hyun Woo. Kang Ji Sub is such a cheesy piece of beefcake, but he's won me over with his comedic timing. I don't know if I can stand it, though.

In the queue: Argon, Wise Prison, Black.