What to watch: ‘Swarm’ a scary-good look at unhinged music fan
Two high-profile streaming series — Apple TV+’s climate-change spectacle “Extrapolations” and Amazon Prime’s cult-of-celebrity thriller “Swarm” — debut this week. And we have a clear favorite.
In theaters, committed actor Willem Dafoe becomes a one-man show in “Inside” while Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are together again, but is “Moving On” any better than “Grace and Frankie”?
Read on.
“Swarm”: There’s a lot to unpack in each episode of this shocking and disturbing series about an obsessed music fan. I watched it a week ago and still can’t stop thinking about it and the lead performance. The seven-part miniseries from creator Janine Nabers and co-executive producer Donald Glover recently debuted at South by Southwest and makes the skin crawl from start to finish as it follows obsessed and homicidal music fan Dre (Dominique Fishback) as she spirals into madness. She sets her obsession on the fictional R&B icon Ni’jah (clearly modeled after Beyoncé), a phenom who commands a vigilante social media posse poised to pounce like a tiger on anyone who tears their icon down.
Already on a shaky mental foundation, Dre becomes more unhinged after her foster sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey) dies and she essentially slaps a target on the back of most anyone who crosses her path. Told in quick 30-minute bursts, “Swarm” takes you deep into the creepy mindset of Dre as she tries to insinuate herself next to her idol, lying and cheating and murdering to reach that goal. It’s a spellbinding horror story about our fascination with celebrities and the loneliness and isolation many feel when they are stuck on the outside of a star’s inner circle.
The final two episodes shift tones and call into question our own insatiable appetite for true-crime movies. Let’s just say it all becomes even more timely and unnerving. Expect Fishback to be collecting awards for her take-no-prisoners performance. Details: 3½ stars out of 4; all seven episodes drop March 17 on Amazon Prime.
“Extrapolations”: With an A-list cast (Edward Norton, Meryl Streep, Diane Lane, Kit Harington, Daveed Diggs, Sienna Miller, Judd Hirsch and more) and an urgent call for action, creator Scott Z. Burns’ eight-episode Apple TV+ climate change series aims to be this spring’s talker, a prophetic thriller likely to keep us on the edge of our sofas, just as HBO’s apocalyptic “The Last of Us” did. Sadly, “Extrapolations” never scales those heights, feeling more like it wants to manipulate us rather than draw out genuine emotions.
“Extrapolations” does a bang-up job of splashing ice water into climate-change deniers’ faces, but it picks up a bullhorn and shouts and shouts its message, often reducing characters into speechifying pundits rather than human beings. To its credit, it is visually impressive and throws out distressing and pertinent facts that are worth heeding. It also features Meryl Streep voicing a lonely, pitiful whale in Episode 2. Can’t get better than that. But it often goes overboard in its pontifications and winds up preaching to an already convinced choir.
The opening episode lays things out but jumps around too busily, introducing us to a fleet of players caught in ethically bankrupt power grabs — people dealing with David vs. Goliath struggles that often snub out valiant efforts to conserve and protect. The doomsday clock ticks louder and louder in the series’ 33-year-span, each depicting our world hurtling dead-ahead toward extinction.
Episode 3 is the best of four ones I watched. That’s due, mostly, to the presence of Oakland native Daveed Diggs. The “Blindspotting” and “Hamilton” star gives a tempered performance, accentuating but never overstating the conflicted emotions with which his Miami rabbi Marshall Zucker grapples as he watches his South Florida temple take on more water. He soon realizes that the only hope for its salvation would be to compromise his own principles. It, too, goes just a little too far, inserting a cute but sorely out of place musical homage.
The most intriguing characters who pop in and out, including a rich and frenzied blowhard played with hilarious grandstanding by a tremendous Matthew Rhys, too often get sidelined. That’s a problem and a missed opportunity.
True, “Extrapolations” has its heart in the right place but its pedantic volume rises just like the sea level and all but overwhelms the characters and the drama itself, spinning the whole enterprise sadly right off its storytelling axis. Details: 2 stars; three episodes drop March 17 on Apple TV+, with one episode every Friday afterward.
“Inside”: An art heist in a swanky 1 percenter’s New York apartment traps an erudite thief (Willem Dafoe) in director Vasilis Katsoupis’s eccentric character study that comments on the enduring quality of art and the pretense and artifice that often confines it. A closed-space thriller such as this one forces a director to perform visual calisthenics to keep it interesting, be it through flashy edits or artsy visuals to make it anything but a still-life piece of work. But beyond all that fancy directorial footwork, the weight of “Inside” rests on the shoulders of Dafoe. He elevates this high-concept indie with his standard brand of twitchy performance art, and that’s well worth a look even if the film winds up being too impressionistic (and gross) for its own good. Details: 2½ stars; in theaters March 17.
“Moving On”: The pairing of Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin has worked wonders both in movies (1980’s “9 to 5” with co-star Dolly Parton) and in a streaming series (Netflix’s little spitfire “Grace and Frankie”). The duo proves to be engaging again in writer/director Paul Weitz’s dramedy, but the tone and the subject matter ventures into darker territory than either of those earlier efforts. Fonda is the standout as the vengeance-seeking Claire, who has just cause to want to get back at the widower (Malcolm McDowell) of her now dearly departed friend. Tomlin’s Evelyn is mostly Claire’s comic foil, but saves the film from getting too bleak. Weitz hands Fonda the juiciest role, but he doesn’t always deliver the best comedic lines in a #MeToo story that raises the unexpressed voices of female survivors from decades in the past, women who were told to shut up and take it. There’s a seething power that exists under the surface of “Moving On,” and while Fonda reaches into those difficult places, Weitz doesn’t always give her, or the film, enough room to maneuver at the toughest parts. Instead we get warmed-over screwball bits about a gun. “Moving On” has much to recommend it, even as it occasionally gets stuck in idle gear. Details: 2½ stars; in theaters March 17,
“The Magician’s Elephant”: Once upon a time, the fictional city of Baltese was a vibrant and magical place, a city supporting wonder, imagination and endless possibilities. Then came the war and everything changed within the firmament, turning this colorful world into a somber mash of grays and muted blues. In her entrancing animated adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s novel, director Wendy Rogers suggests the old Baltese could return as Peter (voice of Noah Jupe), an orphan, heeds the prediction of a fortune teller that the rare appearance of an elephant will lead him to his believed-dead sister, a reunion that could even boost the Countess of Baltese (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and the city’s spirits. “Toy Story 4” scribe Martin Hynes, along with Rogers and a team of animators, have created an original fairy tale that reminds us to dream big and keep hope even in the darkest times. It’s a lovely message in a lovely animated film. Details: 3 stars; drops March 17 on Netflix.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.