Binge-r #157: Big Mouth + Undone
Puberty Brews: The Hormone Monster and Andrew (both Nick Kroll) in Big Mouth
BIG MOUTH
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming, plus S2
There are two reasons to go back to Netflix’s unexpected animation success. The first is that the third season arrives on Friday 4 October, which means the push notifications are soon to come your way, and the second is that in often surprising ways it’s a very good show. Created by comic actor Nick Kroll (The League), Jennifer Flackett, Mark Levin, and Andrew Goldberg, Big Mouth manages to be both wildly explicit, gently funny, excruciatingly familiar, and bluntly educational. In turning the hormonal rampage of puberty into a fantastical coming of age comedy, the show erases barriers that at first glance you initially expect it to break.
Beginning in a sex education class, where knowledge and arousal are in sharp contrast, seventh grade students Nick Birch (Kroll) and Andrew Glouberman (John Mulaney) try to make sense of their changing bodies. Nocturnal emissions, the emergence of secondary sex characteristics, and newly discovered masturbation are exacerbated by the input of Hormone Monsters, salacious and wildly inappropriate anti-angels on the shoulder of these budding adolescents. The first you meet is Maurice (also Kroll), who visits Nick, but in the second episode, having got her first period during a school excursion, the boys’ friend Jessi Glaser (Jessi Klein) is introduced to her unfiltered avatar, Connie (Maya Rudolph).
Once you get past the stacked vocal cast, which also features Jordan Peele, Jenny Slate, and Fred Armisen, the episodes are almost sweet in their raunchy escalation and frisky escapades. The show’s internal logic is loopy, with all manner of detours and devilish incitement, but it’s held together by the character’s hopeful uncertainty – chances are good you’ll recall your own memories of being aged 13 while watching Big Mouth. The actors don’t try to sound like adolescents, so the tone has an engaging mix of the ludicrous and the matter-of-fact. Plus it balances the genders so that it’s not just about the boys. “Newsflash: girls get horny, too,” Andrew’s older sister tells him, causing his head to explode. That mix of fact and friction feels about right.
Astral Tweaks: Rosa Salazar (Alma) in Undone
UNDONE (Amazon, eight episodes): Amazon Prime Video has been relentlessly plugging its period fantasy Carnival Row, which is very expensive and too often formulaic, but there’s been no push for the week-old and far superior Undone. Created by Kate Purdy and Raphael-Bob Waksberg (BoJack Horseman), this mix of trippy science-fiction and wrenching personal anguish uses rotoscoping animation – where live action footage is traced over and recoloured to create life-like but distinct images – to form pocket universes that fragment and reform in line with the protagonist’s perspective. The pacing is considered: dissatisfied to the point of self-destruction, Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar) has just blown up her life when her father, Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), appears to her after being dead for two decades. What he tells his daughter changes her reality, which is readily reflected in the way the animation cels erupt and reform as times and dimensions shift. The concepts are wonky – Jacob is a theoretical physicist – but the themes remain family anguish and generational dissatisfaction, and Salazar gives a compelling and lived-in performance that guides you through these eerie and painterly new frontiers.
>> Do Not Bother: The I-Land on Netflix.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Before the ballyhooed Joker, The Hangover director Todd Phillips made War Dogs (2016, 114 minutes), which could have easily been titled Brofellas, as Jonah Hill – giving a fascinating performance – and Miles Teller play 20something friends who get into the arms dealing trade; T2 Trainspotting (2017, 117 minutes) is a very busy resurrection with Danny Boyle and his original cast that is at best amusing.
New on SBS on Demand: Mumblecore graduate Andrew Bujalski has received extensive praise for his recent features Computer Chess and Support the Girls, but the offbeat romantic comedy Results (2013, 101 minutes) remains under-appreciated. Supported by Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother) gives a remarkable and career-best performance as a personal trainer with a simmering certainty about what she doesn’t want in life.
New on Stan: There’s a Coen brothers double bill with the addition of the quietly compelling No Country For Old Men (2007, 123 minutes), a Texan crime film starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Tommy Lee Jones that matches philosophical despair to stark violence, and the ornate revisionist western True Grit (2010, 111 minutes), where Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld cross the frontier’s varied borders.
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