Binge-r #206: The Boys + I’m Thinking of Ending Things
American Gods: Antony Starr (Homelander) and Erin Moriarty (Starlight) in The Boys
THE BOYS S2
Streaming Service: Amazon Prime Video
Availability: Four episodes now streaming, new episode each Friday
Overflowing with exploding heads and political body blows, Amazon’s R-rated satire of cape culture is the only superhero content that currently matters. Following on from a debut season in 2019 that became an unexpected hit via detailing the corrupted corporate lies and amoral antics of a famous superhero collective and the vigilantes trying to destroy them, the show’s new season has a scathing confidence. Demagoguery and xenophobia are mixed with celebrity culture, a corporation contracting for American superhero soldiers, and political disinformation campaigns. “When you see it on your uncle’s Facebook page then you know it’s working,” one seditious superhero tells another.
Traumatised everyman Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), who joined the vigilantes after a tragic accident involving a superhero under the influence, still sits at the story’s hub, but the plotting shoots off in multiple directions involving vengeful former CIA agent Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the all-powerful Homelander (Antony Starr), who has duelling God and Oedipus complexes, as well as the conscience-stricken young Starlight (Erin Moriarty), who wants to bring down the company that markets and controls them. Add in Stormfront (Aya Cash), a newly promoted saviour who reduces the themes down to their historically resonant origins while dispensing curt insults, and you have an overflow of blithe commentary. Amidst such wild circumstances the savaging of a Scientology-like cult is a minor gambit.
But every time you start to think that Eric Kripke’s comic book adaptation has gone overboard, which is basically two or three times per episode, there’s a moment of clarifying condemnation or shocking excess that makes the knotty subtext sublimely explicit. One episode in this season has a passing exterior shot during a car journey, briefly showing a street art take on Homelander, that speaks to the corrosion of symbols and America’s racial divide with pungent timelessness. The Boys doesn’t apologise about its many provocations, but it doesn’t hide from the values and 2020 politics they expose. The show’s giddy energy stems not just from its pulp provocations, but the knowledge that they draw blood.
There’s No Place Like Home: Jesse Plemons (Jake), Jessie Buckley (Cindy), Toni Collette (Suzie) and David Thewlis (Dean) in I’m Thinking of Ending Things
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (Netflix, 2020, 132 minutes): A wintry psychological horror film about reaching the point where your identity may be consumed by others, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is the new film from Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before putting his obsessions into the existential epic that was his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Beginning with a new couple already dissolving, Cindy (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons), driving to visit his parents, the narrative accumulates detail that undercuts its own plausibility. Something, on multiple levels, is wrong, which by no means negates Kaufman’s affection for surreal interludes or scoffing humour. That’s only exacerbated when the duo meet the parents, Suzie (Toni Collette) and Dean (David Thewlis), who flicker in disturbing ways, so that Kaufman’s focus on a female protagonist feels as much like a trap as a step forward after his previous movie’s increasingly disconsolate male fulcrums. What keeps the film going until the finale’s embrace of the inexplicable is Kaufman’s enhanced visual skills, which satisfyingly jangle the plot, and Buckley’s masterfully fluid performance, which holds the film’s many strands out for your admiration even as it jumbles them.
New on Stan: The Paperboy (2012, 107 minutes) is a white trash Florida noir that lets a star-laden cast – Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack, and Zac Efron – get down and dirty without saying anything that endures; Helen Reddy biopic I Am Woman (2019, 117 minutes) has a capable lead performance from Tilda Cobham-Hervey and an anthemic title track, but the music career storytelling is formulaic.
New on SBS on Demand: A spare period trek liberally adapted from an Albert Camus short story, Far From Men (2014, 98 minutes) stars Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb respectively as a teacher in a remote colonial Algeria and the accused murderer he’s forced to take to trial, leading to an examination of personal freedom and responsibility; Good Vibrations (2012, 99 minutes) is a vibrant paean to music’s potential, recounting how the punk scene took shape in an increasingly divided 1970s Belfast because of one man’s conviction.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to catch up with SBS on Demand’s polyamory drama Trigonometry and Stan streaming the best film of 2019, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
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