Binge-r #249: I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson + Cleverman
The Man Without the Irony Mask: Tim Robinson in I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE WITH TIM ROBINSON S2
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes now streaming, plus S1
On Wednesday night I laughed so much – and so loudly – during the third episode of the new season of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson that my teenage son knew exactly what was happening: “Were you watching the new season of I Think You Should Leave?” he later asked me. I wrote about Netflix’s oft-brilliant sketch show in May 2019, after the first season reared up out of nowhere and seared absurdist brilliance onto my brain, and the new edition does not disappoint. The ability of Robinson and his collaborators to take a ludicrous concept – a fedora hat with safari flaps at the back, or a reality show called Coffin Flop where dead bodies endlessly collapse out of caskets – as their starting point, and then extend and twist it into an even more obtuse and amazing realm is unparalleled.
There are six new episodes, each roughly 18 minutes in length, and they showcase both Robinson’s demented genius and the most malleable face on television right. The actor can make his chin disappear into his neck, rupture his comfort with a nightmarishly distorted grin, and look genuinely befuddled by social norms. The idea of people refusing, for reasons both genuine and psychotic, to give any ground even at the most galling of costs emerges, but there’s an added air of eccentric pathos that even makes the self-obliterating Robinson a figure of sympathy at certain points. Concepts such as clothes store Dan Flashes are introduced and then brought back in a later episode under different circumstances, which only emphasises the level of control that this farcical portrait of American nuttiness operates at. Honestly, you’ll either love I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson or be coldly dismissive, but you really have to try it.
Into My Arms: Rob Collins (Waruu) and Adam Briggs (Maliyan) in Cleverman
CLEVERMAN (Stan, two seasons now streaming): Airing in 2016 and 2017, this Indigenous Australian science-fiction drama had a small ABC budget and big ideas, shoehorning stories and symbols from the Aboriginal Dreamtime into a dystopian thriller about a near-future Sydney-like city where a new species, the physically powerful but collectively unorganised Hairypeople, has become public knowledge and are thus discriminated against and exploited. Private security and public scorn are the backdrop for two feuding brothers, Koen (Hunter Page-Lochard) and Waruu (Rob Collins), whose pursuit and use of ancient powers underpins a carnivorous narrative. The show sometimes hungered for action set-pieces to offset the swirl of intimate exchanges and face-offs, but offsetting that need was a pithy supporting cast that included Iain Glenn, Frances O’Connor and, most of all, Deborah Mailman as a motherly figure who understood where nurturing started and most definitely ended. Genre twists such as this are common on streaming services now, but if you’re a fan of them then Cleverman is worth going back for.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Before he flipped out with Bo Burnham: Inside, the stand-up and filmmaker made Eighth Grade (2018, 94 minutes), a granular depiction of the life led by an unobtrusive 13-year-old American girl (Elsie Fisher) that proved to be an illuminating drama; Late Night (2019, 102 minutes) is something of a fantasy work friendship, but the combination of Emma Thompson as a distaff David Letterman and Mindy Kaling as her new writer is enjoyable.
New on Stan: Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008, 102 minutes) was probably the last good film Kevin Smith made, aided and abetted by Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen as his cheerfully deadbeat leads; Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005, 140 minutes) has an awful lot of father figures for Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne, but its vigilante billionaire fantasies have a muscular assuredness.
New on SBS on Demand: Centred on the invigorating friendship and friction of best pals played by Alia Shawkat and Holliday Grainger, Sophie Hyde’s Animals (2019, 105 minutes) is a bracing, Dublin-set portrayal of life at the end of the party years, when choices are made and division looms.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Stan’s London Muslim punk comedy We Are Lady Parts and Netflix’s true crime doc Sophie: A Murder in West Cork.
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