My Favorite Things This Week #111
The Friday High 5: Sports, superheroes and immortals
Running Point: Season 1
I don’t always have the time or emotional bandwidth for an hour-long episode of prestige TV. But I also don’t like feeling like I’m wasting my time. I want my TV viewing to count for something. I realize that’s ironic. But there’s a world of difference between watching a game show or a procedural in which every episode is interchangeable, and watching a character-driven show. I need at least the illusion of progress and change.
Running Point is a Mindy Kaling joint about Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson), a party girl nepo baby who takes over a fictionalized version of the Los Angeles Lakers. Real life Lakers owner Jeanie Buss is an executive producer on the show. The show’s not supposed to be autobiographical, but the similarities between Buss and Gordon are too obvious to ignore. It’s basically based on a true story, without the very loose strictures that declaration imposes.
I’ve seen some people compare Running Point to Ted Lasso. It’s not in the same league. But it’s fun and cute. I like the characters. The episodes are an easily-digestible 30 minutes. And it’s the closest we’re going to get to another season of Winning Time. Running Point does have some Ted Lasso-esque good vibes, which is sorely needed in the year of our Lord 2025.
Streaming on Netflix.
The Boys: Season 1
Though I’ve been a superhero fan literally all my life—it all started with my first pair of Superman underoos—I somehow kept not-starting The Boys.
Well, not somehow. It’s on Prime, which I dropped after 2-day shipping became whenever-we-get-to-it shipping. That I’m no longer stuffing the pockets of a wannabe Bond villain is frankly just a bonus.
I’m still not paying for Prime. My son was recently home for spring break, and with him came the Prime subscription he gets free or dirt cheap as a poor college kid. It felt strange to crib access from him because that’s not how our relationship works. I pay for everything, he uses it. Having the natural order upended felt like glimpsing an end-of-life scenario, where I’m back in Superman underoos and he’s spoon feeding me.
The Boys is a very R-rated show about what superheroes would probably be like if they existed. It’s reminiscent of Kick-Ass in its casual depiction of gruesomely bloody and meaningless violence, and is very cynical of American capitalism in a manner that feels both timeless and newly relevant.
The central posit of the show is basically: What if Superman was a huge asshole? And goes from there. To the point that The Boys has its own version of the Justice League, complete with analogs for Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman. (The show gets a ton of mileage out of dissecting Aquaman’s whole deal.)
Our “heroes” are normies who’ve had their lives blown up by superheroes living consequence-free lives and decide to get even, which typically means murder. It’s a dark show at times, but super addicting, full of reveals and reversals. It’s so good! I blazed through the first season in a handful of days.
Maybe this is addressed in future seasons but the one thing I couldn’t shake was why the superheroes didn’t just completely break bad. They are held in check by a fear of being disliked and thus causing their company’s stock to drop. But what is money when you can just take whatever you want? These characters believe themselves to be gods but don’t act like it, which means they don’t really believe it. But that’s the logical endpoint.
The Age of Adaline (2015)
There’s a really interesting premise at the heart of this movie that never feels fully realized. Due to the freakest of accidents, Adaline (Blake Lively) becomes a woman forever on the cusp of turning 30. Which seems like an ideal place to be; as a 20-something, 30 feels like the first mile marker on your way to becoming old and also dead.
(Much later you realize becoming old is a process without concrete borders. The very definition changes with time—ahh, to be 35 again, or 41—which means you always feel on the verge of being put to pasture but nobody arrives to cart you away. It’s not like turning 16 or 21, from which Everything Changes. Instead, it’s a slow, irregular winnowing of things you take for granted.)
The problem is that while Adaline remains the same age, everyone else around her continues to age. It’s the opposite of the Wooderson corollary. To continue piling on pop culture references—she’s Wolverine without the claws and all the associated baggage. A contemporary immortal is such a juicy idea—she’s a vampire without the pseudo-sexual blood cravings; okay, I’ll stop—but unfortunately the film attaches a forgettable love story, so the result is less than the sum of its parts. Not even Harrison Ford can save it, though he tries.
On the Nicholas Sparks scale: The Age of Adaline aims for The Notebook but ends up A Walk to Remember (which I’ve seen but don’t remember). It’s fine.
The film is narrated by a budget Morgan Freeman dryly commenting on events like he’s watching a documentary about the migratory patterns of birds. It’s the strangest choice.
All that said, I enjoyed the movie, though with the clear sense it wasn’t as good as it could be.
Streaming on Netflix through March 31.
‘X-Men: First Class’ and ‘Days of Future Past’
My son spear-headed this X-Men double-header, which I heartily cosigned.
The first two X-Men films were the MCU before there was a MCU. And then X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) squandered that goodwill. It’s similar to the MCU’s trajectory, as recent films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have eroded the MCU from must-see to maybe, eventually. It’s really hard to build something of lasting value and relatively easy to ruin it. As America is discovering to its ongoing horror.
X-Men: First Class (2011) came at the franchise’s lowest point and revived our slagging interest in all things mutants. It’s also that most damnable of things—an origin story—filling in 40ish years of backstory to answer that most crucial question: Was Professor X always bald? Imagine my surprise to discover young Xavier looked like James McAvoy and wasn’t yet confined to a wheelchair.
First Class is hamstrung by third-rate X-Men, but fortunately the Professor X and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) bromance-to-frenemies subplot elevates the entire film. But the single best thing about First Class is how it sets up the sequel.
Days of Future Past is told via two different timelines—an apocalyptic future where the X-Men are down to a handful of survivors—and 1970s America. It bridges the old (the original X-Men films and characters) and the new (First Class and the younger versions of characters like Magneto and Professor X), giving us the best of both. And by that I mean it adds Wolverine to the First Class formula. Days of Future Past is a time travel movie about saving the X-Men’s future, but it also rectifies our own past by righting the wrongs of The Last Stand. It’s just a dazzling example of the superhero form.
I’m also a fan of how these films intersect and branch from our own history. It’s a neat way of establishing setting. Plus Magneto being involved with JFK’s assassination will never not be compelling.
Back in Action (2025)
One of the hallmarks of this age of nostalgia-driven content is how often Hollywood employs familiar faces in ridiculous ways. For example: The entire Cobra Kai saga, in which 60-year-old men settle differences like angry teenagers and somehow never get hurt. Meanwhile my back is sore from sleeping funny last night.
Blame Tom Cruise. He sets a high bar for the 50-and-up action star.
Back in Action is a spy-comedy action-thingy in which Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx play married-with-children former spies who are lured back into action. They bring their kids on their globetrotting adventure, even though bad people are trying to kill them. If nothing else, Back in Action made me feel good about my parenting.
Logical inconsistencies aside, it’s a fun movie. I laughed and enjoyed myself. The action set pieces were quite a bit better than I’d expected. And, yeah—I liked seeing Diaz and Foxx in an action-comedy again. Or just in general.
Back in Action is not cinema—there’s no ignoring the strange cinematic discord that pervades all Netflix movies—but it’s a perfectly fine movie for a Saturday night with a pizza.
Streaming on Netflix.
Your turn!
What’s giving you good vibes this week? Let me know so I can check it out.
Our oldest kid gets a discount on Hulu and (I think?) HBO Max, and like you, it seems weird to be cribbing those from him, but here we are.
What's got my attention these days? White Lotus and March Madness in equal parts. The WI Film Festival is also coming up and I'm really looking forward to seeing a screening of "Just a Bit Outside: The Story of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers."
Everything you said about Running Point! I love it. I'm so glad they made this since as you said, it's like the sequel to Winning Time which I really miss. Mindy Kaling was on Armchair Expert and she said how Running Point is like a tribute to her dad who really loves basketball, like the really deep cut players from the Celtics that people who have only heard of Parrish or Bird wouldn't know. But the show works also even if you are just a casual fan who is familiar with the basics of the NBA and those sports commentary shows on ESPN and TNT. Hope this gets a S2!