In Which We Resleeve Ourselves Into Something More Familiar

Important Men

by ETHAN PETERSON

Altered Carbon
creator Laeta Kalogridis
Netflix

In this future story from novelist Richard K. Morgan, we are thrust into a world where anyone can look however they want. That James Purefoy wants to look like James Purefoy makes sense on its face, but who would want to look like Joel Kinnaman? Joel Kinnaman looks like the "before" picture in one of those old advertisements in Archie comics, the shrimp who would get beat up at the beach or a dinner party (see below). Kinnaman explains fairly early on that he is an Envoy, which is some kind of soldier. The basic point we are meant to get across about this individual is this: he has a rich and storied history, and could tell you things of which you are probably unaware.

Instead of doing so, Kinnaman's version of Takeshi Kovacs is only interesting when he is thinking about killing himself. It would have been an important moment to have a suicidal main character if I already didn't want to cut myself when I saw Matt Damon's goofy face.

It was a mistake to cast Joel Kinnaman in this role for so many reasons:

1) He admits he has never brushed his teeth.

2) His cloying overacting may have singlehandedly torpedoed House of Cards in retrospect, sparking a sexual harassment revolution.

3) The only time he ever had chemistry with a co-star was in The Killing, and that co-star was ostensibly a corpse,

4) His penis is shaped like a soda can and from some angles cannot be viewed by the human eye.

5) His transparent overtraining to look like a soldier (what a fucking Christian Bale wannabe) makes him have the practical dimensions of the star of Where's Waldo,

6) He is Asian when he dies in the show's opening scene, and when he wakes up, he's Joel Kinnaman. We lost so much just right there.

There comes a point in your life when you realize you're dating yourself. In real life, the Swedish-born Kinnaman is married to a tattoo artist. Her skin resembles a sheet of paper that's been written over too many times.

Kinnaman's main antagonist is a Latina police officer named Kristin (Martha Higareda). Kristin is pretty tiny, and the two have so many scenes together that it is very awkward to see them both in the same frame. Perhaps wisely, creator Laeta Kalogridis puts as much focus on the surrounding mise-en-scene as she can. (She even refers to it as mise-en-scene.) The future, in Morgan's imagining, is basically like now except some people can live forever if they have enough money. What they are really paying for is for a version of themselves to be hosted on satellite and beamed back into a new cortical stack should they be murdered.

This has in fact happened to Mr. Bancroft (The slovenly James Purefoy, who has the biggest mole imaginable, gross, disgusting). He wants Kovacs to solve the murder, but despite his ample resources and connections within the resleeving industry, he cannot find an Asian body for his private detective to inhabit. That this is racist is indisputable, so Altered Carbon papers over it with a bunch of roles for African-Americans in which they play second bananas or omnipotent, advisory god figures.

If you think I'm trying to discourage you from watching Altered Carbon, think again. There may in fact be a future, or even a present where someone would want to look like Joel Kinnaman - all gangly and soda-canesque. I'm pretty sure Kinnaman has ruined everything he has ever been in. I don't even remember who he was in Suicide Squad, which is probably for the best.

The worst part of his casting is that Altered Carbon would basically be John Wick if Keanu Reeves would do television. In any case, an actual actor was required for the role.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Retreat To Our Frank Castle

Immolation Man

by ETHAN PETERSON

Marvel’s The Punisher
creator Steve Lightfoot
Netflix

Fearful that the traditional depiction of a gruff, grunting automaton Frank Castle would not resonate over the course of television series, showrunner for Marvel's The Punisher, Steve Lightfoot (Hannibal), made some major changes to the character as portrayed by Jon Bernthal. The first he was unceremoniously saddled with: Bernthal is all of 5’7”, and The Punisher is traditionally a larger man. The rest he brought upon himself: Frank bleats, pouts, cries, dreams, and barely kills anyone, making him almost unrecognizable from the version that has inhabited comic books for the past decades.

“I hate hipsters,” Castle whines at several points after he is identified as one in a diner. Lightfoot is very focused on what and how Castle eats, viewing this as a window into his character. No matter how depressed or devastated a human being is, the procedural consumption of food in the morning shows a basic will to go on, Lightfoot reasons. Frank’s main motivation to live is to kill the people who authorizes a series of unpalatable missions when he was serving on a black ops unit in Afghanistan.

As a result, the ostensible subject of Marvel’s The Punisher is post-traumatic stress disorder. Although this phenomenon is far from unexplored in the medium, as he showed on The Walking Dead, Bernthal is particularly talented at portraying an individual in evident distress who is still forced to make the decisions required to live a day-to-day existence. Really nothing Castle does, not even his brief, thick beard, reminds one of a modern person, and for the first few episodes of Marvel’s The Punisher, his main activity is breaking a wall with a sledgehammer as part of a construction team.

Punisher stories are always at their violent best when they focus on the main character at the exclusion of other parties. Lightfoot unsuccessfully bucks this trend by focusing a great deal of time on two peripheral characters: a Jewish disgraced CIA analyst named David Lieberman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and a Homeland Security agent named Dinah Madani (Amber Rose Revah). Both of these peripheral subjects are not only deeply unlikable (suitable in this regard for making Frank more sympathetic) but also extremely dull and prone to extended scenes, especially those of Madani with her mother (the awful actress Shoreh Aghdashloo).

Instead of a single-minded story about a man forced to enact revenge after revenge on parties who do not take him seriously, Marvel’s The Punisher is a weirdly meditative version of the same. Unfortunately, this approach suits neither the character or the subject matter. Frank is at his best when he is unexpectedly forced to show compassion for others; instead this iteration finds him a bit too unfeeling, and as a result, less of a real person.

In scenes with Lieberman’s wife (Jaime Ray Newman), who believes her husband to be dead, Bernthal seems most in his element as a gruff but likable package of power. Lightfoot gives him way too many lines about how he likes the old fashioned things in life, imagining Frank Castle as a kind of relic in a world unfamiliar with his like. This does not really jive with the character – the real Frank Castle was never an aspect of the past. He was merely a symptom of the present.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Visit Our Wife In The Hospital

Double Trouble

by ETHAN PETERSON

Counterpart
creator Justin Marks
Starz

Howard Silk (J. K. Simmons) is meant to be the sympathetic protagonist of Counterpart, a new series debuting January 21st on the premium network Starz. He works as a low level functionary in an NGO, he is nearing the end of an unremarkable career, and his wife (Olivia Williams) is in a coma after a non-fatal car accident. My sympathies for Howard were destroyed at the exact moment when he found out there was a parallel universe, and the only question he had for the Howard Silk in that universe (still J.K. Simmons) was “Do you also enjoy carbs?”

Counterpart proves that human curiosity has evaporated completely. Other things prove this in equal measure. The Pentagon recently released footage of an unidentified aircraft moving at an unprecedented speed and it barely made the news. On one hand, almost nothing could manage to be as impossible as the world we now inhabit, and the prospect of having to deal with the unlikeliness of another universe does seem daunting. On the other hand, as Counterpart alleges, we may very well be that other universe.

The other Howard Silk - let’s call him Howie - since he drinks more and is very informal at times - is an impatient man who is unfaithful to his wife Emily (also Olivia Williams). Counterpart tells a lot of the story of the differences between these two worlds from visual cues and props. These details inform us one version of reality is far advanced from another. In order to prevent the series from ever becoming dated, this is not a story about politics on a global level. Instead, we are focused on J.K. Simmons to an exclusive degree.

As a sadistic instructor in Whiplash, and other memorable roles, Simmons invests his characters with a trademark, overwhelming amount of a self-possession that makes him believable in a variety of specific professions. As Howie Silk, he is a higher-level functionary in the parallel-universe business, and it is amusing to watch him boss around his meeker Howard version. Simmons sometimes overacts his parts, but he seems to make a concerted effort in Counterpart to hold back from entirely taking over each scene in order to allow his supporting cast here - which includes Homeland's Nazanin Boniadi and the versatile Ulrich Thomsen (Banshee) as Howard's superior.

Simmons has always used his unnaturally blue eyes as a weapon to show the depth of his engagement in a particular scene. As Howie, those electric spheres take in everything around him, whereas Howard Silk may as well have regular brown peepers – in a scene where he asks for a promotion he proves that he is the sort of person reluctant to take what belongs to him. Marks dresses his pathetic hero like he is in reconstructed Eastern Europe in the middle of the last century, with old-fashioned hats, vests and overcoats. When he goes to visit his wife at the hospital, he always brings flowers.

These nods to Kafka are somewhat novel, but they do not really contain any kind of substance or background that interests the viewer in any way. As a result, Counterpart feels more like a sketched out concept (see Lost, where the writers had no idea why they were on the island). Here we sense that Counterpart’s creators do not really have a destination in mind for this parallel universe concept – it is mostly a device that allows J.K. Simmons to stretch his range as a featured performer rather than a genuine mystery in its own right.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.