In Which Amy Schumer Confines Herself To The World

Tripwire

by ETHAN PETERSON

Snatched
dir. Jonathan Levine
97 minutes

Roger (Christopher Meloni) is a fellow traveler Emily Middleton (Amy Schumer) and her mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) meet in the Colombian jungle. Just 14,000 years ago, the residents of the region farmed maize, potato, quinoa and cotton. These three hikers do not even know what is edible. When Roger takes them to a valley they must cross by swinging on a thick vine, he suggests he go first because "I am the man." Women deal with this kind of sexism all the time. It is called "casual sexism" because it is not really ill-intentioned. Snatched, an important film that also features a scene where a romantic interest inadvertently catches sight of Emily Middleton wiping her vagina with the aid of a bathroom mirror, has Roger swing manfully to his death when the rope breaks.

Unfortunately and somewhat ironically, Meloni is the best actor in Snatched by far. The film is a substantial improvement on Ms. Schumer's last "comedy," in that it actually features some, but not many, jokes completely unrelated to the fictitious idea that she is unpleasant, unkempt, and unattractive. As her fervent fanbase can readily attest, none of these things are actually true. She is a lovely woman whose oversized cheeks only add to her considerable beauty.

In a key scene where Emily Middleton sunbathes at a resort in Ecuador, she shows off her body, which is also quite impressive. Later, she humbly suggests that her slim physique is due to a tapeworm, which is extracted orally in an extensive and graphic scene. Emily recovers from this parasite in a native village with a disturbing patriarchal culture. She is so offended by the sexism she finds there that she destroys their way of life. These heady subjects all occupy space in the best screenplay Katie Dippold (The Heat) has ever written.

Hawn is not given very much to do in Snatched. The character of Linda Middleton is an overbearing single mother; it is unclear why her relationship with the father of her children fell apart so many years ago, or why she has refused to have any sex in the years that followed. Dippold introduces this woman in a scene where she writes up a rough draft of a dating profile before deleting it in disgust. The profile says that she loves cats and Grey's Anatomy. Later on, we are informed that Linda is learning how to be a sculptor, although her daughter immediately dismisses the singular art she produces.

Emily Middleton also has a brother named Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz). Barinholtz, recently the author of the Kevin Hart comedy Central Intelligence, plays an overly verbal loser in most supporting appearances. As he tries to recover his mother and sister after they are kidnapped and brought into Colombia, he makes a trip to the State Department when he cannot find anyone who will listen to him over the phone. This is a taxing and anxiety-ridden journey, since Jeffrey is substantially agoraphobic and makes his only income teaching piano lessons to young people.

Dippold acquiesces to Schumer's typical self-deprecating humor, but she treats Jeffrey's illness with astonishing sensitivity. The characters of Snatched are all ill, in fact. Whatever technology permitted them to stop farming maize and potatoes, as the first humans did quite easily, has also meant an end to any intrinsic chance of happiness. Emily Middleton's boyfriend Michael (the talented Korean-American actor Randall Park) explains that he is breaking up with her because she has no direction in her life – he is tired of her focus on appearances, and declines to accompany her on a trip which has the intrinsic purpose of subjectifying native cultures while having frequent, unemotional sex.

In another less sensitive film, the Middletons would befriend some locals who would show their inherent aboriginality. In Snatched, these white women are outsiders to every part of the culture. They are treated with respect for the most part, and they only come to harm out of their own stupidity. Emily in particular fights back with a velocity of violence never employed by her captors. Using an arrow, she kills the young son of the man ransoming her and her mother, and caves in the skull of another man who is transporting them to nicer living quarters. "You are an excellent murderer," Linda observes of her daughter.

The Spaniard Alonso de Ojeda was the first conquistador to discover Colombia. (He also gave Venezuela its name.) His expeditions were thoroughfares of rape and murder; no women and children were spared by his men. He was so ashamed by his actions that at the end of his life he died penniless and alone after ensuring that people would walk over his grave as punishment for his colonial acts of subjugation.

Emily Middleton's emotional journey is remarkably similar. On her next trip, this time to Kuala Lumpur, she stays within the tourist trappings so that no one else can be hurt. Emily has not altered who she is, she has only the knowledge that her inherent destructiveness must be contained to prevent it from harming the people around her. There is something so completely non-redemptive about Snatched, a refreshing, if depressing testimony to how little of life we are even capable of living.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which We Complete One Vile Task After Another

Human Events

by ETHAN PETERSON

American Gods
creators Bryan Fuller & Michael Green
Starz

Reading Neil Gaiman's writing has always been more of a drag than it is worth. His extended graphic novel The Sandman is the most overrated work in the medium not created by Alan Moore, and his novels are equally fraught with various gimmicks, iimpotent violence, and a bizarre appropriation of black culture meant to be inclusive, but that really comes across as tone deaf. Gaiman's chief literary technique is overwriting, and his questionable command of various cobbled together mythologies, a subject Gaiman is fascinated by because writing about human beings is beyond his capabilities, emerges onto television in American Gods.

Are you prepared to be alternately excited and tremendously bored for long stretches? American Gods will probably be your favorite show now that Hannibal has been canceled. Bryan Fuller is fresh off completing the abominable achievement of making a Hannibal Lecter series boring. Even a serial killer who eats his victims could not be kept entertaining on that graphic and dreadful show that made real life into some bizarre fantasy whirlwind, just because people were dying. Occasionally in Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen would kill someone. The rest of the time he spent giving extensive lectures on god-knows-what before dramatically not taking someone's life. Fuller's sometimes enthralling aesthetic sense demanded that blood be evoked in nearly every scene, along with a hokey slow-mo used so often it was simply the key signal to fast-forward the show on DVR.

American Gods gives him a larger canvas and possibly a larger budget for the one thing he excels at in this medium: special effects and dream sequences. Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is released from prison three years early on a six year term for assault. He finds out his wife and friend were killed in an automobile crashed while she was giving the fellow oral sex. This is the kind of over-the-top schtick Gaiman loves in lieu of actual characterization and scene work. It is like watching the bullet points in a character sketch read on screen. (American Gods even features more than one different voiceover.) On his way to bury his wife, Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), who is reprising his character from Deadwood in virtually every aspect.

Whittle has about three or four facial expressions of which he is capable. His most recent acting performance in The 100 showed about as much range as a tin can. Watching him try to emote is physically painful, as are the awkward and lame scenes where a Russian god played by Peter Stormare asks him if he is black. There is really no reason Orlando Jones, an actor of considerable talent and range, couldn't have played Shadow much better. Instead he, along with Gillian Anderson, Cloris Leachman, Yetide Badaki and Crispin Glover, are gods who have relocated to America for some reason, I guess to give extended monologues or have sex with mortals, since this is all they really do.

Many British writers have written excellent books about America. Gaiman is not really among them. He has a weird jealousy for this painfully diverse nation, but he also views it as a central hub for the intersections of commercialism and the evil manipulation of various technologies. Stop me if you've heard this dreck before. Mr. Wednesday, along with various other characters, takes predictable shots at low-hanging fruit like gun control, cell phones and the American midwest. These edgy hot takes are somewhat out-of-date, but who cares? Here's a scene where Peter Stormare murders a cow.

The sad thing is that there is a good concept for television buried underneath all these indulgences, but American Gods never brings out any of the considerable pathos involved in viewing how actual deities might react to human events. You see, there are not any human events in American Gods, or at least not any we are driven to care about. Even the historical phenomenon of human enslavement is brought up as if it began only four hundred years ago; apparently Gaiman can only be bothered to think back that long. There is nothing so dull as a worldliness that begins and ends with blaming America.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Bosch Has Tread Upon Our Last Nerve

Nobody Counts

by ETHAN PETERSON

Bosch
creator Eric Overmyer
Amazon Studios

LAPD detective Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) lives with his teenage daughter Maddie (Madison Lintz) in a glass apartment overlooking Los Angeles. One night he sees a fire in the distance, and gets a worried look on his face. You can only tell this from his eyebrows, since the rest of Welliver's 56 year-old countenance is generally frozen. His cheeks resemble those of a chipmunk's, or a victim of two parallel toothaches. In Bosch's third season, which rewrites Michael Connelly's minimalist source material present in three books into ten episodes, he almost never touches or is touched by anyone. You would be forgiven if you thought he was an angel or Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

Breaking up the monotony of Bosch's days – he picks up takeout, he kisses his daughter on the head, he sleeps – is another, far better character. Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick) actually has things happen in his life that affect how he lives it. The LAPD's Chief of Police lost his son, his wife, and his house, but he is still very annoyed by Harry Bosch, and rolls his eyes at the guy after every single scene they share. After getting Bosch out of an IA complaint when he threatens the city's district attorney, Bosch screams, "I don't owe you!" at him. It is about that time when we start to conclude that perhaps Bosch is a miserable piece of shit.

Bosch's motto is "Everybody counts or nobody counts," and he has a very soft spot for the following groups of people: runaways and orphans, because he was one, prostitutes, because his mother was one, and cops, because he is one. He meets Sharkey (Bridger Zadina), a homeless teenager, and has great sympathy for the boy despite the fact the kid has a loving mother and spends his evenings robbing men he picks up outside a liquor store.

In the show's least believable plot, Bosch is set up for a murder by an angry Hollywood director, who plants various items in the dead man's room before killing him. The concept of Bosch being a murder suspect would be an exciting twist to the series and it made for a great novel (A Darkness More Than Night), except Bosch creator Eric Overmyer (The Wire) finds this and so much of the original material ludicrous and has this angle fall apart within an episode. Bosch has never had a single believable adversary during the entire run of this show.

But maybe that's for the best, since looking slightly uncomfortable or subtly upset is not really in Titus Welliver's wheelhouse as an actor at this point. Welliver received his break portraying various characters on David Milch shows – NYPD Blue, Brooklyn South, Deadwood - throughout the years. Milch loved his coldness and lack of feeling, and it sort of works to carry a show like this, since the dialogue and action-heavy plots do not lend themselves to much emotionality.

The best part of the novels was being able to follow Bosch through the years, as he met a daughter he never even knew existed, and learned to live a different sort of existence. This element is completely scrubbed from the Amazon series, which began when Maddie was twelve. Bosch's parenting is not particularly on the mark, but we never see him struggle with his daughter at all. She just wants to be a police officer and learn how to drive, just like her dad!

It is never completely explored why Maddie would like to be like this monster, which probably represents some dark aspect in her own nature. The other women in Bosch share the same fate, but we never really see what they like about Harry – it actually makes sense that a woman would be attracted to such a malevolent figure, but most women who date Bosch seem to basically be fucking him until they get bored.

Other supporting characters besides Lance Reddick are intriguing enough to ensure that Bosch never gets dull no matter how much food Welliver stores in his cheeks, or how often he not-so-dramatically tilts his head to the side like a beagle. His captain Grace (Amy Aquino) has an interesting home situation and an intense mien; his partner Jerry Edgar (Jamie Hector) is dealing with a complicated divorce and gifted children; his ex-wife Eleanor (Sarah Clarke) looks to be slowly decaying from the inside. What a nuanced cast, all waiting their turn to be like, "Haaaaaaaary."

So why has Bosch been the most successful of the original offerings Amazon has presented over the past few years? (The show has already been funded for a fourth season.) It is gratifying to watch a series that requires so little to succeed, and that actually has long term stories, however flimsy they may be once you unpack them in your mind. Watching Bosch is like consuming a light-crispy pastry in the morning. You forget it as soon as it passes through you.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.