Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 10: Breakdown

Gan is alone on the flight deck and suffers a debilitating headache just as Liberator encounters a meteor storm. Luckily Jenna arrives in time to rescue the situation, but her reward for this is being attacked and then dragged through the ship by Gan. Blake is unable to subdue him but luckily the others arrive and tranquilise him.

Avon deduces there’s something wrong with the limiter and scans confirm this is the case. None of the crew have the skills to perform delicate neurosurgery required to fix the limiter, even if Zen could tell them what needs to be done. Blake identifies several nearby planets that might have the capacity to undertake such surgery but they’re all some distance away and Gan doesn’t have long.

At this point Avon mentions a neutral space laboratory called XK-72 that does work on weaponry and space medicine, and it becomes apparent that Avon has identified XK-72 as a bolthole he can escape to if he tires of Blake. Avon is certain they will be able to help. Zen advises it will take too long to get there which Avon says is nonsense as there’s a direct route, but this will take them through an area of space that Zen categorises as extremely dangerous, though Zen doesn’t know why.

With Gan’s life at stake Liberator heads for XK-72, but Zen really isn’t keen…

I know I moaned about The Web, but actually I think this might be the low point of the first series. At least The Web had a plot. There’s a joke that the duck billed platypus exists only because God had a lot of left over animal parts and just threw them all together. Breakdown feels like that, and I can’t help feeling that Nation was struggling to come up with a script and so cobbled together some random ideas into a story.

There’s so much wasted time here. They don’t even reach XK-72 until around thirty minutes into the episode! Even then there’s a lot of sitting around (quite literally in Dr Kayn’s case) but we have a lot of wasted space even before this. After Gan attacks Jenna the crew spend ages with a radio scanner examining the limiter (spoiler alert it looks very silly) then we get what feels like minutes of Avon pushing buttons and trying to circumvent Zen. They even have to contrive to let Gan out so he can go on another rampage to waste some more time.

Talking of which, the characterisation of Cally here is awful. Nation can’t quite seem to decide whether she’s the ship’s empathetic conscience or a hardened guerrilla fighter and she flits between the two in different episodes. For me Cally is at her best when both sides of her personality segue together, but she’s rarely portrayed as stupidly as she is here when she falls for Gan’s trick.

The flight through the Danger Zone feels like we’ve seen it before (and we have, and we’ll probably see it again) and again feels like its there purely to eat up minutes.

I need to add, Nation writing all 13 episodes is something no one had really done before, and is only really beaten by J. Michael Straczynski writing practically every episode of Babylon 5, but episodes like this show the limitations of the practice, and really you would expect the same writer to show consistency in characterisation!

This isn’t to suggest Breakdown is completely devoid of anything interesting. We don’t get to see much of XK-72 bar the administrator’s office and the exterior of the station but it’s still a nice idea The flip where the officious bureaucrat turns out to be okay while the apparently caring doctor is a secret fascist is nicely done, and Blake has rarely been quite as brutal as when he threatens not Dr Kayn’s life, but to destroy his hands. I’ve never been the biggest Blake fan in the world but I’m seeing way more in Thomas’ performance on this rewatch than I think I have before. It’s always tricky playing the noble hero/straight man but he does it really well.

Talking of Kayn it’s always nice to see Julian Glover. The man’s been a Bond villain, a Star Wars villain, a Doctor Who villain, an Indiana Jones villain, and now in his late 80s he’s still working. He’s nicely evil as Kayn, you just kind wish Blakes 7 had given him a meatier role than this.

Jenna doesn’t get to do much except be beaten up by Gan and flirt with Kayn’s assistant, but Vila gets some nice stuff, correctly working out that Kayn’s up to no good, and he has a nice scene with Avon.

Avon flits from telling Blake he’s leaving, that staying involves a degree of stupidity he no longer feels capable of, to sacrificing his escape plan to save the others and Darrow plays it convincingly.

The big loser in all this is Gan. For an episode that centres on him he doesn’t get much to do, and I always feel a little sorry for Jackson.

So yeah, it isn’t an awful episode, but it’s awfully forgettable.

Cocaine Bear

Directed by Elizabeth Banks. Starring Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Isiah Whitlock Jr., Margo Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta.

When a drug smuggler drops a shipment of cocaine over the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest in Georgia, he starts a chain reaction that will lead to a series of brutal deaths.

Fearing his cartel paymasters, crime kingpin Syd White (Liotta) sends his fixer Daveed (Jackson Jr.) to try and retrieve the cocaine. Syd also insists his son Eddie (Ehrenreich) accompany Daveed. Eddie is mourning the loss of his wife and wants to escape his father’s criminal empire but he goes with Daveed anyway.

Meanwhile a nurse named Sari (Russell) discovers her daughter Dee Dee (Brooklynn Prince) and her schoolfriend Henry (Christian Convery) have skipped school to venture into the forest in order to paint a waterfall. Sari goes after them.

Along with a cop named Bob (Whitlock Jr.) a forest ranger (Margo Martindale) and several juvenile delinquents, this rag tag collection of people wander into the forest, little realising that a black bear has eaten a bag of cocaine and has embarked on a coke fuelled, bloody rampage.

Much like Snakes on a Plane this is clearly a case of starting with the title and working backwards. There actually was a cocaine bear, though as is often the case the real life story is infinitely less dramatic. Someone did drop a load of cocaine and a bear did ingest some, but then the story ends as the bear almost immediately died!

Hollywood is never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, not that this is a good story. As a low budget B-movie it might have had charm, unfortunately this is a relatively big budget B-movie, though one imagines the money mostly when on creating the bear rather than the script.

And to be fair the bear is effective, when we see her. Of course many monster movies have parlayed far less screentime for their titular creature into monstrous levels of success, take Jaws, but in those cases the film had great direction, better than average scripts and significant levels of drama. Cocaine Bear doesn’t quite hit these marks.

Part of the problem is the script, leaning into the comedic aspects of the story the film is populated by a gaggle of characters, none of who feel that real. They’re not cardboard cut-outs, quite the reverse because they’re all kooky and/or exaggerated in some way, but herein lies the problem. In the hands of the Coens or Wes Anderson such characters can soar, here they mainly just tend to just be annoying. So much so that you don’t really mind when they’re torn to shreds.

The film is funny, though most of the laughs were in the trailer, and thankfully it is genuinely gory so it at least doesn’t fall into the trap of M3gan by skimping on the blood, in fact one set piece involving an ambulance is really great, it’s just a shame we don’t get a lot more of this. The ambulance scene is the classic promise of the premise in screenwriting terms, the film just doesn’t have much else.

With a few exceptions the cast is bland. Ray Liotta is of course Ray Liotta and throws himself into the part (shame it was one of his final roles) and Convery is fun as Henry, the kind of foul mouthed kid you mainly only get in films, but beyond this few stand out, though Ehrenreich and Jackson Jr. have a nice buddy thing going on.) Russell should be our main protagonist, but she’s given very little to work with beyond ‘mom’.

Banks’ direction is solid if uninspiring and it isn’t a terrible film, it’s just that given who was involved and the money spent on it you can’t help feeling it doesn’t live up to its premise. Seeing it in the cinema probably didn’t help. Watching on the TV on a Friday night it might well be a more enjoyable, if still very throwaway, pleasure.

It’s done very well though so expect Cocaine Bear 2, plus a slew of other drugged up animal films! (Meth Donkey anyone?)

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

By Hallie Rubenhold

In the Autumn of 1888, in the improvised Whitechapel area of London, five women were brutally slain by a killer whose identity would never be known, and who would for all time simply be known as Jack the Ripper.

Everyone knows, or thinks they know, the story, foggy streets and knives, a gladstone bag and prostitutes with cockney accents who made the mistake of picking the wrong john, and for many people the misnomer persists that the five canonical Ripper victims were just that, prostitutes. Not human beings, not daughters or wives or sisters or mothers.

In this book historian Rubenhold sets out to provide these women with a voice, separating their lives from their horrific deaths.

I’d been meaning to get hold of this book for a few years, and I wish I’d read it earlier. It would be wrong to say I enjoyed it, because at times it’s a heart-breaking, harrowing read. At times it made me angry as hell. So no, maybe not enjoyable, but it is incredibly fascinating and illuminating.

Rubenhold spends very little time on the murders themselves, so if you’re looking for gory details you might be better served elsewhere. Instead she recounts, as far as she can, the lives these women led, from birth to the nights of their deaths and it’s a remarkable work of historical research.

This is a book about the grinding, awful poverty of Victorian England, it’s a story of doss houses and huge swathes of people sleeping on the streets, it’s about workhouses and the demon drink. It’s about addiction and sensationalist journalism and, at its heart, it is about the place of women at that time, because despite there being a woman on the throne, 19^th Century England was not a good place to be a woman. Domestic violence was par for the course and it was always far easier for a man to abandon a woman than the other way around.

Perhaps the main takeaway of Rubenhold’s work is that these five women were not prostitutes. In fact there is no evidence that three of them ever solicited, and whilst a fourth had been a prostitute at several points in her life there’s again no evidence that she was leading such a life at the time of her death. Only one victim, Mary Kelly, was definitively a prostitute when she was murdered, and Rubenhold’s conclusion is that rather than these women being chosen because of their vocation, they were in fact chosen because they were sleeping on the streets, and as such were easy prey.

Of course whether they were prostitutes or not doesn’t really matter, none of them deserved to die, and none of them were any less of a human being because of how they earned a pittance, but by calling them prostitutes the press sold more papers, and history was able to dehumanise the victims. We think we live in more enlightened times, yet so much of what Rubenhold talks about still exists; extreme wealth living cheek by jowl with extreme poverty, homelessness, addiction, sex work and sex trafficking and the general exploitation of woman, and of course the lurid obsession of the press and those who want to read all the gory details.

No one can ever give back Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane their lives, but Rubenhold does at least give them back their humanity.

Highly recommended.

Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 9: Project Avalon

On an unnamed ice planet Travis and his Mutoid accomplice (who looks strangely familiar) meet with a member of the local rebel group, working under a famed leader named Avalon. This man is a traitor. It becomes apparent that Blake is on his way to pick up Avalon and Travis wants to use this as an opportunity to both kill Blake, but also capture the Liberator.

Oblivious to Travis’ machinations (as always) Blake and co find out what they can about their destination, there’s a smidgen of world building as it appears the planet is heading for its winter. The Long cold, which is well named as it lasts over eight years. Zen is asked if the planet supports intelligent life, never one to miss an opportunity Avon asks, “Does the Liberator?” We also learn that Jenna has met Avalon before.

Meanwhile in the caves below the surface Travis and Soolin…er I mean his Mutoids, have surrounded Avalon’s group and we discover that Avalon is—shock!—a woman! After she’s taken into custody, we get another early evening massacre as the Mutoids gun down the entire (unarmed) resistance cell, including the guy who betrayed them. Karma and all that. Before leaving, Travis ensures the homing beacon leading Blake in remains active.

After checking their suit’s heating elements are on Blake and Jenna teleport down to find Avalon, instead finding only dead bodies, and a sole survivor.

Travis and Avalon have a not so pleasant conversation, meanwhile Blake has a plan to save Avalon, what he doesn’t realise is that saving Avalon will play into the hands of Travis, who has an exceptionally convoluted plan that involves biological weapons and a ridiculously sophisticated android….

Vila: “I’ve got a weak chest.”

Avon: “The rest of you isn’t that impressive.”

That exchange alone is worth the price of admission, though Project Avalon is another episode I didn’t have hugely fond memories of, there is a lot to enjoy. Another cunning plan of Travis that fails miserably as Blake outwits him yet again, some gunplay during the rescue which sees Jenna go in guns blazing (though I’m not sure she hits anyone) some Avon sass and some Vila cowardice. Oh and Jacqueline Pearce swans into the Federation base, drops her fur coat on the floor and firmly cements her place as the show’s big bad. Sorry Travis, but it was never going to be you.

In fairness to Travis there is an interesting exchange where it becomes clear that the Administration’s insistence that he take the Liberator intact is somewhat tying his hands. I don’t think Servalan is buying this however, although she shows some loyalty to her man, even if she makes it clear that she’s only there to take the credit if the plan succeeds.

Spoiler alert. Travis’s plan doesn’t succeed.

Julia Vidler doesn’t quite convince as a great military leader, but having her lie half naked while Travis smugly pontificates at her doesn’t help, and takes away some of the points the show gets for being progressive enough to show a female revolutionary leader. She does get something of a Princess Leia moment when she talks about thirty planets breaking away from the Federation. Travis almost seems to accept the Federation may fall eventually which is surprisingly self-aware of him.

This is primarily a Blake and Jenna episode, knowing what’s coming for Ms Stannis I’ll take having her front and centre whenever I can. Vila gets some moments too, even if he is mainly relegated to opening doors and providing the comic relief by turning his suit’s thermostat up to incinerate. He gets more to do than the other three at least, Gan is outfought by an android which Avon then gets to reprogram and Cally? Well I’m sure she does something. The android really is a ludicrous concept, and if the Federation can produce something that convincing you wonder why there aren’t more of them running about?

Talking of robots our old friend the security robot makes a reappearance, as does the crazy visual Walkman, this time it’s Jacqui’s turn to look silly. Slipping the, with the best will in the word clunky, security robot back in again just serves to make the flawless android seem even more ridiculous. The biological weapon test is suitably gruesome, however.

Blake wins again, and this time you think maybe Travis has had his last chance, Servalan certainly seems to suggest so.

The only thing I don’t get is why Travis doesn’t kill Blake at the end, to hell with unleashing the virus, you’d think he’d die a happy man knowing he’d put Blake out of his (Travis’) misery first? I guess his training kicked in and he was protecting his Supreme Commander, that’s the only thing that makes sense.

It is a real shame about Travis, each time we see him he’s initially portrayed as a ruthless officer and a tactical genius but by the end of the episode he’s an easily outwitted fool. It doesn’t have to be this way of course, Servalan will be thwarted numerous times over the years yet somehow never feels like a failure.

And talking of the Supreme Commander, while I docked the show some points for the way it treats Avalon, they get way more points back for giving us such a wonderful female villain, though much of that is of course down to Jacqueline Pearce’s performance. I try not to fall into the trap of ‘actor-X is the only person who could play character-Y’ but I do think few could have walked the tightrope between camp and menace as surely as Pearce did.

Anyway, a decent episode that rattles along at a good pace, and while it’s never going to trouble my top ten list, there are much worse episodes out there. Talking of which, I suspect Gan might be getting some headaches…

Blakes 7. Series A, Episode 8: Duel

On a desolate alien planet two women, the younger Sinofar and the elderly Giroc, watch lights in the sky. They discuss the lights and Sinofar says it isn’t clear that the ships will come their way, or that this planet will be their battle ground. It seems they may be the last of their race and act as some kind of guardians. Sinofar is resigned to her fate and seems to be almost proud of the responsibility, while Giroc is petulant; she didn’t ask for the responsibility.

In space it becomes clear that some of those lights are federation pursuit ships where Travis and his Mutoid crew are stalking Liberator. Blake sees Sinofar’s planet as a handy hiding place to rest up and recharge their energy banks, unaware Travis is closing.

Back on Pursuit 1 Travis is irked when his Mutoid pilot ingests some blood serum, which is seems all Mutoids must do at regular points, leading some to call them vampires.  Travis isn’t squeamish but he does have a space battle to win!

Blissfully unaware that old eyepatch is on the way, Blake, Jenna and Gan teleport down to find nothing but a giant graveyard. Not for the first time Gan spots a beautiful woman no one else sees, but there’s nothing imaginary about the pursuit ships Blake sees in the sky.

After waking up Vila (not only asleep at his post but he’d even taken his shoes off!) they’re teleported back aboard ship and battle is joined. Travis has them outnumbered and tactically outgunned. Blake has a desperate plan, but it involves ramming Travis’ ship! The leads to a great interaction between Blake and Avon when Roj asks Kerr if he agrees. “Do I have a choice?” asks Avon. “Yes.” “Then I agree.” It’s a lovely moment demonstrating the grudging respect the two men are developing.

Blake enacts his plan, but before impact time slows and suddenly Blake and Travis are down on the surface, summoned by Sinofar and Giroc who explain their race destroyed itself and now they want Blake and Travis to learn the lesson of the futility of war by, er, checks notes, fighting each other to the death. There’s just one more thing, the death of an enemy is only half the lesson, there’s also the death of a friend…

The hero battling an enemy with only his wits and a pointy stick is, of course, a well-worn trope, just think back to Kirk vs the Gorn in Star Trek, and here it comes again, Blakes 7 style and we get a more than solid entry into the series that again highlights the differences between Blake and Travis.

Before we get to mano-a-mano (and smuggler-a-mutoid) we have Blakes 7’s first space battle, and it’s a doozy, exceptionally well done on a limited budget, and much like Trek’s Balance of Terror it’s played very much like submarine combat from World War 2. Travis’s tactics are effective, though treating two ships as expendable highlights, yet again, how coldblooded he is. The only slight niggle I have is that when Sinofar freezes the ships, the Pursuit ship seems hugely out of scale. I don’t believe Pursuit Ships are equal in size to Liberator.

Though obviously a set, the location where our characters interact with the two aliens is nicely done, there’s an eerie, desolate feel to it and the statutes/gravestones depicting a figure breaking a weapon in half are a really nice touch.

That said it’s probably for the best that the actual battle takes place on location in a forest. There’s nothing especially original about the combat and the time leading up to it. Lots of spear sharpening and campfires, ambushes and traps, but it’s handled well.

Despite being trussed up like a turkey Jenna at least gets some nice interactions with Blake, the rest of the cast are less well served as they watch the battle remotely. This could have worked but they’re not given much of interest to say, bar two examples. The first is that it’s nice to see Cally appraising Blake’s actions with a cool, tactical eye. The second is Darrow’s delivery of the line; “I’ve never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational to prove you care, or why it should be necessary to prove it at all.”  You know, I think he may have a heart after all…

On the other side of the divide the interactions between Travis and his Mutoid pilot are quite chilling. At times Grief almost imbues Travis with a warped sense of honour, but not here and the way he taunts her with her real name is almost as terrifying as the realisation that Mutoids were all people whose memories were wiped. He doesn’t go into details but says enough to add to the creepiness. Blakes 7 has rarely been quite so unsettling. It’s shame Mutoids are never looked at in as much detail again, and Carol Royle does a great job in the role.

Sinofar and Giroc make for interesting characters as well, once you set aside the logic of seemingly immortal beings who live just to make others fight in the hopes they’ll learn some lesson or other. Isla Blair is lovely and ethereal (though the outfit is, ahem, a little distracting) and Patsy Smart at times appears to be having a ball as the bloodthirsty Giroc.

For a show that at times has felt like Dr Who, for perhaps the first time it feels a little more like Star Trek. It’s a solid episode though, with good performances and some eerie sets and music. The outcome is fairly predictable, and relies on Travis making a huge tactical error, but Blake’s rationale for not killing Travis is a nice bit of reasoning. Do we learn anything new about any of the characters or do they grow in any way? No, but it’s diverting all the same.

Anyway, turn you suit heaters up to maximum. It’s about to get a mite chilly….    

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Directed by Peyton Reed. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Corey Stoll and Michael Douglas.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Earth, Ant-Man Scott Lang (Rudd) is feted as a hero and celebrity. He’s written a bestselling book and everyone wants his autograph or a selfie. He’s happy living with his girlfriend Hope Van Dyne (Lily) or Wasp as she’s also known. His only problem is his grown up daughter Callie (Newton) who’s been arrested during a protest and who wants him to star helping people again.

 While visiting Hope’s parents, Hank Pym (Douglas) and Janet Van Dyne (Pfeiffer) Scott discovers that Cassie has been working on a device to allow them to view the Quantum Realm. Upon learning this Janet, who’d been trapped for decades in the Quantum Realm, becomes anxious and turns off the device. It’s too late, the message Cassie sent got through and now all five of them have been pulled into the Quantum Realm.

The group are split up, but soon learn that the people of the Quantum Realm are being ruled over by a despotic overlord. Can Ant-Man, Wasp and the others help overthrow Kang the Conquer (Majors) and more importantly can they all get home?

I’m not sure whether I’m getting a little fatigued with the MCU, or whether its quality has dropped off, but I’m not feeling it the way I used to. Quantumania is a perfectly diverting film, but it’s average at best and given this is supposed to be the film that launches Phase 5, you have to be concerned about what’s coming next.

The biggest problem with the film is relocating Ant-Man to the Quantum Realm. The main selling point of the Ant-Man and Wasp characters has always been their interaction with the real world and how they relate to it, either in tiny mode, or in giant mode. Consider the finale to the first film which saw a battle take place, not across a city, but in a little girl’s bedroom. It’s fun to see Scott almost taken out by a Thomas the Tank Engine toy that looks like a life sized train from his miniaturised perspective, and both films are chock full of such fun.

Quantumania denies us this USP, instead we’re faced with a generic alien world that feels like a knock off version of the garbage planet in Thor: Ragnarök, even down to giving us a knock off version of Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster in the form of Bill Murray.

The cast do their best. Rudd’s natural charm goes along way (just not far enough) and it’s always good to see Pfeiffer and Douglas. In particular Pfeiffer gets a decent amount to do, unlike Lily whose Wasp seems short-changed, and it feels like maybe some of her role has shifted onto a re-casted Callie. Newton is fine but it’s hard to see this as the same character from the first two films.

The one redeeming feature is Majors as Kang, who walks a fine line between charm and menace with aplomb. Given he’s the big bad of Phase 5 this does give me hope, though I can’t help feeling that multiverse versions of him risk diluting his impact.

Corey Stoll is interesting, returning from the first film only in a radically different form as M.O.D.O.K. who is, to say the least, an odd character!

What’s interesting about the cast is who isn’t here. Much as taking Ant-Man and Wasp out of the real world makes them less interesting, the loss of  Michael Peña’s Luis, and his crew, dents the film as well. Sure, he wasn’t a major character but he, and his associates, were such a joy. None of the residents of the Quantum Realm come anywhere near close to being as interesting.

There are weird and wonderful inhabitants of the Quantum Realm, and lots of CGI thrown at the screen, yet it all feels bland and by the numbers, and people taking their masks off every ten seconds becomes a trifle annoying. The first third is terribly edited, and while it does settle down somewhat, it isn’t enough to salvage it as anything beyond mid-tier MCU (and that’s being generous).

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons

(Seen in February)

When a new law is proposed limiting individuals to only 140 words a day, musician Oliver (Turner) and lawyer Bernadette (Coleman) have differing views. They’re still in the early days of their relationship, and while Oliver is angry and vehemently against the proposed bill, Bernadette is more pragmatic, and doesn’t think the ‘Hush Bill’ will pass.

When it does it will have a profound impact on their relationship. 

“You’re going to speak more than 123 million words in your lifetime. What will you do when they run out?”

Something a little different as I haven’t seen much live theatre, but I made the effort because I’m a fan of Ms Coleman and I’m glad I did because I enjoyed this a lot. There’s no expansive set design, no wild costumes or huge cast, just two actors on stage talking for around 85 minutes and it worked really well.

Sure you have to accept the preposterous notion of a law limiting each person to 140 words a day (how could this remotely be enforced?) but once you accept the premise what you’re left with is an interesting two hander that tackles love and communication, and questions whether love can survive when our ability to communicate is curtailed.

I was lucky enough to have a front row seat and have to say both Coleman and Turner were fantastic. The story is nonlinear, bouncing back and forth between pre and post the Hush Law, which gives us the opportunity to see how Oliver and Bernadette’s relationship began, and thrived before their word count was cut short. It’s testament to both the script and the performances that I think there was only one moment where I was confused over which time period we were in.

Bernadette and Oliver are polar opposites. She’s the working class girl made good, he’s the son of wealthy parents (mention is made of growing up in a castle) who’s gravitated towards a life in the arts. He’s all anger and passion, she’s all calm logic yet each of them transcends stereotypes.

The story itself was written before Brexit, yet it feels like it’s a story about Brexit—the scene where they watch the result of the vote on television felt awfully familiar. It could equally be about freedom of speech however, but at its heart this is a romance not a political diatribe however, and it’s sweet and funny and heart-breaking, and if anything, the thing it most reminded me of was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another tale that used a fantastical premise to explore the realities of romance. 

Turner is much funnier than I’d taken him for having only seen him in very serious roles, but for me its Coleman who shoulders much of the heartbreak and I was close enough to see her tears.

Highly recommended if you get the chance to see it, and it definitely shows the benefits of steeping outside one’s comfort zone every once in a while.