[ad_1]
In a late episode of Netflix's latest television series, movie star Emma Stone performs a drunken elvish ranger. In the next episode, movie star Jonah Hill plays a dungeon that drinks gimlet, named "Snorri", which refers to himself in the third person with a bad Icelandic accent.
It will make more sense when you look Maniacal. Kind of.
The Netflix mini-series, released today (Sept. 21), takes a lot of what you've learned to expect from TV and launches it into the ether. The duration of the episodes varies enormously between about 25 and 45 minutes. The genre goes from science fiction to black comedy to family drama, but it would not be fair to call it just one or two.
Directed by filmmaker James Bond recently anointed Cary Fukunaga and written by Leftovers the scribe Patrick Somerville, Maniacal is a new type of television experience that constantly questions what it means to be "normal", or even if it exists.
Stone and Hill are Annie and Owen, two subjects of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial under the direction of a Dr. James K. Mantleray, performed by Justin Theroux. Mantleray's thesis is both simple and crazy: each subject ingests a series of psychedelic pills that induce wild fantasies (or are they illusions?) Which, according to him, will allow them to eliminate their trauma and their neuroses. Humanity can "evolve in past suffering," says Mantleray. Many episodes follow Annie and Owen through these fantasies, which become more bizarre as the trial.
Annie is there to solve the problem: she became dependent on the first pill of the trial, so she sinks into the study to have more drugs. Owen, the black sheep of a wealthy New York family, pledges money (he rejects his family's financial aid offers), or maybe he does it because he thinks that it could help him. Owen very well can be schizophrenic. He understood that some of the things he sees are not real and they have almost stopped trying to make a difference.
The entire experiment is controlled by an artificial intelligence supercomputer called GRTA, inspired by Mantleray's famous mother psychologist, Dr. Greta Mantleray. (Sally Field plays Greta and plays the AI). GRTA, nicknamed Gertie, is an even more unstable version of HAL 2001: Odyssey of space.
You see, nothing in Maniacal Behaves exactly as it should. That's the goal. "We want to question the idea of normality," Somerville told Quartz.
This interrogation is deeply rooted in the DNA of the series. The default human parameter is the malfunction, Maniacal Nobody is normal. "Normal" does not exist. We do not need to be healed of our anomalies, but to find some peace with them, then to come to a solution.
Maniacal is surprisingly as positive and poignant as trippy. Where many dense shows like this have avoided emotions in favor of the next turn to unravel or solve in mystery, Maniacal is the rare psychological "jigsaw puzzle" that carries one's heart on the sleeve, finding humanity in a psychological mystery. Detectives on the Internet will be tempted to examine the many subtleties of the show, even if they have to resist this urge. Delivery for viewers of Maniacal is quite ordinary, but profound: life is about creating bonds.
It's strange to see a show like this having such a clear and optimistic point of view. Again, this is not normal.
Even how the series came together was not normal. Fukunaga and the producer Anonymous Content owned the rights to the story, based (very, very vaguely) on a Norwegian series of the same name. They brought Stone and Hill on board and then sold the show to Netflix, "without taking," Somerville explained. That means there was no show at that time – just a vague idea of one of them, with two big movie stars and an acclaimed auteur director (directed by Fukunaga). Beasts of No Nation and the first season of True detective) attached. Somerville arrived on board and began to describe the details of the story with Fukunaga in the reverse order of the design of most television shows.
If what the two partners have found is odd, there is a version somewhere even stranger: Fukunaga and Somerville said that several rich ideas, including complete scripts, had been developed for various reasons. Some of the fantasies and delusions they cooked were apparently too meta and incomprehensible.
But what we get is pretty crazy in itself. The show takes place in a meticulously rendered and completely bizzaro version of New York City. It's "the future through the filter of the '80s," says Billy Magnussen, who is still as good as Owen's kid, a bastard's brother, tried for assault. And this is a very good description: all the technology, fashion and architecture of the series are from this decade, although it is clear that we are supposed to be in the future. (Mantleray says he was born in 1977, which would put the series in the 2020s if he is about the same age as the actor who plays it, although the exact date does not really importance.)
The staging generates some Maniacal"More cool – and the funniest – the details. The Statue of Liberty has been replaced by the "Statue of Extra Liberty," a ridiculous act of bidding that may or may not be a subtle job of the current president of the United States. The city works economically: a company called "Friend Proxy" sends people to play the role of true friends of its users. Another, called "Ad Buddy", allows users to acquire products and services for free if they literally listen to commercials. Better yet, there's what can only be described as "poop-bots," pint-size drones that roam the streets in search of trash.
Netflix
Maniacal is a show with his tongue firmly in his cheek. It may not be a "comedy" in the classic sense of the word, but it is completely hilarious. Everyone in the cast seems to have an explosion, but the star of the show, humor, is Theroux, whom Mantleray, nervous and insecure but also serious, quickly embarks on the top of the television comedy. characters. (The way we are officially introduced to Dr. Mantleray in the flesh is simply remarkable – do not let anyone spoil this moment for you.)
For all technobabbles included in the show, none of this should be taken seriously. The readings of Theroux's line of "The last thing we want is a data corruptionAnd "Globular Cluster of Tree Realities" are as fun as they appear, and where they come from.
Somerville and Fukunaga have repeatedly emphasized that the series is very collaborative. "We have incorporated so many different elements from so many different people," Somerville said. Effectively, Maniacal is the kind of show that can only happen after late night brainstorms and half-prepared group positions. Of course, this sometimes translates into a messy narration, and some of the ideas in the series are clearly better executed than others. (One of the drug-induced fantasies is boring, while Annie's overall scenario is stronger than Owen's.)
The show owes debts to beginning for his dream sequences infiltrating the mind; at 2001 for items misplaced by the AI; at Brazil for the quasi-dystopian setting; and Eternal sun of the spotless spirit because the argument that love and the human bond are forces that we do not really understand – and that they can undoubtedly transcend modern science. (Hey, wait, Interstellar explored that too.)
Maniacal is a Netflix show this way – you can almost see the algorithm at work, how it guided Fukunaga and his company to create a show that would appeal to fans of various shows and movies. But whatever the influence of past work, the result is strangely unique. The ingredients are mostly familiar; the cocktail is something new. There is absolutely nothing that looks like Maniacal.
"Television is somehow a way to avoid clichés," Theroux told Quartz. Theroux knows how to avoid clichés, as a star of HBO's beautifully original series Leftovers-and Maniacal carries part of this shifted DNA. It's an uninteresting, amorphous and incredibly abnormal film that tells us it's not a cliché. And it's even better to be manic.
Source link
