THE MORNING LIST
Aside from the squeaky comedy that Ali Wong and Steven Yeun deliver, this week’s releases are nothing new. From the genesis of the characters of Grease (45-year-old feature film) to the descendants of those of The Spanish inn (2003) through the return of the ghosts of the Royal Hospital in Copenhagen, the series look back.
“Acharnés”: a delicious game of massacre
In English, there is an expression to designate collisions at the wheel which degenerate into fistfights, road rage (“road rage”). The starting point of Beef (relentless en VF), the first collaboration between the trendy producers of A24 and the Netflix platform, is a banal altercation at the wheel between Danny and Amy, which turns into a game of massacre when the two thirty-somethings see revenge as a means of evacuate the existential frustration that gnaws at them.
Danny is a failed entrepreneur, demoralized by his parents’ financial bankruptcy; Amy runs a store but lacks desire for her husband. Average citizens of a dreary suburb of Los Angeles, each sees in the other an opportunity to fill their inner emptiness. There followed a series of pettiness and low blows carried out with as much application as jubilation by these two mediocre beings, perfectly embodied by the excellent Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead, Nope) and comedian Ali Wong. In ten nervous episodes, which sometimes overplay the tension, the series provides an effective fictional outlet for the ambient benevolence. Me. F.
relentless Series created by Lee Sung Jin. With Ali Wong, Steven Yeun, Joseph Lee, Young Mazino, David Choe (USA, 2023, 10 × 30 min). On demand on Netflix.
“The Hospital and its ghosts. Exodus”: the macabre dance of Lars Von Trier
A quarter of a century after the second season of The Hospital and its ghosts, Lars Von Trier returns to haunt the corridors of the royal hospital in Copenhagen, known as “the kingdom” (this is the title of the series in Danish and English). We might as well warn you right away, if you want to immerse yourself in this bath of terror and suffering (which is “what all living beings share”, according to one of the characters), fortunately agitated with burlesque or poetic whirlwinds, it is better to see or see the first two seasons again. At the time (the 1990s), Lars Von Trier walked on the broken legs of David Lynch, who had just given birth Twin Peaks. The Hospital and its ghosts was to the medical series what the investigation into the death of Laura Palmer was to the detective genre: a destructive and transcendent subversion.
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