Guy Somerset experiences a horror TV show that is really radio, and a movie that is really a stage play, in this week's Critic's Chair column on On Demand viewing.
How much like a TV show does a TV show have to be to count as a TV show? How little like a TV show can it be and still count?
Calls is a starry supernatural/horror series consisting of nine episodes of between 13 and 21 minutes.
Among its stars is Nicholas Braun, best known to most of us as Cousin Greg in Succession.
Calls is the sort of dumb-fool high concept to which Succession’s Kendall Roy might commit millions of dollars of the family media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo – and you can envisage the scathing look and language with which his father Logan would greet the news.
Because how’s this for the future of television? The future of television is … radio.
We never see Braun in Calls. Nor other illustrious presences such as Lily Collins, Aubrey Plaza, Nick Jonas, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Riley Keough, Danny Huston, Karen Gillan and Jennifer Tilly.
We just hear their voices as we eavesdrop on what at first seems a disparate collection of phone conversations in one of those portmanteau anthologies familiar to followers of the supernatural and horror genres, but which coheres around a shared sci-fi storyline involving time, astrophysics and the perils of meddling with parallel universes.
Calls, says Apple TV+, “proves that the real terror lies in one’s interpretation of what they cannot see on the screen and the unsettling places one’s imagination can take them”.
The place my own imagination took me on reading this was one where Logan Roy was rolling his eyes.
Apple TV+ might be right, but it’s hardly a resounding endorsement for the new television streaming service, unless it’s planning to relaunch as Apple Radio+. As we await the proposed RNZ–TVNZ merger, we better hope no one there is taking notes.
Calls does have a visual element: graphic realisations of the phone calls’ pulsing electrical signals. Combined with the synthesiser washes that drift across the soundtrack, it’s like being at a Tangerine Dream concert or an audio-video art installation.
I watched half the series and just listened to the other half. The visuals, pretty and trippy though they are, aren’t essential to the experience. In any other show, they’d be the credit sequence and then we’d get on with the story.
Which leaves us with what? Well, a radio drama. Or, if you want to be more modish, a podcast.
On which terms, Calls works well enough, with episodes moving from what is initially merely confounding to often horrific conclusions.
But the series succumbs to sentimentality, including a story where a winsome young girl isn’t enough and they feel the need to add Stevie Wonder’s saccharine I Just Called to Say I Love You.
And when the horror kicks in I couldn’t help but think how much more horrifying it would be to see and not just hear it. The visual aspect of TV having its benefits and all.
The showrunner of Calls is Uruguayan horror auteur Fede (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) Álvarez and it is based on a French series of the same name created by Timothée Hochet.
And who knows, maybe they’re on to something. After all, as Succession fans awaiting its third season know, you really shouldn’t underestimate Kendall Roy.
Early in One Night in Miami, there is a line so shocking, at once both unexpected and inevitable, that it is every bit as horrific as anything Calls can conjure up. Expertly arrived at by all involved – writer, director and actors alike – it truly takes your breath away.
If Calls is TV that’s really radio, One Night in Miami is TV that’s really a movie that’s really a stage play.
Although cinemas have remained mostly open in New Zealand and other parts of the world where Covid-19 has been contained, they have been shut or under severe audience restrictions for the past year in the locked-down countries where movie companies make the bulk of their money – i.e. the United States.
As a result, many movies, including One Night in Miami, have been released simultaneously and often exclusively on streaming services.
Big though the TV screens in our homes have become, they still can’t do justice to the visual expanses of a movie such as the recent News of the World. One Night in Miami, however, notwithstanding the efforts to open it out by director Regina King (yes, the actress who played Angela Abar/Sister Night in last year’s Watchmen reboot), betrays its stage origins, with the bulk of the movie taking place within the confines of a hotel room.
The night in question is the one in 1964 when boxer Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston and became world heavyweight champion. Adapting his own play, Kemp Powers has created a fictional celebration of the win featuring Clay, singer Sam Cooke, black rights activist Malcolm X and NFL football player Jim Brown, who were friends in real life as well as the movie.
While the rest of Miami marks Clay’s win with jubilant partying, Clay is stuck cooped up with the abstemious X as he seeks to make a notable convert of him to the Nation of Islam and lectures him, Cooke and Brown on the roles they need to step up to in the black rights movement.
British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir missed out on an Oscar nomination for his performance as X, whose piousness is balanced with vulnerability in the face of foreboding as he is tailed by the FBI (“Hoover’s lackeys have been following me around so long they know where I’m going to be before I do”) and lives under a constant threat of violence. Ben-Adir is spot-on with everything from X’s posture to the cadences of his speech.
Powers did receive an Oscar nomination, with actor and singer Leslie Odom Jr, for his performance as Cooke and for the song he and the movie gift Cooke, Speak Now, which plays during the closing credits.
Speak Now is the sort of song X would wish for Cooke as he berates him at length for the compromises of his career and the flimsy fodder he sings when, instead of “wasting a brilliant and creative mind on pandering”, he could be “so much more”.
It is an example of what that “so much more” might have sounded like; A Change is Gonna Come, which we see Odom Jr as Cooke perform on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, is what “so much more” did in fact sound like, being one of Cooke’s genuine songs.
Often in movies such as this, actors mime to recordings of the singers they are playing; Odom Jr performs all the songs himself (including a remarkable, live a cappella rendition of Working on a Chain Gang) and has Cooke’s sweet soul voice to a tee.
Aldis Hodge is solid as the self-contained Brown. Only Eli Goree disappoints in the perhaps hapless role of Clay. The verbal energy is there in the lines Powers gives him but not in the delivery. But then Clay’s charm and charisma were lightning in a bottle no one else could replicate.
Powers is too intelligent a writer to let X have the argument all his way and Cooke gives as good as he gets, as do Clay and Brown when X also goes after them for being “bourgeois Negroes too happy with your scraps”. The movie covers the many nuances and ways of being a black man in 1960s America and by implication in the decades since.
At one point, X erupts: “There’s no more room for anyone … to be standing on the fence anymore. Our people are literally dying in the streets every day. Black people are dying. Every day. And a line has got to be drawn in the sand … a line that says either you stand this side with us or you stand over on that side against us …”
Powers doesn’t let X land a knockout punch, but he does let him win on points.
Calls (Apple TV+); One Night in Miami (Amazon Prime Video).
