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Ken and Robin Consume Media: The Critics are Wrong About The Dead Don’t Die, Which is Why You Rely On Us

June 18th, 2019 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

The Pinnacle

The Dead Don’t Die (Film, US, Jim Jarmusch, 2019) Small town cops (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny) try to keep it together when polar fracking unleashes a global zombie epidemic. In the future, if we have one, this deceptively ramshackle zom-com will be recognized as an essential document of the first-stage Trump era.—RDL

Recommended

Barry Season 2 (Television, US, HBO, Alec Berg and Bill Hader, 2019) Assassin-turned-acting student (Hader) tries to cleave to the latter and forget the former, but his ex-partner (Stephen Root) and gregarious Chechen client (Anthony Carrigan) have other ideas. As second seasons that live up to a great debut grow rarer, this drives deeper  into bananastown while still maintaining its balance between laughs and moral horror.—RDL

Bolshoi Babylon (Film, UK, Nick Read, 2015) Documentary goes behind the scenes at Russia’s mythically central Bolshoi Ballet Theater in the aftermath of an incident in which one of its dancers ordered an acid attack on its artistic director. It sounds odd to say this about a documentary, but this does a lot of early, methodical worldbuilding to contextualize its fly-on-the-wall institutional power struggle.—RDL

Justified Season 1 (Television, US, FX, Graham Yost, 2010) Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) receives an unwelcome transfer to his Kentucky stomping grounds, where he navigates between his ex-wife (Natalie Zea) and a witness he shouldn’t be sleeping with (Joelle Carter) and contends with the hillbilly mafia. Police procedural partners up with the contemporary western, with fine black hattery from Walton Goggins and M. C. Gainey.—RDL

Salt Fat Acid Heat (Television, Netflix, Samin Nosrat, 2018) Chef Nosrat travels the world explicating the four core concepts of cooking, generally with two or three dishes cooked in between excitement at a salt pan or olive grove. Nosrat’s educitement is infectious, and there’s nothing more deeply lush than food documentary vegetable photography. Also, she’s right about the salt, people. –KH

Good

Gonza the Spearman (Film, Japan, Masahiro Shinoda, 1985)  In an era where years of internal peace have tightened the social constraints on samurai, a marriage negotiation gone awry brings dishonor and doom to a rising court attendant and the wife of his mentor. Stately adaptation of a 17th century kabuki drama is your reference point if you’re looking for a clear cinematic explication of the tea ceremony in its political context. Suffers from a notably egregious case of that longstanding bane of the samurai genre, Unconvincing Bald Cap Syndrome.—RDL

Roughly Speaking (Film, US, Michael Curtiz, 1945) Determined New Englander (Rosalind Russell), her brood of kids and her ex-pilot second husband (Jack Carson) push through the wild ups and downs of early 20th century American life. Curtiz’s mastery of momentum finds a cohesion few other directors would manage in this episodic memoir adaptation.—RDL

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