Saturday, April 22, 2017

TV Review: 24: Legacy – A Mostly Satisfying Season Concludes


*This review contains spoilers.

From the very first episode, comparisons have been made between 24: Legacy and the original series starring Kiefer Sutherland as the iconic Jack Bauer. Fair or not, it is understandable because the original 24 was an undeniable juggernaut that shook up TV dramas on broadcast and cable networks with its innovative split screens, a timely terrorist threat, and a real-time scenario that included the pounding beat of that clock that kept everything at a fast pace.

Despite negative hubbub generated by some critics and fans, 24: Legacy held things together for the most part, largely due to executive producers from the original show staying on board (Howard Gordon, Manny Coto, Brian Grazer) and also thanks to a solid performance by new leading man Corey Hawkins portraying hero Eric Carter.
The original format of 24 one-hour episodes has been subsumed this time by 12 episodes that still unfold in real time – until the last one which features a 12-hour time jump to encompass the 24 hours indicated in the title. For 24  purists this has been an issue, but that also was a case in the last bad day Bauer experienced in 24: Live Another Day, so the side stories that seemed to enhance characterizations and the office intrigue at CTU that pleased many fans were no longer possible.

As I was watching this series, I kept telling myself that this is 24 despite feeling like something was off at times, which reminded me of watching the Star Wars prequels during which I kept thinking, “Come on, this is Star Wars.

Depending on to whom you are speaking, the many similarities to the first season – a senator running for president, a hero whose wife was in danger, a possible mole at CTU, a nefarious plot that is not what it seems to be, and a bad guy who was supposed to be dead and is not – were either annoyingly repetitive or just what the doctor ordered.

The season kicked off with a great first episode and then sort of sputtered along the way, and it seemed like the producers knew this and turned over a big rock and dug up Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard) to save the day. As it turns out, Tony has a past with presidential candidate and Senator John Donovan’s (Jimmy Smits) wife and former CTU Director Rebecca Ingram (Miranda Otto), who brings him into the picture as a problem solver. They take Donovan’s father Henry (a terrific Gerald McRaney) to an abandoned warehouse (a 24 staple) where they interrogate him the old fashioned and painful way (another staple of the old show). When this produces no results and causes friction between John and Rebecca, Henry is released and we figure maybe Tony is done here (though I was hoping he might give Jack a call for old time’s sake).

Tony doesn’t get much more to do until the last two episodes when he is called by Director of National Intelligence Donald Simms (James Moses Black), who wants him to do a dirty job that is right up Tony’s dark alley. Those who remember Tony fondly from the past might have forgotten that Bauer’s old buddy turned to the dark side and then some.

The back story here is that DNI Simms and Rebecca hatched a plot just as sinister as anything the terrorists could imagine. They targeted terrorist families, and managed to kidnap Sidra Naseri (an excellent Moran Atias), the young daughter of Asim Naseri (Oded Fehr). Naseri had been helping Carter in Afghanistan but turned on him after his daughter’s abduction thinking that she had been killed. He joined the terrorist Sheik Bin-Khalid (Eli Danker) whose men were sent to wipe out Carter’s team as payback.

Carter learns that Sidra is still alive, and because Naseri is holding Rebecca hostage, he hopes to trade Sidra for Rebecca. Of course, Tony and his team have been sent by Simms to kill the girl creating a collision course between Carter and Tony. The best moments of the finale involve Carter and Tony’s fight – sort of like old 24 against new 24 – and it is a brutal battle until Carter breaks Tony’s arm, and then Tony receives a call from John Donovan telling him that Carter is there to try to save Rebecca. Did you get all that?

Yes, it is a bit of the old winding and intertwining conflicts of interest, but Tony reveals his inner goodness by telling Carter that he would go with him to save Rebecca if he didn’t have the broken arm. Carter gets the girl onto a helicopter to the Egyptian embassy and then goes to meet Naseri, and once he knows that his daughter is safe he is willing to cooperate. The exchange does not go well because Bin-Khalid is angry at Carter for killing his son Jadalla (Raphael Acloque) and starts shooting. He kills Naseri and wounds Rebecca before Carter takes him out, and then Carter makes a desperate attempt to save Rebecca.

Unfortunately, Rebecca makes it to the hospital but passes away. Her husband is devastated, and when his father comes into the room where Donovan is sitting with her body, Smits does a great job of conveying the man’s pain and also his anger with Henry. The old man admits his mistake and is willing to go to prison, but he thinks John should still run for the presidency because the country needs him.

Donovan knows that his father Henry was in cahoots with Bin-Khalid (Henry was being blackmailed because he had business dealings with ISIS) and yet, because of Rebecca’s dirty deal with Simms (who blows his brains out when he realizes that he will be exposed in the kidnapping of Sidra) she was also connected with Henry, and John wants to protect her reputation more than maintain his bid for the White House.

While loyal viewers would figure that one main character had to die in keeping with the show’s tradition, it was very surprising that it would be Rebecca – I was thinking it would be Carter’s wife Nicole (Anna Diop) – but then that would be entirely too much like the first season when Jack lost his wife, so the impact here is a bit different but has major implications if there will be a second season.

While the series had a mostly good run, the ratings weren’t terrific, but based on Hawkins’s strong performance and the show’s pedigree, Fox should give this series at least one more season to try to build its fan base and gain more viewers.
There are many possibilities with the remaining characters including Donovan becoming president, fallout from the program Simms and Rebecca put in place, and Carter becoming a CTU agent. During a touching scene with his wife, Carter promises her no more lies (he had been secretly applying to CTU), and Nicole accepts that.

As Carter goes into a debriefing with CTU Director Mullins (Teddy Sears), we get a last shot of Nicole’s face, but from her expression we cannot be sure whether she is just afraid for her husband or unhappy about his decision to join CTU. Let’s hope we get a second season so that we can find out!

Thursday, April 20, 2017

What Happens in Schools With No Report Card Grades – True Learning Begins!

When thinking of Socrates – one of the greatest teachers who ever lived – it is hard to imagine him assigning A’s and B’s or worrying about students Plato and Xenophan’s grade point averages. Socrates knew that greater knowledge brought greater happiness, but the first and foremost assignment would be to know oneself in relation to the world – only then through reasoning and logic could true knowledge be attained.

Flash forward to our current abysmal education system where everything revolves around grading and standardized testing. In order to get students to do well on these assessments, so-called “knowledge” is shoved down their throats with intensity in order to have them perform well and prop up test scores for their districts. In this meaningless annual cycle, teaching to the test amounts to little or no teaching at all, but rather a concerted effort to make the grade.

Parents across the country have rebelled against state assessments and standardized testing. They have realized that students are not truly learning content – which means mastery – but rather are being put through repetitive drills with sample tests in order to succeed on the examinations. Once the exam periods are over, there is no retention of information and thus the next school year the exasperating cycle will have to begin again.

One school district in Connecticut has done away with grades. In Windsor Locks students in the middle and high school there are involved in a new system that requires them to “master” skills in every subject area in order to be promoted. School superintendent Susan Bell notes that a D- (the old passing grade) is no longer a pass to the next grade or to graduation. Of course, this makes sense because no one is ready to move up to the next grade with a D- average.

The model in Windsor Locks should not only be applauded by other educators – it should be initiated in some form or other in their districts. The idea of mastery means progress – gone is the formality of number or letter grades that do little to tell anyone what a student knows. In this school district, a student must fully learn skills and, if he or she needs more time, is not penalized but rather supported until mastery is achieved.

Yes, this is a unique model, but it also fits into a vision I have had for schools for a long time. In my ideal school, every student would have an IEP – an Individualized Education Program – not just those enrolled as special education students. By giving each student a plan designed for his or her abilities, schools would be enabled to structure a course of instruction that is reasonable and personal.

In this system grading would be obsolete. Students will compile semester portfolios which will show their progress and, as in the Windsor Locks system, they will have to demonstrate more than a simple understanding of each subject area – but each student will have his or her own level of tasks needed to be completed. In this way mastery is in no way a one size fits all expectation just as A’s and B’s used to be.

Opposition to these kinds of innovate education plans is to be expected. Many parents and teachers who came through antiquated A’s and B’s school systems feel semesters and report cards are normal parts of their children’s scholastic experience. They have been conditioned to accept the status quo because they know nothing else.

Why should any child not have an optimal educational experience in school? What has been going on in classrooms for many decades is far from optimal. A teacher who is in a classroom with 25 students must face the facts – that  in some ways he or she is failing to reach each one of them in a given day  because he or she is expecting them to conform – to all get the same understanding through instruction and then to get the same grades on tests which should result in the same grades on their report cards.

How could any teacher possibly believe that he or she could reach 25 students who are all unique individuals in the same way every day? It is a cookie-cutter approach that has been going on for far too long, but the problem is that kids are not uniform cookies – they come in all shapes and sizes and have different learning needs. The education system continues to fail students because of this folly of expectation that has resulted in reliance on standardized test scores that have no meaning in relation to what a child knows and retains.

I praise Windsor Locks school district for its innovative approach and hope that more school districts will begin to embrace this kind of instruction and assessment. It should be the wave of the future, but administrators will have to be brave and bold and do something that has not been done for so long – what is best for the children and not their budgets and the vested interests like testing companies.

Instead of a child bringing home a report card with grades on it, he or she should come home with a multi-page document – I  label it a "Learning Narrative" which sounds a good deal less intimidating than "report card" – that covers all skills learned, ones yet to be learned, and realistic goals to be reached in the following period of instruction based on his or her IEP. As it always should be, parental involvement and support would be encouraged and welcome – as it is now many parents are kept at arm’s length from the school building and do not feel like partners with their children’s teachers. This has to change.

The most important thing to parents besides their children’s health and well-being is their education. As a parent, I want my kids to come away from school with the skills they need to succeed in life, but I also want them to be able to retain knowledge and have an understanding about subject matter that is deep and not just cursory in order to pass state and standardized tests.

As parents, it is our duty to do everything we can to advocate for this kind of change that will create a more meaningful and memorable school experience for all students. We owe it to our children because they deserve so much better than what they are getting now.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

TV Review: Big Little Lies – Satisfying Finale Leaves Us Wanting More




*This review contains spoilers.

From the first dreamlike strains of the opening credits (featuring Michael Kiwanuka’s amazing “Cold Little Heart”), we get sucked into a stream of consciousness sequence of beautiful images of Monterey, our main characters Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), Celeste (Nicole Kidman), and Jane (Shailene Woodley) driving their kids to school, the wild ocean, a gun held in the sunshine, children dancing, the female leads mugging for the camera in Audrey Hepburn costumes, and silhouettes of lovers – and the show hasn’t even started yet. But just like HBO’s other recent hit mini-series Westworld (they really have cornered the market on making opening credits an art form), we come to understand what Big Little Lies will be about and it’s quite compelling.

The (hopefully season and not the series) finale answers the questions everyone wanted to know – who got murdered and who did it, but the way we get there is not how we have believed we would. The fact that Jane has a gun and fears the rapist who impregnated her has hung over the series (that is the  gun seen in the opening credits), and if we subscribe to Anton Chekhov’s theory about guns (if one is shown in a story it has to eventually go off), the way the murder takes place is a shove instead of a shot, and the person doing the shoving is the least likely character to do it.

The series would have been compelling enough if the murder was not in the mix. We have Madeline cheating on her husband Ed (Adam Scott) with Joseph (Santiago Cabrera), the director of the local theatre company, and also dealing with her teenage daughter Abigail (Kathryn Newton) wanting to auction her virginity for charity. Former lawyer Celeste is trying to raise twin sons while engaging in an increasingly violent and abusive relationship with her husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård). New in town Jane gets into a battle with powerful executive Renata (Laura Dern) who accuses her son Ziggy (Ian Armitage) of bullying Renata’s daughter Amabella (Ivy George), so there is plenty of conflict and also numerous potential aggressors and victims, which makes the murder mystery all the more interesting.

Writer David E. Kelley and director Jean-Marc Vallée have taken the story from Liane Moriarty’s novel and adapted it deftly (while also leaving out a number of details from the book) for television. The arc of seven episodes gives ample time to develop these compelling characters, show the tensions in their interactions, and question who would have enough animosity to cross the line and become a killer.

During this time, we identify with each of the three main female characters, even the less sympathetic Madeline grows on the viewer as we see how she is torn by her actions and understands that her marriage could be unraveling and, when her daughter announces that she is moving in with Madeline’s ex-husband Nathan (James Tupper) and his new, younger wife Bonnie (Zoē Kravitz), she begins questioning her parenting skills.

As the abuse escalates we connect with Celeste’s quiet but incongruous battle to stay with Perry, who one minute is gentle and loving and the next minute is smashing her head against a wall. While Perry maintains he is fighting demons and needs help, he also suggests that their twin sons Max and Josh (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti) have no idea that he is using her as a punching bag; however, Celeste believes that the boys are not only aware but that it is affecting them.

Perhaps we empathize with Jane most of all as she fights the good fight for her son, knowing in her heart that Ziggy is a gentle soul and confirming it with testing and evaluation. Her flashbacks of the rape by a man she cannot remember as well as her chasing him along the beach after the rape are upsetting, but not any more than when she dreams about the rapist trying to break into her home and she reaches for the gun to stop him.

The series culminates with the big Trivia Night fundraiser for the children’s school where it is Audrey and Elvis Night – all attendees are dressed in various incarnations of the iconic figures Audrey Hepburn or Elvis Presley. Some of the main characters take a turn at the microphone to sing, and none is more moving and hypnotic than Bonnie. She is probably the least developed of the five female characters, but her opportunities in scenes are memorable and she brings a subtle strength to the table literally when Ed and Madeline visit with Bonnie and Nathan to discuss the raising of Abigail and handling her virginity auction. Amidst all the bickering, Bonnie is the only one who makes sense.

The most misunderstood of the five is Dern’s Renata, who comes off as the hard as nails CEO who wants Ziggy expelled from school for messing with her child, but to Dern’s credit she gives Renata a vulnerability that redeems her for the viewer, especially when she and Jane meet and try to at least come to an understanding, even after Jane has attacked her and given her a black eye.

At the Trivia Night the lies of the title start to unravel one by one. Joseph’s wife Tori (Sarah Sokolovic), who has confronted Madeline previously about her suspicions of an affair, now glares angrily at her. Celeste, who has been hiding a beachfront apartment as part of an escape plan, is confronted by Perry about it in their car, but she manages to get out and run to the party. Celeste confesses to Renata that Max is the one abusing Amabella, and Madeline overwhelmed with guilt (and more than a little drunk) runs off to the edge of the property where yellow caution tape is stretched across a dangerous staircase. Jane follows her and Madeline confesses that she had an affair.

This is when Renata seeks out Jane to let her know that she is sorry about wrongly accusing Ziggy, and then Celeste comes toward them as she is trying to escape Perry. In horror Jane stares at Perry and realizes that he is the man who raped her – and Perry recognizes Jane too. He still wants Celeste to come home with him and, when she refuses, he begins to get physical and pushes away the other women who are trying to help Celeste. Bonnie, who has followed Perry because she saw him and Celeste bickering, comes running forward after Perry has knocked the other women to the ground. As he prepares to punish Celeste, Bonnie rushes him and pushes him through the yellow tape and down the staircase, killing him.

If this seems way too coincidental, perhaps it sounds that way, but Kelley and Vallée pull it off, thanks in large part due to the cast’s incredible talent to make this moment actually work when we see it. In the end the police arrive and Detective Quinlan (Merrin Dungey), whom we have seen throughout the series conducting the investigation, doubts the story that the five women have obviously agreed upon telling – it was an accident. She suspects that they are covering up something and asks her partner, “Why lie?” Of course, that has been the context of the whole series, so ending the series with one last big lie that is far from little seems apropos.

The last scene shows the mothers and their children frolicking on the beach, all laughing and enjoying each other’s company. Gloriously adult male free, they throw their cares (and the plot’s many other loose ends) to the wind. It is a fitting final moment but the last shot is seen from the perspective of Detective Quinlan looking through a pair of binoculars watching the women on the beach, letting us know that she is still not satisfied and leaving the door open for season number two. 

There are many situations yet to be resolved, including the detective’s lingering doubts about the case. A second season will have to rely on something vastly different than just the continued murder investigation, but there are more than enough stories yet to be told for these characters.

We should hope for season number two to eventually happen, but getting this dream cast back together may be harder than reuniting the Beatles and ultimately just as unsuccessful. What a shame that would be!