The_late_Buddy_Ryan

This awesome series didn't get much love when it was streaming on the AT&T Audience (?!) platform, which actually went under before S3 was ready to go. Now that it's on Netflix, it's finally getting the attention it deserves. Indie go-to guy Ron Livingston plays the title character, a hard-partying rock critic turned substance-abuse counselor for an "AA ripoff" outfit, Sober Friends. He presides over a shifting cast of weirdos and lovable losers--all very funny, even the ones who never talk--plus a foxy art girl/recovering meth head protégée (Anja Savcic) and Loudermilk's former sponsor, now fallen from grace, a kind-hearted dufus played by Will Sasso.

The series was filmed on the cheap in Vancouver, though it's ostensibly set in Seattle (more relatable??), and many of the supporting cast are Canadian, including Sasso, Ricky Britt as New Guy, a volatile ex-meth head personal-injury lawyer, and gorgeous Laura Mennell as the obligatory hot-girl neighbor. The dialogue's smart and funny, Loudermilk's glum misanthropy is actually quite refreshing in a workplace-comedy context, and the storyline, though it can veer pretty far into the outlandish, never quite jumps the shark. The show's portrayal of recovery and the weekly routine in "the rooms," from what I've heard, is pretty much on the money.

Though we tried hard not to binge, three seasons of 10 half-hour shows each weren't nearly enough for us, and I was stoked to hear that, accd'g to series co-creator Peter Farrelly, a fourth season might soon be in the works now that the show's such a hit on Netflix.

Normally the introduction of a novel food crop onto a barren tract of scrubland wouldn't make for a very involving film, but this one has Mads Mikkelsen, an excellent script based on what seems like a fine historical novel, a villain you love to hate and a strong supporting cast, including a band of Pythonesque outlaws and wandering Roma (called "Taters" in the CC, based on the mistaken belief that they were Tatars from Central Asia when they first arrived in Denmark).

The original Danish title--a word that's almost the same in English but I mustn't mention here bc "community standards"--gives a better sense of our hero's motivation. Mads's character, Captain Kahlen, is the unacknowledged son of a rapey landowner who was sent off to join the Prussian army as a boy. Now retired with a small pension, he's taken up a standing offer to cultivate a vast (by Danish standards) expanse of heath that's resisted all efforts to tame it in return for a noble title and a share of the takings. The king approves in principle but his ministers are unhelpful and the neighboring gentry downright hostile. As mentioned, the captain has a trick up his sleeve--a New World staple that's slowly crept northward through the fields of France and Germany but is still unknown in Denmark. (No points for guessing...)

Fine performances by all, especially newcomer Melina Hagberg as the light-fingered, potty-mouthed Roma girl Ahnmai Mus, Simon Benebjerg as the sadistic landowner De Schinkel, and action star Amanda Colin ("Raised by Wolves") as the captain's avenging angel. I recommend the CC over the dubbed soundtrack; the dubbing's pretty good, but the original Danish and German dialogue's much more expressive, and the subtitlist's gone above and beyond finding English equivalents for the Taters' "gypsy" cant.

Though it only dropped last year, Forgotten Love (original title Znachor, which means "quack") is a good old-fashioned popcorn movie, as contrived and over the top as anything you're liable to find on TCM these days. Despite the creakiness of the plot (it's an adaptation of a Polish novel published in 1937), it's extremely entertaining, with a strong, appealing cast, gorgeous cinematography and plenty of lavish folkloric detail in the sets--I can't imagine any existing Polish village is as charmingly picturesque as this one.

The hokeyness of the plot can only command respect: A respected Warsaw surgeon, Dr. Wilczur, ventures into a rough part of town in search of his wife, who's fled with their young daughter to join her lover. He's beaten up by hooligans and loses his memory; it seems like an ambitious younger colleague at the clinic might have something to do with this, though it's not entirely clear. Fifteen years later, still suffering from amnesia and traveling with false papers, he ends up in the same remote village where his daughter, who believes herself to be an orphan, is working as a barmaid. His medical skills haven't deserted him, however, and after he intervenes to save two critically injured villagers, one of them his daughter, he's arrested and charged with znachorstwo (practising medicine without a license, which carries a penalty of five years' imprisonment.) There's a trial and a dramatic recognition scene, like something from an opera or maybe A Winter's Tale, and curtain...

The actors who play the doctor and his daughter both have tremendous presence; it's easy to imagine Paul Muni or Spencer Tracy as the doctor in the Hollywood (Barton Fink?) version, with maybe Miriam Hopkins or Bette Davis as the daughter. There are a couple of characters--a Jewish tavern keeper who's played mostly for comic relief and a sprig of the local nobility who's daughter Marysia's love interest--who wouldn't have fared too well IRL in the years to come, I expect, but a Polish audience is probably accustomed to such ironies. The author of the novel was killed In a skirmish with Soviet troops in 1939; his other claim to fame in the West is that the plot of an earlier novel bears a strong resemblance to Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, which some critics felt was unlikely to be coincidental.