Spring is here. Winter is over. So say we all.
We had our days of near-freezing temperatures. Now it’s 66. Tomorrow 72. That’s okay by us.
I had to sign my name 265 or so times yesterday. The project hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say exactly why.
We watched The Hollars on the weekend, enticed by the presence of Margo Martindale (from Justified and The Americans). It’s a family drama about a man (whose girlfriend, Anna Kendrick, is profoundly pregnant) who returns to home after his mother (Martindale) falls and is found to be very ill. His brother is living at home again and his father’s plumbing business is failing. It’s a nice movie with a good heart. There’s always one character in these things, though, who destroys any semblance of reality by being over-the-top outrageous, and in this case it’s the brother, who takes comic relief and turns it into some cringe-worthy moments. Josh Groban has a small part, and the father is played by Richard Jenkins, who was the father in Six Feet Under, which makes the scene where he has to lie down in the back of a hearse all that much funnier.
I finished watching the first season of Spotless on Netflix, although it apparently originated with Esquire TV, which I didn’t even know was a thing. It’s a French/British production about two brothers who did something terrible when they were boys growing up in France. One brother moved to London and has a family there (wife, 13-year-old daughter, 10-ish-year-old son). His business is crime scene cleaning, hence the series’ title. He knows how to remove every last spot left from a murder scene or a house where someone died and wasn’t found for a while. The other brother shows up from France in possession of some stolen property that leads to trouble upon trouble upon trouble for both. The series has a strong Breaking Bad vibe as this previously honest guy gets pulled into doing work for a crime boss, played by Brendan Coyle of Downton Abbey, who is even more dapper than Gus Fring, a gentleman crook with sharp fangs. As with Breaking Bad, everything keeps going from bad to worse. A lot is resolved by the end of episode 10, but far from everything, and Season 2 is scheduled for next year, although when it will make its way to Netflix I don’t know. Well worth checking out if you like crime shows.
