The Curse
Sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to make your point! <PERSON>’s screen presence is a bit of a complicating and frustrating factor for me, although all three leads are uniformly excellent - this is really compelling as a super-weird slow-motion <PERSON> moving-parts-in-a-pressure-cooker thriller about white-saviorism, gentrification, New Mexican liberalism, contemporary art and reality TV (the specificity and depth of the venom here, my god!), and the much-discussed WTF ending actually makes about as much sense as anything else would in that context, but in casting himself <PERSON> places this firmly within his artistic project of finding new ways to expose himself as pathetic on television, which has pretty consistently held diminishing returns for me since Finding Frances, when the interiority actually came as a surprise rather than being par for the course. You mean <PERSON> plays a cosmic cuckold with a micropenis? You mean he’s gonna get grilled on camera about his personal failings and the end of his last relationship? Or, tee-hee, is it a show about why and how the constraints of reality TV might make him look like a loser? Haven’t we been through this before? Is there really anything more to be milked out of the <PERSON>-both-<PERSON>-and-<PERSON> stuff? I’m not so sure, especially now that it’s had a perfect formal payoff with “the pottery scene.” Viewed in that light, I’m hoping this is a final kiss-off to that side of his work, but I was saying that that about The Rehearsal too, so I’ll believe it when I see it.
Anyway, whatever it all amounts to, it’s pretty magnetic television. I don’t think the 10 episode format does it any favors - it’s not that it’s too long, exactly, as much as it feels like a pitch for a limited series of 4 two-hour episodes cut into a full season; those previously-ons are obviously at least somewhat part of the show’s parodying of TV, but the show itself isn’t really doing a ton of that, so... 282
they mostly just end up serving the purpose of reminding the viewer what themes they should have in mind for the next 45 minutes. The amorphousness is by and large perfectly harnessed within the episodes themselves (<PERSON> as director is the biggest revelation here, just unbelievably good stuff), although Episode 8 in particular stuck out as an exception to that, but as a Season Of Television I’m not sure how functional it is. Happy to settle for electrifying, alienating, hysterical and perfectly-performed, tho! 282