Author page: mrqe

Everyone from Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Pier Paolo Pasolini has taken a crack at retelling one or more tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. First published in 1353, the short story collection follows 10 noblemen and women as they flee Black Death-ridden Florence for a secluded villa in Fiesole. Over the course of a fortnight, the guests take turns telling stories, resulting in 100 tales, ranging from erotica, tragedy, comedy, and beyond. But just in case the viewer is led astray by the title, Netflix’s new limited series borrows only the title of Boccaccio’s book, and instead imagines how the guests behaved during their rural sojourn. Because it is merely inspired by and not based on the original stories, the series lacks nuance, its point of view is about as sharp as a daytime soap opera, and for the life of me I don’t know how these scripts made it into production. This is perhaps the worst series to hit the airwaves since HBO’s “The Time-Traveler’s Wife,” a feat I did not even think possible. 

The cast, as is usually the case in mid-TV aiming for a prestige rep, is not without merit. As Sirisco, the steward of Villa Santa, the location of the nobles’ country getaway, Tony Hale (“Veep,” “Arrested Development”) does his damnedest with meager material, fighting to find shades of grey in a portrayal of a proud but anxious servant who is on the verge of losing his mind. Hale’s partnership with Leila Farzad, who plays the no-nonsense cook Stratilia, feels like it takes place in a completely different series. Giampiero De Concilio truly shines as the messenger Andreoli; the actor’s light touch gives the part a necessary level of indifference, providing the series’ few true laughs. Zosia Mamet continues to corner the market on entitled, delusional brats as Pampinea, the wealthy fiancée to Visconte Leonardo, the owner of Villa Santa; she turns up for her holiday in the country with her handmaiden Misia (Saiorse-Monica Jackson of “Derry Girls”), who is struggling to define her identity outside of her unending loyalty to her mistress. 

Perhaps most impressive of all are Karan Gill and Amar Chadha-Patel. The former plays a kind but somewhat detached nobleman married to the aggravatingly pious Neifile (Lou Gala), and the latter plays Dioneo, an intelligent and alluring doctor who may or may not be preying on his nobleman friend/boss Tindaro’s (Douggie McMeekin) hypochondria. Rounding out the guests are Filomena (Jessica Plummer), a young noblewoman who has thus far survived the plague with the aid of her abused handmaiden Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). 

The original Decameron is, to me, an early literary version of what, in television, is known as a bottle episode: characters are held captive in a room by the writer, and what they say reveals something about them, the times in which they live, and the artist who pens them into existence. Excellent examples of this include “MILF Island” (“30 Rock”), “Cooperative Calligraphy” (“Community”), “Connor’s Wedding” (“Succession”), “The Suitcase” (“Mad Men”), and “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” from Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone.” But nothing about the Netflix adaptation makes sense, much less creates commentary on the past or the present. Characters make decisions that they reverse within minutes; alliances are dissolved without any real explanation; toward the back half of the eight episodes a dozen new characters enter the narrative to serve no real purpose. The soundtrack hails from the 1980s and ’90s: New Order, Depeche Mode, Enya, The Pixies, Edwin Collins — the pop music needle drops of Peacock’s reality dating show “Love Island” are about as edgy. Even the women’s costumes do not resemble the historical record of 14th century Italian fashion; everything looks like a child’s half-hearted attempt at Ren Faire attire, lacking structure and detail. The production design was clearly inspired by Federico Fellini’s “Casanova,” which is set four centuries after the events of “The Decameron.” I suppose this is all par for the course for a new member of Netflix’s catalogue, much of which looks and sounds like a mid-budget Hollywood studio film penned in the early 2000s. 

In a New York Times puff piece about the making of “The Decameron,” director Andrew DeYoung (he helms two episodes out of eight) gushed that series creator Kathleen Jordan (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) and the writers “did such a beautiful job of touching upon what we just went through without being didactic.” Perhaps he was on the set of a different series, because the eight episodes I saw were so heavy-handed I felt genuinely depressed. Yes, the wealthy abuse their servants, flee consequences while the working class suffers, and adversity does occasionally cause them to change for the better, but these broad strokes neither reveal anything new about human psychology to us, nor are they portrayed in a way that draws us in. And it’s not as though artistry and pandemics are mutually exclusive. “Station Eleven” was a vibrant take on an uncontrollable and catastrophic flu; it used Shakespeare, a brilliant color palette, humor, and science fiction to talk about love and loss. “The Last of Us” wielded stellar performances, horrifyingly realistic visual effects, and expansion of its video game origins to create something indelible. “The Decameron” is a failure on nearly every level and is a missed opportunity to show that humanity has never really changed. 

If Boccaccio’s wise observations about love, fidelity, wealth, morality, and class do not inform your narrative; if you are content to waste the talent of so many people on writing that wouldn’t pass muster in an introductory screenwriting class, may I suggest you rename your series “Florentine Flu: Electric Boogaloo.” Perhaps someone will immortalize the series in a low-effort Twitter meme: the real “Decameron,” after all, was the friends we made along the way. 

Whole series screened for review. Now on Netflix.

At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies.

Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal albums and songs by iconic alternative rock bands of the late 1980s and ‘90s. First up is F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” paired with Radiohead’s albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.”

The second release will be Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” paired with career-spanning songs by R.E.M. In a statement, Bertis Downs, the band’s manager, said, “The guys thought it seems like a good idea and they like the uncanny way their music and ‘Sherlock, Jr.’  match up — kind of perfect. What a great and unlikely way of presenting great art.”

“Silents Synced” will be distributed in partnership with CineLife Entertainment, a division of Spotlight Cinema Networks, which books exclusively to independent indoor and drive-in theaters.

“People look for what’s next and new,” Frank says. “My secret sauce is I look for what’s next in what was. I look at what was popular before my time and figure out how it is still valid today. I take what people liked about it and bring it back better.”

Inspiration for “Silents Synced” goes back more than 15 years. In 2006, Frank was invited to the premiere of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s presentation of Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s 1915 horror film, “The Golem”” with a commissioned score by Black Francis, front man for the band The Pixies, whose oral history Frank co-wrote.

“It was incredible, and left a lasting impression,” Frank says.

Three years later, Frank opened the 12-car Blue Starlite drive-in in an alley in downtown Austin in 2009.  “It was more an art installation,” he jokes. The Blue Starlite focused on classics and revival house programming, not standard drive-in fare at the time, but one of his earliest programming experiments was to pair Fritz Lang’s visionary “Metropolis” with Nine Inch Nails’ “The Fragile” to show privately to a few friends. “I’ve never forgotten how cool that was to do,” he says.

The downtown location has moved out of the alley and onto a parking garage rooftop. A second five-screen location off of I-35 presents a mix of new indie releases (“Maxxine,” “Robot Dreams”) and contemporary classics and cult faves (“Jaws,” “Dirty Dancing”).

When the pandemic hit and drive-ins enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, Frank’s idea for “Silents Synced” further crystallized. “There was not a lot of new content,” he says, “which led to serious outside-the-box thinking. What new type of movie experience would give people a compelling reason to go out to a movie theater?”

Frank is no stranger to quixotic quests. He spent five years co-creating a graphic novel based on Salvador Dali’s 1937 14-page treatment for a proposed Marx Brothers film, which at the time, MGM deemed unfilmable. “Giraffes on Horseback Salad” was published in 2015.

He knew bringing “Silents Synced” to fruition would not be—wait for it—duck soup.

But “Silents Synced” may have been made for these times. Coupled with low attendance woes, theaters are grappling with the effects of last year’s six month’s writer’s strike, which wreaked havoc on Hollywood’s production pipeline. “Inside & Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” may be doing boffo business, but efforts to get people to return to their pre-pandemic habit of regular outings to the movie theater have been seemingly a mission: impossible.

Frank drew on treasured movie and music memories from his Gen-X youth. “I grew up in the days of midnight movies,” he says. “Every weekend, you knew your people would be at ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ There was also the Pink Floyd laser light show at our planetarium that synced Pink Floyd music to this trippy laser extravaganza.”

Frank envisions “Silents Synced” as a having the same repeatable potential that will appeal to film and music buffs, particularly fans of that particular band. Titles yet to bs announced for 2025 will be synced to They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, the Pixies and others.

Frank has spent the last two years, he says, negotiating with record labels. The films are in the public domain, but he is taking care to find  and negotiate for exceptional prints. such as Kino Lorber’s restoration of “Sherlock, Jr.”

But at the heart of “Silents Synced,” Frank says, beats the imperative that has endured for more than a century of film exhibition, from the first moving images, through such technical innovations as 3-D, Cinemascope and IMAX.

“It’s all about creating an experience you cannot get anywhere else,” he says.