First impressions of Problemista
Julio Torres's leap from television's Los Espookys to the big screen has some remarkable highlights... and some complicated challenges.
Would you rather see great storytellers for the screen invest their creativity in television series or standalone movies?
In my devotion to pop-culture’s conversation about movies, I strictly limit my attention to conversations about television series. While everyone’s encouraging me to watch The Bear and Succession and Atlanta and Fargo, I count the cost of such engagement in hours and consider how many movies I might see and write about in the amount of time a TV series would demand. That’s why I still haven’t seen more than an episode or two of Breaking Bad, or even Mad Men.
What’s more — my only opportunities to watch television occur in my limited hours at home with Anne, and as I love her company I will only commit to watching series that also appeal to her. We would rather spend our time together buried in books and filling up notebooks, not staring at screens. And our interests in onscreen art and entertainment only occasionally overlaps. So that limits what I’m likely to watch. (None of the titles I’ve listed above have appealed to both of us, and thus they remain unknowns.)
Am I missing out on great stuff? I’m sure that I am. All the time. But when it comes down to decision-making, I would rather see a complete work of art than an episode that has been largely influenced by a storyteller’s need to keep audiences coming back for more.
Once in a while, though, something gets its hooks into Anne and me both. We are card-carrying members of the Taskmaster cult — specifically the original version with Greg Davies and Alex Horne — because we love British humor, and because we need heavy laughs to help us cope with the layers of hardship that weigh on this season of our lives.
And it was laughter that drew us to visionary world-builder Julio Torres’s extraordinarily imaginative series Los Espookys. We loved both glorious seasons. We were dazzled by Torres’s wild, unpredictable, and singular imagination, and even more impressed that it was all coming from the mind of one of the colorful cast’s youngest players.
I was intrigued — if a little skeptical — to see that Torres was shifting his attention to big-screen comedy. Selfishly, I scowled. I want more Los Espookys! I love that world. I love that cast. I love those characters. But I trust Torres enough to follow him just about anywhere at this point. What would he do with a larger canvas? What could he accomplish with a two-hour, uninterrupted narrative?
And so, here we are — with Problemista.
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