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Comics series adaptation "Swamp Thing": Maybe the world has to be saved by a plant being
Photo:
Warner / Sky
"Swamp Thing," Sky
Time budget:
ten episodes of 50 minutes each
for fans of
lesser known DC comic heroes such as Huntress, Hawkman, Raven
This is a superhero for our time: a mountain of muscles with plant extremities and a human soul, who fights against environmental destruction and helps a doctor to stop a spreading virus.
Swamp Thing is no longer the youngest: He saw the light of day in a DC comic book in 1971 and was already fully grown when he was born.
Swamp Thing has always been a second-tier DC hero, unlike Superman and Batman, but very popular with fans.
There were already two feature films in the 1980s, now this series.
But it could not save its presence either.
Just one week after the regular US TV start last year, the producing WarnerMedia group announced the end of the series after the first season, despite good reviews and enthusiastic fans.
It was probably about the tiresome money: The US state of North Carolina, where the shooting took place, had significantly reduced an announced tax rebate, the production was much more expensive than planned.
It's a shame, because the series turned the comic into a rather dark and surprisingly bloody horror story, which cleverly fishes in the murky sediment of human nickness.
"Killing Mike", ZDF media library
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"Killing Mike" with Sylvester Byder: Jasper was there in the accident and still hasn't recovered from it
Photo:
Andreas Houmann / ZDF
Time budget:
eight episodes of 60 minutes each
for fans of:
Hennig Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Jussi Adler-Olsen
The fact that the wave of
nordic noir
subsided and Henning Mankell died years ago does not mean that no good crime novels can come from Denmark.
On the contrary, in "Killing Mike" you can see this inimitable mixture of harmonious psychology and slightly exaggerated realism.
The story takes place in the small town of Balling on Fyn: a year and a half ago a high school graduate was run over by a car and died there.
His father thinks it was on purpose, and Mike the village tyrant was behind the wheel.
Other villagers have reasons to hate Mike too.
They team up with the aim of killing him - which turns out to be not that easy.
The tension builds up slowly, but the makers look all the more intensely into the interior of their protagonists.
As befits a serious shocker from the north.
"Close Enough", TNT series
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"Close Enough": The world as a place of surreal experiences
Photo:
Warner / TNT
Time budget:
eight double episodes of 60 minutes each
for fans of:
"The Simpsons", "BoJack Horseman"
The legendary Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein ("Battleship Potemkin") was fascinated by the possibilities of animation and disappointed at how little Disney made use of it in its conventional drama works.
He would have really enjoyed the cartoon series that have been coming out of the USA for several years.
There is nothing there that the human imagination cannot imagine: acting horses ("BoJack Horseman"), birds with anxiety ("Tuca & Bertie") and planets populated by baby clowns ("Revelations at Midnight").
"Close Enough" also plays with hallucinogenic exaggerations and surreal ideas.
In the first episode, Josh and Emily, the parents we are talking about, run into a gang of street kids who turn into zombies before their eyes.
But as wacky as the stories are, they always remain immediately human and accessible.
The creator JG Quintel was obviously inspired by the "Simpsons" and processed the cross-border experience of having to raise a child as an adult and constantly asking yourself whether you really check how the world works.
(Can be received via Sky Ticket, among others.)
Just don't watch this:
"Brave New World," TVNow
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"Brave New World": Bored beauties in lacquered pictures
Photo:
Universal / TVNOW
Time budget:
nine episodes of 60 minutes each
then prefer:
"Westworld", "The 100"
Film adaptations have always been a problem in cinema.
Far too short to really get to the bottom of novels, cinematic ruins of literary works of art.
Series could be the solution: you have more time to follow different storylines and motifs, while the novel gives the script something that series often lacks: a definitive ending.
"Olive Kitteridge" and "I Know This Much Is True" are examples of how wonderfully this can be achieved.
"Brave New World" shows how serial film adaptations of novels can go wrong.
It is about a society of the future that uses pills to fool itself into false luck.
The US media giant Comcast, to which the TV broadcaster NBC and the Hollywood studio Universal belong, wanted to decorate its new streaming service Peacock with it.
But the creators used the classic novel by Aldous Huxley for little more than a series of colorful pictures with lots of naked meat, almost exclusively by women, of course.
The series therefore fits perfectly on RTL's streaming platform, which has secured the German broadcasting rights.
And as if to illustrate the empty content of the sci-fi dystopia, the main role of the rebellious outsider is cast by the actor Alden Ehrenreich.
He recently struggled to breathe life into the Harrison Ford flagship Hallodri Han Solo in "Solo: A Star Wars Story".
In "Brave New World" he now seems so uninvolved as if he accidentally got lost in the backdrops of the main New London location.
"Hubie Halloween", Netflix
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Comedian Sandler in "Hubie Halloween": Angry and sadly mindless horror story
Photo: Scott Yamano / Netflix
Time budget:
103 minutes
then rather:
"Halloween", "Don't mess with the mess"
There is the highest level alarm when Adam Sandler lined up his stomach contents in a high arc on the street in one of the opening scenes of a film.
"Hubie Halloween" is the name of the creepy, clumsy comedy joke with Sandler in the title role of a guy named Hubie, who can now be seen on Netflix.
Sandler, basically a brutal body comedian, is good for intelligent surprises such as "Don't mess with the mess" from 2008 or, most recently, "The Black Diamond".
But in this new work (director: Steven Brill) he does screeching, eye rolling and bite-bone grinding by numbers.
It's Halloween in the US east coast town of Salem, famous for its historic witch burnings.
The daydreamer Hubie portrayed by Sandler is a village idiot, badly mocked by almost all children, with a pure heart and an allegedly secret great love.
Hubie speaks as if he had stones in his mouth, keeps falling off his bike with a laughable helmet on his head and is a naive mothers boy whom old mum would like to forbid to go outside on Halloween.
Of course, he does it anyway, plays the child guardian and gets caught up in an outrageous horror story.
There are all kinds of interesting guest stars like Julie Bowen, Ray Liotta, Ben Stiller and a particularly scruffy Steve Buscemi;
and yet “Hubie Halloween” remains a stupid film with such rude punchlines that it unfortunately doesn't even have what it takes to be a laughing stock for alcohol-related disinhibited Halloween friends.
Incidentally, the film seems to be a history lesson for very young streaming viewers: In "Hubie Halloween" it is said of one of the ancestors of the hero Hubie that she was burned as a witch in Salem - because she supposedly could do magic, not because of her bad jokes.
Instead of a "crime scene", the third season of "Babylon Berlin" starts on Sunday.
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