Furies Season 2 - Netflix Series

Furies: Season 2 – Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

We watched Season 1, but Season 2 is a bridge too far. Too much like a comic book, not enough substance. We bailed after two episodes.

Clandestine Activity

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

Page 161

We're in the early stages of WW2 and the Germans are preparing to invade England from northern France (Operation Sea Lion).

Montmarte Paris
Hotel Bretagne is somewhere around here

The resistance has set up a radio transmitter in a room on the 6th floor of the Hotel Bretagne in Paris. With all the German army activity, there is a great deal of information that needs to encoded and then transmitted to London. The amount to be transmitted takes long enough that the Germans are able to get a fix on the transmitter. They break down the door and arrest the teenage girl operator. She crunches a cyanide capsule in her teeth and dies.

Mk. XV British WWII spy radio set

Nazi radio man Grahnweis inspects the Mark XV radio transmitter: 

Grahnweis took a soft leather tool pouch from the pocket of his uniform jacket and selected a screwdriver for the task of getting behind the control panel. To the senior officer looking over his shoulder he said, "Maybe something new inside."

There was. 

Grahnweis left the hotel by the Saint-Rustique side of the building; meanwhile, the senior officer exited on the rue Lepic - this parting company a mysterious event that nobody ever really explained. For a time it wasn't clear that Grahnweis was ever going to be found, but with persistence and painstaking attention to detail, he was. Crown on the second bicuspid molar, fillings in the upper and lower canines, a chipped incisor. Yes, that was Grahnweis, if a tattered charcoal log under a jumble of brick and tile could be called any name at all.

I had to read that passage twice before I figured out what happened to the Grahnweis and the senior officer.

Killing Eve

KILLING EVE Official Trailer (HD) Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer Thriller BBC Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV

I dunno about this show. We've got two very smart women, one works for the British government in some kind of Ministry of Information and the other is an assassin operating at the behest of some shadowy group. Our girl, Eve (Sandra Oh), works for the government, is good at data analysis, but not too sharp when dealing with the real world. The bad girl, Viallanelle (Jodie Comer), has no patience with any kind of bureaucracy but is talented with all the tools of an assassin, knows how to fight and has plenty of street smarts.

Eve is fine in the office, but out in the field she is a bumbling nitwit. I find myself yelling at the screen in every episode because she is doing something boneheaded. Now that I think about it, I realize she is much like Sam Lowry, the hero/victim in Brazil. 

Villanelle takes an interest in Eve because she is the first person to get an inkling of just who she is, which makes her a worthy adversary. Eve wants to find out who Villanelle is working for. Her victims are all over the map, politically and geographically, so it is not apparent who is benefitting from all these killings. Villanelle and Eve sit down for dinner one night (not Eve's idea of a good time) and Eve asks her. Villanelle responds that if you go high enough, they are probably working for the same people. Aha! Conspiracy! I newd it!

Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the head of the Russia Section at MI6. She is kean, as into neato-keano, as she is very quiet, keeps in the background, but wields a heck of a lot of power. I've seen Fiona around before, but the only shows I remember seeing were Enola Holmes and the Harry Potter films where she played Petunia Dursley.

Later post about Villanelle

Furies

Furies | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Phillippines

Comic book style criminal underground fantasy, in Paris. Very entertaining in a John Wick kind of way. A lot of it didn't make much sense, what with every player apparently double crossing every other player. Even when we get to the end we still aren't sure of who's on first. But we have a cute young woman bringing the smack down of box lots of thugs, so it's fun.

In the last episodes we have a secret underground train that runs continuously in the subway tunnels beneath Paris. I think I've seen the same thing in a couple of other movers. In the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, the head of the Japanese secret service, Tanaka, has a secret subway train. The Debt is one and it isn't really a secret train, there are just some secret bits.

Everybody Watch Now

New Year's in Paris

Are you even a person if you don't have a smartphone?

Fashion

Shalom Harlow in Thom Browne on Grand Staircase

Another jigsaw puzzle. I couldn't quite make out what this was until I put it together. Shalom Harlow is a fashion model and Thom Browne makes fancy clothes and this photo was taken in the Grand Palais exhibition hall in Paris, France. 

Sometimes girls in high fashion clothes will catch my eye but more often, like in this case, I will wonder WTF were they thinking, especially those white splotches. She looks like she has been bombarded by some giant seagulls. No accounting for taste apparently.

A wider view of the same scene

Grand Palais, Paris, France

Thicker Than Water | Official Trailer | Netflix

Eight 30-minute episodes. Three generations of Algerian women living in the projects in Paris. One brother gets a gig as a mule driving a van but he screws up and has a wreck. Number one sister has a job as a reporter for a TV news station. She gets passed over for an anchor position one too many times and loses her shit, which goes viral, and the big shots decide to put her in the anchor position. Brother hides his van in number-one sister's garage. Things quickly spiral out of control, and keep getting worse. All due to failure to communicate.

Flower Style

Jaques Germain Soufflot (1714 1781) - Charles-André van Loo

Those are some fancy threads there, Jaques baby. I don't think I've ever seen the like, at least not being worn by men. Jaques was an architect, most famous for the Panthéon in Paris. The building is impressive, likewise is the Google Maps 3D view.

The Panthéon

P.S. Never seen the like except for Hawaiian shirts worn by tough guys.

The Perfect Mother

THE PERFECT MOTHER (NETFLIX) TRAILER
ME GUSTA CHANNEL
A very annoying show. We have an 18 year old woman who has moved from her home in Berlin to Paris where she is supposed to be going to school. Something happened and she has gone off the rails, but her mother has no clue. The family seems like they get along. There is something seriously wrong with this situation. Either the daughter is a psychopath (she might be) or her mother is oblivious to what should be obvious clues. Anyway, the daughter has been taking to blackmailing sexual predators. She meets them, has sex with them and then takes GHB, the date rape drug. Now she demands payment or she will go to the police and accuse him or rape. A clever, if risky, ploy. 

The perfect mother has an old boyfriend in Paris whom she abandoned when she fled Paris for Berlin twenty odd years ago. He has since become a lawyer and when the daughter gets in hot water, she asks him for help. They are poking around the shady side of town looking for a drug dealer who might know something about the catastrophe. A couple of thugs take exception to his presence and toss him out of a third story parking garage. He lands on his back on a car and collapses the roof. You might suspect him of being dead, but you'd be wrong. A busted hip and some fractured ribs and in no time at all he's up and hobbling around on a crutch, and not too much after that he's banging the perfect mother. This guy has remarkable powers of recuperation.

Later on we have an illegal immigrant jumping from a bridge to escape the police. He lands on the road and dies. That's two people falling to their death in one show. Oh yeah, there was also the guy who got stabbed to death at the beginning that started this whole catastrophe.

4 one-hour episodes in French & German, I think, with English subtitles.

Elegant Tape, Practical Tape

Paris Shop Window WW2

From Flares Into Darkness:

During WWI Parisians were worried that their city might come under German bombardment or air attack. Shop owners and businesses, to minimize the danger of shattered glass, taped their windows. While the taping started out utilitarian, eventually the taping deigns became more elaborate and artistic.

These images are taken from the La boite verte post Les élégantes protections anti-bombardements des vitrines de Paris en 14-18. There are more examples at that link.  

I'm a great believer in tape. I recently got fed up with not having any tape (evidently I had used up every kind of tape I had on hand, except Scotch tape), so I dialed up Amazon and ordered a bunch. I ordered packs of electrical, package, masking, duck and gaffers tape. I got too much of some, like electrical tape and packing tape, but when one roll costs $4 and ten rolls costs $8, you can see how that happened. I only got one roll of gaffer's tape because the stuff is expensive. It's supposed to better than duck / duct tape cause it doesn't leave any adhesive residue on the surface when it's pulled off, but I haven't had a chance to try it.

The Take

The Take Official US Release Trailer 1 (2016) - Idris Elba Movie
Movieclips Trailers

The Take is action packed. That's about all I can say about it. We watched it because we are big fans of Idris Elba (from Luther & The Wire). There were a couple of clever lines, but the plot was likely pulled out of a book of standard B-movie plots.

Kelly Reilly had a small part as some kind of CIA bureaucrat. I only mention her because I recognized her but didn't remember where I had seen her. It might have been True Detective or possibly Flight.

Richard Madden (Robb Stark from Game of Thrones) plays a pickpocket who hires an attractive young woman to distract the tourists by taking off her clothes and walking down the steps of a tourist hotspot while he steals all their stuff. That nets him a couple of bucks, but he's soon back at it and this time he steals a backpack from a very foolish young woman, a backpack that contains a bomb that goes off 10 steps after he dumps it in the trash. And then we have action.

On Netflix.