Add “The Squid Game” to the list of virally popular programs I don’t expect to watch to the end.
Despite, in this case, being curious about what the ending might be.
“The Squid Game,” a Netflix import from South Korea that has become a sensation, comes a distant third to “The Walking Dead” and “Game of Thrones” among shows I elect to ignore.
One reason is its style. While purporting to tell back stories of people so down on their luck, mostly indebted to loan sharks or dodging warrants signaling serious prison time, “The Squid Game” stays so studiously superficial, it builds no genuine regards for its characters or their fate, which is likely to death by mobsters or organizers of the Squid Game. That, or virtual death by commitment to a Korean prison for life.
Characters tend to scream their lines, which is off-putting enough in the original Korean, let alone the badly dubbed and barely acted English. Emotions and sentiments are thimble-deep and so obvious, they become more laughable than worrisome. Even when death or genuine calamity, such as a woman needing attention for advanced diabetes looms.
With characters so dismissible, the most sympathetic, and not too sympathetic, being a businessman who lost all in gambling and added embezzlement and fraud to his troubles, “The Squid Game” depends on one element that triggers curiosity and creates a modicum of suspense.
That’s the Squid Game itself. In the episodes I’ve watched, the only reason I’ve kept the TV tuned to “The Squid Game” is to see what contest has been devised for the hapless players to compete in to preserve their lives and their chance to win life-changing millions in South Korean currency.
Here’s how that works.
Squid Game contestants have been lured by a para-military group dressed in costumes that obscure any way of recognizing them to try to survive a game, usually a simple and familiar child’s game, that offers a fortune in winnings that can be used to clear debt and attain wealth that can lead to a new, carefree life.
The first such game is Red Light, Green Light. The second involves meticulously cutting shapes from a fragile sugar pie shell without breaking the star, circle, or umbrella the game’s proctors have embedded there.
The penalty for breaking rules, clearly stated before each game, or failing to fulfill a task, however arduous, is immediate death. One of the guards monitoring the contest shoots the loser without pause or mercy, the latter at times being begged by a contestant who knows he or she has violated the given directions.
Contestants sign a contract agreeing to their summary execution for disobeying or flunking an assignment.
“The Squid Game” depicts an ugly, cruel world. A few shots of Seoul as a bright, bustling city are overmatched by squalid areas where the characters live and work. These character’s lives spiral downward until they are no longer manageable. They cannot go about routine business because the police or a loan shark’s enforcer is always about to remind them of their dire predicaments.
These are desperate people, who not have to acquire ready cash to satisfy the officials and mobsters preying on them but who have spent money that is supposed to go for a family’s rent, a mother’s care, or to maintain a reputation as a the neighborhood’s shining star.Taking advantage of this desperation is a para-military group dressed in bright red uniforms with face-hiding black masks marked only by a white square, circle, or triangle where a face would be. This group invites those who regard themselves as hopeless to participate in a game in which the result can be sudden, problem-solving fortune or death.
The sad notion in “The Squid Game” is how much death seems as tantalizing an option as facing what exists on the streets of Seoul.The creator of “The Squid Game,” Hwang Dong-hyuk, is more insidious and sadistic than Ellen DeGeneres in devising a contest that humiliates its contestants and accentuates their angst.
Apparently the squid game is a popular children’s activity in Korea, hence the show’s name, although the children’s game does not involve death, real or acted out.
As opposed to the toxic setting of Seoul and the seamier places the characters tend to inhabit, the para-military’s operation is efficient as clockwork and clean enough to be called pristine.
Everything is tightly and logically organized. The desperate who agree to take their chances at the proffered games wait on street corners and are picked up in shiny, chauffeur-driven vans in which they are put chemically to sleep so they can’t trace the destination where the games are held.
The vans meet to form a double-file caravan that goes smoothly over a bridge and to a port where they vans enter a boat that takes them and the contestants to an island. While unconscious, the contestants are stripped of their garments and dressed in play clothes that resemble prison uniforms. They are housed, unisex, in a large room that suggest a jail dormitory.
Their guards, though better garbed in those snazzy tight, red jumpsuits, don’t live much better when off duty. Their lodging area also looks like a cell block, their compartments cells including a jail-like toilet, simple cot, and Spartan storage and living space.Once you’ve seen all of this, and curiosity is satisfied, it becomes comme il faut as episodes go by.
The setting and devised games are the show. The lives of the participants are too cartoonishly depicted to matter. Novelty wears off. Dong-hyuk throws in situations that are supposed to create interest, but few are dramatic or interesting enough to fulfill that objective. General ham acting doesn’t help.
About the only plot twist that piqued my interest was the appearance of Seoul policeman whose brother is missing and suspected, by him, of participating in the squid game, something the police do not otherwise believe exists. This officer infiltrates the game conductors’ island and poses as a guard to his peril, as he is untrained, doesn’t know the rules, and is caught unwilling to kill contestants who fail at a game.While I’m interested in this policeman, it’s not enough for me to watch more of “The Squid Game.”
One program that has interested me is another Netflix series, “You,” which adds wit to an otherwise tawdry tale of a stalker who is so obsessed a woman he murders others involved in her life.
I know. This sounds sick, but it plays out in an engaging way, and Penn Badgely is wonderful as the stalker.
I am also watching Hulu’s “Dopesick,” which manages to fascinate although taking an obvious point of view and meticulously living up to Hollywood notions of political correctness.
Another show sampled, Netflix’s “On the Verge,” about four women in L.A. who form a close friendship and fight to enjoy life in a way that underscores their feminism while being enmeshed in marriages, other relationships, parenting, and professional obstacles.
Reminiscent of “Sex and the City” in format, “On the Verge” lacks that model’s sense of fun and glamor. It goes about its business more seriously, often to its detriment, and like “Dopesick,” is determined to hit every populist, politically correct button square on its head.
Christmas is here on Hallmark
Halloween’s ship has just sailed.
The departure was a mere few hours ago, but The Hallmark Channel is ahead of the calendar.Way ahead. At The Hallmark Channel, it is and has been for a few days, Christmas.
I’m not one who cares or will give the slightest harrumph about retailers who feature Christmas displays in late September. It’s their business. They know what they have to do to maximize it. And it’s none of my business. I can grab my water, protein shakes, Goya beans eight cans for $6.99 (Costco), and other folderol, while ignoring the trees and reindeer.
It is a tad astounding, although still none of my business, to see titles such as “Christmas in Evergreen,” “A Wish for Christmas,” “Let it Snow,” “Christmas She Wrote,” “Christmas by Starlight,” “Coyote Creek Christmas,” “Christmas Sail,” and “Christmas Waltz” appear on a television network’s roster when I do my regular fly through schedules to see what’s airing on a given day.
Again, Hallmark has been in business for a long time, so one has to believe it knows and carefully plots what it’s doing.
Speaking of plots, my occasional look at Hallmark holiday programs, and all I hear about them from cynics and aficionados tell me they don’t vary much between movies, most of which have been commissioned or produced by Hallmark.
Indeed, there’s a meme circulating that asks what has 643 titles, eight actors, four settings, and one plot, the answer being a Hallmark Christmas movie.
That plot tends to be romantic, sentimental, complication-fraught, and resolved by a corny but tearful happy ending. It has some variations after all, but usually involves the holiday meeting of couple that is either made for each other or not, the revival of a relationship when one nomad returns home to his/her/their hometown for Christmas, or a complication such as someone having a past they’ve been keeping secret or a child from one family balking at the merger of his/her clan with that of the man or woman his/her parent has met and fallen in love with.
Summoning Karen Carpenter in a different context, “It can really make me cry, just like before.”
None of these movies are quite “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “The Bishop’s Wife,” but they have devotees, some of whom have are encamped in front of their TV, two months-worth of snack and tissues at hand to take in the entire Hallmark canon, especially the new titles for 2021.
These include Jordin Sparks and Michael Xavier in “A Christmas Treasure” (debuting Friday), Christopher Lloyd, Lyndsy Fonseca, and Lea Thompson in “Next Stop, Christmas,” and Merritt Pattersn and John Ecker in “Gingerbread Miracle.”
And a Happy New Year.
Neal Zoren’s television column appears every Monday.
Source: Berkshire mont
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