The Gymnasts do a pretty efficient job of setting the tone for the series. Photo / Supplied
The Gymnasts (TVNZ+)
A bloody hand in the snow, a looming statue, a large mid-century alpine resort – the three shots that open Italian drama The Gymnasts do a pretty efficient job of setting the tone for the series. An atmospheric murder mystery set at an international gymnastics competition, it basically combines the best bits of Big Little Lies (one of the characters is going to die but we don’t know who), Yellowjackets (a high school sports team goes a bit Lord of the Flies) and (terrifyingly mean Italian teenagers).
The story is told from the perspective of Martina, one of a team of five 15-year-old gymnasts, as she walks a detective through the week of the Winter Fox tournament. We know something big has happened because her hair is drastically shorter than it was a week earlier – the context behind the haircut is almost as intriguing as that of who gets murdered.
Rejoining the team after mangling her wrist and attempting a dangerous floor routine, Martina is the fifth wheel of a dangerously unbalanced dynamic. On one side there are the inseparable mean girls Nadia and Carla, on the other the pair they have dubbed “the useless two”, Anna and Bendetta. Martina is taking the place of another gymnast, Luisa, who perhaps unsurprisingly has suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown.
On the way to the tournament, their van hits a deer. “Must be bad luck to run one over,” one of the girls muses, googling the symbolism in case we could have possibly missed it. The resort they’re staying at is the scene of a historically tragic avalanche; at the first practice session, one of the other gymnasts breaks her neck… you get the idea.
Hard to tell if The Gymnasts is actually good or just has subtitles – but while you wait for season two of Yellowjackets, it’s worth giving these teal tracksuits a look.
Extrapolations (Apple TV+)
Black Mirror famously explored the wide variety of ways things could go badly for us in a future where technology maintains its current trajectory. Apple TV’s new anthology series does the same but with climate change – and the results are a bit more real and quite a lot less fun to imagine. Look at the cast, though: Meryl Streep is in one episode, Tobey Maguire, Ed Norton, Sienna Miller . . . if anyone’s going to force us to think about the oncoming climate apocalypse it’s these guys. It’s also written by Scott Z Burns, whose credits include the movie Contagion – we know how prescient that turned out to be.
Will Trent (Disney+)
Will Trent might sound like a new Ted Lasso character, but he actually has more in common with Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in Knives Out – which is to say he’s an idiosyncratic detective from the American South. He’s also the literary creation of Karin Slaughter, whose novel Pieces of Her was turned into a Netflix series starring Toni Collette last year. This is your more conventional police procedural, in which the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s top man (played by Ramón Rodríguez) notices things nobody else notices at crime scenes and annoys the police with his various idiosyncrasies. Not exactly reinventing the wheel here, but it does exactly what it’s meant to do.
Gotham Knights (Neon)
Sad news from the DC cinematic universe: Batman has died. At least he has in this series – he’ll be back in yet another movie reboot before too long no doubt. In the wake of Bruce Wayne’s death, – based on the video game, which was inspired by the comic book series – follows his adopted son Turner Hayes and Carrie Kelly (aka Robin) as they attempt to figure out who did this to him, which involves forming an unlikely alliance with the wrongly-accused children of some of Batman’s most classic rivals.
Movie of the Week: Banshees of Inisherin (Disney+)
The Academy Award for “movie title that sounds the most like a Melbourne Cup horse” goes to . . . Banshees of Inisherin, which failed to win any of its nine nominated categories. The tragicomedy about the falling out of two old friends on an island off the coast of Ireland in the 1920s reunites stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson with director Martin McDonagh, with whom they last worked on In Bruges. This is a bit darker and moodier and really not similar to that 2008 crime caper in any way, but it’s still very good.
From the Vault: School Ties (1992) (TVNZ+)
Not quite where it all started for the Academy Award-winning Brendan Fraser – the comedy California Man, in which he played a caveman who was thawed out in the year 1992, came first and set his career on a certain trajectory for years to come. But the 1950s-set campus sports drama School Ties, released later the same year, showed the young actor was capable of more serious acting too. Fraser stars alongside a young Matt Damon, with a cameo from a young Ben Affleck, making this a retrospectively very star-studded movie. Who would’ve thought?
Podcast of the Week: Good Sport
What does it mean when an athlete is “in the zone” – and how does one get there? How did a Netflix reality series turn the terminally uncool sport of Formula 1 racing into the hottest ticket in town – and what does it mean for the future of sports as entertainment? And to what extent are sports panel shows to blame for the dismal state of political discourse these days?
All of these questions are miles more interesting than the usual calibre of sports questions (“who’s the GOAT of [insert sport here]” ad nauseum) and now, finally, someone is asking them on a weekly podcast.
Just how nerdy is Good Sport? Well, it’s on the Ted Talk network, and the guy who hosts it, Jody Avirgan, sometimes talks about how he used to play ultimate frisbee. But it’s a good kind of nerdy – episodes are fun, short (to the extent that some feel like they could be longer – hard to overstate what a rarity this is in podcasting) and approach the big questions from all sorts of angles. The episode about “the zone” for example, features a fascinating chat with an elite biathlon . . . biathlete? And one about stadiums gets stuck into the urban renewal of Barcelona. It’s a far cry from Ronaldo vs Messi, and thank Maradona for that.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.