What to watch this weekend: The return of Jon Hamm’s Your Friends and Neighbors – and your friendly neighbourhood spiders
Open this photo in gallery:
Olivia Munn, James Marsden, Jon Hamm and Heather Lind in season two of ‘Your Friends & Neighbors,’ which premieres on Apple TV on Friday.Jon Pack/Supplied
Your Friends and Neighbors, Apple TV
This glossy Jon Hamm crime comedy sees the former Mad Men star play Coop, an out-of-work New York hedge fund manager who pivots to breaking into the megamansions of his ultrarich neighbours and stealing expensive items they won’t ever miss.
James Marsden (Paradise) joins the cast in the second season, which starts April 3, as a new neighbour – an import-export man named Owen Ashe. He keeps making portentous comments that suggest he’s a complicated man like Coop; the writers keep dropping references to The Great Gatsby.
Created by Jonathan Tropper, Your Friends and Neighbors is mostly empty as satire, its superficial social critique about economic disparity undercut by its wealth-porn aesthetic – but the new season digs deeper into how affluence doesn’t stop aging, as Coop commits cat burglary with a bad back and his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) tries dating during perimenopause.
Spidey and His Amazing Friends, Disney+
Open this photo in gallery:
Spidey and His Amazing Friends has been a big hit for Disney, surpassing more than a billion hours streamed globally last year.Disney/Supplied
From Your Friends and Neighbors, we turn to your friendly neighbourhood spiders.
Bluey gets all the press and parental love, understandably, but this Marvel animated series aimed at the preschool set has been almost as big a hit for Disney, surpassing more than a billion hours streamed globally last year.
My household has been responsible for an embarrassing number of those hours – to the extent that the aggressively peppy pop-punk theme song by Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump seems permanently stuck in my head.
While I initially viewed Spidey and his Amazing Friends as toddler indoctrination into the increasingly mushy Marvel Cinematic Universe, I have given in to the show’s sweet charms.
Three spider-children – Peter Parker is Spidey, Gwen Stacey is Ghost-Spider and Miles Morales is Spin – work together to rein in kiddie versions of well-known, but often gender-swapped villains (Doc Ock, my fave, has a hipster do straight out of the aughts) who are up to low-stakes mischief. The message is always the same: Be friendly, work together, everyone is a “superhero.” The 102nd episode lands April 3.
How to Beat the High Cost of Living, Prime Video
This 1980 comedy, newly added to Amazon’s streaming service, is more curiosity than classic – but it’s interesting to revisit how Hollywood reacted to the stagflation of the 1970s at a time when the word is re-entering our vocabulary. (The poster copy read: “A hilarious new comedy for everyone who ever wanted to give the oil companies gas pains.”)
The film follows three women in Oregon, played by Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange. All are struggling with money, exacerbated by a lack of financial independence from their husbands. (One man ran off with a secretary and left behind unpaid bills; another is undermining his wife’s business as part of a tax write-off scheme). Of course, the answer for all ladies is a heist.
While the film does not seem to have been reviewed by The Globe and Mail upon release, pioneering personal finance columnist Mike Grenby wrote about how it reflected real-life money woes for women. Grenby advised his female readers to make sure they had their own credit cards, obtained without a co-signer, and a bank account in their own name.
Cheetah Fast and Wild, CBC and CBC Gem
Open this photo in gallery:
This new episode of ‘The Nature of Things,’ from Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker Joe Kennedy, follows two orphaned cheetah sisters as they go through an innovative, months-long process of learning how to hunt on their own.CBC/Supplied
This gorgeous new The Nature of Things episode (April 2, 9 p.m., then streaming) from Vancouver-based documentary filmmaker Joe Kennedy is also about females gaining their independence. It follows two orphaned cheetah sisters, raised in captivity at South Africa’s Ashia Cheetah Center, as they go through an innovative, months-long process of learning how to hunt on their own.
Lilly and Iris, as the young cheetahs are named, first chase remote-controlled bait at a centre where human contact is minimized. Then, they are sent to a “wilding camp” where there is real prey to chase down but, crucially, no predators like the lion that killed their mother.
Kennedy was the first filmmaker allowed access to the camp – and it’s thrilling to watch Lilly and Iris discover through harsh experience which animals are and aren’t dinner. (A zebra, I learned, can crush a cheetah’s head with a kick.)
If the sisters survive three months without assistance, they are freed. Ashia, at the time of filming, had a 100-per-cent success rate releasing captive cheetahs into the wild, while almost all previous attempt by other means had failed.
You Hurt My Feelings, Crave
Open this photo in gallery:
Julia Louis-Dreyfus in ‘You Hurt My Feelings,’ a light, loving comedy about which little white lies keep relationships healthy and which destroy trust.Jeong Park/The Associated Press
This 2023 film from director Nicole Holofcener has what sounds like a horror-movie premise for anyone who loves a writer. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author, overhears her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), tell a friend that he doesn’t really like her new novel. What follows is a light, loving comedy about which little white lies keep relationships healthy and which destroy trust – and, also, how to find or regain your confidence at different stages of any career.
“Nearly every performance here is excellent, a beautiful balance of nerves and neuroses,” Barry Hertz wrote in his Critic’s Pick review. “Louis-Dreyfus is a particular wonder to watch as Beth nosedives from proud wife, mother and author to grievously injured victim.” It’s added to Crave on April 3.
