Sorry Brangelina, this Mr. & Mrs. Smith reboot smokes yours
Donald Glover and Maya Erskine are a dream pairing in Prime’s genius reboot of the 2005 spy caper.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Prime Video
Rebooting the 2005 film Mr. and Mrs. Smith as a television series was a stroke of genius. It’s a film we all remember because it birthed Brangelina, but could any of us recount anything else about it? Something about guns going bang, and Angelina Jolie looking predictable amazing in a dominatrix outfit? This Prime Video redux, which has been years in the making, is superior to its predecessor in every conceivable way.
When it was first announced, it was supposed to be Donald Glover, the comedian/writer/rapper and creator of Atlanta, one of the best television shows of the decade, as John Smith, starring opposite Phoebe-Waller Bridge, the creator of Fleabag, one of the other best television shows of the decade, as Jane Smith. It was too good to be true, and Waller-Bridge dropped out in 2021.
Watching this, it’s hard to imagine her one-upping her replacement, the fabulously droll Maya Erskine (PEN15). So it goes: Glover and Erskine play strangers who have the smarts to be spies but, for whatever reason, flunked out of the government jobs. With money as their motive, they both sign up to a mysterious organisation in which they must assume the identity of John and Jane, a married couple who complete “missions” assigned to them by a chatbot called Hi Hi. If this all sounds a little ridiculous, it’s because it is, but that’s part of the charm. It hits that sweet spot between gleefully stupid and wickedly smart. Glover and Erskine are sensational — they have charisma and chemistry out the wazoo, and their banter is pure pleasure — and the supporting cast, think Alexander Skarsgard, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, is bang on.
Feud: Capote V The Swans
Binge
Pity the poor actor tasked with inhabiting a role once owned by the greatly missed Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Tom Hollander, who you will recognise as one of the conniving “evil gays” in The White Lotus, infuses his portrayal of Truman Capote in the latest instalment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, Feud, both with delicious deviousness and great sadness. The narrative revolves around Capote’s rift with his “swans”, the elite women of New York’s high society, triggered by the spilling of their secrets in his fictional tale, “La Cote Basque, 1965”, published in Esquire Magazine in 1975 (which, hilariously, has been published online with a trigger warning for “insensitive descriptions of beauty and body standards”.) There’s few directors that blend cold, camp and distant filmmaking quite as well as Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho), who leant his hand to six of this show’s eight episodes.
The Matchmakers
SBS on Demand
From February 14
It may shock you to learn that some young people across Australia are ditching the wretched apps and tentatively embracing old-school dating. In-person speed dating events, like Dear Pluto’s queer ice-skating night at last year’s Rising festival in Melbourne, offer an appealing alternative to online love. The Matchmakers, a fascinating new SBS documentary, explores a kind of dating that is unfamiliar to most of us: traditional matchmaking. The series follows three matchmakers across Australia, representing Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu faiths. Though compelling as a documentary, it’s at its most irresistible when it slides into dishy reality TV territory. Toby Lieder, a Jewish matchmaker in Sydney who has 14 children, five of whom she’s orchestrated marriages for, sees “matchmaking as a way to serve God”. The best scene from the first episode is when the council of Jewish matchmaker women convene to discuss (or perhaps gossip about) potential female candidates. “What about the doctor’s daughter?” “She’s too posh.” “This girl will not go for less than 5-foot-9.”
Harley & Katya
ABC iView
This Emmy-winning documentary, inspired by The Australian’s Walkley-winning investigation into the untimely death of Olympian Katya Alexandrovskaya, is a bruising watch. Alexandrovskaya was a figure skater who was brought to Australia from Russia at just 15, where she was made partner of the first Indigenous Australian Winter Olympian Harley Windsor. The duo competed for Australia between 2015 and 2020, winning gold at the Junior World Championships in 2017, which led them to the Winter Olympics in 2018. Tragically, in July 2020, at the age of 20, Alexandrovskaya was found dead on a Moscow pavement, outside the apartment she shared with her mother, in a suspected suicide. This documentary explores both the improbable sporting rise of Penrith-born Windsor, and also the unsettling chain of events that led to Alexandrovskaya’s death, and the systems, coaches, and mentors who failed her. “Maybe some people could have helped more, I don’t want to blame anyone,” says Windsor at the beginning of the documentary. The film is beautifully made — and the footage of the two competing and training is extraordinary — but it is sorely missing accounts from those who knew Alexandrovskaya deeply. Nobody could speak, or attempted to learn, Russian while she was in Australia, so we only get a thinly sketched idea of what she was like, and what she was going through.