Intercourse (Short 2017)

Intercourse: Directed by Jonatan Etzler. With Amalia Holm, Marcus Vögeli.

“As we are all told, this is a golden age of television, where the medium has the clout, money, and audience, to attract names and budgets that previously were not available to them in the same way as it was for cinema. There are many examples of quality shows, of experimental shows, but there are also plenty of examples of big budget shows that feel like they have been made because the math made sense to the investors – a statement that very much can be made of any media that needs to sell and make money of course. From the trailers and the critical reception, Jack Ryan certainly felt like it is not going to be competing for the top spot in the u0026quot;best ofu0026quot; list for television unless it is a list with a very narrow parameter for inclusion. It looked like it would be a solid u0026#39;by the numbersu0026#39; thriller, the type of which get made regularly and are better by virtue of adding stars and budget – albeit this is not a 100-minute movie, this is a 7.5-hour television season.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd this is basically what it is. It delivers a well-made thriller which has several threads running, all around the race to stop a terrorist attack and it does it in a fairly solid and workmanlike fashion. The plot has no great nuance or depth, but it does the job and fills each episode with enough tension and incident to make it work. There are good action sequences and events, although I will be honest that I found myself passively watching a lot of it as I didnu0026#39;t find it particularly engaging. It is well-enough made to overcome that though, it has good performances, plenty of budget, and it looks, sounds, and moves well. If it has politics, they do seem more akin to that of 24 than Homeland, but I donu0026#39;t think it has politics really – you can accuse of it islamophobia just as much as you can accuse of it hating America; but really I think it comes down to the writing just being interested in whatever it needs to do in the moment.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIt is not a bad show, indeed it is better than I had expected, but it never shakes off the feeling that this is a big product for Amazon and that it is being delivered safely and by-the-numbers, with Prime subscriptions being the core metric on which it is measured.”