Binge-r #162: Toon + The Laundromat
Dutch Courage: Amy van der Weerden (Nina) and Joep Vermolen (Toon) in Toon
TOON S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming, plus S2
“If you can leave it out, it’s good,” an advertising executive explains to Toon Visser (Joep Vermolen), an Amsterdam musician who spends his days alone in his home studio composing backing tracks for jingles. The idea of ubiquitous redundancy makes sense to Toon, who has a similar approach to his own life. Happy in his solitude, Toon is mistaken for a guest at a surprise birthday party organised by his take charge sister, Elise (Loulou Hameleers). “This weirdo has some really strange crap,” another guest observes, as Toon looks stressed and says nothing. But when coerced into singing to the crowd, a moment of kismet occurs: Toon’s annoyed muttering becomes a lyric, a DJ supplies a beat, and fellow guest Nina (Amy van der Weerden) sings striking harmonies. The next day a video of the improvised performance has over one million YouTube views and Toon is famous.
This Dutch comedy, which now has two concise seasons available, is about someone unfortunately getting what everyone else wants. Amenable and polite, Toon has no interest in being a public figure. Within a day he’s been booked onto a TV panel show by the industrious Elise, who has a background in the music business, where he doesn’t prove to be anyone but himself when under strong lights and leading questions. But his neutrality makes for a crucial distinction: his lack of ambition keeps Toon buoyant, and the embarrassment never becomes excruciating as it would have in the Ricky Gervais version of this concept.
The wit at work here is dry and, I’m guessing, very Dutch. Apart from a running joke about “camping in Vreeland” that I didn’t get, the subtitled humour bubbles along with Toon – the name has an anonymous sing-song quality that’s perfect for the character - as the unwitting guide to a music career. Nina and Elise also take shape, sometimes unexpectedly, in the space created by Toon’s avoidance of activity, as the show comments on our obsession with self-promotion. The title character is neither an idiot savant nor, as a television host describes him, an “uber-loser”, and the mix of grace notes and laugh out loud ramifications is enjoyable without demanding cynicism.
>> Other Reading: The ABC’s Total Control, starring Deborah Mailman and Rachel Griffiths, is the best drama series a free to air channel has aired in this country for several years. It exists in the political moment and has some razor-sharp dialogue that reveals uncomfortable truths. Total Control is available for catch-up on ABC iView, and I wrote about it for The Age [full review here].
Return to Sender: Meryl Streep (Ellen Martin) in The Laundromat
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
THE LAUNDROMAT (Netflix, 2019, 95 minutes): Steven Soderbergh tests you with his new film, which doesn’t so much dissect the financial misdeeds of the 1% that were exposed to light by 2016’s Panama Papers leak, as reflect on the pathology of corruption and complicity that let them take root. The storytelling can feel divergent, even wilful, changing tack so that a distraught widow, Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), trying to make sense of how a worthless insurance policy for her late husband leads to the duplicitous Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, dips in and out of the story. Lawyers Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Fonseca (Antonio Banderas) are extravagant hosts to the history of credit and banking, as opposed to nefarious villains, and Soderbergh delights in misdirection: sets are revealed as studio backdrops, story points are sidestepped, and history is satirised. It’s more extreme than The Big Short, although there are explanations, and this shell game about shell companies has an unexpected outcome that reveals Soderbergh’s bluntly impassioned feelings about the 21st century’s games without frontiers.
New on Netflix: Joe Wright directs the hell – whether it’s necessary or not – out of Darkest Hour (2017, 125 minutes), trying to elevate the rousing, old-fashioned tale of Gary Oldman’s embattled WWII British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; starring Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson, Babak Anvari’s Wounds (2019, 95 minutes) is a creepy but not altogether effective horror film about a New Orleans bartender and a possessed mobile phone.
New on SBS on Demand: The diseased fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree: Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral (2012, 103 minutes) updates the body horror template laid down by his father David, coolly observing a technician (Caleb Jones) who works for a company that trades in the infections of the famous who is literally sickened by a movie star (Sarah Gadon).
New on Stan: The self-descriptive Cowboys & Aliens (2011, 119 minutes) was one of Hollywood’s weirder attempts at a comic book blockbuster, with Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde saddling up; Now prescient in its depiction of transactional relationships, Paul Schrader’s stylish thriller American Gigolo (1980, 117 minutes) features Richard Gere’s finest performance as a conflicted male escort framed for murder.
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