The Middleman and Wendy: the pop-art phase

The Middleman is my discovery of the week, a TV series that ran for a brief but brilliant twelve episodes on the ABC Family Channel last fall before it succumbed to dismal ratings. Perhaps it would have found its audience on the SciFi Channel (now just identified by the mutant SyFy logo). Perhaps a cult audience will likewise discover this deliciously tongue-in-cheek spy fantasy series on DVD and the groundswell of support will revive it like Family Guy. (I can dream, can’t I?) All I know is that it was canceled before I had really heard about it, let alone ever seen an episode, and it had me in the first ten minutes of the pilot episode. Matt Keeslar is a Boy Scout of a special agent – part Men in Black operative, part Doctor Who freelance good guy with a faceless boss and a crotchety receptionist robot stuck in battle-axe mode – who specializes in unconventional cases (aliens, demons, a genetically enhanced super-ape that aspires to be a mafia Don). and Natalie Morales is Wendy Watson, an art-school grad and sidekick in training scouted by The Middleman (it’s apparently his name, his job and his rank all in one) from her adventures in temping. Keeslar is both colorful and clean, like Jack Bauer with impeccable manners and kick-ass skills, while Morales is Piper Perabo with a dash of Rosario Dawson. And by jiminy, it’s gosh-darn great, absolutely hilarious and marvelously inventive, a rare gem of genre TV that both lovingly quotes and hilariously parodies its inspiration. It deserves to be seen by everyone who likes their genre TV funny, clever and hip as they come. More on this when I complete the series. For now, I’m doling the episodes out like precious treats.

Criterion originally released Repulsion on laserdisc, the old-school high-definition standard of the pre-DVD age. For its long-awaited DVD and Blu-ray debut, Criterion goes back to the original elements for a beautiful new digital transfer approved by director Roman Polanski. "I always considered Repulsion as the shabbiest of my films," confesses Polanski in the commentary track, originally recorded in 1994 for the laserdisc, referring to the technical seams and budgetary limitations. Reviewing the film after decades, it’s in fact a masterfully conducted portrait in madness, a horror defined not in the the murders perpetrated by an unbalanced young woman (Catherine Deneuve) losing herself in nightmares and phobias, but in the loss of self as the alienated Belgian beauty disconnects from the world and unravels into her fantasies and fears. Deneuve’s Carol is a child-woman both fascinated and repulsed by sex, but her nightmare fantasies of rape also suggest repressed memories of abuse bubbling to the surface in her isolation and urban alienation. Polanski doesn’t explain, he explores with imaginative detail and eerie imagery (walls split with a thundercrack, hands reach out from the hallway like a Cocteau nightmare, food decomposes) as the fragile girl slips into helpless madness. One thing is certain: Apartment living is dangerous to your mental health and your soul in Polanski’s movies. This is his first victim.

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