Weekend Watch: A Man Called Otto, The Last Of Us
A miserable man finds his heart again and a loner is landed with a better reason to live
Image Credit: Sony Pictures
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Tom Hanks is grumpy, and Pedro Pascal has a post-apocalyptic mission. Follow James on Twitter: @jamwhite
Do audiences want to see Tom Hanks play a cranky, suicidal retiree? He’s certainly challenged his nice guy image from time to time, especially playing a gangster in Road To Perdition. And if I’m truly honest, his Otto, the focus of his new movie, A Man Called Otto is only grumpy For Reasons.
Based on the huge bestselling novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and the eponymous 2015 film that Hannes Holm made from it, Otto introduces us to Otto Anderson, who grumbles his way through a forced retirement. Relatively recently widowed and with no children, he primarily spends his time complaining about his neighbours – be it the dog that he believes is fouling his driveway or those who don’t hang their parking passes to the private street he lives in properly from their rear-view mirrors.
He's snappy and morose, though you always still get the hints of Hanks-style sweetness underneath, and his resolve is even more severely tested when new neighbours Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) move into the street with adorable daughters Luna (Christiana Montoya) and Abbie (Alessandra Perez). Marisol is someone who won’t give up if she thinks another person is worth bringing joy – and food – to, and she quickly makes Otto her latest project. He’s less than thrilled, but his heart is soon starting to melt slightly, even if you wouldn’t know it from his gruff exterior.
Like the source material and the original film, Otto (directed by Marc Forster and written by David Magee) must trade a careful line between comedy and drama, Otto’s attempts to kill himself chafing somewhat awkwardly with the warm laughs drawn by the rest of the movie. And there are some blatant tugs at the old heartstrings that could have cynics who identify more with the main character tutting and rolling their eyes.
Yet between Hanks and Treviño (who has been good in other things, but blazes here, lighting up the screen and proving more than a match for the leading man), the film works, nudging you towards appreciating its energy and with a story that mostly works (a subplot about another neighbour sometimes feels wedged in, but it’s successfully wrapped up without worrying the main story too much).
Kudos also to Truman Hanks (yes, Tom’s son), who while he’d prefer to be the other side of the camera as a director of photography, is effective as the younger Otto who meets and falls for Sonya (Rachel Keller), whose death down the line is what pushes him further inward.
It’s not going to win awards for originality, but A Man Called Otto is certainly worth watching if you need a warm hug of a film with a slightly sharper edge than some.
A Man Called Otto is in UK and US cinemas now.
Image Credit: Warner Media
Otto, with all his quirks and attention to detail, might be one of the few people to survive a fungal infection-driven apocalypse. He’d probably just look at the Ophiocordyceps fungus and it would shrivel away.
That’s not the fate of many people in the new HBO series, charged with finally bringing the massively popular video game’s story to TV. The Last Of Us, created by Neil Druckmann, became a console sensation, lauded for its cinematic atmosphere and compelling characters.
Naturally, attempts have been made to translate it across media before, but at least two movies stalled in development. This is understandable; the sprawling story demands the length that a TV series can offer. And, in this case, the budget of somewhere like HBO.
The Last Of Us boasts the talents of Druckmann, who is deeply involved with writing and producing the series, and Craig Mazin, who proved he knows how to make great television with HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries back in 2019. This new show is even more ambitious, the first episode alone jumping from 1968, where a scientist on a talk show posits the idea of fungal infection turning humans into mindless, infection-spreading zombies to general derision to 2003 when his prediction comes horrifyingly true.
Yet the focus of the show is a post-apocalyptic 2023, where millions are dead, and the survivors are largely living in quarantine zones that have risen in cities such as Boston. There, military dictatorships such as Fedra enforce the rule of law and look to keep the infected out, while freedom fighters known as Fireflies battle the oppression they see.
Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller (who we first meet in 2003 as the chaos kicks off) straddles the two worlds. Neither a government supporter nor a fan of the Fireflies, he’s just looking to stay alive, earn money where he can and track down his brother Tommy (Diego Luna), who he believes is still alive somewhere in an even more dangerous part of America.
That’s how he meets and is asked to smuggle grumpy teen Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of the city. Ellie has something special about her… Infected with the fungal condition a while ago, she has somehow not developed a single symptom and is therefore of great interest to those looking for a cure.
The dynamic between Pascal and Ramsey is the heart of the show, even if they can’t really stand each other from the first moment they meet. This means that comparisons to The Mandalorian, where Pascal spends his time as a gruff fighter looking after a young charge, are rendered null and void.
Another potential comparison might be The Walking Dead, which got a lot of mileage (some would argue too much) out of a post-apocalyptic scenario with the threat of the zombified hovering at the edges of a character story. But The Last Of Us is ahead and shoulders ahead of that in terms of its character development and its attention to detail, and its impressive realisation of the ruined world.
Future episodes play with storytelling techniques and deepen the narrative, and there is a truly fantastic cast, including Nick Offerman, Anna Torv, Murray Bartlett and Melanie Lynskey bringing the characters to life.
It sounds like hyperbole, but The Last Of Us has set a high watermark for the year’s shows to meet.
The first episode of The Last Of Us will launch on HBO Max in the US on Sunday 15 January and in the UK via Sky and Now in the early hours of Monday 16 January, with a repeat later that day. I’ve seen the first four episodes.