The Five Spot: Look At Cristin Milioti’s Eyes
Also: Cops thwarted by magnets and a great story about Halle Berry and Prince
The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…
Off we go.
FIVE: I can’t get over this
The temptation with The Penguin, the new Batman-free Batman series that debuted on Max recently, is to focus on Colin Farrell as, well, the Penguin. Which is fair. He’s the star of the show and he’s playing the main character and he’s buried under about 85 pounds of prosthetics, to the degree that you would have no clue it’s him under there if you didn’t know going in. It’s a fascinating situation all around, taking one of the most handsome and charming people alive and making him unrecognizable for… reasons, I guess? I really don’t know. It’s all kind of like taking a Lexus and going to great lengths to make it look like a Ford Taurus. It’s not even that he’s bad in the role. He’s not! He’s really good, which is a little infuriating, actually, if only because there are only so many big meaty roles out there for sweaty goons from New Jersey and we can’t just have beautiful Irish scamps taking all of them. It’s a bad precedent. I guess that’s my point.
But there I go, doing the thing I said I wasn’t going to do and focusing on the Colin Farrell of it all when the real story here is Cristin Milioti and her eyes. That’s her up there at the top of this section as Mafia princess Sofia Falcone staring white-hot daggers into the soul of someone. She does this a lot. We’re only one episode into this sucker and she’s already done it maybe six or eight times. It’s usually Farrell’s character she’s doing it to. It’s a miracle it doesn’t melt the prosthetics right off of his perfectly sculpted face. Look at the moving pieces here from a scene later in the episode where she empties an entire clip of suspicion with a single glance.
I need you to know something here: If Cristin Milioti ever looks at me like that, I will crumble immediately. I will confess to everything I have ever done. I will confess to things other people did, too. I will just keep talking and apologizing until she stops making that face at me. Am I proud of this? No, not especially. But it’s important to know your own limitations.
I also need you to know this: Cristin Milioti is awesome. She’s been awesome in just about everything she’s ever done, too. She’s incredible here as a wild-eyed psychopath in a Batman-adjacent television show and she was great opposite Andy Samberg doing silly goofs in Palm Springs and she would probably be great in your show, too, assuming you are making one, which I choose to believe you are. Please at least consider it.
So, in conclusion:
The Penguin is pretty fun and worth a shot
Please do not stare into my soul with your piercing eyes
It’s kind of funny that the two main performances in this show are polar opposites, with one actor burying all of his physical attributes under a mountain of makeup and the other using the eyes the Good Lord gave her to say a whole bunch of things you can’t write into a script
The Penguin is a land of contrasts.
FOUR: The Rock has a hilariously specific request for the people at Hot Ones
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