We are in the final stretch of the summer, the dog days if you will. Although the weather hasn’t been as balmy of late, this is usually the time where we long for Pumpkin Spice Lattes and fall foliage. The stores certainly have been manufacturing that feeling with Summerween, another horrible marketing term meant to encourage rampant consumption instead of genuine interest. Why do we want the years to fly by without any sense of enjoyment? Before we know it, the moment will pass and we will miss out as we all race to the next thing. As I watched Charli XCX’s set (Lollapalooza was fun, BTW); her final sentiment. a gift to the crowd was “No One Lasts Forever.” That all we have in the here and now. I don’t believe she intends us to wallow in existential angst, but to cherish these fleeting memories as we are living them. I, for one, will keep Autumn squarely in September and share what little of the summer is left before it runs out. Because it, too, will come to end.
High school is a nexus point for many of us as we head into adulthood. Where we have been gives way to the rest of our future. But the love we have will continue past then. This ends up being the thesis for Netflix’s Heartstopper Forever. Over three seasons of this show, creator and writer of the same graphic novel Alice Oseman has explored this close-knit group of British teens as they navigated coming of age. We have watched Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson fall in love as well as deal with everything from sex to eating disorders. How family affects our general outlook has been a major topic of the series and this final movie doesn’t disappoint in that regard.
Nick is about to head to university and is unsure about what he wants to do with his life, the age-old issues of growing up. He has always been there for Charlie but what is he without him? Here he grapples with how his distant father creates complexes where he always needed to be strong and never show weakness. Oseman makes the gradual transition of Nick from seemingly put together to using alcohol as a way to hide those inconvenient emotions in his head. This is done without things being caricatured. Charlie spirals as a result of this and has to pull them both together. Very little melodrama is used despite the subject matter which is welcome.
This focus on the main pair does mean the rest of the cast gets short shrift for any cathartic moments. Teo, played admirably by William Gao, provides the line of everlasting love between those in the friend group and couples. However, this is at the expense of seeing the growing apart of him and his high school sweetheart Elle. Still a fitting ending to a great series, I recommend it to fans of the show.
Over on HULU and sandwiched in-between seasons four and five of The Bear, Gary is an odd duck of an episode. Here creator Christopher Storer enlists his cast Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Jon Bernthal to make not a prologue or an epilogue but an excuse to be in this world a little while longer. We know that Michael is going to die even before it starts. And if you finished the series, we see how far Richie has gone up to the finale.
So this is more a mood piece than a storytelling exercise. These two travel to the title Indiana border town on a job by Uncle Jimmy, presumably delivering something shady and illicit. The resolution of this did give me a chuckle but nothing more. This was just to see the dynamic between these two before the start of the series. If so, it must have been fun for them to film. Because the audience’s patience is greatly tested by the twenty-minute mark, as the duo drives aimlessly past boarded up buildings and seedy dive bars. But the episode ends as we first meet Richie in season one. Is this the memory that he is thinking about at the beginning? If so, it’s all a little late for this great series.
