Crooks: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Crooks: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
TrailerWorlds TV

Our two heroes, Charly and Joseph, are still after THE COIN:

Gold 5 Ruble of Catherine the Great

This time they bounce between Berlin, Austria and Bangkok, where Joseph has some very useless 'friends', to use the term loosely. There are also two rival gangs there who are engaged in mortal combat over a black idol. Back in Vienna, poor, damaged Rio is hopelessly in love with Tamara (of the bright red hair). Rio is trying to get his hands on THE COIN so he can pay off his gambling debts. Mr. A., some kind of Russian mobster, who might be the rightful owner of THE COIN, wants it back. Chaos, including fist fights, kick boxing, stabbings and at least a couple of massive gun fights. We are also treated to Charly picking numerous locks and cracking open at least one safe. It all ends happily enough, with Mr. A. even reconciling with his daughter, who has become the lead in the Bolshoi ballet company.

Season 1 post here.

Killing Eve

KILLING EVE Official Trailer (HD) Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer Thriller BBC Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV

I dunno about this show. We've got two very smart women, one works for the British government in some kind of Ministry of Information and the other is an assassin operating at the behest of some shadowy group. Our girl, Eve (Sandra Oh), works for the government, is good at data analysis, but not too sharp when dealing with the real world. The bad girl, Viallanelle (Jodie Comer), has no patience with any kind of bureaucracy but is talented with all the tools of an assassin, knows how to fight and has plenty of street smarts.

Eve is fine in the office, but out in the field she is a bumbling nitwit. I find myself yelling at the screen in every episode because she is doing something boneheaded. Now that I think about it, I realize she is much like Sam Lowry, the hero/victim in Brazil. 

Villanelle takes an interest in Eve because she is the first person to get an inkling of just who she is, which makes her a worthy adversary. Eve wants to find out who Villanelle is working for. Her victims are all over the map, politically and geographically, so it is not apparent who is benefitting from all these killings. Villanelle and Eve sit down for dinner one night (not Eve's idea of a good time) and Eve asks her. Villanelle responds that if you go high enough, they are probably working for the same people. Aha! Conspiracy! I newd it!

Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the head of the Russia Section at MI6. She is kean, as into neato-keano, as she is very quiet, keeps in the background, but wields a heck of a lot of power. I've seen Fiona around before, but the only shows I remember seeing were Enola Holmes and the Harry Potter films where she played Petunia Dursley.

Later post about Villanelle

The Coin

Museum Island Berlin

The show Crooks opens with the brazen smash and grab of a valuable coin on display in a museum on Museum Island in Berlin.

The Coin

The coin is a Russian half-imperial gold piece, minted in 1780 by Catherine the Great. Numista tells us that in 1895, a half-imperial was equal to five rubles, which contradicts what someone in the show says  later on when he tells us the face value is two rubles.

1766 Russian Two Ruble Coin
$8,000

There are such coins available on the market for modest prices. 

1787 Brasher Doubloon
Last Auctioned for $9.4 million

There are also other gold coins that people have paid extraordinary amounts for. The condition of the coin is going to have some bearing on the value, but rarity is what drives the price to stratospheric heights.

Sleeping Dog - Trailer (Official) | Season 1 | Netflix [English]

The missus and I seem to have recovered enough from respective ordeals that we can resume our two hours of Netflix each evening. This one is pretty good. We've got a very good sample of most every urban social problem. We have gay Muslims, homeless people, a suspended cop with mental problems estranged from his wife and daughter. We've got a murder and a cover up, an annoyingly strict boss lady, a black young woman who has just joined a squad of detectives, a cute young white woman who works for the nasty boss lady. So it's mostly about life among the rubbish. There's a plot that creeps onto the screen in bits and pieces, just enough to keep you hooked, but not enough to reveal or even suggest the answer. It's darn near perfect. Or maybe it's just been so long since I've been able to sit through two hours of Netflix.

The Perfect Mother

THE PERFECT MOTHER (NETFLIX) TRAILER
ME GUSTA CHANNEL
A very annoying show. We have an 18 year old woman who has moved from her home in Berlin to Paris where she is supposed to be going to school. Something happened and she has gone off the rails, but her mother has no clue. The family seems like they get along. There is something seriously wrong with this situation. Either the daughter is a psychopath (she might be) or her mother is oblivious to what should be obvious clues. Anyway, the daughter has been taking to blackmailing sexual predators. She meets them, has sex with them and then takes GHB, the date rape drug. Now she demands payment or she will go to the police and accuse him or rape. A clever, if risky, ploy. 

The perfect mother has an old boyfriend in Paris whom she abandoned when she fled Paris for Berlin twenty odd years ago. He has since become a lawyer and when the daughter gets in hot water, she asks him for help. They are poking around the shady side of town looking for a drug dealer who might know something about the catastrophe. A couple of thugs take exception to his presence and toss him out of a third story parking garage. He lands on his back on a car and collapses the roof. You might suspect him of being dead, but you'd be wrong. A busted hip and some fractured ribs and in no time at all he's up and hobbling around on a crutch, and not too much after that he's banging the perfect mother. This guy has remarkable powers of recuperation.

Later on we have an illegal immigrant jumping from a bridge to escape the police. He lands on the road and dies. That's two people falling to their death in one show. Oh yeah, there was also the guy who got stabbed to death at the beginning that started this whole catastrophe.

4 one-hour episodes in French & German, I think, with English subtitles.

When the Allies settled in Berlin (1945)

When the Allies settled in Berlin (1945)
CHRONOS-MEDIA History

Just a curiosity that caught my eye. Just after the one minute mark there are couple of images of FDR, Stalin and Churchill. I wonder if the pictures of Stalin are still there.

National Kaiser Wilhelm Monument

I am pretty sure that the National Kaiser Wilhelm Monument appears briefly (3:35-4:08). It was erected in 1897 and demolished by the communists in 1950. Must have been in East Berlin. There might be a lesson here for all those morons running around screaming that all the old statues must be torn down. Well, there might be a lesson here, but I doubt those shitheads could comprehend it, much less learn anything.

Monuments are built for a reason, but that reason may not survive. But the fact that the monument was built can be a lesson for succeeding generations, if they are willing to think. Yeah, I know, thinking is passe. Screaming is what's happening now.

Timeline from the YouTube blurb:

  0:00 Driving on the German Autobahn in direction to Berlin

  0:50 Entering the US Berlin District

  1:00 Picture of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill

  1:15 Soviet soldiers marching, probably on Straße des 17. Juni in direction of the Siegessäule

  2:40 German refugees pulling carriage

  2:56 Trümmerfrauen "rubble women" at work

  3:25 destroyed Berliner Dom (Cathedral)

  4:15 US military visiting the Neue Reichskanzlei

  5:40 Berliner U-Bahn

  5:56 Olympia Stadion (olympic stadion)

  6:59 Olympic swimming pool

  8:11 American Beach Club / Amerikanisches Strandbad

  8:52 Trümmerfrauen "rubble women" at work

  9:34 Galopprennbahn Hoppegarten

10:11 Strandbad Wannsee

13:37 US military playing golf

The Berlin File

The Berlin File (베를린) - Official Main Trailer with English Subtitles
CJEntertainmentUSA
This movie was a little hard to follow so it didn't make much sense. We have North Koreans, South Koreans, the CIA, Mossad and some unidentified Arabs in Berlin to make an illicit arms deal. Well, some of them are there to make an arms deal and the rest of them are there to either watch what happens or to stop it. In any case there is some skullduggery going on and every few minutes a violent fight erupts. Some involve hare brained chases, some are just action packed karate battles and some are full-fledged machine gun shoot outs. There were a couple of unexpected bits, like the voice recorder that self-destructs after playing the message. Haven't seen that trick since Mission Impossible. Also, first movie featuring a North Korean agent as the protagonist that I've seen, or at least that I remember.

There was a spectacular stunt where our hero falls through a glass roof, bounces off of several beams, gets caught in some electrical wiring that proceeds to get ripped loose from the lights, which leads to him swinging like a pendulum into the wall, and if that's not enough, more wire comes loose and he swings away and into another wall where he finally comes to rest. For two seconds and then he's off again.

Netflix, subtitled, 2 hours.

Update June 2023 replaced missing video.

Update July 2024 replaced missing video.

Counterpart

Counterpart Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
We started watching this series the other night based on Roberta's recommendation. It's set in Berlin, which is a good start as Babylon Berlin was set there, and Berlin is is Germany, which won WW2 in the The Man in the High Castle. Both of those shows were great, so we'll give it a shot.

It is pretty great. The best part is the actor J. K. Simmons. He plays two characters, one from this world and one from the alternate world, a world almost identical to this one but just slightly different. In this world he is a mild mannered, inoffensive office drone. In the other world he is a man-to-be-dealt-with. The difference is striking, all the more so because the differences are so subtle. I think it must be because of the way he carries himself and the way he moves. It is just phenomenal.

One aspect of the show involves a flu pandemic that killed five hundred million people in the other world. Naturally, people on that side of the divide are very conscientious about preventing infection. It looks a lot like the USA does now with everyone wearing masks.

The atmosphere on the other side looks a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War: big guys in heavy coats and soldiers with machine guns everywhere you go. I can kind of understand it in both cases. During WW2, Russia suffered horrific losses and when they finally defeated the Germans they were not going to let that happen again, hence their iron rule. Likewise, the other world has been devastated by disease and they are taking all possible precautions to prevent it happening again.

Update August 2022 replaced missing video

Update March 2023 replaced missing video