It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflix’s latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon Stålenhag’s much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the film’s leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.
Entertainment
Fabrizio Guido's subtle comedy is a slam dunk in Netflix 'Running Point'
Unlike his character Jackie Moreno in the Netflix sitcom “Running Point,” Fabrizio Guido wasn’t much of a basketball connoisseur before booking the gig. He’s more into pugilism.
“I constantly compare acting [to] boxing,” said the 25-year-old Angeleno about getting the call informing him that he would be portraying Moreno, a concessions worker for the fictional Los Angeles Waves who finds out he’s the product of an affair and, in turn, the youngest and newest member of a basketball family dynasty.
“I remember I just threw both hands up in the air like if I had just been boxing 12 rounds and it was the knockout I had been looking for.”
The comedy series, which premiered Feb. 27, stars Kate Hudson as Isla Gordon, the only sister in a family of brothers who is often overlooked but is unexpectedly appointed as the new Waves president.
The revelation that Jackie is a love child and the fifth Gordon sibling is one of the many blips Isla encounters as she looks to prove herself in a male-dominated industry.
Much like his new half-sister, 19 year-old Jackie is looking to prove himself as a new member of the Gordon clan. Though an outsider in the family, Jackie’s comedic chops have rendered him a fan favorite for his off-the-cuff lines and seamless delivery.
Humor is a skill Guido has crafted in previous roles as Mikey Gutierrez in Netflix’s series “Mr. Iglesias,” as Dennis (a.k.a. Baby Joker) in the Laura Steinel film “Family,” and Mr. Jensen in Paramount’s “Good Burger 2.”
De Los spoke to Guido following the announcement of “Running Point‘s” renewal for a second season.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tell me more about yourself. Where did you grow up?
I am L.A. born and raised. I was born in Montebello. To be honest with you, I’m at a point in my life where I can’t exactly claim anywhere ’cause I moved around a lot as a kid. I spent a lot of time in Whittier, Pico Rivera. I lived in Culver City at one point and in San Diego for a couple of years. My formative years were spent in Alhambra, near City Terrace, so that whole East [L.A.] community.
How did you land the role of Jackie Moreno?
It was a very traditional kind of process. An audition came my way from my team; it was “Running Point.” The role was Jackie Moreno, who was a 19-year-old kid from L.A., Boyle Heights specifically.
They wanted someone with very strong comedic chops. I feel like that was a big focus for the role. I read it and fell in love with this character. I felt like I could bring more to what the page had to offer, and that’s not a knock on our writers. This is an essence I’m familiar with, a culture I’m familiar with.
I was told the audition went really well. They said I was their top pick. I wake up a day later, and my phone is blowing up. My DMs are full of an open casting [call] that [co-creator] Mindy Kaling put out for the same role. I was like, “I thought we were tight!”
I just said thank you to everybody sending the casting call my way, and I was like, you know what, I’m happy. I’m actually really happy about this. I feel like it’s a perfect opportunity to just attack the impostor syndrome and get it out of the way. I was like, “I gotta feel like I earned it. Fine. This is perfect. Let’s go against the world. Let’s do this.”
Bam. I sent [in the tape]. I just felt like the role was mine.
Walk me through the day when you got the news that you booked Jackie Moreno?
I can’t describe it, but I felt like a workhorse blocking out a lot of the noise.
I constantly compare acting to boxing. I’m not talking about getting beat up or it being a fight. When I say fight, I mean the beautiful sport that is boxing. I just felt like a fight for these 12 rounds. I remember I was home alone, and my agents had spoken to my mom.
The call came in from my mom. She’s on the other side of the phone crying, “They want you for this show.”
It was exactly the project I wanted.
What are some personal elements that resonate with you and your character?
For starters, it was definitely the cultural aspect. I knew Jackie might have to dabble in some Spanish and I was like, “perfect.” A huge part of this character’s life is his relationship with his mom and what it’s like to deal with her loss. I love the layers of that. I think everybody deals with loss. I’m slightly older than Jackie, so I had to dial it back to a younger part of me that I felt like was enthusiastic and ready to learn.
And you got to work with Keyla Monterroso Mejia in one of the first scenes. How was that?
I was just talking to her last week. She gave me a call. She’s the absolute best. I was so excited to get the chance to work with her ’cause I feel like you get to see a side that’s not always seen in that style of comedy.
Keyla Monterroso Mejia as Ana Moreno and Fabrizio Guido as Jackie in “Running Point.”
( Netflix)
Tell me how you were able to form an onscreen relationship with your older, rich and white siblings?
I think in the same way as Jackie — I don’t want to say I wanted to be accepted but I had a thirst to understand them. I feel like that thirst for me personally [was] as an artist. I would sit in, hearing them talk. I would listen to the life experience that they have. They’re so easy to get along with, so funny.
(Katrina Marcinowski/Netflix)
Oftentimes, we would schedule little lunches when we could get all together as a family. I had the opportunity to work with each one of them in one-on-one scenes. So that lent itself to get into more focused conversations with them.
Did the cast give you any advice?
I often found myself kind of seeking Brenda Song for advice on sports, ’cause she’s really, really knowledgeable, and I’m not as knowledgeable as Brenda.
So I would talk to her about trade rumors and stuff, and she served as a great guide, and that kind of transitioned into like, “Hey. How do you know when a project’s right for you? How do you know how to make these moves?” Brenda has just been amazing in giving me her opinion about things and how she’s moved through her career.
My other siblings, I love ’em because they’re a joy to be around. Their advice has just all been about life, relationships.
You’ve worked closely with comedian Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias on his show “Mr. Iglesias” and have also done some stand-up comedy yourself. Do you see yourself staying in the comedy realm?
[Stand-up] comedy is my newest passion thanks to Fluffy. I’m not exactly looking to do anything with this. I just wanna do it for my own fulfillment. I’m going to go up there and have fun. That’s my goal every time I go up. I get super nervous about something, and I’m like, “Hey, you have nothing to prove, nothing to gain.”
I would love to go on tour. I love every time I get invited to open for someone I admire. I love being out late at night with other comics and hearing their set, coming up with jokes, spending my days writing. It’s a huge and very important part of my life right now.
There’s this clip of you as Dennis, a.k.a. Baby Joker from the 2018 film “Family,” that has been circulating social media. I also notice it in the comment sections of “Running Point” promos. What do you think about that?
It came out of nowhere honestly. I had done that film a couple of years ago. It’s a fantastic film. It’s just been really cool to watch this video resurface. Now, anything that gets posted about “Running Point,” there’s always some sort of Baby joker comment. People love Dennis! I’m glad it’s bringing views to the film because I’ve always felt it’s such a strong comedic film, and I just want to give Laura her flowers.
What was your reaction to “Running Point‘s” Season 2 renewal?
I was asleep, and my phone just started going off with congratulations. I thought this may still be coming from people that are just watching. Then it was an article that revealed it got renewed for Season 2. It was a good, really exciting morning, but still, I was like, “Is this true? Like, what’s going on? How come Netflix hasn’t called?” But I guess they were just super open and ready to rock and roll with this one.
Perusu Movie Synopsis: Two brothers discover their deceased father with a persistent erection and scramble to conduct his funeral while hiding this embarrassing condition from their gossipy small town.
Perusu Movie Review: When Biggus Dickus is less a character name and more a posthumous condition, you get Perusu, a comedy that proves not everything stays down when you kick the bucket. Director Ilango Ram’s Tamil remake of his own hit Tentigo turns funeral preparations into a farcical circus when two brothers discover their recently deceased father sporting an enthusiastic farewell salute that simply won’t quit. Cue the panic as Durai (a perfectly buzzed Vaibhav) and Swammy (Sunil) desperately try to keep dad’s final stand from becoming the talk of their nosy small town.
Perusu Movie Review: When Biggus Dickus is less a character name and more a posthumous condition, you get Perusu, a comedy that proves not everything stays down when you kick the bucket. Director Ilango Ram’s Tamil remake of his own hit Tentigo turns funeral preparations into a farcical circus when two brothers discover their recently deceased father sporting an enthusiastic farewell salute that simply won’t quit. Cue the panic as Durai (a perfectly buzzed Vaibhav) and Swammy (Sunil) desperately try to keep dad’s final stand from becoming the talk of their nosy small town.
The film barrels forward like a runaway hearse, rarely pausing between its rapid-fire dialogue and increasingly absurd attempts at concealment. Each new person drawn into the conspiracy — wives, mother, the loyal but exasperated Ameen (Bala Saravanan), and one very confused auto driver — adds another layer to the comedy of errors until the situation becomes as stiff as… well, you know. What makes this mechanism work is that the joke itself becomes secondary to the characters’ increasingly desperate machinations, allowing the film to tap into universal anxieties about family reputation and small-town gossip without resorting to heavy-handed social commentary.
Eventually, even the most enthusiastic anatomical jokes wear thin (there are only so many euphemisms one can deploy), and the pacing occasionally sags under the weight of too many characters juggling the same secret.
Vaibhav handles his sloshed character with credible restraint, while Sunil holds his own as the more composed brother. The seasoned supporting cast, including Bala Saravanan, Redin Kingsley, Dhanalaskhmi, Niharika, Chandini, and Munishkanth act as good set pieces.
Perusu never pretends to reach beyond its raunchy premise or offer profound insights into the human condition. It’s a two-hour exercise in committed absurdity that delivers what it promises — a consistent stream of chuckles punctuated by a few genuine laughs. Comedy’s rigor mortis hasn’t quite set in, but neither has true comic immortality.
Written By: Abhinav Subramanian
Entertainment
Review: How the storied Vienna Philharmonic returned to SoCal for the first time in a decade
It had been a decade and a year since the Vienna Philharmonic came our way to remind us how, for this storied ensemble of like-minded musicians, the medium can be magically both the message and the massage. The orchestra produces a ravishment of sound both immaterial and downright tactile.
The orchestra’s pair of concerts this week at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa were, as always, tradition-bound. The ensemble’s membership may have become slightly more international since last here. A few more women have been welcomed into its formerly misogynistic ranks. Old-timers’ fears of diversity diluting the unique Vienna affect — the blend of instruments being a wonder of the orchestral world — proved unsurprisingly unfounded.
The standard repertory, moreover, barely budges. Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák and Richard Strauss were on the tour’s docket — nothing written in the last 125 years.
One way to maintain its hold on a glorious past is for the musicians to run the show. The orchestra has no music director to push it in this or that direction. Every conductor is, in effect, a guest of the manor invited by the musicians. No breaking the china. Every piece by Mozart or Beethoven, every Viennese waltz, remains a venerated relic.
Yet to be Viennese is to be inherently open to an occasional fling or three. And the orchestra has had notable affairs with the unlikely likes of Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez. These days it shows fondness and respect for Esa-Pekka Salonen and downright love for Gustavo Dudamel. The Vienna Philharmonic sound is so sumptuous it takes a rare conductor to resist its advances. A Salonen or Dudamel is just as likely to get the Viennese to try something new.
Yannick Nézet-Séquin, who led the concerts at Segerstrom, is another who enjoys a long-term relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic. The French Canadian conductor, just turned 50, is a mainstay on the East Coast as music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He is prominent throughout Europe and much-recorded.
But he has had little exposure on the West Coast. Nézet-Séquin conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic once, 16 years ago. That is not, though, to say that he doesn’t care about L.A. He did drop everything (namely a chamber music concert with musicians from his Met Opera orchestra at Carnegie Hall) to show up at the Hollywood premiere of “Maestro,” having contributed to the bland soundtrack of the Leonard Bernstein biopic.
Nézet-Séquin’s popularity, however, hardly derives from blandness. The Viennese fondness for him may well be that, in his exuberance, he lets them live it up, even when that might mean chipping the china a little in his lust for splashy spectacle. Then again, lust in music, art and literature is one of Vienna’s great gifts to the world.
At Segerstrom, Nézet-Séquin had an interesting advantage. The hall opened shortly after Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson (formerly Verizon) Hall with a similar, but improved, acoustic design by Russell Johnson. Now in his 14th season with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séquin knows how to exploit Johnson’s variable sound-enhancing devices.
He got remarkable results. Rather than the warm acoustical refinement of the famed Musikverein, the Vienna Philharmonic’s home, every orchestral utterance jumped out at the audience like a 3D special effect. That could be full orchestra climaxes louder than you ever thought possible without amplification. The very, very quiet violas, cellos and basses opening Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony had a soul-filling robustness that even the best headphones couldn’t match. At either extreme, it could be hard, as a listener, to catch your breath.
Each of the two programs contained an early 19th century classical period work and concluded with a late 19th century romantic period one. Sunday afternoon the opener was Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman as the bold-toned, rhythmically precise, eloquent soloist. Where permitted, Nézet-Séquin added sharp orchestral punctuations but otherwise let the orchestra support without fuss a commanding pianist.
That was followed, in the second half, by Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben” as sonic spectacular. There is nothing new to that. Decades ago, a young Zubin Mehta blew Angelenos’ minds with “Heldenleben,” and his Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of it still can. Daniel Barenboim led a grandiloquent “Heldenleben” at Segerstrom Center’s older, acoustically troubled hall on an earlier visit of the Vienna Philharmonic.
In Nézet-Séquin’s performance, Strauss’ hero proved still larger than life. Brass blared, winds squawked, timpani thundered as though this hero who conquers music critics and makes love to his wife were Captain Marvel. The real marvel, in this instance, being the avoidance of vulgarity. No matter how hard the orchestra was pushed, it never sounded strained.
Much of the same could be said for the second program, Tuesday night, with Schubert’s early Fourth Symphony and the ubiquitous “New World.” In the Schubert, Nézet-Séquin went for bold Beethovenian effects that strained Schubert’s score. In the Dvorak, Nézet-Séquin appeared to want to outdo everyone else, making this “New World” a louder, softer, slower, faster place. He had the means. He had the acoustics. He had the persuasive power to get the orchestra to give its incomparable all.
The audience jumped to its feet, thrilled by the bravura of it. But it was just that, an hour of bravura, not a new world.
While you can kind of see where some of the money went, it’s exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated “movies” littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.
Set in an alternate history where Walt Disney’s invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a rebellious teen orphan desperate to escape her abusive home. Like most kids around her age, Michelle’s world was turned upside down during the brutal human / robot conflict that began with thinking machines demanding equal rights as sentient beings. But whereas most of her peers lost loved ones specifically because of the war, an ordinary car crash is what tears Michelle’s family apart and leads to her being adopted by loutish layabout Ted (Jason Alexander).
With her parents and brilliant younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) seemingly dead, Michelle doesn’t feel like there’s all that much to live for. Much like her chaotic adoptive home life, school feels like a prison to Michelle because of the way children are expected to learn everything using Neurocasters, bulky headsets that transport wearers into virtual realities. Though many people like Ted gleefully strap their Neurocasters on, the technology disgusts Michelle, in part because of how they were first created as tools to give humans an edge in the machine war.
Given how people still live in fear of being attacked by the few surviving robots sequestered in the Exclusion Zone, Michelle can’t fathom why other people are so game to tune the real world out. Michelle herself is constantly looking over her shoulder in case a bloodthirsty machine finds its way into her room. But when one of them actually does, she’s charmed by the fact that it looks like one of her favorite cartoon characters. And she’s shocked when it tells her (through canned catchphrases from the cartoon) that Christopher is actually alive.
Though Michelle’s new robot friend looks very much like one of Stålenhag’s illustrations, its vocal impairment makes it read as a cutesy spin on the live-action Transformers’ take on Bumblebee. As it urges Michelle to follow it on a mission to find Christopher, you can almost hear the Russos and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely patting themselves on the back for creating a character who encapsulates everything about The Electric State’s war-torn world. It’s a damaged thing that just wants to be seen as a person and given the chance to live its life in peace. Those details could have made for an interesting narrative if there were any more depth to them or if Brown could muster up even an ounce of chemistry with her CGI companion. But The Electric State is much more concerned with simply showing you as many of its broken machines as it possibly can.
Outside of a multitude of cultural references meant to remind you that it’s set in the ’90s, and shots of Neurocaster users lying passed out on the street like junkies, The Electric State never feels very interested in doing the kind of worldbuilding necessary to make movies like it work. Instead, it simply spells out that the inventor of the Neurocaster, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), is a villain who wants Colonel Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to capture Michelle’s robot. And Bradbury’s chasing after the pair gives the film a way to show how littered The Electric State’s world is with the rusted frames of machines destroyed during the war.
The movie becomes that much more of a slog once Michelle crosses paths with boring smuggler Keats (a profoundly charmless Chris Pratt) and his wisecracking robo-friend Herman (Anthony Mackie), who make a living selling things they scavenge from the Exclusion Zone. Unlike Brown’s Michelle, Pratt and Mackie actually do manage to come across as people who have lived through a sort of apocalypse and become much weirder due to their general isolation from the outside world. Their knowledge of the Exclusion Zone and access to vehicles makes them perfect to get Michelle and her robot to their destination. But the sheer number of jokes about Twinkies and Big Mouth Billy Bass (again, this is the ’90s) that The Electric State has Keats spit out is enough to make you root for Bradbury.
Image: Netflix
Part of the problem is that The Electric State is never all that funny, though the movie certainly thinks it is as it starts to introduce some of its more unusual robot characters like mail-bot Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), spider-like fortune telling machine Perplexo (Hank Azaria), and their leader, Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). You can almost imagine The Electric State working if it were more focused on the lives of the pariah machines — all of whom are somewhat evocative of Sid’s horrific creations in Toy Story.
But rather than tapping into those characters’ potential, the movie spends its last third rushing headlong into tiresome action sequences that fall far short of what you would expect from such an expensive project. Ultimately, The Electric State leaves you with the distinct sense that Netflix greenlit it assuming that the Russo bros. + IP + a bunch of well-known actors would = a movie people would reflexively want to watch. But that math simply doesn’t add up, and this feels like an instance where you’d be much better off just reading the book.
The Electric State also stars Colman Domingo, Ke Huy Quan, Martin Klebba, Alan Tudyk, Susan Leslie, and Rob Gronkowski. The movie is now streaming on Netflix.
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