A Post In the Machine.

Back on the beat and in the Bay, re-starting "Veep," being blown away by "Perfect Days," falling for movies, waiting for returning TV faves and more.

I flew back from Portland on Saturday night, landing in a bizarro world of the Bay Area being gray and cold. I actually had to put pants on. These are strange times.

(Thanks for being patient with the reduced vacation-adjacent production schedule, by the way.)

I had just concluded two weeks of vacation with my partner and she likes to have that extra day — Sunday — to decompress and ready herself for the work week. In my line(s) of work, there clearly isn’t that kind of delineation. I’m often wrong about what day it is, which can be extremely annoying to people who work regular or “normal” jobs.

Since we still had a Saturday night to enjoy, we went in search of wine and beer (and, just to be clear, actual groceries). The Bay Area has a strong craft beer scene, which I don’t partake in nearly as much as Portland’s scene, which seems much more robust, but at least I know my way around of the Bay beers.

We ended up at a Whole Foods with the worst wine selection I’ve ever seen — like it was 1998 or something, and the worst craft beer selection of any Whole Foods I’ve seen (some are really good, actually). We didn’t need any dinner — we hit the PDX airport version of Screen Door before our flight and while most airport versions of neighborhood restaurants have a notable dip in quality, so far we’ve lucked out here with excellent chicken sandwiches.

Of course I ate it.

Flush with food and now beer and wine choices, all that was left of the night was to pick a movie. We had watched Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” on Friday night and spent a couple of hours deconstructing it, in awe, as one does about a movie that leaves so much to interpretation.

(I’m going to write more about that movie this week.)

On Saturday night, we weren’t looking to meet that level, but to continue a recent quality streak that includes “Past Lives” and “Anatomy Of A Fall.”

She has a master list of Letterboxd titles to watch. Having barely sat down to mess with mine — an OCD operation that will devour hours if there ever was one — I deferred but, as lots of couples and friends can attest, some nights you just can’t agree on anything.

We opted instead for rewatching “Veep,” the relevant-all-over-again comedy from HBO that I had watched every episode of in years past and written extensively about for years. On the other hand, KB had, if her streaming cyber fingerprints and clues were accurate, watched only half the first one and half of the third one. Episodes, I mean. Not seasons.

So this was fresh to her.

As it appears to be for the staggering increase in both interest in the series and people now watching it. It’s clearly the Kamala Effect, duh, but it’s also a wonderfully fitting time to remind people of why the show is was so great.

I think a lot of people who watched in the first place are considering going back to “Veep,” as they should, and lots of newbies are seeing what the critical fuss was about. Me, I watched that first episode and forgot how much it was like “The Thick Of It,” but with a lot more bright lighting (and a feeling, I suspect, of the writers and actors trying to work out the rhythms — even by the second episode it felt noticeably more confident, less trying to copy its British inspiration).

Armando Iannucci, who created “The Thick Of It” and “Veep,” among many others, has the bullet-fast angry zinger of a put down style of comedy in his blood and he managed, I’m more certain as I rewatch, to adapt “Veep” to an American sensibility faster than expected, and certainly faster than I remembered.

The first season of “Veep” is, like many eventually-brilliant comedies, a set of steps, corrections, changes and micro-tuning that gets better and finds its North Star after that opening episode. It’s a season that gets better as it goes and the series just continues to improve by episode and season. It’ll be nice to get reacquainted.

Let me know if you’ve started your own rewatch. It’s worth it, if you are thinking about it.

I can’t say we kept up the quality movie streak on Sunday — a day I spent sleeping late, gloriously slurping down coffee and reading when I did wake up, then several hours later deciding a nap was a nice detour, as naps always are. By the evening we just went ahead and opted for a “lots of shit blows up” style movie, this time “Land of Bad,” a special ops war movie that is — you were already waiting for it — all kinds of bad. The movie tanked in early 2024 before Netflix scooped it up and somehow made it the third “ranked” most popular thing on the streamer.

Which, of course, means nothing. It’s a bad movie, even for a brainless action film, and as someone who is reading “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” it feels tragic that I let those two hours of my life go by.

I could give you another three paragraphs but I think you get it.

On the plus side, all the great vibes of Wender’s “Perfect Days” are still bouncing around my head. Here’s the trailer:

I had such a visceral reaction to this film. Choose happiness, people. How to explore that and how to make it more resonant and deeper than a mere idea? That’s what a great film does.

Upcoming series of note (or already noted here in the past) include AppleTV+’s “Slow Horses” (Sept. 4), “Silo,” (Nov. 15) and “Severance,” (Jan. 17, 2025), which together make a pretty good statement for keeping the streamer. I will say this — if you haven’t seen “Silo” and like creative sci-fi, watch the first season immediately. Loved it all.

But the point here is just to ask, what series are you looking forward to coming back for its next season (and yes, before you say it, I’m with you on “The Riches” and any other long-gone gem, but let’s keep this for series that are really coming back, not just in our fantasies and hopes).