![]() Early episodes are directed by Paco Cabezas, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan and Roxann Dawson, and shot by John Conroy and Pedro Luque, so the series looks lush, sun-soaked and frequently stunning. With all that said, there are still some comparable Penny Dreadful pleasures carried over. There’s an almost profound agnosticism to how City of Angels equates traditional faith with the witchcraft and blood cults of the original series - but if your point is that all religions are equally crazy, you’d better make that point more sharply. The same is true of how City of Angels approaches Judaism through Lane’s Michener. I get why the skulls and candles and imagery of saints and dark spirits might attract Logan, but it’s treated as a lot of symbols and signs without much meaning. Nobody is going to criticize you for not taking the mythology of Dracula seriously enough, but there’s a wealth of Mexican-American religion and folklore that’s being treated with an uncomfortable superficiality here. If pulp fiction was the spine of the original series, City of Angels is fixated on what it approaches as pulp religion, with predictable problems. In the background, we see L.A.’s rich and powerful - embodied by ambitious councilman Charlton Townsend (Michael Gladis) - bucking for control over the city of the future.Īnd even if the sixth episode turned out not to be the finale (there are four additional episodes that were not sent to critics), the problem isn’t that it’s overcomplicated - a frequent issue in the original series - but rather that Logan keeps getting distracted by shiny things only to get jarred back periodically by, “Oh right, there was a murder!” or, “Oh right, Nazis!” Tiago’s mother Maria (Adriana Barraza) has deep religious roots tied to Santa Muerta, while his siblings, including Raul (Adam Rodriguez) and Mateo (Johnathan Nieves), have ties to organized labor and the burgeoning pachuco subculture. This is contemporaneous with Chinatown and there’s a similar perspective on Los Angeles as a city that’s devouring itself in order to grow, where neighborhoods reflect each wave of immigrant experience, passing the torch from one to the next, often with violence. It’s obvious why Tiago has been put on this case, which seems to relate to the construction of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, an ambitious piece of urban planning set to decimate one of L.A.’s many ethnic enclaves. Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) is about to start a job as the first Chicano detective in the LAPD when his new partner Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane) summons him to work a day early.įour bodies have been found in the Los Angeles river basin, bodies mutilated in ritual fashion and accompanied by the scrawled phrase “Te Llevas Nuestro Corazon Tomamos El Tuyo” (“You Take Our Heart, We Take Yours”). ![]() After a beautifully shot preamble introducing the clash between Santa Muerte (Lorenza Izzo), the Angel of Holy Death and the chaos-craving dark figure Magda (Natalie Dormer), a showdown with clearly apocalyptic consequences, the story jumps to Los Angeles circa 1938. ![]()
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