(Sweete 2002) Tim­o­thy Findlay’s Eliz­a­beth Rex [tv play, w. Diane D’aquila, Peter Hutt, Brent Carv­er]
(Resnais 1955) Nuit et brouillard
(Fish­er 1959) The Hound of the Baskervilles
(Guiller­min 1978) Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile
(Sales 1990) The Silk Road: In Search of the King­dom of Lou-Lan
(Lam­bert 1992) Pet Sematary
(Fre­undlich 2004) Catch That Kid
(Car­pen­ter 1978) Halloween
(Hes­ton 1993) Need­ful Things
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Mike Judge’s Idioc­ra­cy seemed rea­son­ably fun­ny to me, though this may have been influ­enced by the herb par­tak­en while see­ing it. It’s more or less a sci­ence fic­tion satire in the man­ner of an old L. Sprague deCamp sto­ry. A man awak­ens from cryo­genic stor­age to find that the U.S. has bred itself into idio­cy. Though him­self select­ed for the cryo­genic exper­i­ment because of his aston­ish­ing aver­a­ge­ness, in this brave new world he is the smartest man in the coun­try. He saves the nation from famine by deter­min­ing that crops should not be irri­gat­ed with Gatorade. Most of the com­e­dy is in sight gags embed­ded in the set design. Any­way, rent this for some ston­er par­ty and stock up on taco chips to go with it.

Tim­o­thy Find­ley (1930–2002) was one of Canada’s finest nov­el­ists, but he began as an actor before turn­ing to writ­ing. He was part of the orig­i­nal Strat­ford Fes­ti­val com­pa­ny in the 1950s, act­ing along­side Alec Guin­ness. His life­time part­ner, William White­head, his inseper­a­ble oth­er half from 1951 until his death, was an actor and direc­tor, respon­si­ble, among oth­er things, for over a hun­dred episodes of the ground­break­ing sci­ence series The Nature of Things, and the extreme­ly intel­li­gent radio series Ideas. They occa­sion­al­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed on screen­plays. So it should come as no sur­prise that Find­ley wrote a fine play, as well as famil­iar nov­els like The Wars and The Last of the Crazy Peo­ple. Read more »