Boston Legal has been doing a good job of oppos­ing the sta­tus quo in the Unit­ed States, and is bril­liant­ly fun­ny in the process. My thanks go to Isaac White for draw­ing my atten­tion to this series, and bring­ing over files of it to watch. This par­tic­u­lar episode is the fun­ni­est I’ve seen, and the best exam­ple of stand­ing up to the morons. It not only takes on the Iraq War, but Bush’s idi­ot­ic and destruc­tive edu­ca­tion poli­cies. While all the act­ing is good in this series, the best parts are when James Spad­er and William Shat­ner inter­act. Shat­ner has, over the years, matured into a bril­liant com­ic actor.

My ratio­nale: Some­body went to the trou­ble to get suf­fi­cient­ly stoned to make this movie. I felt that I owed it to them to get suf­fi­cient­ly stoned to watch it.

Ray Steven­son as Titus Pul­lo and Kevin McK­idd as Lucius Vorenus

HBO’s Rome is a superb series. There are some his­tor­i­cal inac­cu­ra­cies: Octa­vian was ship­wrecked in his youth, but nev­er kid­napped, and he was not in Rome when Cae­sar was assas­si­nated. Nei­ther was Cicero. Cae­sar is shown offer­ing to give land in Pan­nonia to the 13th Legion, though Pan­nonia wasn’t in the empire at that time. But as far as pre­sent­ing Roman soci­ety, and the mores and behav­iour of Romans, the series is quite accu­rate. It quite prop­erly shows the casu­al vio­lence and bru­tal­ity of a soci­ety that was not informed by any real eth­i­cal prin­ci­plrs, but mere­ly by cus­tom, caste con­scious­ness, vengeance, and bar­baric con­cepts of “hon­our”. Much of our world remains like that, today, and it is a pro­found dis­tor­tion of his­tory to ignore it, as most his­tor­i­cal film and fic­tion usu­ally does. The real­i­ty of slav­ery and Roman sex­ual prac­tices are shown with rea­son­able accu­racy. The death of Cae­sar is shown as it is in Plutarch’s account, rather than Sue­to­nius. Read more »

(Benedek 1953) The Wild One
(Nicholls 1995) Alien Empires: Hardware
(Nicholls 1995) Alien Empires: Repli­ca­tors Read more »

Oh My Gawd what a hor­ri­ble film! Oil rig­gers equipped with no skill or knowl­edge save the earth from aster­oid impact by fly­ing to the aster­oid in the Space Shut­tle and drilling a hole a mere 800 feet into it (as if this would make a dif­fer­ence?), to plant a nuclear bomb . They and NASA and var­i­ous mil­i­tary types save the Earth by com­pet­ing in how loud­ly they can shout at each oth­er and who can say the tough­est things. A sop­py romance is thrown in — one that makes you cringe when­ever those char­ac­ters show their faces. Annoy­ing act­ing, annoy­ing music, annoy­ing every­thing, and sci­en­tific illit­er­acy so pro­found that NASA uses the film to train astro­nauts. They are required to iden­tify as many of the 167 major vio­la­tions of phys­i­cal laws and prob­a­bil­i­ties as they can. Yes, 167.

I was sat­is­fied with this per­for­mance-cap­ture ani­mat­ed ver­sion of the Beowulf epic. It does­n’t have much to do with the orig­i­nal Anglo-Sax­on epic, but mythol­o­gy is, by its very nature, open to any muta­tion the re-teller cares to make. Who the hell knows what trans­for­ma­tions the sto­ry expe­ri­enced before our “lit­er­ary” ver­sion appeared? No one object­ed when Allan Gard­ner turned the sto­ry on its head in his nov­el “Gren­del”. This ani­mat­ed ver­sion is an even greater depar­ture, but it held my atten­tion and was visu­al­ly pleasing.

Buster Keaton in Out West (1918)…

… and near­ly a half cen­tu­ry lat­er in The Rail­rod­der (1965)

I acknowl­edge Char­lie Chaplin’s genius, but I have to say that his screen per­son­al­ity nev­er appealed to me, and I appre­ci­ate his films with a detached, tech­ni­cal eye. Buster Keaton is anoth­er thing entire­ly, for me. His com­ic genius touch­es me direct­ly. I laugh when I see Keaton’s silent clas­sics. I was first exposed to his work as a child. The last film he made, before his death, was a short pro­mo­tional film for the CNR”s coast-to-coast pas­sen­ger ser­vice across Cana­da. His stone-faced char­ac­ter cross­es the coun­try on a rail­way hand-car. Keaton was as bril­liant in it as in any film he had made a half-cen­tu­ry before. Read more »

Hal Hol­brook’s one-man stage show, in which he repro­duces Mark Twain’s nine­teenth cen­tu­ry stage appear­ances, is per­haps the most exact and sub­tle rep­re­sen­ta­tion of any pre-cin­e­ma era his­toric fig­ure under­tak­en by any actor. It’s not just Hol­brook’s tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty, but the taste and intel­li­gence with which he select­ed from Twain’s writ­ings that makes the per­for­mance unfor­get­table. Much of this mate­r­i­al is high­ly rel­e­vant today. Twain was not a sim­ple man. His ambi­gu­i­ties have fas­ci­nat­ed both his­to­ri­ans and lovers of lit­er­a­ture since he left the world’s stage (just as he entered it) with Haley’s comet. Hol­brook cap­tures this. The 1967 CBS broad­cast of the Broad­way show must have been one of the most amaz­ing tele­vi­sion events of its time. It’s avail­able from Kul­tur, a com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in pre­serv­ing notable stage per­for­mances on DVD.

This is a slow-paced psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma, styl­is­ti­cal­ly influ­enced by Tarkovsky. It holds atten­tion because the act­ing is superb, the psy­cho­log­i­cal nuances real­is­tic. One scene, for exam­ple, involv­ing a lost watch, stands out for the fine-tuned per­for­mances of the two lead actors, Muzaf­fer Ozdemir and Emin Toprak. Sad­ly, Toprak died in a car crash short­ly after learn­ing he had received his award at Cannes. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is first rate, with Istan­bul buried in snow form­ing a grey back­drop to the claus­tro­pho­bic inte­ri­or shots and tight­ly repressed rela­tion­ships of the char­ac­ters. It’s a grim film, but the sym­pa­thy of the script makes this tol­er­a­ble to the view­er, and the cam­era con­veys both the beau­ty and the bleak­ness of a Turk­ish win­ter.