I have to be the only per­son who went to this movie to see the scenery and the sheep. A long time ago, I was a shep­herd. I spent two and a half years work­ing var­i­ous sheep farms. So I’ll skip mak­ing the obvi­ous com­ments about this movie. The March­ing Morons, in their tens of mil­lions, are no doubt up in arms about this “gay west­ern”. But there’s no point in debat­ing with igno­rant sav­ages, so I won’t waste my time doing so. See the film. It’s not a mas­ter­piece, but it’s a well-craft­ed love sto­ry and char­ac­ter study with some superb act­ing. Now, I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly eager to see a sto­ry about true love mud­dled and thwart­ed by a dumb cul­ture. But Rodri­go Pri­eto is a good cin­e­matog­ra­pher, and I am home­sick for moun­tains. Well it didn’t take me more than a few min­utes to fig­ure out that it couldn’t have been filmed in Wyoming, where the sto­ry is set. A few of the estab­lish­ing shots were of the Tetons, but most of the time the moun­tains looked all wrong. Those huge diag­o­nal slabs with caste­late peaks, and unbro­ken mass­es of dou­glas fir and spruce sweep­ing down into crys­talline lakes in deep intra­mon­tane trench­es — well, that’s Cana­dian Rock­ies [see pho­to above]. Wyoming moun­tains have a dif­fer­ent look.

The bane of film authen­tic­i­ty: inac­cu­rate sheep.

The sheep. Well, there was some stuff that was right. The old Euskalduna with a beret is some­thing you would have seen in that time and place. Some of the work the main char­ac­ters where shown doing was cor­rect. But all the sheep were fresh­ly shorn and marked, and they were still fresh­ly shorn and marked after they had sup­pos­edly been pas­tur­ing up in the moun­tains for months! There wasn’t a din­gle­berry in sight. The main char­ac­ters where not shown inter­act­ing with the dogs, which were nowhere to be seen, most of the time. Take note, Ang Lee, I’ll be watch­ing… next time, get the sheep right.

None of the big med­ical shows on tele­vi­sion has suc­ceeded in gain­ing my seri­ous inter­est ― until now. I love this show. And what is most aston­ish­ing about it is that the grub­by, surly, sar­cas­tic, and extreme­ly Amer­i­can main char­ac­ter is played by Hugh Lau­rie, who played Bertie Woost­er in the Jeeves and Woost­er, and many hilar­i­ous char­ac­ters in the Black­ad­der series. Laurie’s Amer­i­can voice and man­ner are com­pletely con­vinc­ing. The series assumes the audi­ence has a rea­son­able knowl­edge of med­i­cine and phys­i­ol­ogy, and tack­les hard issues with­out slip­ping into the tire­some eva­sive­ness that Amer­i­can TV shows usu­ally get into when faced with real prob­lems. In this show, peo­ple decide things. Many thanks to Isaac White for bring­ing over four episodes of this show.

After about twen­ty min­utes of expe­ri­enc­ing Steven Spielberg’s “typ­i­cal Amer­i­can fam­i­ly”, which con­sists of an incred­i­bly bone-head­ed father, played by Tom Cruise, an annoy­ing, con­stant­ly screech­ing young daugh­ter, and a tire­some­ly surly son, I start­ed to root for the Mar­tians. I des­per­ate­ly hoped that the Mar­tians would turn them into blood slurpees. Actu­al­ly, the film doesn’t say they are Mar­tians; it would be impos­si­ble to log­i­cal­ly update Wells’ 1898 nov­el and have them com­ing from Mars. But wher­ev­er the aliens come from, they seem to have been able to build a tech­no­log­i­cal super-civ­i­liza­tion with­out know­ing the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease. The 1953 Byron Hask­ins adap­ta­tion, star­ring Gene Bar­ry, was a lot more fun.

The 1994–1996 tele­vi­sion movies based on Ellis Peters’ medieval mur­der mys­ter­ies are very well done. The pro­duc­tion val­ues are mod­est, but do their job. What makes it all work is the act­ing skill of Derek Jaco­bi, who becomes the char­ac­ter so thor­ough­ly that that when I read one of the nov­els I could­n’t help but hear his voice and see his face. He has cre­at­ed one of the most lik­able char­ac­ters on tele­vi­sion. Monk’s Hood has all the ele­ments that Ellis Peters likes to play with: the inter­play of local and king­dom pol­i­tics, the ambi­gu­i­ty of the Church being both inside and out­side the soci­ety, the no-man’s-land between the Welsh and Eng­lish, and, of course, flow­ers and herbs. The monk’s hood, by the way is a par­tic­u­lar­ly pret­ty flower.