Happy Thursday, everyone! It's a misty day here in Richmond after a day of quick thunderstorms where we had 80 MPH wind gusts, which is really exciting to watch from my home office window. I took a trip back to Chicago last weekend and hit a bunch of my favorite thrift stores, so I have actual stuff to talk about this week!
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If you've never seen The Great Dictator, a quick recap; a Jewish barber in a fictional country, 20 years after a losing war, ends up swapping places accidentally with a rising dictator who looks exactly like him and who is trying to consolidate power and rule with an iron fist over his European country. Oh, and he has this little moustache. So yep, Chaplin is...well, he's playing Hitler and savagely mocking him at a time (1940) when the US was still technically not at war with Germany and there was still a decent amount of brownshirt support for Hitler in the USA. So yeah, it's a big swing. And what a swing this is, Chaplin's most commercially successful movie and one that never stints on the satire and emotion while also at times being legitimately lovely and funny as hell. If you've never seen it, this absolutely should be a priority.
Part of the reason I picked this up was this fantastic cover, which you can flip and it works either way. Olly Moss is a fantastic graphic designer known best for his reimagining of movie posters and I simply love his work. For instance, his posters for Star Wars I-III.
The Great Dictator is currently streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel and Kanopy.
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One of the things that Criterion has been doing, outside of their usual one-movie sets, have been their interesting Eclipse sets, which are more themed around a certain director or studio or theme. This set is all new to me, since somehow I have only seen Ingrid Bergman's acting work in her Italian and US movies. I've always loved her work and I'm very curious to see more of it in her native language. In particular, The Count of the Old Town is her first speaking role and I'm very curious to see her in a purely comic role. It looks light and charming. (You have to click through on this one to watch it on YT, sorry.)
These all appear to be available on The Criterion Channel.
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The other Eclipse set I found, When Horror Came To Shochiku, is the product of a very weird, brief period in the history of Japanese film studio Shochiku, which is one of the oldest of the Japanese film studios (and predates film, having started as a kabuki production company). For a long time in their history they were kind of...stately. Ozu was their showpiece director, for instance. It's like one studio distributed all of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films, for instance. But for this very brief period, they got onboard with '60s Japan schlock and made magic. Here is where I'm going to use Criterion's blurb for it, because I can't do any better:
Following years of a certain radioactive beast’s domination at the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating, if short-lived, dives into that fiendish deep end was the one by Shochiku, a studio better known for elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies, tales haunted by watery ghosts, plagued by angry insects, and stalked by aliens—including one in the form of a giant chicken-lizard. Shochiku’s outrageous and oozy horror period shows a studio leaping into the unknown, even if only for one brief, bloody moment.
I've seen half of these movies so far. The X From Outer Space is a lot of goofy Japanese 1967 sci-fi fun where a spore comes back from a mission to Mars (one that has stewardesses and a frankly popping '60s lounge music soundtrack and, well, of course it becomes a kaiju and attacks a random city. It's a ton of fun and a very Saturday afternoon movie.
But WOW, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell. This movie is insane in all the right ways and if you told me this was a favorite of Takashi Miike (Audition, Zebraman) I would not be surprised at all. A plane has to crash land somewhere remote and the crew and passengers slowly find themselves possessed by an alien force. It gets gross and grisly and weird and I cannot recommend it enough.
These are also on the Criterion Channel! I love that they've embraced the weird and schlock a bit.
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My recommendation this week is an odd one. Jenny Nicholson is a very accomplished YouTuber who delivers deep-dive essays on pop culture subjects, sometimes celebratory and sometimes annoyed about them. She took some time off this last year and then last night made a triumphant return with this look at the weirdly well-done Easter plays/musicals from a Canadian megachurch, many of them saved on the Internet on all their copyright-violating glory (and I'm not talking about other people; I'm talking how much the church uses pop culture references and apes character names, costumes, scenes, songs and it's all amazing). It's about 90 minutes, which might seem long, but I cannot recommend this enough. Especially the part where Iron Man gets crucified by Loki.
Happy Thursday, everyone! It's still in the 90s (low 30s for our Celsius friends) here in Richmond but that's about to break with some thunderstorms today, which is nice. Meanwhile, the Sox continue their downhill slide and I'm slowly getting my office in more order. So let's take a look at this week's subject. I was kind of casting around for what I wanted to talk about this week and it struck me; I went through my shelves and picked out a bunch of my weakenesses at thrift stores: schlock DVDs that I may never watch! So here's five DVDs of ostensible schlock.
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Paul Walker's career outside of the Fast & Furious franchise is littered with this sort of thing (seriously, it's almost hilarious how many movies he did that look as cheap as hell and involve car races). I almost don't even need to watch this because I'm pretty sure I can predict what the hell happens. He's wrongly accused, has to get out of it, there's car chases, bad guys, Paul wins in the end and looks good doing it. This is exactly the kind of "I've never heard of this" schlock that I spend a buck on as a lark.
Vehicle 19 is on Prime with subscription and on Redbox and Pluto with ads. Weirdly, it's not on Tubi, the usual place for this sort of thing.
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Warner Archive is a weirdly fun service that Warner media runs where they don't distribute DVDs for a lot of their deeper catalog titles but they're happy to burn you a decent copy and send it to you. Almost always no special features, but hey it's a nice physical copy. Now this one, again, I'd never heard of and I assume it's in that weird period as Kurt Russell was transitioning from his Disney teen career and heading toward being the most badass John Carpenter leading man he would ever have. Going by the logo, I would guess this is part of the Egyptology craze of the '70s as the King Tut exhibition was touring the US. But going by the name, I really hope this is also part of the Erich von Däniken nonsense scam with his books about ancient aliens (which the more you read, the more obviously racist it becomes because goodness, obviously those people in this primitive countries certainly couldn't figure out how to move rocks). It's such a dumb '70s thing that thankfully has subsided a bit but is still there in parts of those white supremacist doofballs.
Hey, it's all on YouTube!
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Look, whatever else I might think of Quentin Tarantino (and let's be clear, his handling of the stunt work in Kill Bill and how Uma Thurman was in danger was terrible and he's rightly been dragged for it), it's worth noting that he's done a decent amount of work in promoting schlock that hasn't especially been available or widely seen. Case in point, Switchblade Sisters, a cult classic from 1975 about female high school gang members that for fans of exploitation films is apparently way up in the cult canon. I've obviously never seen this one, from Tarantino's short-lived Rolling Thunder DVD label (which amusingly, besides fun schlock, also included the stone-cold romance classic from Wong Kar-Wai, Chungking Express, which was pretty much out of print in the US outside of that DVD before Criterion released their big Wong Kar-Wai set last year).
Interestingly, I know this title much more as the name of film critic and screenwriter April Wolfe's excellent (and sadly no longer) podcast where she and guests looked at genre films from a female perspective. Switchblade Sisters is absolutely a podcast you should check out if the subject interests you at all (I particularly recommend #168 with Mallory O'Meara on Blow The Man Down, or #149 where Isabel Sandoval discusses Double Indemnity).
Switchblade Sisters is currently on AMC+ and Shudder as well as for rent/buy on the usual places.
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I love me a good double pack of schlock! Especially when it has working actors who are going to spend a lot of it just staring off screen at crude effects in a nonsensical plotline. Bonus points if there's at least one Oscar nominee in them and they've never been rated because why bother if it's just going straight to DVD? Even better if, like Supernova, it aired originally on the Hallmark channel for some reason.
That's some quality staring off screen. Supernova is streaming on Freevee (which is apparently the new, deeply stupid name for IMDbTV with ads). Final Days Of Planet Earth doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere.
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Well, that's enough schlock for one week, so let's close out with my recommendation. I've been doing this odd decades project, where I look at Letterboxd for the highest-rated film from 100, 90 and so on years ago and this week I got to 1982 and hoo doggy, Fitzcarraldo is as damn good as you may have heard. There's insanity and opera and actors who obviously want to murder Klaus Kinski and it's pretty damn great. Streaming on Kanopy and also a bunch of ad-supported channels like Roku, Freevee and Tubi (and hey, Shout! Factory) and absolutely worth your time.
Happy Thursday! The days are getting longer, this weekend is the Superb Owl and maybe spring is on the way. So let's see what fun stuff I've found recently.
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Guillermo del Toro has such an odd, interesting career. He's done comic book movies (Blade II and the Hellboy movies), a kaiju film (the very fun Pacific Rim), gothic horror (Crimson Peak),,,but I do love his odd couple of movies set during the Spanish Civil War. The Devil's Backbone is a brilliant piece of work set at a boys boarding school during that war with a possible ghost, a deadly pool and a bomb that can go off at any time.
And then there is Pan's Labyrinth. Del Toro works so, so well with fantastic elements and this movie about a daughter and mother who have taken a sort of shelter with a Spanish general (wonderfully played in all his cruelty by Sergi López). It's a both lovely and horrifying film about war and family. It's a little girl who is trying to survive a war with a mother who is doing her best to survive and then...and then there are these creatures she finds. And who may be her salvation.
Pan's Labyrinth is available for rent and purchase at the usual streaming places.
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Ah, the first time I noticed the great Oscar Isaac. Drive is ostensibly not about him, but is about Ryan Gosling's very quiet and reserved character who drives for the local mobs (especially for a weirdly scary Albert Brooks). But Isaac keeps looming over it, as a just-out-of-jail partner to Carey Mulligan who absolutely sees that Gosling is interesting in Mulligan and is so confident about his relationship that he barely feels the need to say anything. Isaac since this has done a lot of good genre work, like Force Awakens and Annihilation and Ex Machina) but I do enjoy when he does some gritty crime work like this. (I can absolutely recommend, for instance, the excellent HBO mini series Show Me A Hero, about the public housing fight in Yonkers NJ in the '70s).
Drive is available on Tubi with ads and rent/purchase at the usual places.
Show Me A Hero is on HBO Max and Cinemax Go for subscribers and one Apple TV and Amazon for purchase. (And really, if you can check it out. It may have Catherine Keener's best performance.)
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Schlock time! The Exorcist is a great movie about a mother terrified how her daughter is ill and she and their doctors cannot figure out why (there is a scene in this with a spinal tap that is maybe the scariest medical scene I've seen in a movie). The possession parts of the movie are almost besides the point for how terrifying the movie is about a mother who is so, so scared for her daughter.
Then there is The Exorcist II, which is simply kind of dull and weird as they use a goofy device on Linda Blair's head to...bring forth dreams? Summon Satan again? Maybe try and make the movie interesting? In any aspect, it doesn't work.
And now, 17 years after the original, we get to The Exorcist III. Which I might keep for October and my annual horror watches, because by all accounts this movie is entertainingly bonkers.Directed by William Peter Beatty, author of the original novel of The Exorcist, and I'm always intrigued when an author of a novel takes a more direct hand on a movie sequel, It doesn't happen that much but when it does it can be...weird.
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My pick of the week is 2020's Crip Cramp: An American Revolution. Running on Netflix, this is an excellent documentary about Camp Jened, a New Jersey camp for teens with disabilities that ran from the '50s through the '70s and was a fulcrum for a lot of people who became important in the civil rights movement that resulted in theAmericans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It's a fascinating documentary that is both infuriating in what these people had to go through while also uplifting and at times quite funny. After all, they were teens and they went through the usual teen dramas with how there were camp dramas and romances and tiffs.
But god, this is worth seeing for the ADA stuff. It's 32 years old now and parts of it feel so established that we forget how new it actually is.
Happy Thursday, everyone! It's snowy as heck here in Chicago, MLB is still in a lockout and the Landover NFL team has chosen a new team name that is both lame and is part of the NFL's weird fetish for the US military. Rants over, let's talk about my finds of the week!
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Brian DePalma is kind of a difficult director for me. Many people have said over the years that he's aped the works of Alfred Hitchcock and I'd be as annoyed as anyone else at that if well, it's not completely untrue. DePalma has his own style, but it's so clearly influence by Hitchcock. But is that a bad thing? Certainly not, if you are going to specialize in thrillers you can do far worse as an influence.
What I do have a serious problem with DePalma is that he can be weird about woman in his movies. Body Double, I firmly believe, is a sexist movie. Carrie can be very good at times but I think misses a decent amount of the points that Tabitha King brought to Stephen's novel. And geez, Femme Fatale. There's a move that wastes Rebecca Romjin on male gaze nonsense.
But Blow Out is one where DePalma gets it right. Nancy Allen plays, for once in a DePalma movie, a well-rounded and interesting character in a fantastic thriller plot about a possible assassination captured on audio tape that may or may not exist. (It's directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, about a photographer who may have accidentally captured a murder on film.) With Allen, John Travolta and John Lithgow, this is a really taut thriller that is very worth your time.
Blow Out is available for purchase and rental at the usual places.
And hey, check out Blow-Up! It's stylish and creepy and fun. It's in the Criterion Collection and currently is also available for sale and rent at the usual places.
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Jeff Greenfield is a halfway decent political commentator, even if he's still stuck in the "both sides have good points" that hasn't been true since about 1970. But he's also at times a very funny and acerbic fiction writer and this is a novel I've always quite loved. Two days after a Presidential general election, the Republican whose won...dies. (In a stupid accident based on a badly designed campaign stop.). Now, ask yourself...who is going to be President?
No, seriously, who is going to be President? This is after the general election but months before the electors meet to actually elect the President. Is it the winning Vice President? Can the RNC simply meet to nominate the VP winner to the Presidential slot? Does the second-place Democrat candidate have any place in this? It's a weird, weird, blind spot in the Constitution and Greenfield has some wicked fun playing with the idea.
Because naturally, everything goes nuts. This came out in 1995, when the Internet was barely a thing, but Greenfield even then knew it was enough of a thing that it would come into play along with the big ones of the time, like talk radio shows and cable news and letter columns. I can only imagine this scenario in a world of Twitter and Facebook and TikTok; Greenfield is very good at both the humor and the horror of the situation. (Also, this is a reminder I need to check out his books on alternate histories of the USA, a subject I find fascinating.)
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Time for schlock!
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Really, if that title doesn't get you a little intrigued for how this could be fantastic junk, I don't know what I can tell you. Jeremy Rennet and Gemma Arterton are having a ton of fun as the titular siblings, now grown up and dedicating themselves to, well, witch hunting. It's so...wonderfully dumb in all the right ways. Crossbows and witches and shotguns and for some reason a diabetes subplot, I love this sort of silliness. (Really, if you ever saw the grim slog that was Van Helsing, this is what that movie should have aspired to be.)
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is streaming on Hulu, Paramount+ and the various Epix platforms as well as being available for rent and sale.
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My recommendation of the week is, kind of unsurprisingly, Peacemaker on HBOMax. I caught up over the weekend and goodness, this is a show that knows what it is and is reveling in it's actiony disgustingness, both in the violence and in how Peacemaker is a pretty awful person who might actually be trying to be better. It's funny, it's gross, the music choices from James Gunn are kind of amazing (there's an actual discussion of Hanoi Rocks that had me cackling) and it's a very, very fun cast.
And seriously, these credits. These are credits I will never skip.
(Fun story about the song here; it's from a Finnish glam-metal group named Wig Wam, and they literally were dropped from their representation a few days before Peacemaker premiered due to COVID making it impossible for anyone to tour. Now they have a song that's charting in the US, new representation and the possibility of playing over here for the first time. They have a fun, "we're doing music that was passe a decade before we even formed" sound.)
Happy Thursday, everyone! When you read this, Christmas for the Western churches is two days away, the Solstice is just past and baseball is coming back....well, someday. Lockouts suck and the owners suck. So, while I go back and forth on packing to visit my house in Richmond (why yes, we bought a house; that sentence terrifies me too) let's look at some good thrift store finds.
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There's been a weird rise in novels and movies set around people contemplating the end of the world and how they would deal with it. I mean...it's an interesting concept; if you knew for certain that the world would end, how would you react? Would you go balls-out nutty? Gather around with the family? Curl up in a ball for a few months until the inevitable end? Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World takes a comedic look at this, but it's also sneakily emotional take as well. Steve Carell and Keira Knightley might seem like an odd combination, but they bring a weird morose comedic energy that I think works well.
Besides, it has a scene with Gillian Jacobs where they stop at a TGIF that has gone into full-one party mode as everyone parties to the end and it's a hoot but also, just slightly, Lord of the Flies.
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is for rent and purchase at the usual places and streaming on HBOMax.
Two recommendations for other works about the end of the world as people wait for it:
Ben Winters is an underappreciated science-fiction author and his trilogy about a policeman determined to finish the job before a meteor wipes out the Western Hemisphere is really worth your time.
Last Night is a Canadian movie about the same subject, except in this case we don't know what the apocalypse is. It's all very vague why but we know the end is coming. Don McKellar's first directing job, it mostly follows Sandra Oh as she gets ready for the end and ending herself before then, which is of course dark as hell but this is all handled in an interestingly gentle way. I always think of how the movie keeps cutting back to David Cronenberg playing a gas company guy in his office, calling every customer on his list about how their service is about to end and precisely crossing their name off his list. It's an odd, interesting movie with a good heart.
And it's one of those interesting movies that is on YouTube for free! I love the weird genre of essentially abandoned movies that live on YT because the rights holders don't seem to care that much.
Happy Thursday, everyone! Christmas is almost here, it's 60 today in Chicago and...we just closed on a house. What a freaking weird day. So let's see that fun stuff I've run across this week or I've rediscovered while I'm weeding my shelves before making a cross-country move.
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I'm a life-long White Sox fan and it's interesting being a fan of a team that has a mark on its historical record as being the only team in Major League history that we know threw a World Series. So of course I'm fascinated Joe Jackson, popularly known as Shoeless Joe, a play for the 1917 Sox who probably knew about the plot to throw the series (mostly because their asshole owner, Charles Comiskey, was a huge cheapskate who cheated them out of bonus money at every turn). Even if he knew about the plot, Joe never participated (he went .304 with a .333 OPS in that series and was easily the MVP of the series) but was implicated with all the others and banned from baseball in 1920.
This novel is about a kid from our time who goes back in time to try and save Joe from this shameful fate...and it's oddly sad for a middle-school book. Like how it's about sometimes you can't change history and the future, as much as you might like.
I figured I'd highlight three actors who have played Joe. The first, in the fantasy film Field Of Dreams, is Ray Liotta, who I still think is playing Joe just a little too mean.
Then again, Ty Cobb can stick it.
And then there is D.B. Sweeney in Eight Men Out, which I feel makes the persuasive argument that Joe might have known about the plot but even if he did he definitely didn't participate...but still, he knew and that's bad enough.
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Naked is back in the news recently; David Thewlis is doing a show called The Landscapers with Olivia Colman and he just did an interview with The Guardian where he dug into Naked (which I believe is the first Mike Leigh movie I saw) and how it's aged to become more sour than it might have been in 1993.
"It’s almost 30 years since Thewlis’s seminal performance in Naked, Mike Leigh’s recently reissued masterpiece. Verbose, sexually violent, feckless and self-indulgent, his antihero Johnny sparked a lot of discussion about representations of misogyny. Were they intended to titillate and, if so, did this make them misogynistic?
‘Johnny was based on a person I knew who’d been ostracised by my friends’
But, surprisingly, that wasn’t the main critical focus of the film at the time. “When I was doing press for Naked,” says Thewlis, “that was never put to me as an actor. Violence against women just wasn’t what we talked about. Now, how could you not talk about it? Violence against women – and unreported violence against women – is such a talking point. We want to discuss misogyny. We want to discuss the fact that members of our government don’t even know the meaning of the word. I found the film much tougher to watch this time than I did 25 years ago.”
I'm definitely going to take a second look at this movie. I remember being absolutely turned off by at the time, and not in a sexual way, but it's Leigh and Thewlis and deserves a second look.
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I can never quite describe the distinction between Afro-Futurism (as some describe their science fiction) and African Futurism (as Nnedi Okorafor describes her work). But it's not up to me to decide or describe. What I am here to do is talk about how Okorafor is one of the best modern speculative fiction authors.
She has a particular talent for using a combination of old societies and newish tech and old traditions and then creating these wonderful woman characters who are thrown into saving the world. This and Who Fears Death and Lagoon and LaGuardia and god, her Binti trilogy about a Himba woman who gets accepted to a prestigious interstellar university only to have a tragic incident change her life forever; she'a a great author who I can't recommend enough.
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Hey, do you know what's surprisingly funny? The Seventh Seal. No, seriously. Is it about a guy coming back from the Crusades (an almost preternaturally beautiful Max Von Sydow) to a countryside ravaged by the Bubonic Plague? Absolutely. Are there also a ton of weird dark jokes about the epidemic and the crazed people in countryside, including a guy in a cloak with a scythe who may be literal Death? Also absolutely. This movie is the definition of a movie where people think they know what it is and are mostly wrong.
And really, look at Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Now there's a movie that gets why Death playing a board game is funny. (It doesn't hurt that William Sadler is so freaking great.)
Happy Thursday everyone! We're in the last week of Spooktober, the leaves are falling and it's crispy cold outside, and I've a few interesting things to talk about this week.
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I'm always slightly surprised how The Criterion Collection has a taste for schlock, whether for historical value or for a sense of fun. The Blog is a great example, an early release for them (it's numbered 91 and is on my shelf between Chasing Amy and Fiend Without A Face) that highlights how important the movie really is in the history of major B-movies and in many ways introducing audiences to a fresh-faced, absolutely-a-teen Steve McQueen. But also, noting that the movie is a lot of silly fun! This is an independent movie in many of the best ways, made outside of the Hollywood system with a crew that had mostly made religious shorts before and with a cast of East Coasters, many of whom had never been in a film before.
And goodness, those effects. Is it a lot of rear-projection? Absolutely. But does this larger-and-larger blob become legitimately menacing as the movie goes on? 100% There's a scene in a movie theater (and part of the charming menace of this movie is how the blob is contrasted, like above, against the clean-cut consumer whiteness of late '50s America in the movies) that is actually terrifying as the blob threatens and definitely kills at least a few people.
Hey look, Steve McQueen! Totally a teenager*!
The movie isn't perfect. The ending kind of grinds to a halt though it does have some fun with using ice machines to defeat the blob but it doesn't quite land. But I will always recommend it as something worth checking out for the fun and for a window into '50s B-movies.
And then you can do a fun compare-and-contrast with the 1988 version, which has a lot to recommend about it. The effects are absolutely amazing and gross (the body count here is way higher, so be warned) and it has one of the best and most underappreciated women in horror performances by Shawnee Smith, who has been in many things (like a long run on the Ted Danson sitcom Becker) but is simply fantastic here as someone who steps up and kicks absolute ass. Sorry, you also have to deal with Kevin Dillon.
The Blob (1958) is streaming on HBO Max, Criterion Channel, Crackle and Plex.
The Blob (1988) is streaming on Peacock.
*McQueen was born in 1930 and was nearly 28 when he made this movie.
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Now here's a TV series I only known from its remake. There were four seasons of the remake of Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh and initially Tom Hiddleston (more on that later) and airing on BBC. It's a quite fine, dark series that does indeed feel like the best of Nordic Noir. There was a nice visual touch that even though the spoken language of the series was English, all the on-screen language (computer screens, memos and so on) were Swedish. SO finding this collection of the first three episodes of the original, Swedish series was a nice surprise. Obviously in this case the spoken language is Swedish, but I assume it's just as dark as the BBC series. There's apparently 32 episodes in total so I'll swing into this and see if I liked it as much as the Branagh version.
That trailer is, let's be clear, kind of schlocky.
Wallander (BBC) is streaming on HBO Max, Hoopla and BritBox.
2 of the three season of Swedish Wallander are streaming on Hoopla.
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Short one this week so I'll just recommend that if you can go to the theater or have access to HBO Max then Dune is worth your time. It's a smart, well-acted adaptation that yes, is 2 1/2 hours long but earns that length for this first half of the first novel, of which we'll see the conclusion in 2023. It's quite good and worth your time if you're interested in deeply weird science fiction.
Happy Thursday, everyone! No big preamble this week because we have some heavy stuff to get to. For some reason, this week's selections are...a lot.
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Lately, I've been trying to read more works by indigenous authors, For instance, Rebecca Roanhorse, whose novel Black Sun made a big splash last year (and I really love her Trail of Lightning, set in a USA where a supernatural occurrence has fragmented the country and the old gods and monsters have come back). This appears to be a thriller set in the Cherokee Nation and right up my alley. Brandon Hobson is a member of the nation, was nominated for the National Book Award back in 2018 and feels like someone I should definitely keep an eye on.
Along with this, this weekend I'm going to finally start Reservation Dogs on FX Hulu. It's been getting some great reviews in various places and it's good to see more varied voices on TV these days. Plus, series creator Sterlin Harjo is an absolute blast in an interview and I want him to keep making TV so he keeps getting interviewed.
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Here we have this weeks complete blind spot for me. I ran across this in a store this last week and was very much intrigued. The late Stan Brakhage was apparently very important in experimental film, influencing animators and music video directors and others. I'm completely unfamiliar with his work but looking at some of his work on YouTube I'm very intrigued. For instance, Dog Star Man, which uses various levels of superimposed imagery to a very interesting effect.
Or Window Water Baby Moving, which is the record of the birth of his daughter Myrrena and is credited for helping to make birth less of a mystery to many Americans who saw it (and was often on a double bill with the educational film All My Babies). CW: it's explicit as hell.
A lot of his work is available on YouTube but I can already tell from these clips that I want to see them remastered on this disc.
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John Adams is an excellent opera composer who works in modern subjects. In this case, the visit of President Nixon to China which resulted in closer relations between them and the USA (and also hung Tawan out to dry as they were expelled from the UN and the USA broke off formal diplomatic relations with them). Sadly, I've not seen this filmed performance but Adams is pretty much always worth a look.
Now the one of his that I have seen multiple times is Doctor Atomic, about the last hours before the Trinity test in Los Alamos where everyone involved in the Manhattan Project is wondering if the bomb will even work or if it's going to work all too well. It's a magnificent work of dread and wonder and has one of the greatest arias I've ever heard, as General Leslie Groves contemplates the impending explosion. Sadly, I can't find that one, but my god check out this area by Oppenheimer.
Sadly, neither opera appears to be streaming anywhere.
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And now, on to the heavy stuff! Coming in 1978, this is the kind of miniseries I so loved in my childhood in the golden age of the network miniseries. I very vaguely remember seeing this as a kid without any real sort of context (to be fair, I was 5). So I was really happy to come across this, with baby versions of James Woods a year before his breakthrough in The Onion Field, Meryl Streep a year before her first Oscar for Kramer Vs Kramer and Michael Moriarty four years before his breakthrough in Q: The Winged Serpent.*
*OK, fine, he already had a Tony by this point and won an Emmy for Holocaust.
FIlmed in Germany and Austria, this was apparently very well-regarded at the time and won a ton of Emmys (and while they aren't the ultimate arbiter of quality, they're also not completely inconsequential). It reminds me that I also want to check out War and Remembrance and The Winds of War, two sprawling miniseries based on very popular Herman Wouk novels that follow several families through WWII. Sadly, those don't appear to be streaming at all but it is available on DVD.
Holocaust as well is not on streaming anywhere. However, Q is streaming on Cinemax and on Pluto TV with ads and I cannot recommend that crazy movie enough,
Good Thursday everyone. This week is going to be a little different because as I write this, my mother-in-law, Christina Francis Pappas, nee Conley, passed away two days ago. So no new acquisitions this week as we deal with things here in Virginia, but I would like to talk about three British series that we always watched when we were visiting her.
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Why yes, that is Clarke Peters from The Wire there. He spends a lot of time in Britain and so became part of the wonderful cast of guest stars in Midsomer Murders, which is set in a fictional county of Britain loosely based on Oxfordshire. This show is sometimes a straight-up weird mix of comedy and drama and gentle cop work; one episode might be a straight-up comedy with no murder at all (there is at least one where the murders all turn out to be accidents but there are definitely crimes involved) to icky situations involving incest and obsession. It's very much ITV/Channel 3, the commercial side of British television. But it's been quite well run over the nearly 25 years it's been on the air (currently, they are in season 22, the second half of which is due next year), with only two main detectives over those years (originally John Nettles as DCI Tom Barnaby, succeeded Neil Dudgeon as his cousin DCI John Barnaby) and a succession of assistant detecctives, medical examiners and families. It can be quite light-handed while balancing that with the darkness of murder cases and is something that I will absolutely always out on for comfort viewing.
Plus, come on, how can you resist a TV series whose main theme is performed on a theremin?
Half the fun of the series is seeing guest stars before they got big and the very first episode, "The Killings At Badgers Drift," shows that off. Hey, Emily Mortimer before the rest of her fantastic career! And then Orlando Bloom later as the town lothario! Henry Cavill! Tobias Menzie! Seriously, the entire first episode is on YouTube and you should check it out; this is a good representation and will ket you know if this is your bag.
All of Midsomer Murders is streaming on Acorn TV and then various amounts are streaming on things like Fubo, Amazon Prime's Acorn Channel (I think they don't have the current season, which Acorn gets as it's airing), Tubi with ads and so on. All 21 seasons are also probably all on DVD at your local library
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Next up, and darker, is the great Brenda Blethyn in the (also ITV) series Vera. Now in it's 11th season, this crime drama set in Northumberland (so, the northern Britain area around Newcastle), this is a damn good series about Vera Stanhope, a police chief inspector who obviously has a damaged past but tries not to let it get in the way of solving cases.
Blethyn has a gift for being able to play someone with a great deal of family drama behind her who maybye has one too many drinks alone in her family home now that her father has passed away, but she still has a certain lightness to her. (That is, until someone on her team screws up and she has to let them have it.). I don't quite love this as much as I love Midsomer, but it's a well-done show that has managed to go through 11 seasons now with no big dip in quality. (Like Midsomer, each season is usually 4-6 90 minute episodes, so basically they've made a bunch of movies.)
An interesting contrast between this and Midsomer is just how bleak the landscape can feel. Whereas the Oxfordshire-esque landscape of Midsomer can feel lush and almost erotic in how green it is (to the point where they have at least three episodes that invoke the myth of the Green Man), Vera is set in a harsh and forbidden landscape on the border of Scotland that always feels in this version like it's in the middle of fall or the end of winter. It's forbidding and unkind and unforgiving and even when the sun appears it's a wan thing that doesn't smile on the proceedings.
By the way, if you watch this, keep an eye out for Kenny. He's the older guy in the department that at first feels like he's just slacking toward retirement but he flourishes under being challenged by Vera and he's one of my favorite parts of the show.
Vera is in one of those weird situations where out of the 11 seasons, 7 are on Britbox and 4 are on Acorn (and their corresponding Amazon channels). The first six are all on Hoopla. It's also widely available on DVD in the USA so check your local library.
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Now...onto the bleakness. Y Gwyll/Hinterland was a Welsh-language SC4 series, later shown in English with occasional Welsh, about a DCI Tom Mathias who gets reassigned to Wales after an indeterminate event has him on the outs with his family and his superiors. Now this, this show could be bleak as hell. So few smiles or levity, this is police darkness at a higher level. And a landscape that is simply blasted to hell, eternally on the verge of winter with nary a scrap of green. And yet, it never feels hopeless...just bleak. A bleakness with a certain level of beauty to it.
Which describes a lot of Y Gwyll. It's a series about the bleakness of the human soul at times, but also with a hope of redemption for whatever Mathias went through and for the people left behind in the rubble. It's a dark series at time, but I can always recommend all three series that we have of it.
All three seasons of Y Gwyll/Hinterland are available for streaming on Acorn TV. (And by the way, this whole post can be an advertisement for Acorn, which is a fantastic resource for Commonwealth TV series. I can also recommend things like Pie In The Sky, a delightful detective series with Richard Griffiths as a retiring detective who just wants to open a bakery. Or Brokenwood, a Kiwi dramedy about a country-music obsessed detective who ends up in a small town police station. Or god, if you don't know Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries yet, I don't know what to tell you.)
That's all for this week. See you next week, where hopefully I'll be home and back to my usual silliness. Stay good, you all.
