The Cartoon Cure

With all the time I've logged just being sick this winter, you'd think that I'd have something profound to say about illness by now. But no. It's just something that robs you of your time and life. And every time it came back around to hit me this season, it seemed to get worse. It's been an entire week this time, and I'm still not completely over it. I tire so easily, and still seem to need a lot of extra sleep.

The good and soothing thing that happened this week that I'd rather write about was that a little bit of my past arrived in Wednesday's mail. The mid to late '60s were the golden age of TV animation, and three of my favorites finally snuck onto DVD last fall without my noticing. If my friend BC hadn't mentioned it, I might never have known the joy of being reunited with my televisual pals The Herculoids, Mighty Hercules and Frankenstein Jr.!

Mighty Hercules was, I believe, a syndicated show from Trans-Lux studios, the same company that created the '60s version of Felix the Cat -- the one with the magic bag. Trans-Lux were no Hanna Barbera, and the animation was quite limited. The main villain was always Daedalus (who sounds exactly the same as Felix's nemesis The Professor) , so the mythology wasn't at all right, either. The stories were short and swift, and usually had something to do with Hercules losing his power ring. My clearest memory of the show is the theme song, and the way Hercules grew into his logo at the end. I never knew the lyrics, but when I popped the DVD into the player I was pleased to hear that my recall of the tune was exact!

Mighty Hercules  was not terribly good. But I was quite young when it was on the air. In the main, I remember watching it during the summers that we spent at Lake Vermillion. Perhaps that's the reason why I remembered it so fondly: those were happy days.

Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles came on the year that the family moved to Maine, and I remember feeling quite traumatized at the notion that the TV stations would be different. What if Frankenstein Jr. wasn't on TV in Maine? This was too terrible a thought to endure.

Hanna Barbera thought that the stars of the series were The Impossibles, a trio of superheroes who were also rock and roll musicians and looked vaguely like "mod" versions of the Three Stooges. I knew otherwise! The real star of the show was Frankenstein Jr.! Unfortunately, the studio's inability to see this meant that there were two Impossibles cartoons to every one Frankenstein Jr. This was perhaps my first lesson that the universe is unjust.

Now that I see it again today, I realize that Frankenstein Jr. was just Hanna Barbera's gussied-up version of Jonny Socko and his Giant Robot, and not the terribly original concept that, as a kid, I thought it was. Oh, well. I still love the schtick and the usual great design work that H-B always brought to their projects (the villains, especially, always looked really interesting, even if all they ever did was shout "I've got you now, Space Ghost! AhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!").

The Herculoids was different. The human family at the heart of the show weren't the stars. The stars were their fantastic pets. There was a dragon that shot energy bolts out of both his eyes and his tail (I'd like to know how he managed that), a giant Rock Gorilla, an eight-legged triceratops-like thing that could shoot blobs of lava out of its horn, and Gloop and Gleep: ghostlike and jellylike, able to take on any shape or stretch like Reed Richards.

I remember my mother complaining about the noise level of The Herculoids, and she was right -- it was a very loud and noisy show with most of the dialogue consisting of the dragon screaming (poor Mike Road!), the rock ape and the lava-shooting, eight-legged triceratops roaring at the top of their lungs, and Gloop and Gleep making their weird nattering sound (poor Don Messick!). The music, like all the music on H-B's dramatic shows, was loud and urgent, and there were constant explosions, whooshing and pounding. Twice every week, someone would unwisely attack the Heculoids, or they'd get into some kind of a jam, and twice every week all the pets would come charging to the rescue, screaming and roaring.

I loved this stuff. Gloop and Gleep no doubt influenced my own character, Sludge, in my Quirk comic strip. It was just great to watch these fantastic pets kicking villain's butts all over the screen. Sometimes the villains ended up in tears. Well, I guess I would, too, if all my evil plans were foiled and I got my butt kicked by a giant rock monkey.

I'm so glad to have all three of these shows back at last. Not that I'm ever far from being a little kid inside, it's a short trip, but the dangers of adulthood are so thick around us that it's worth going there every once in a while. I could definitely use my own giant robot or pets like what The Herculoids have. No one would argue with me. That's for sure.

-- Freder.

Grave Robbers

Last night I watched J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek for the first (and last) time. I have to admit that on one level, I couldn't take my eyes off it: in much the same way that you can't possibly stop looking at a train wreck when it happens right in front of you.

The most basic and obvious reason that I hate this movie is: DeForrest Kelley is dead, Jimmy Doohan is dead, Gene Roddenberry is dead, and here is Leonard Nimoy, playing Spock most likely for the last time, looking like death warmed over.

Meanwhile, here are all these Babies, these new non-entity pukes, all laboring to copy what the Original Cast did so well and so easily. Of all the new cast, the only ones who make no effort whatever to imitate their betters are the actors playing Uhura and Scotty.

For the same reason that I never accepted the impostor Kermit that was installed after Jim Henson's death, I don't accept this impostor crew of the Enterprise, or this alternate history of the Star Trek universe. You can't just keep something alive by pumping hot air into it, just because you're not done making money off it yet. But that's my problem.. What's not my problem is, this movie is just plain bad!

Let's get the good stuff out at the way at the outset, so that I can feel free to knock this piece of tripe from here to eternity. There was one thing and one thing only that I liked about J.J. Abrams's Star Trek:: the production design. They found a way to make the original uniforms work on the big screen, and for the first time since the original series went off the air, Star Trek finally looks the way it ought to.

But that's where it ends.

My biggest gripe is the device that everyone else seems to love: this isn't even our Star Trek anymore, an alternate timeline has been created and the entire original series basically never happened. I've seen this trick used several times before, and it always strikes me as creative arrogance. Abrams doesn't want to be bound by any established rules, so he's just declared that the rules simply don't exist. Like Kirk rewriting the software of the Kobiyashi Maru test, Abrams has declared that the rules are now anything that he wants them to be.

And what he wants is crap. The first twenty minutes of this movie contains some of the most eye-rollinging dumb material ever to come out of Star Trek, and that includes the godawful movie that Shatner directed. Never mind the comic melodrama stuff surrounding Kirk's birth, although that's bad enough. Kirk has always been a cocky piece of work, but never the complete Pain in the Ass and Menace to Society that Abrams has drawn him as here.

Beyond that, I just don't buy Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and all the rest, all at Star Fleet together at the same time. I don't buy Kirk hitting on Uhura all the time, and Uhura throwing herself at Spock on the elevator while they're both still on duty. It's like Star Trek 90210.

I don't buy blowing up Vulcan and killing off Spock's mother just on a whim, just on a plot point.

And I don't buy turning Star Trek into Raiders of the Lost Ark, into an Action Movie. Star Trek is not and never was about car chases, barroom brawls, things exploding everywhere, death drops, shootouts in space or big CGI monsters trying to eat people. Abrams can't seem to hold the camera still even when it's not even a bloody camera, even when it's a CGI shot of the Enterprise! Star Trek is supposed to have a brain -- but you wouldn't know it from this lobotomized, cannibalized monster. All it cost me was my time, and even then I was cheated.

-- Freder.

Don't Go Back There

Television on my computer? Now that I've tried it, I'm not a big fan. It is quite the Brave New World, though, to discover that your computer really is a Time Machine.

The first TV that I watched full screen on my computer was Doctor Who. I was just discovering Stephen Moffat's re-imagining of the show, wanted to see the episodes that he wrote for the David Tennant years, but didn't like Russell Davies' Who well enough to pay fifty to seventy-five dollars for the full seasons. At a buck ninety nine an episode, I was willing to make an exception to the rule of "No telly on the iMac."

These five or six episodes really cemented my enthusiasm for Moffat's Who, but the viewing experience is nowhere near as good as that of watching a DVD on a high-def set. The resolution is notably lower, there are the glitches caused by dreaded vagaries of the interwebs -- and you can't share it, unless you allow your friends to log in as you. So taken was I with Matt Smith's debut on Who that I sat my father and his wife down in front of the telly and said, "Just watch." I'd have a hard time plunking folks down here in my study.

Cutting to the chase, last night I made two more exceptions. My friend DP has been singing the praises of Hulu, so I checked out the list of shows that they host. What to my wondering eyes should appear but Nanny and The Professor.

Watershed moment! Yes, really. Stop that snickering.

As a seven or eight year old kid I loved Nanny and the Professor, and adored Juliet Mills with the pure soul burning adoration that's only possible in childhood (actually both of the Mills sisters have been objects of my ardent puppy love at one time or another. Haley several times). Nanny and the Professor  is not now, nor has ever been available on DVD or VHS. I made that excited "sucking in of breath" sound that children used to make when they heard the ice cream truck coming down the street. I thought, "Nanny and the Professor! I'm in!!"

Alas, you really can't go back. While Ms. Mills remains as puppy-lovable as ever (though I see more calculation in her performance than I did when I was eight years old), and Richard Long brings everything he's got to the table to sell the thing, Nanny and the Professor is really just an awful, terrible, no good, very bad show. Looking at it with adult eyes, I have to wonder how it stayed on the air for two seasons! Or how the pilot episode ever sold in the first place!

I was never deluded that it was anything other than a down-market Mary Poppins, but it never seemed so very down in that market back in the day. The adult cast all do what they can, but the writing is lowest-common-denominator, the direction hideous, and those children -- egad! All of their dialogue is overdubbed, and many of their scenes look like they were cobbled together from the only useable takes lifted from other, differently planned scenes.

But the thing that really annoyed me was the little musical trill, the cue that they use every time Juliet Mills does something "magical."

She guesses the children's names correctly.

*TRILL!*

She talks to the dog.

*TRILL!*

She knows that someone is at the door.

*TRILL!*

It's the producer's way of saying "GET it?" {nudge, nudge, trill.} "GET it? Nanny is MAGICAL, see! SEE? Did you GET that she just did something MAGICAL?"

Just how dumb did they think the audience was?

Oh my, what a crashing disappointment. Until last night I would have been first in line to buy any DVD release of this show. Now that I've ridden the Wayback Machine across the televisual timestream, any DVD release of this is going to have me running in the opposite direction. Not even prurient thoughts about Juliet Mills would make it worthwhile. Yeesh, even H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville have aged better than Nanny.

There's something uniquely disappointing in discovering that as a child you had all the taste and standards of a toadstool. It makes me wary about trying to "rediscover" some of my other televisual favorites from that era, stuff like The New Adventures of Tom and Huck (I had such a crush on the girl who played Becky Thatcher, plus the body of the show was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, plus Injun Joe was played by Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family -- what, I say what was not for an eight year old to like?). Stuff like Mister Terrific, and Captain Nice. Stuff like Here Come the Double Deckers and The Partridge Family.

Being the glutton for punishment that I am, once Nanny had ended I cast around Hulu for some more lousy TV. And I found it.

I was vaguely aware that someone had made a cable series out of the Swamp Thing movies, and was curious enough about it to consider, a time or two, buying the DVD. Oh my! Thank goodness that never happened!

The original Swamp Thing comics are pretty good, and this looked to be hewing closer to the source material than the movies. Also, the first Swamp Thing movie is about as good as a really tacky, ugly, bad movie can be. Hulu has the series as part of their line-up. I had the time. Let's check it out!

I knew that I was in trouble from the first shot, which showed a dwarf tied upside down onto a pole in the middle of the swamp. It got worse. Why would you shoot a kid boating through the swamp from inside the bottom of the boat, with nothing but a cloudless sky for a background? Obviously, because your budget is so low that you're probably shooting the scene in a wading pool.

The dialogue! Oh my god! Dialogue is supposed to accomplish certain purposes, and this went in the opposite direction. And the way it's delivered by the "actors"! There's not a natural intonation anywhere within hearing. Rarely have I seen TV this bad, and it's not even good-bad. The writer, director, producer, cast and crew must all have been either drunk or on drugs when they made this lame-ass excuse for a TV show. The production values are so slight that the original Swamp Thing movie looks like Star Wars by comparison -- and it was strictly a poverty-row production.

I thank Hulu for saving me money, but even though it hadn't cost me a penny, I still felt cheated. Their line-up includes several other shows that I've long been curious about. . . but tonight, I'm feeling my curiosity draining away as surely as if someone had pulled the plug in my low-budget wading pool.

-- Freder.

National Endowment for the (Low Comic) Arts

I have NO idea why this popped into my head this morning, but I can tell you why I remembered it in the first place, and it's one of those things that, if you haven't heard it already, you'll wish you didn't know. So, be warned before you read on!

I learned it from a book about the early years of Saturday Night Live. (Gad, it's a bit on the depressing side when they start publishing histories of things you were there for!) One of the writers (and no, I can't remember his name) got his start writing "roast" jokes for Milton Berle, so when Uncle Milty came to host Saturday Night Live, they had a chance to sit down and talk about Olde Times.

And the writer said something along the lines of, "Funny, my having to write all those jokes about your penis..."

Uncle Miltie replied, "You mean you haven't seen it? Do you want to see it?"

That's why I can't purge this story from my memory. Milton Berle was everywhere when I was growing up, even on Batman fer crine out loud, and his range of expression is embedded in my mind, and I can just hear his voice and see the expression on his face when he said those words.

The writer then went on to describe Berle taking it out and laying it across the table, and that's where I'll stop.

A couple of years later I was working as a typesetter for Thorndike Press (the best job I ever had and probably ever will have, until the Evil Corporate Bastards at Thomson/Gale laid off the whole production department). Late in the game I had to set a book by Jack Lemmon's son. It was a memoir about their golfing experiences together, pretty dry stuff. The best story in the book was about Harpo Marx and his ongoing battle with a tree on a particular golf course. Harpo seemed to hit it every time. He finally put the tree out of his misery by sneaking onto the course one night and chopping it down!

 But the book also contained a postscript to the Berle story. One day, in a private room at the Hollywood club where all the stars played golf, with Jack Lemmon and his son present, Milton Berle and Forrest Tucker got into an argument. Call it a cockfight. They had it out, so to speak, right then and there, and Berle, in the words of Jack Lemmon's son, "won by a head."

Now I know why Corporal Agarn was afraid of Sergeant O'Rourke.

Anyway. Moving right along. . .

-- Freder.

Mixed Media

Does BBC America have the worst programming directors in the history of television?

I mean that rhetorically, of course.

Why do they even call it BBC? Most of the programming is recycled American crap. Star Trek: The Next Generation every damn night! I think once a month they buy the rights to about two movies, and then run them over and over again. For the past month every single Friday night it's been two hours of Top Gear (a show I simply don't "get," and one which BBC America runs incessantly) followed by the original Clash of the Titans. Every single Friday night! How freakin' often can you watch Clash of the Titans? I had a tough time getting through it once. (Hello, Larry? Did you phone in your performance, or what?)

At least Clash and The Next Regurgitation have British people in them. Now, The Crow -- I'm sure the BBC programmers chose that because it represents the essence of the British Empire, yes?

I actually tried to watch The Crow. I thought that I might like it. Alas, it stinks in the way a movie can only when it is made by people who are so bereft of talent or skill that they have to murder their lead actor in order to get PR for the thing.

It is one of the more nonsensical movies I've ever seen. Nothing adds up. The city burns every night, apparently just for effect. Nobody fights the fires. After a few nights of this, there wouldn't be anything left to burn. The reason The Crow paints his face white is because he once playfully spooked his wife with a theatrical mask. Say what? (Plus, it's an ugly theatrical mask that no one in their right mind would own in the first place!)

How is it that the Brandan Lee character comes to rise from the dead, anyhow? People don't un-die just because they're pissed off. I know this is a comic book movie but even comic book movies need to have a certain internal logic. The Fantastic Four got their powers from being bombarded with Cosmic Radiation. Superman gets his from a yellow sun. We know what motivates The Crow (ugliness), but what animates him?

In no time at all he's mopping up the street of those vile Bad Guys that did in him and the missus, and although the ugly tone is consistent, there's no suspense in how it all plays out. I switched it off after the first one. I knew where it was going, and I didn't care. Life's too short. If that's The Moral of The Crow, then at least its producers did something right.

The other night, the Beeb ran Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior. Well, at least that's Australian. They're getting warm.

I hadn't seen The Road Warrior since it's original release, and now I think it's almost the opposite of The Crow. Oh, it's every bit as ugly and mean, and its premise is every bit as stupid, but it's so quirky and well-made that I couldn't take my eyes off it. The ugliness plays out in desert sunshine instead of darkness, and the mean-spiritedness at its core has the weight of a Philosophy. The villains aren't just generic Depraved Killers. They have an inspired lunacy and are almost Grand Opera in their appearance and actions. The final act, and especially the ending, has real bite.

I was dismayed, however, that the Beeb gave it a rating of "TV-14." This was an R picture when it came out, and deservedly so. It is not okay, in my house, for a fourteen-year-old to watch The Road Warrior.

If it wasn't for Doctor Who, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and the endless farting marathons of Top Gear, there wouldn't be anything British on BBC America. And now Doctor Who's gone on hiatus. D'you know what they replaced it with? Battlestar Galactica!

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

-- Freder.

David Copperfield, David Copperfield

While I was in the early stages of the move, before DirecTV was installed and I had no television at all, one of the best DVDs that I watched was one that my father had given me of the 1999 version of David Copperfield produced by the BBC. I took it in approximately hour-long bites, and given how I feel about all remakes (and Dickens in particular: The Beeb did a version of Oliver Twist in 1985 that was wretched with a capital Retch, and another one in 2007 that I'll never watch -- Nancy played by a black woman? I don't think so!), it came as a surprise that I liked it so well.

At its exact center is Maggie Smith as Betsy Trotwood. I'll watch Maggie Smith in anything, but her performance here is just delightful. Miss Trotwood is one of Dickens's best female characters, and Ms. Smith really shakes the trees to bring her to life. And she's not the only one. Just look at the cast list over at imdb. But, in particular, Trevor Eve as Murdstone and Zoe Wannamaker as his sister, Sir Ian as Creakle. . . and more. On the whole, I don't think that any version of Copperfield has ever been this well-cast. Plus, the producers didn't mess around with Dickens, instead focusing on what the Beeb used to do better than almost anyone: faithful realizations of classic British dramas that look and sound gorgeous.

At well over two hours, the 1935 MGM version of David Copperfield is an extraordinarily long movie for the period, and even then there's much compression and shortening. It aired on TCM a few days ago, and I hadn't seen it since I was a Young Thing -- and then not from the beginning. On many levels I found it disappointing. I've loved many other of George Cukor's movies, especially including Gaslight, but, I suppose necessarily, this one left me feeling exactly the way the film version of The World According to Garp did. Too much novel crammed into too little film real estate.

When it's good, it's very good. Davey's slow walk and his reunion with Aunt Betsy are terrific. But there's a distinct feeling that we're getting the Classics Illustrated version of the story.

And to a great extent the casting compares unfavorably to the BBC version. Oh, Edna May Oliver as Miss Trotwood was probably the best they could have chosen at the time, and she has great fun with it, but she's no Maggie Smith. And Basil Rathbone gives, I think, one of the worst performances of his career as Murdstone. Good casting, or so one would think: but Rathbone is a scary enough guy when he's being subtle, and there's nothing of subtlety to what he does here. Snarl, rage, chew on the draperies: it's a big performance in a part that's more effectively played quietly.

Jesse Ralph as Peggotty is kind of scary and artificial compared the genuine qualities Pauline Quirke brings to the role in the British version. And in the 1935 version we don't get to see Creakle at all: Young Davey's school years are brushed past with a line of dialogue. This is particularly damaging to the story, as Steerforth isn't introduced until he's all grown up -- and without knowing the details of their school years together, it's frankly hard to understand why David thinks so highly of Steerforth in the first place.

But there are three actors here who, imho, blow away the cast of the BBC version like so many toy soldiers. First, someone named Lennox Pawle as Mr. Dick. He would die just a year after this film was made. There's nothing wrong with what Ian McNiece does in the BBC version, but I can see him acting. By comparison, Pawle has the genuine appearance of good-natured simple-mindedness. You all know what I mean.

Then there's Roland Young as Uriah Heep. I simply can not believe this is the same man who played Topper. It can't be possible! But it is. Nicholas Lyndhurst is good casting in the British version, but there's a trick to playing Uriah Heep that Lyndhurst didn't work out: Heep must be, in equal parts, sickeningly smarmy and unsettling, but also nonthreatening. Too insignificant to be taken seriously. Young actually appears to be sincere in certain of his kind words towards David. You can see why David (and the others surrounding Heep) could be put off-balance by this person. The magnitude of his villainy needs to come with at least a measure of surprise. Lyndhurst doesn't succeed at that. His Heep is slimy all the way, from the get-go.

Last, but certainly not least, is W.C. Fields in the role he was born to play, Wilkins Micawber. Fields was a great fan of Dickens in real life, Micawber was one of his proudest roles. Now, I like Bob Hoskins a lot, and I even liked his Micawber -- but Fields is The Man.

He is good for the role and the role is good for him. It's nice to see Fields playing someone who doesn't hate women and children, someone with a little bit of the hero about him, who is both a protector and someone who needs protection; someone who pays his debts when and how he can, and who for all his lesser qualities is nonetheless fiercely loyal. Nobility looks good on Fields, and so does Micawber's Fancy Dress. It's almost as if Dickens had Fields in mind when he wrote the part.

The pairing of these two Great Men, the one real and the other fictional, is a high-water mark in movie history. If the 1935 David Copperfield had nothing else to recommend it (and it does), W. C. Micawber would be reason enough to call it a classic.

-- Freder.

Of Weeping Angels and Weeping Chefs

My two current televisual obsessions are Doctor Who (no surprise there) and Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (perhaps a little bit of a surprise?).

Of the latter, I go into it without delusions. I know what's going on. Every single frame of it is nothing more than a commercial for Gordon Ramsay, and I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way. But its ostensible conceit -- the producers find restaurants that are on the verge of collapse, then bring Ramsay in to fix them over the course of four days, a process which usually involves fixing the owners as well -- is oddly compelling to me.

The foul-mouthed Ramsay generally finds disgusting food and even more disgusting kitchen conditions, on a level that make one think twice about setting foot in any restaurant, ever again. He also generally finds owners who are either apathetic, or deluded, or have lost their way in the daily grind. One, I would swear, was an undiagnosed Asperger's patient. He kept wandering around with a "deer in the headlights" look on his face, completely lost, while his father-in-law constantly berated and insulted him -- the opposite of a productive atmosphere. The show pays to have their kitchens cleaned and refurbished and the dining rooms redesigned, while Ramsay works over the menu, the chefs, and everyone else who gets in his way.

Except that sometimes he's been really nice. He seems to be a good judge of character, and a lot of what he does here is a combination of pyschotherapy and motivation. Sometimes the owners just need a good swift kick in the pants or a slap across the face, and he does not shy from delivering that. Other times they need support and a renewed sense of self-worth, and he delivers that as well, insofar as anyone could within the timespan allotted.

It doesn't always "take." Ramsay returned to a British Pub one year latter to find that the owner had reverted to his old ways and was alienating the staff and customers.

Regardless of the results, I can't seem to stop watching the damn thing. I keep seeing myself in the owners, and wishing that someone like Ramsay would come along and give me some motivation -- or a kick in the pants, or a sense of self-worth.

As for the Doctor, BBC America has been stripping the Russell T. Davies seasons at 5:00 PM weeknights, and I usually get home in time to catch most of it. It's a real mixed bag. Davies deserves kudos for getting the show back on the air, getting it a real budget, changing the format, transforming the show from a half-hour soap to a real prime-time contender. But also for hiring Stephen Moffat to write one story a season.

I don't like the Davies years well enough to spend $50 and up for the DVDs, but I have started going to Amazon, picking out the episodes that Moffat wrote and watching them full-screen on the new computer for just 98 cents a pop.

I've watched two of them now, and have been really blown away both times, actually applauding after last night's episode, "Blink." I'm sorry, but Davies isn't half the writer that Moffat is. I haven't seen writing this good on TV since the early days of Northern Exposure.

"The Girl in the Fireplace" is a virtual template for themes that Moffat would explore in greater depth when he took over the show. While checking out a seemingly abandoned spaceship, the doctor finds an 18th century fireplace that is actually a gateway into a little girl's bedroom. That little girl is being terrorized by clockwork automatons who scan her brain, declare that she's "not ready" and then leave. The automatons (and, now, The Doctor) reappear at various times throughout her life, and as the young girl grows to womanhood she finds herself falling in love with the curious stranger who reappears every time to protect her from the automatons. (and who never gets any older). As it turns out, she grows up to become France's Madame de Pompadour, and the automations want to use her adult brain to repair their ship. They've been building time portals into her life, and at last they've caught her at the ripe age. But if the Doctor closes down the time portals, he'll be stranded forever in 18th century France.

You see, it takes a long time to describe one of Moffat's plots.

If "The Girl in the Fireplace" is a thematic Statement of Principles, then "Blink" could well be the Pilot for Mofat's tenure on the show. It's remarkable in that the Doctor hardly appears at all. We're in the present day, while he's trapped in 1969 by  new series villains The Weeping Angels. This time, it's up to a girl from the present day who's never met the Doctor to get information to him in 1969 so that he -- get this -- can record a video that will one day be inserted as an easter egg onto 17 DVD titles; a video that will get information to the girl in the present day that will allow her to defeat The Weeping Angels and free up the Doctor's TARDIS.

Are you following this? Trust me, it doesn't even begin to cover all the wrinkles that Moffat gets into this story.

It is brilliant and clever and it takes the show to a whole new level. The original Doctor Who was not for everyone. It was cheaply made and eccentric and sometimes long-winded. I loved it without reserve in nearly all its incarnations, but could completely understand why lots of folks walked away.

This is different. If you've never seen the show, or if you've seen it in the old days and had enough, get your hands on a copy of "Blink" and start there. It's been many moons since I've seen something that made me want to grab people by the shoulders, push them into a chair and say, "Just sit down and Watch."

Blah-blah-blah, burble-burble-burble. Had enough? I don't blame you.

-- Freder.

Once Upon a Time. . .

I now pronounce the new Doctor Who pretty danged good.

Well, I call it new because it's new to me -- but as it turns out Matt Smith and the cast, crew and writing staff have been doing this for a whole year already. This is their second season.

I had my worries, in part because Smith looked so very damn young. He is the youngest actor ever to take on the character.

But he's really, really good. His youthful looks work well against the way that he somehow manages to evoke the character's true age (which depends on what part of Episode One you're watching!). He sometimes goes a little far with the manic thing, but it's balanced by a real sense of wisdom, experience and gravity.

I like him much better than what I saw of David Tennant. I also like the scripts better than what I saw of the latter Tennant years: it seemed to me that the people in charge of the show during that run were more interested in getting TORCHWOOD off the ground and that whole agenda than they were in the Doctor. By the end of their run, there were so many supporting characters that the balance had shifted too far.

When Stephen Moffat took over as head writer and Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, a RESET button was hit, and the show took off in a whole new, and inspired, direction.

It's not that it's any less complicated than the end of Tennant's run; it's that it's complicated in the right way.

Moffat is doing things with the show that have never been done before, things that someone really should have thought of sooner. Like, the whole concept is time-travel, right? So why has the Doctor never used time travel within the context of a single story? He's doing it all the time, now, to the extent that we sometimes see him a hundred or more years apart in his own timeline within one episode. He's killed: then he's back. He's met a lady time traveler with whom he clearly has a relationship -- except that even he doesn't know yet what that relationship is, because she's traveling backwards through time while he's traveling forward. They just kissed: it was his first, her last.

In a Christmas special from the end of last season, he hopped into his TARDIS and popped into a crusty old gent's home movies while the guy was watching. Changed his whole past right out from underneath him.

His current lady traveling companion is someone that he first met when she was a child. She grew up thinking he was a dream: then he came back. By that single move, Moffat has cast the whole series as a fairy tale.

Genius, really.

Sometimes the talk, in the manner of most modern teevee shows, comes at too fast and furious a pace for me to follow. This is just one reason why I watch the reruns the following week. I'm able to pick up a lot that I missed the first time 'round. And there's a lot to miss: the scripts are dense and shrewd.

One way or another, I'm definitely going back in time myself, to check out Matt Smith's first season on the show. But not right away. For now, I'm good with my weekly Saturday night dose of the Doctor. Like all good things, this season won't last forever.

-- Freder.

Sensory Overload

You're looking at a photo of the Living Room in the old house, taken after my mother's death, but before the auctioneers came to pillage, plunder, and destroy.

The whole house was like that, almost.

This is going to seem choppy and disjointed, but it's going somewhere, really, it is.

For the Store, I ordered Temple Grandin's latest book, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperperger's. I was all over it as soon as I could decently do so (i.e., as soon as I was not on camera).

This may be the next step that my reading will take. Where the reading that I'm doing now is all still in the area of diagnosis and description, this is focused on living, and is overwhelmingly positive.

But for now, I'm still in the realm of basic learning. The Guide, as I've written here before, is eerily descriptive of my life. I keep seeing scenes from my own childhood, and explanations for my behaviour as an adult.

I've written about mornings in the old house before. I've written that I had to get up earlier and earlier in order to beat my mother into the kitchen, so that I could get my morning chores done before she came into the room.

It's true that this was made necessary because the house was so impossibly claustrophobic, so fully packed with Stuff, that it was hard enough to get from the sink to the refrigerator to the front door, hard enough to sponge the floor, when I just had to step over her chair. But when she was sitting in the chair, and I had to climb over her in order to get everything cleaned (sort of) and everyone fed -- well, that was just plain Too Much.

But there was more to it than that. I needed some quiet time, some alone time, some peace and solitude in the morning, in order to gather myself somewhat before I had to start Being Social.

And yes, I was drinking as a coping mechanism then -- I needed to get a couple of shots of vodka and orange juice into my system in order to cope with the assault that was about to come, the Daily Bludgeoning that is life as I know it.

As soon as my mother struggled into the room and sat down, the television came on. Some mornings, this was like a brutal slap across the face. The volume was always too loud, the insipid Morning Shows that she wanted to watch were intolerable to me with their huge casts of Preening Idiots all yammering to each other at the same time about Nothing At All. For some while, the local CBS affiliate ran Guiding Light in the morning, and that was barely tolerable, because it had a discernible storyline; but once Guiding Light was cancelled, morning television was just a daily ramming of nails into my forehead.

For my mother, it was her connection to the outside world, the only connection that she had. For me, it was an almost unbearable onslaught of White Noise. In my mother's world, the television was on 24/7, there was never any quiet, and I coped by retreating to my own end of the house, and by learning to block it all out when I could not escape.

The combined task of doing my morning chores, filtering out the noise of the television, and interacting with her in what I hoped was a meaningful way was, many mornings, more than I could cope with, an emotionally exhausting Chinese Water Torture without the actual cachet of Asian Spies gloating over me while I suffered.

I learned to fear the distant sound of her canes in the front hallway. Clack, clack-clack. Oh, god, I would think, she's coming., Have to hurry up and get this done.

And so I kept getting up earlier and earlier, in order to beat her there and get some of the basic things done, so that I would have a few less things to deal with when she came in.

The problem was, as soon as she found out how early I was getting up, she'd come in that much earlier, in order to be with me. She was desperate for some social contact, and I was desperate for some peace.

One morning I absolutely snarled at her: How freakin' early do I have to get up to beat you in here?!

She balanced herself on her crutches, and said, "I didn't know it was a contest."

I was wiping the floor under the cat food dish clean with paper towels. I think that I bowed my head and just sighed. I thought, she doesn't get it, she doesn't understand, but I didn't have the words to say that to her.

The next thing I knew, she was turning in place and struggling back out of the room.

"Well, for god's sake, don't go now that you're here!" I said.

"I'm going," she said.

Are you wearing shoes right now? Cross your legs, look at the soles, notice the Heel.

That's what I felt like.

And yet there was another part of me. The part of me that closed my eyes and closed my ears when the television came on and splashed over me like a bucket of ice-cold water every morning, the part of me that shouted inside Oh my god! Oh my god! Why does she have to have that so freakin' loud?!

As my mother laboured her way painfully back down the stairs, through the narrow and claustrophobic front hall, to sit on the padded stool in her own room, in front of her own television, most likely resentful, most likely not understanding why her son was "being so mean to her," -- as she said to me several times -- there was the part of me that gathered myself in silence, and sighed, and inwardly said:

-- Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

-- Freder.

Happy Walpurgis Night

So hard to believe that this is the last night of April, that this is the night where the winter demons are laid to rest, that another year has gone by in a blur of tears, disorientation, and regeneration.

So it's appropriate that tonight I'll celebrate with a new (to me) Doctor in a brand-new Doctor Who adventure. My initial reaction to Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor is overwhelmingly positive. Though the youngest actor ever to play the role, he captures the characters combination of youth and age, wisdom and play. I like him better than what I saw of David Tennant, and I like the scripts that he's been given to work with better than anything that Tennant had.

Someday, my old Who website, "The Prydonian Order" will reappear as part of the new www.ducksoup.me, and I have a feeling I'll have something new to add when that day comes.

Earlier in the week, I took the time to sit through a couple of '50's SF monster movies, not really ideal Walpurgis Night fare, but the things that came to hand. The Monster That Challenged the World at least had a good and genuinely repellant monster in the form of a giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of thing with creepy bulbous eyes that lays eggs that hatch a bunch of other giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of things with creepy bulbous eyes. Yuck! It's too bad the rest of the movie is so lame, strictly by the genre numbers, with Hans Conried being the only real actor on hand to hold the thing down. He fails.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space was just the opposite. Oh, the actors were still bottom of the barrel, and the script was typed by someone with a lead ear, but the concept has possibilities for claustrophobic horror that were not realized until Dan O'Bannon stole the idea brazenly for Alien.

But that monster! Ye gods! Poor Ray "Crash" Corrigan, reduced to lumbering around in a pathetic rubber suit, waving his arms like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps, for him, there wasn't. . .

Before the Doctor comes to call, I'll re-visit Beetlejuice, which I have not seen since its original theatrical release, all those years ago.

'K, I've got to run and get my dinner going so that I can get the "celebration" started. I'm sure at least three of my quats will sit on me, and that's relaxing for all of us. The regenerating me will raise a glass to the regenerated Doctor -- an old friend with a new face, who always brings monsters.

Happy Walpugis Night!

-- Freder.

Curse You, TCM!

Does Robert Osborne think that I don't have anything better to do than sit around and watch movies?

There was a good stretch over the past few weeks where I got a few things done, because TCM was running pictures that I'd seen before, or things that weren't so appealing that I was willing to take the time, or else just running the good stuff at an hour that didn't work for me. This week they could almost have been thinking, "Let's target that idiot up in Maine! He hasn't been watching for a while!"

First came So Evil My Love, with Ann Todd and Ray Milland, part of their tribute to Milland going on this month. It was a good contrast to The Uninvited; Evil being the operative word, Milland does it like a champ, making his seduction of Miss Todd credible enough that her own descent into evil takes on a level of inevitability. Todd gives a marvelous performance herself, going on a deep journey with some ups and a whole lot of downs. Her looks give her a natural advantage, as she has a kind of cold beauty, the Ice Princess ready to melt, given enough reason. Soon she's up to all manner of trouble, including murder for the sake of an undeserving love.

The ending is that rarest of things, a shock ending that really is shocking, both in its unexpectedness and its detached savagery. Had the same scene been filmed today, it would have been much more graphic, and far less effective. Leo G. Carroll (Mr. Waverly from The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) gets the last word, and he ain't just whistling dixie, Missus.

Wednesday night was A Southern Yankee. I broke a rule for this one: Never come into any movie from the middle. Out of pure monkey habit, I am compelled to watch Survivor in all of its idiot incarnations, oftentimes marveling at the stupidity of the players while blithely ignoring the level of stupidity it takes to watch the thing. On Wednesday nights I don't even check the listings. Redemption Island, here I come! Just don't ever call it a "reality" show.

So I missed the first third or so of A Southern Yankee and now I want to watch the whole thing. I'd never seen one of Red Skelton's movies before, knowing him only from his decades on television (he was a favorite of my wee years) and stage. I think Red must be one of the hardest working comedians in the biz, but he is an acquired taste: with his facial ticks and his crossed eyes and his arms cocked this was and that, it's a little bit like the School of Schizophrenia. It was nice to see him not doing Clem Cadiddlehopper for a change, and this picture, while far from a classic, goes down easy and pleasing with some real laugh-out-loud moments. According to Osborne, Buster Keaton worked as a consultant on this picture -- so Red had good taste in advisors, although there's little of the trademark Keaton manipulation of reality on display.

The plot? I'm not sure that there was one. Anyhow, if you glanced at the poster above, you get the drift. Civil War spoof, just an excuse to hang gags on. Most implausibly, Red gets the girl in the end, or she gets him. I'm not sure which.

Then last night my plans for the evening were foiled when The Glass Key appeared on my menu at eight o'clock. Before last night I never knew that this had been filmed, much less twice, and the second time with such a great cast including Brian Donlevy, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd and William Bendix (the kind of actor who, once you've seen him do comedy, is hard to take seriously in dramatic roles like this one). 

I don't think that The Glass Key is one of Hammett's more compelling novels, and that shows in this screen adaptation. It's hard to really fall in love with a movie when absolutely everyone in it is a villain, including Ladd, albeit a villain who goes through a kind of violent redemption in the hands of the Bendix character. But it does have all the hardboiled elements including a hero who can take a lot of punishment (and does) and a femme fatale capable of giving looks, as Raymond Chandler writes, that men "can feel in your hip pocket."

Actually the thing I found most remarkable about Veronica Lake was how very young she seemed. Before this, I'd only ever seen her in Sullivan's Travels. and although that picture was made earlier, somehow she looked as though she'd been around the block a few more times.

Apparently Ladd is one of the few actors who didn't mind working with Lake; whether or not that's true, they certainly do perform some chemical magic together on screen, and the sparks between them are the picture's main draw. Unfortunately, John Huston or Michael Curtiz didn't direct this, and it shows. Except for a few scattershot scenes, the movie lacks both the mood of The Maltese Falcon and the lightness of touch in The Thin Man series. 

It's interesting to watch the way violence is portrayed in The Glass Key, and I strongly believe that, nine times out of ten, this is the way it should be done. We never see the actual beatings in any great detail: the director inevitably cuts to reaction shots of the bystanders, and by watching their faces we are allowed to sense the brutality of the scene. Only the consequences of the beatings are shown in detail, and this is pretty much unflinching, as real as they were allowed to get in those days.

I liked all three of these pictures, although I didn't love any of them. I'm hoping that tonight the TCM programmers will opt to go with something along the lines of "Giant Gorilla Night." I've seen all the giant gorillas I need to see, and Getting Something Done tonight sounds like a good direction to head in!

-- Freder

The Place Where Anything Can Happen

The world is divided into two classes of people: those who don't get or like Paul Ruebens's Pee-Wee Herman, and those who do. I have the perfect solution for all parties: if Pee-Wee isn't your cup of fur, don't watch his show, and leave the rest of us in peace. If you must watch Pee-Wee (say, you're a critic for The New York Daily News), don't come crying to us with comments like "There isn't enough plot!" or "It's like being trapped in a room with a sugared-up four-year-old for ninety minutes!"

Both comments actually miss the point by a wide margin.

Actually, there was plenty of plot, if you were paying attention, in Saturday night's HBO Broadcast of The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway, and no, it's not like being trapped with a sugared-up four-year old, it's like being one and still being grown-up about it.

Not only was there plenty of plot, but there was all the usual layering of subtext and winking pop-culture parody, wrapped in a very sophisticated technical production, performed by a talented cast of true believers who really all seem not to be acting so much as becoming the characters.

From the beginning, Pee-Wee Herman was Paul Ruebens's subversive take on that long-extinct species, the '50s afternoon kid's show. Maybe you had to be around in the day. It wasn't just Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody -- every local station worth its salt had an afternoon kid's show that involved specific ingredients: a kid-friendly character host, puppets, colorful sidekicks, an in-studio kid audience, and cartoons.

I actually appeared on the Portland, Maine iteration of that show in the late sixties when I was a practicing Cub Scout. They gave us bags of candy and soda pop, got us all sugared up, let us all say our names on TV, introduced a few cartoons (we didn't get to see them, they were spliced in later). We got a tour of the studio and saw where they filmed the evening news. We all had a grand time.

That kind of show went the way of the dinosaur more years ago than I care to think about. But off and on over the years, its memory has been kept alive -- and satirized, and reinvented, and gloriously undermined -- by Pee-Wee Herman.

It was danged good to see him and all the Playhouse gang again. Understand, Time has taken its physical toll on Pee-Wee and Jambi the Genie and Miss Yvonne just like it's taken its toll on you and me. People said the same thing when William Shatner and the rest of the original Star Trek crew made Star Trek: The Motion Picture -- and that revival was done just a little more than a decade after the original series went off the air.

It's been nearly thirty years since we last were invited into Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

So, what's really remarkable here is not that the gang shows signs of physical wear and tear, but that they can do a marathon, highly physical ninety minute show at the exact same level of energy and enthusiasm that they did all those years ago. Paul Ruebens is pushing sixty, and he can still sell this character like there is no tomorrow. That is a mark of greatness.

The show itself was a mix of the old and the new, very shrewdly and slyly written and performed. Ruebens doesn't dodge any of the questions or concerns we might have had going in, but faces them head-on and makes us believe in Pee-Wee and the Playhouse all over again by sheer force of will.

In addition to the visible cast, a crew of fifteen puppeteers brings the Playhouse and its characters to life in wonderful style. Again, a lot of thought went into this, and most every theatrical trick I can think of was employed to great effect. This was not a hap-hazard or cheaply mounted production done to cash in on the affection of old fans. Rather, a lot of effort went into it to reward us and recreate the Playhouse experience in a vibrant way.

I won't describe the individual gags or reiterate what was done on the stage other than to say that it was Pee-Wee, and it was perfect. The ending is particularly delightful, and involves interaction with the audience, puppetry, music and wish fulfillment. When Pee-Wee sang "I'm the luckiest boy in the world | Much luckier than YOU," I confess my eyes were not dry. It felt genuinely like a personal triumph for Ruebens & Co., one that resonates with the audience.

You get over things, and you fly.

Welcome back, Pee-Wee. Don't stay away so long this time, hear?

-- Freder.

A Whisper of Spring is Near. . .

I wanted to post the theme to the BBC TV show Mulberry as a soundtrack to this post, but I couldn't find a source. Anyway, if you are familiar with the show, you are familiar with the song, and if you are not familiar with the show, I urge you to track it down. It's readily available on DVD, and it is sublime, transcendent, any other word meaning "really good" that you care to apply.

This afternoon when I got home from work -- gad, it was such a nice, springlike day that I decided to open the front door onto the porch, and to open most of the windows on the porch, and let some air in.

The quats were right there. They ventured out into this new space, and at first their whole body language said: "Whoa! This is scary! -- But, you know, kind of cool!"

Then the scary part faded away. Within minutes Patches had found a Favorite Spot. Whitey liked getting up on his back legs and looking through the door. Pandy settled on the ledge and watched the cars go by. Contentment and surprise at Something New was the order of the day.

It made me so happy.

La Chaine

A poster that tries to make Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier look like a Lynd Ward woodcut.

Somehow, it doesn't seem as much fun to comment, as I'm about to, on something that aired on a network rather than something I chose for myself, on DVD, as my own personal Programming Director.

When you make your own choices, it's something suspiciously like a creative action, and when you can comment on it, you're a lone voice. But when potentially millions of other people have seen the same film at the same time, and drawn their own conclusions, you're just one voice in a million with an opinion that's no better or more well-informed than anyone else's -- and you know, possibly it's worse and less informed than some! We live in an age where any idiot with a keyboard can call himself a critic, and I'm no less of an idiot than most.

TCM, until last night, had been obliging me by running pictures that I'd already seen before, or perhaps even owned a copy of, and that was good because it freed me up to do other things. But last night they aired The Defiant Ones, one of those significant gaps in my experience, and I had no choice but to glue myself to the telly!

It's a genuine classic, hard to take your eyes off of, even though it's riddled with Creeping Hollywoodisms that sometimes threaten to bring down the whole affair.

In particular, at first I had a real hard time buying Tony Curtis in his part. It's not that he didn't do everything in his power to sell it, but he's fighting history -- in this case, a history that occurred both before and after he made this movie. It's hard to look at Tony Curtis and not see Tony Curtis, if you catch my drift.

You'd think the same would be true with Poitier, but it's obvious that Poitier put on some weight for this role, and he looks physically different from the man who made To Sir With Love and In the Heat of the Night.

It goes deeper than that, though, to the script. I had a hard time believing that these two characters with their reputed backgrounds, would have the kind of conversations that they sometimes have, and use the very self-consciously scripted words that they sometimes use.

Then there's the Good Cop / Bad Cop subplot, with the parts played by actors who don't really bring anything to the roles that goes deeper than the surface, the bumpkin with his omnipresent radio playing sophisticated jazz, and worst of all the Girl.

Yes, the Girl. The Single Mother living out in the middle of nowhere who still manages to look like, well, like a Hollywood Actress in full seduction mode.

But the other things in the movie are so strong that they manage to just plow right over these contradictions in the sense of reality. It's beautifully shot, acted powerfully by both of the leading men -- -- and by Lon Chaney Jr. in a small part, dipping most effectively into his seemingly bottomless well of Inner Conflict and Despair.

I'm going to digress here and pass on a rumor about Chaney that I can't substantiate and that may already be known to you. It is said that Chaney was a repressed homosexual. If this is true, then the key word (repressed) would explain a lot of the conflictedness that Chaney brought so successfully to most of his screen roles.

I've heard a story that I can't attribute, because I can't remember the source, that Chaney and Raymond Burr worked on a picture together, and Burr was very cruel to Chaney, berating him in front of everyone for being a "faggot."

Which says particularly nasty things about Burr, who was himself a closet homosexual.

As you can see, I have faults, too: in order to make the writing interesting for me, I have to stray away from the subject and try to show off how much I know.

My father met Raymond Burr, once, on an airplane. He reports that Burr was about as flaming as they come, and made some advances.

But then, my father has his faults, too, and one of them is homophobia.

My father also met Sidney Poitier on an airplane. Mr. Poitier gave my father a copy of the novel Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley. Ever since that day, many years ago, when Poitier was at the height of his success, Parnassus on Wheels has been on my reading list. And I still haven't read it.

I figure that I still have time, and that some things should be saved.

Let's see. In the roster of celebrity meetings, among others, my father met Leo McKern, in a hotel bar in Florida, while McKern was in America for the filming of Rumpole's Return. I'll have to ask him about that one, to see if there are any juicy anecdotes. But his memory has always been a convenient one, and he's not a Spring Chicken anymore, and it wouldn't surprise me if he no longer remembered the encounter at all.

Where was I?

The Defiant Ones. Yes. Beautifully shot and acted. Highly contrived, yet quite compelling. Not a favorite, by a long shot, but completely worthy of its reputation. Holds -- and rewards -- your attention. Quite possibly hobbled a bit by it's own success, in that it was later imitated by lesser pictures and television series.

That about says it.

Incidentally, a Google search for the poster revealed a French version with the title I used in the header of this post -- and I'm not sure but that The Chain wouldn't have been a better title for the American release as well!

-- Freder.

The Light at the End

It's nearly over at the old house.

I still have some things outside, buried under three feet of snow (a concrete garden bench, a bird bath, some tiles that I will have to write about at another time, and the jailhouse -- ditto), and I still have some things in the two barns -- yard ornaments, mostly -- but inside the main house I am done.

It's hard to believe, really. . . Everything from the house is moved.

I made my last sweep through the basement, workshop and generator room. As expected, there wasn't much that I wanted: barring only the laundry that was hanging on the line and piled in the sinks, the things I took didn't even fill two boxes. I expected to find more tools and useful things in the workshop than what I did. Most likely, my sister or the auctioneers beat me to them.

The whole sweep took less than an hour. I brought one load back with me on Saturday, then made three trips out and back on Sunday, clearing out not just the things in the house, but a good chunk of the yard ornaments in the big barn. This last required a lot of repacking and fussing during the final load of the day. There were particular things that needed to come out right away. With the barn now shoveled out and no padlock on the doors, my sense was that I'd better take the things that meant the most to me, because they might not be there when I get back.

My car is still full, because I can't fit anything more into the house. The laundry room that I'm using as a staging area is full to the ceiling with boxes, baskets, totes, and even a Christmas Tree. Some of it (like the tree) is going straight up to the attic. That's Job One for me tonight.

I still have to get the auctioneers over to the old place, let them have their last sweep through, and then I will be ready to turn the keys over to the new owners. I'm actually looking forward to that. Heating two large houses is for the birds!

I got through it mostly without tears. I learned that controlling the tears meant controlling my thoughts. If I thought too long about the fact that this was it, the end, done, that this was basically my Good-bye to the house and all the years that it contains, then I'd break down, every time. But if I just kept focused on the task, the packing, the loading, the seeing to it that I had everything I needed and that it all went into the car in the right order (the last of the plants, including the old geranium, had to be the last into the car, due to the cold) -- then I was all right.

By the time I'd been out and back three times, I knew I'd put in a day's work. It was time to kick back. My dinner came out of the freezer. I flopped into my office chair and launched one of the cheap games that I picked up the day before at Wallyworld, just so that I would have something that I could actually do with the new computer. Killed an hour. Watched an episode of Dark Shadows (one of their more turgid efforts: yeah, guys, we get that Maggie has been attacked by a very special vampire). Enjoyed having Patches and Whitey sit on my lap in the new home. Walked through the place and looked at everything I've done over the last two months. Discovered that the sofa in front of the bay window is a really neat space, and one where I will want to spend some vacation time, just reading. It looks out over the drive at the row of pine trees lit by the street lamp.

Went to bed early.

Just under two months. Even though there's much left to do (and still no phone or internet!) the quats and I are firmly installed in the new diggs. The past is the past. Over. I just have to keep on plodding towards the light.

It's. . .

I seem to be using much of my recent DVD time in re-visiting Olde Friendes. This past Sunday, as a preface to the series, I put on Life of Python, the 30th Anniversary Reunion show that they made in 1999. The date gave me a shock; it means that the thirtieth anniversary was more than ten years ago, and The Flying Circus is now forty-two years old!

. . . and Grahame Chapman has been dead a long time.

It also strikes me (although I must have known this at some point) that Python didn't hit in the USA until several years after the show had gone off the air in Britain.

My first exposure to the Pythons was on the summer replacement series for The Dean Martin Show, produced by Martin's company and hosted by Barbara Feldon of Get Smart! fame. I'm not sure about this, but it must have been the summer of 1973, one of the first summers that our family spent in the old house.

The summer series that year was devoted to British comedy, and Monty Python's Flying Circus was not the only featured show. The great Marty Feldman also had a series at the time; his format was similar to the stand alone two-reel comedies of Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges: a different, stand-alone situation every week, often in the style of silent comedies. His shows were every bit as brilliant as what the Pythons were doing, yet I've never seen them since.

On those cool summer nights I would lie on the floor in front of the television and literally roll around in laughter. I would have been about fourteen or fifteen years old, and probably did not know the meaning of the word anarchic, although I was learning the definition just by watching. Once in a while, something comes along down the cultural pipeline that doesn't just connect with you, it splices itself to your DNA and warps you for life. Such a show was the late Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, and such were the shows that I was introduced to that year on the Dean Martin Summer Replacement Show. Thank you, Mr. Martin!

If the reunion that I watched on Sunday night wasn't quite the genetic-splicing thing that it commemorated, still it's good to see the boys working together again and giving it the old college try. I would guess that they've put together about fifteen to twenty minutes of new material, which is used as a shell around a full-length documentary about the show and its origins, hosted by Eddie Izzard (who, try though he may, isn't remotely funny: just weird), followed by a Michael Palin-style Travelogue, hosted, oddly enough, by Michael Palin, about the locations where the show was shot, and a brief segment hosted by Meat Loaf about the Python recordings. Throughout, a forceful BBC chat-show host advertises a gathering of all the surviving Pythons on his stage. This turns out to be the final joke, and a good one.

Much of the new material is a re-working or re-combination of bits that seem familiar, grafts from earlier work, and if there's any real disappointment in the show, it's simply that the Python's haven't come up with anything powerfully new, but instead seem to be imitating themselves. That's all right. I suspect this was just a lark for them, a chance to celebrate their own success, work together again and raise a glass to the halcyon days. They're entitled to it.

There was one later reunion that I'm aware of: a still photo that appeared in GQ magazine a while back. I have it hanging on my closet door. It's a shot taken from above, of all the Pythons, in character, more or less lying in their coffins. Except Terry Jones has a naked lady with him in his, and they're all interacting with each other in very funny ways. Even Graham Chapman was there for this reunion: Terry Gilliam is leaning half-out of his coffin, sweeping Chapman's spilled ashes into a vase.

-- Freder.

Me and My SHADO

As you can tell from the photo above, Gerry Anderson's completely wonky '70s SF series UFO had just about everything a fourteen-year-old boy could want.

By today's standards, the show is almost laughably sexist. Although women are shown in command positions, it's rarely a higher rank than lieutenant, it doesn't come without frequent harassment from the self-styled lady's man Col. Alec Freeman (George Sewell, and an unlikelier lady's man you never will see) -- and just look at the uniforms they have to wear!

'Way back at the end of November, with Farscape behind me, I decided to revisit UFO for my Monday night dose of SF. With one thing and another, I've only managed to get a few episodes into the run. Oddly enough, it's the futuristic fashions (by Sylvia Anderson) that have aged the most.


Gerry and Sylvia Anderson are better known for their "Super-Marionation" puppet shows, Fireball-XL5, Stingray, and others, but UFO is very much in the same line as those shows, only featuring "live" actors (I have to use quotations, because sometimes I think the puppets displayed a broader range of expression than the cast of UFO!). To the Anderson's credit, it doesn't try to model itself on Star Trek or Lost in Space; its conceit is that Earth is under attack by humanoid aliens who harvest human body parts for transplant. Our only line of protection from the invasion is SHADO, a super-secret special ops branch that has its headquarters under a film studio, and brings the latest, most advanced technology to bear in its defense of the planet. Under the sea, on land, in the air, and from its base on the moon, SHADO seeks 'em here, seeks 'em there, seeks those aliens everywhere -- but still they get through!


The show is full of gadgets and flying things, and many of the effects hold up to this day; some of you already know I'm a believer that model work is more effective than CGI at just about everything. The alien craft and Skydiver (a submarine that launches a jet into the stratosphere) are particularly good effects.


As Commander Straker, Ed Bishop (an American actor who turned up a lot in British films) makes William Shatner's Captain Kirk look easy-going and lax. Bishop's whole performance lies in looking as steely-eyed and determined as possible. The series gets off to a rocky start with an episode that was so violent that it needed to be re-cut for syndication, and two more episodes that merely stick the shtick, all machines, all the time. But within three episodes Col. Paul Foster (Michael Billington) is introduced, and the scripts get markedly better as Foster is allowed to become the single three-dimensional continuing character on the show.


It's nowhere near as good as Star Trek or Farscape at their best, but the Andersons never scrimp on style, and most of the episodes hold your attention. But it's also very much a period piece, and a modern viewer needs a mental ride in the Way-Back machine to stomach some of the styles and attitudes on display.


It helps that I still have the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy.


-- Freder.

In the Heat of The League, With Love. . .

There's still so much left to do (including yet another run out to the old house tonight after work -- another storm is predicted for Tuesday and Wednesday, so it has to be tonight), but last night I reached the point where I just. . . couldn't. Couldn't unpack another box. Couldn't shelve one more book. Couldn't lug one more tote into the house. My wheels just rolled to a stop, and I collapsed into my comfy chair, and watched In the Heat of the Night on TCM from start to finish.

Of course I knew it by reputation, but I'd never seen it before. It's been on my DVD-to-buy list for years, just never got around to it. Now I don't have to!

In the end, I can't give it top marks because the murder mystery -- the plot -- ends up being so unsatisfactory. Realistic, yes, but if you've ever read Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, you know that a good murder is deeply complicated and creates ripple effects that impact all the characters in the story -- even (sometimes especially) the detective. But the murder that everything hangs on In The Heat of the Night ends up being almost perfunctory: a spur-of-the-moment thing perpetrated by a low idiot who manages to take another life for no reason before the final credits roll.

All that said, the picture is well-directed in a deeply laconic style by Norman Jewison, and gorgeously photographed by the great Haskell Wexler (who also shot American Graffiti and seems to be a master at photographing cars that pass in the night).

But the reasons to watch, obviously, are the two monster performances at the core of the movie, from Poitier and Steiger, and the depictions of a racism that is so casual as to be horrifying. The movie sets you right down into the character of Mister Tibbs, in a way that I don't think any other movie had done up to that point. The man is a Gladiator, and not by choice.

It helps that Steiger's character, Gilespie, is not a cardboard cut-out nor the raging bigot that he at first appears to be. He is out-leagued and out-classed, and he knows it. . . but he's capable of learning.

Before that, before I ran out of steam, I caught a part of To Sir With Love, and was less impressed with that. Not less impressed with Poitier, mind you, but I didn't buy a lot of what the picture was selling. The song's still great, though. . .

On Saturday night, between rounds of unpacking during the commercials, it was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on American Movie Classics. First -- what's happened to AMC? They used to be a good station. They used to run movies that really are American Movie Classics. To say that League doesn't fall into that category is stating the obvious, but it doesn't end there. It seems that all AMC is showing these days is contemporary crap, including a grisly Carnivorous Zombie series that doesn't stint on the gore, even in the commercials. I expected to be glued to that station (as I am to TCM) -- instead, I mostly avoid it.

Now then: I don't think I've heard one positive review for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I'm not going to break from the pack except to say that it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected and that I've sat through lots worse (Van Helsing, anyone?). Actually, I found it vaguely diverting. Yes, it's nonsensical, yes, the CGI is shoddy. . . and Captain Nemo is an Arab? Granted, it's been a while since I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, and my memory may be corrupted by images of James Mason and other Anglo actors in the part, but. . . really. . . since when?

I suppose what I responded to were the vestiges of Alan Moore that remain in the film: there's a really good idea at the core of the picture, and it doesn't get completely lost amid all the action set-pieces. For that reason alone, it's smarter than its competitors. But it ultimately fails, because if you're in the business of making "Gosh-Wow" adventure movies, you'd better make certain that the audience is thinking "Gosh Wow!" as the credits roll -- and I wasn't. Guess I'm not alone in that!

Sean Connery? Eh -- they needed his star power and they got what they paid for, but Connery has been slacking and collecting his checks through a lot of half-hearted performances lately.

-- Freder.

Who watches The Watchmen? Not me -- at least, never again!

Oh, my. After just three days I'm convinced that DirecTV is the handiwork of The Devil.

The installer came by late on Thursday and spent four hours setting me up. My first reaction was: Yippee! Teevee again! I am back in the land of the living! I can listen to the news and weather reports!

Then the installer started showing me some of what DirecTV delivers, and I think I said, out loud, "This is insane!"

For all of my life, I've had access to just eight or ten channels: all three networks (from two locations), a couple of PBS stations, and within the last couple of years, FOX. It used to take me maybe sixty seconds to go through all the channels, find out there was nothing on that I wanted to watch, and slot a DVD into the player.

Now it takes an hour!

Sports channels up the wazoo (of no interest to me)! Bible-thumping channels! Infomercial channels -- seemingly hundreds of those useless things! There's even soft-core porn (I've seen more simulated sex in the last three days than I care to think about). . .

I'm grateful that, as you flip through the channels, a description of the program that's currently airing pops up before the channel actually has time to load. This gratefulness stems from a couple of encounters with the premium movie channels (which, thankfully, will be going away in three months). I was thumbing the "channel up" button when I suddenly noticed the words: "HBO -- SAW IV."

I thought, "Yikes!! Saw IV!!?? I don't want to see a single frame of that thing! Get me outta here!!"

The exact same thought was repeated a few moments later when the title Zombieland came up. Ye Gods! Who watches this stuff? Its easy availability is actually disturbing to me. I've been a life-long proponant of free speech, but free speech doesn't give you the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, and it doesn't give you the right to make and distribute torture porn and cannibalism movies, either.

Then I stumbled upon the much-talked-about film adaptation of Watchmen, the graphic novel by Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I decided to brave it. After all, it didn't cost anything (over and above what DirecTV costs, anyhow). So I wasn't directly giving them my money to watch it.

I expected the egregious lapses in taste, but what surprised me was that the egregious lapses in taste weren't the main reasons why I ended up giving this ugly movie a "thumbs down." The original graphic novel was many things: but it wasn't pretentious. This thing, with its over-use and abuse of slow motion, portentous empty-eyed, stone faced acting, not to mention its overwhelming sense of self-seriousness, self-importance and superiority (particularly notable for something that's really just a grotty little exercise in nose-wrinkling) embodies pretension to the nth degree.

It's been noted that the movie displays an almost slavish devotion to the book. I didn't see that. Admittedly, it's been years and years since I read the thing, but there were whole swaths of story material that I didn't remember and would swear were not in the book. The movie is also more gruesomely violent than the book. It replaces the book's many layers of complexity with layers of vulgarity. Its one improvement over the book lies in the ending, which for expediency's sake changes a fake alien invasion into a fake attack from one of the existing characters.

You feel exhausted when the thing is over, and a little bit dirty, and very much as if you have wasted your time.

Oh -- and don't even get me started about Universal's recent remake of The Wolfman.

Much more enjoyable (though still problematic) was BBC America's marathon showing of the new Doctor Who series. I'd never seen this incarnation of the show before. With its significantly larger budget and the abandoning of 20-minute "cliffhanger" episodes for hour-long self-contained stories, Who has gained much over the days of the original series -- but it's also lost something, too.

The first story I looked at was an epic-length two-parter starring the Good Doctor's most popular baddies, the Daleks. Because it's now shot on film and because they have access to computers, the producers can now make their Dalek Invasions quite spectacular: but with literally hundreds of Dalek spacecraft careering around shooting everything in sight, and literally thousands of Daleks hovering and swarming about, the emphasis has shifted away from story and onto spectacle. At its core, it was a fairly ordinary, by-the-numbers Dalek story, even when a four-way cliffhanger was tossed in at the end of the first hour.

The second part was worse: a mish-mash of technobable and confusion. It was complicated by the boatload of supporting characters who were being re-united for this story, all of whom the producers seemed more interested in than the Doctor! U.N.I.T -- the Torchwood crew -- Sarah Jane Smith. Too many characters and not much in the way of clever dialogue for the Doctor.

The second story that I watched -- "The Next Doctor" -- was much, much better, though still, in the end, over-reliant on computer-generated spectacle. The Doctor finally gets to be Doctorish, and the story was a clever one featuring the Cybermen. And -- was that Miranda Richardson guest starring? In Victorian London, the Doctor meets what he at first believes to be a future incarnation of himself. Meanwhile, the Cybermen are using child labour to build themselves a gigantic cyber tinkertoy with which to literally squash the British Empire.

I was grateful to catch up on what the beeb were doing with one of my favorite shows, but three hours was more than enough. By then I was just rested-up enough from a day of moving to manage dinner.

I'll continue to dip into DirecTV as time permits, but I suspect that I'll be returning to my DVDs soon. I can program better for me than some young suited dunderhead.

Oh -- and if you want proof positive that it's the work of the Devil? Check out something called Yo Gabba Gabba!

-- Freder.