Post Mortem: Ripper Street

Post mortem: Ripper Street

It’s become a cliché, but fans of television shows always think they can save their show when cancellation is announced.  For some reasons fans always think they are smarter than network executives.  And they are, by and large, but network executives also have access to information, like detailed ratings, episode budgets, and new pilots in development that make what’s on the air look like My Mother the Car by comparison.

I suppose the first group of fans to try and revive a doomed show were the Trekkies who labored from 1969 until the first Star Trek movie came out in 1979.  But that was a long game, not the kind of “get them to renew the show before the sets are destroyed” that has since been used on numerous shows, mostly SF.  Roswell used bottles of hot sauce, Jericho used peanuts.  Such campaigns usually fail, or at best eke out one more season.

The latest successful campaign to save a TV series took place on the other side of The Pond, where the show Ripper Street had been cancelled after two seasons.  Decisions to cancel shows in England are subject to different forces than in America (the decision to shut down Doctor Who in the 1980’s was just because they were tired of it), and fans of the show successfully lobbied for an additional season, with an on-line petition gaining 40,000 signatures.  Given the events of the finale, we should not expect more (although there are reports of it finding new life on Amazon).  But at least the show got the sendoff it deserved.

Ripper Street took place six months after the reign of terror caused by Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel district of London.  The police were powerless to stop him, and his just quitting was almost a bigger blow to the constabulary’s pride.  The police force was barely professional at that time (in one episode a detective proposes to a prostitute and she declines because being married to a policeman would lower her social standing) and one man, Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfayden), struggled mightily to restore the citizen’s confidence in the concept of law and order.

Reid was an eminently civilized man willing to do uncivilized things in order to make Whitechapel more civilized. His main associate was Sgt. Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn, also of Game of Thrones), whom Reid could rely on to use his muscle and beat answers out of suspects when Reid’s investigatory skills fell short.  He was also aided by an American doctor named Homer Jackson (Adam Rothberg), a former Pinkerton and a pioneer in the fledgling field of criminal forensics.

In the first episode, a series of brutal murder lead the police to think that the Ripper might be back.  However the culprit turned out to be a wealthy gentleman who acquired one of the world’s first movie cameras and projectors and set about making snuff films.  Ripper Street is a mirror to modern times; if you think people are sick now, you should have been around 150 years ago.

Ripper Street’s third season was daring, set five years after the first two.  The robbery of a train carrying bearer bonds results in the death of 55 people, reuniting Reid, Drake and Jackson (whose estranged wife masterminded the crime).  Also, Reid was reunited with his long-lost daughter Matilda, missing since a boating accident.  The season ended with Reid confronting Jackson’s ex-father-in-law, a wealthy American who owned the bonds that were stolen.  He orders his men to kill Reid, but they are all taken out by Drake and Jackson; they leave the father-in-law locked up in abandoned building project where he will certainly starve to death before being found.

When I watch Ripper Street, I can’t help but think that it is the Koch Brother’s vision of America.  No minimum wage, no OSHA, no impediment to treating human beings like cattle to be exploited.  The Koch Brothers have a fortune worth billions of dollars, yet they have said they feel imposed upon because they had to pay their workers a minimum wage.  In Ripper Street countless lives are ruined in the name of the wealthy having unlimited power to treat people however they wished.  The train robbery that results in a wreck killing 55 people was orchestrated by a train employee who was fired after he injured his shoulder and could no longer pull the train switches; no workers’ comp, no severance package, just unemployment and no hope of another job.

There have been a number of complaints that some of the events depicted in Ripper Street are not strictly (or even remotely) period-authentic.  And I certainly don’t know if common people at the time spoke with such formality.  But it always seemed authentic, and I’m not going to dig up a history book to find out that Jackson’s revolver wasn’t introduced until 1915.

Maybe there will be more Ripper Street, thanks to the profusion of sources for TV shows.  If not, I am happy that the show’s first two seasons got a coda, one that reunited Reid and his daughter and ended with them frolicking happily on a beach.  If any fictional character deserved some happiness, it was Inspector Edmund Reid.

TV Review: Mr. Robot

TV Review: Mr. Robot

The revolution, apparently, will be televised.  And on basic cable.

USA Network’s new series Mr. Robot served up what is probably the most fascinating pilot episode since Dominic Monahan uttered the words, “Guys, where ARE we?” on the first episode of Lost.  I don’t know if Mr. Robot can sustain the kind of wholesale insanity Lost served up, but it is off to a great start.

Saying the show is fascinating is not the same as saying it is original.  It is a heaping helping of Fight Club’s anti-corporate philosophy, part urban paranoia from the short-lived series Rubicon, with just a dash of flair from The Third Man, with a shout out to Heroes.  The show stars Rami Malek as a young hacker named Elliot who stumbles into either an international conspiracy to ruin the world’s economy, or a nut calling himself Mr. Robot (played by Christian Slater) claiming he wants to ruin the world’s economy (or “the single largest incident of wealth redistribution in history,” as he puts it).

Elliot works for a computer security firm whose major client is E Corp (whose logo bears a strong resemblance to Enron’s).  Elliot calls them Evil Corp; other people call them Evil Corp, including their own advertising, which doesn’t quite make sense unless Elliot is an unreliable narrator.  He’s been diagnosed with several psychological conditions, sees a sympathetic but ineffectual shrink (Gloria Reuben), and self-medicates with morphine and other non-prescription pharmaceuticals.  He also thinks the television audience watching him is a product of his delusions, so maybe there is something to his world view being un-related to reality.

Elliot is a social outcast (what a shock for a hacker) who has one “normal” friend, a platonic childhood friend named Angela who works with him as an account manager for the security firm.  At one point he hacks into her files and sees she has nearly $200,000 in student loans, which explains her anxiety about keeping her menial, somewhat degrading job (one could question the value of her investment in education as she seems unclear on the concept that 2:30 AM is Saturday morning, not Friday night).  Her debt underlines something Elliot was told by Mr. Robot; the world is enslaved by debt.  What good is an education if you have to spend your life as a slave in order to pay for it?  Mr. Robot’s plan is to free the world of debt by crashing the world’s interlocking computer systems, thus eliminating any records of debt that can be enforced.

The first episode ran for 70 minutes and was nearly commercial free (that raises a good point; what company would advertise on a TV show that portrays corporations as, literally, evil?), and the time flew by; I thought fifteen minutes had passed and found I’d been watching for nearly an hour.  The entire production supports Elliot’s paranoid world view; in the first scene I noticed a random extra looking at Elliot, and I assumed he would be a major character but instead he faded into the background not to be seen again (like other extras in nearly every scene). The lighting is drab and harsh, accentuating Elliot’s pallor and deep-set eyes.  The editing is jumping, mirroring Elliot’s somewhat fractured attention span.

The show is overt in its homages, most notably the scene between Mr. Robot and Elliot that takes place on an abandoned Ferris wheel, mimicking the classic scene in The Third Man where Orson Wells laid out his nihilistic philosophy to Joseph Cotton.  Slater, who played a much younger but similar anti-establishment character in Pump Up the Volume, doesn’t chew as much scenery as Welles but is similarly oily in laying out his plan to liberate the world from the debt that has been accumulated by acquiring things.  The scene is also where Slater comes the closest to channeling his inner Tyler Durden from Fight Club, another script that harped on how people were slaves to their possessions.

Mr. Robot also lifts a move from Heroes, when Elliot is standing in Times Square and sees the news feed that a target of Slater’s group has been arrested and he raises his arms in triumph, much like Masi Oka did in Heroes’ most iconic moment.

I’ve said before how difficult it is to judge how a series will develop from a pilot.  Sometime a pilot will be lovingly crafted, but then have nowhere to go; other times the pilot will be slap-dash, but work effectively as a weekly series crafted by a number of hands.  Mr. Robot smells more like the former, a script that would have been a movie if the author could have crafted another hour of plot and an ending.  It is unlike other USA programs (Royal Pains, Suits), which usually feature attractive people with relatively well-defined moral compasses.  It isn’t clear who is right, Mr. Robot’s dream of financial anarchy or E Corp’s view of world domination, and Elliot’s role in either is up in the air (which makes rooting for one side or the other difficult).

Mr. Robot is a well-made, well-scripted show with a definite agenda.  The AMC series Rubicon also dealt with global conspiracies over control of the economy, and it sunk under its own weight.  How Mr. Robot plays out depends on how well its creator, Sam Esmail has foreseen its future.  In one respect the future is already determined; it has already been renewed for a second season.  As someone once said, the future ain’t what it used to be.

TV Review: Killjoys

Once upon a time, the channel now known as Syfy was a critical darling.  Against all odds a reboot of the cheesy 1970’s TV show Battlestar Gallactica was a commercial and critical hit and even won a couple of technical Emmy awards, along with nominations in the writing and directing categories.  This must have been heady stuff for a small, fairly obscure basic cable station (at the time whatever cable system I was on didn’t even carry Syfy).

Since then Syfy has tried to catch lightning in a bottle again, but their track record has been one of surprisingly consistent mediocrity.  I’d say their best series after BG was Eureka, which struggled to find an audience.  Warehouse 13 made some bad casting decisions and never achieved buzz.  Haven is awful; it must only survive by meeting very low expectations. Lost Girl had been on for three seasons before I even knew it existed.  Definace has some interesting elements, but not a lot.  Syfy is now best known for deliberate cheese like Sharknado, which must embarrass them even as they rake in the profits.

Syfy’s latest attempt to get back on the science fiction map is a series called Killjoys.  It is about futuristic bounty hunters who call themselves Reclamation Agents and operate independently from The Company (which you know must be evil because it doesn’t have a name).  There are rules to bounty hunting, but of course the protagonists break them because who would watch a TV show where people followed rules?

Maybe because the series is created by a woman (Michelle Lovretta), gender stereotypes are broken and the leader of the bounty hunters is an attractive woman (Hannah John-Kamen) known only as “Dutch” (presumably in the future everyone is as pretentious as Cher or Madonna).  Her assistant John (Aaron Ashmore) helps her run scams so they execute warrants on wanted fugitives; these warrants give them authority over seemingly anyone so long as they physically touch the fugitive.  In the first episode John accepts a “level 5” warrant (basically wanted dead or alive, preferably dead) on Dutch’s behalf because the fugitive is his long lost brother.  He and Dutch then try to get the warrant cancelled by finding an even more wanted fugitive who stole something valuable from The Company.

Like Firefly, the production design mixes futuristic and retro, probably because retro in the future is modern, and that’s cheaper that doing all futuristic.  It’s surprising how many sci-fi shows think cyber-punk will be the fashion statement that survives the centuries.  Dutch is a little slip of a girl but can toss burly guards around like paper dolls; she has some training that is hinted at in the pilot and looks fairly unpleasant.  John is supposed to be some sort of con man, but he doesn’t seem very effective in the pilot.

The acting is competent.  I must confess to having an irrational dislike of Ashmore, only because he played a jerk on Veronica Mars and the “Jimmy Olsen who was not Jimmy Olsen” on Smallville.  Prior to Mad Men I had similar reservations about John Slattery because he always played jerks (I don’t watch Supernatural primarily because I was annoyed by Jensen Ackles on Smallville and Jared Padalecki on Gilmore Girls).

The plotting is neatly positioned between being just trite enough to be familiar but just fresh enough to avoid being entirely derivative.  I must confess I was amused by some of the one liners (John makes a bold statement to the guy torturing him, who replies “Is it difficult to walk with balls that big?” to which John replies, “Yeah, they do chafe a little.”). But overall it was nothing I haven’t seen before somewhere.

I’ll stick with Killjoys because, well, what else is there on Friday nights while Grimm is on summer recess?  It is in Syfy’s wheelhouse, another unmemorable example of science fiction that can be amusing on Friday night and forgotten by Saturday morning.  Frankly, I’d rather watch the 1970’s version of Battlestar Gallactica; that much cheese is definitely memorable.

Movie Review: Spy

Spy pastiches come in two varieties: those that mock the whole genre by throwing out any pretense of realism, like the TV series Get Smart; and those that try and take the genre seriously, but with a wink and a nod, like the old TV series I, Spy.  The latest Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy starts off as the latter, then veers into the former.  It works very effectively at the start, creating a plausible scenario for a heavy-set woman to suddenly be thrust into the world of international espionage, but works less well when the plot starts getting silly (if indeed it even makes sense at all).

This is writer/director Paul Feig’s third film with Melissa McCarthy, and it is a classic director/actor combo like Billy Wilder and Walter Matthau or Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni.  Feig somehow seems to be able to develop funny material for a plus-size woman with comic timing and a fearless approach to comedy, and he found the definitive muse with McCarthy.  More than that, she brings a certain dignity to her role even as the script puts her in increasingly absurd situations that threaten to turn her into a cartoon character.

The film’s most brilliant invention is the idea that James Bond is only able to be James Bond because of a desk-bound nerd feeding him intel from HQ into an earpiece.  McCarthy plays Susan Cooper, the “partner” of a spy named Bradley Fine (Jude Law), who appreciates her telling him when to duck as he’s about to be shot but at the same time has a patronizing attitude towards her.  When Fine is killed during an assignment and the entire spy network is compromised (apparently the CIA only employs five actual spies, which seems like a really small number), Cooper volunteers to go into the field to track the killer. The only real spy on her side is a rogue CIA operative named Ford (Jason Statham, mocking his hard-boiled persona with abandon), who goes "off the grid" to recover the stolen nuclear bomb Fine was seeking.

While Spy is funny, it is not close to rivaling Feig and McCarthy’s previous film, The Heat.  That film benefitted from McCarthy being able to play off another fine comedic actress in Sandra Bullock; here she mostly plays off bad guy Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), who vacillates between playing Rayna as a ditz and a hard-ass.  She never finds a consistent tone, so the audience is unsure is she is supposed to be scary or comical.  Likewise Statham, who can do comedy (see The Italian Job) is so far over the top he is hard to accept as a competent, if not super-competent spy, but then at a key moment he fumbles worse than Maxwell Smart.  The inconsistencies make it hard to know whether we are supposed to laugh or be seriously concerned about the characters.

There is also a mildly inconsistent tone in the juxtaposition of attempted humor and graphic violence.  As with the movie Kick Ass and the more recent The Kingmen, I find the combination off-putting.  I don't mind graphic violence, but it takes me out of the comedy and makes it difficult to get back in.  I can't laugh at Melissa McCarthy if I think she's going to be shot in the head and brains will go flying out.

The plot spirals out of control until we are dealing with Bobby Canavale as . . . I honestly don’t know.  His character seemed to exist just to look good and serve as a plot point.  When the thing ends, well, it just ends with some deus ex machina exposition and the obligatory closing credit end tag.  And, by the way, I seriously doubt that the basement of the CIA is infested with bats and mice.  I’m just sayin’.

I’ll even criticize the utilization of Allison Janney as McCarthy’s humorless boss (the script actually has her say, “I have no sense of humor.”).  Janney can be an hysterically funny actress (she just won an Emmy for Mom and was really funny in the sort lived series Mr. Sunshine), so if you cast her in a comedy why burden her with being the straight woman?  Morena Baccarin, also an Emmy nominated actress, similarly shows up in a role that could have been handled by a far less talented actress.

If I were grading on a scale from 1 to 10 I’d give Spy about a 6.43.  It will deliver laughs, but it never builds the comedic stakes in a way that is either funny or plausible.  McCarthy delivers another excellent comedic performance, but she is surrounded by a collection of characters who are more funny in theory than in execution.  It is easier to recognize the one dimensional characters when there is a four dimensional one in the lead.

All hail the Warriors

One of my favorite sports quotes comes from, I believe, Damon Runyon: Remember, the race is not always to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet!

Of course the professional sages at outlets like ESPN can’t see it that way.  The odds of every sporting event are known to everyone well in advance; I bet you can place a bet on the coin flip at the next Super Bowl coming up heads.  But no matter how lopsided the odds, there is always a significant element at ESPN who are eager to explain to you why the odds are wrong.

There are understandable reasons for this.  If the outcome of a sporting event can be anticipated, people won’t tune in to watch it, and people won’t turn on ESPN to find out the result.  Also, if you want to develop a reputation as a sage, you can’t just “pick chalk.”  Lastly, well, that’s why they play the game.  Upsets happen; that’s why we watch sports; I am occasionally amused by how much effort ESPN puts into having experts predict an outcome when the reason sports are popular is their unpredictability.

So, many ESPN programs yesterday had multiple talking heads explaining why Cleveland was going to win Game 6 of the NBA Finals and had a good chance of winning Game 7.  Idiots.

Like I said, it was understandable.  Pardon the Interruption featured Mark Jackson explaining why the Cavaliers were going to win.  Mark Jackson’s qualifications?  He was the coach of the Warriors last season that was fired after they lost in round one of the Playoffs.  If Mark Jackson knew so much about basketball, why did the Warriors do so much better after they fired him?

Another Warrior-doubter was Charles Barkely, who picked the Cavaliers to win despite the fact that “analytics” said the Warriors had a 75% chance of winning the series at the outset.  Heck, when the Warriors were down 2-1 FiveThirtyEighty said they still had a 60% chance of winning despite being behind.  Barkley once famously said “Analytics is crap.”  As Barkley’s friend Michael Wilbon explained on PTI, Barkley has lost $10 million betting on sporting events because he doesn’t believe in analytics.

Barkley also said the Warriors couldn’t possibly win because “jump shot shooting teams” can't win in the NBA.  Of course for a rebuttal you could talk to the 67 teams that lost to the Warriors during the regular season, along with the teams they beat in the Playoffs on the way to becoming one of the top ten NBA teams of all time, maybe top three.

So we learned this from the Warriors’ championship: Charles Barkley is a big fat idiot who knows nothing about basketball and should shut up.

Most people who picked Cleveland to win had one seemingly persuasive argument: LeBron James is really, really good.  I can’t count the number of times I heard someone on ESPN say they weren’t going to bet against the best player in the world.

But wasn’t LeBron the best player in the world last year?  Did his team win?  No?  LeBron has been in the league, and been the best player in the league, for twelve seasons but has won only two championships; that makes him the anti-Celtics, who lost only two championships in one 13 years stretch.  The fact that LeBron is the best basketball player in the world has never been enough to produce a championship.  That was why he left Cleveland; they were never going to get him enough help to win.  Their attitude was to ask what was the least amount they could spend to win a championship; that kind of thinking never succeeds.  You win by trying too hard.  They finally got him the help he needed this year, but then Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving went down and once again it was LeBron and a bunch of guys named Fred.

The Warriors were going to win the NBA Championship.  Why?  Because without Love and Irving, they Cavs were a far inferior team, and a superior team will beat an inferior team most of the time (that’s WHY they are considered superior).  The Warriors were probably a better team even if the Cavs had Love and Irving, but we’ll never know for sure.

So all hail the Warriors!  Let’s see what happens when the next NBA season starts in, what, three weeks?

All Star voting: because this time, it counts!

Elections hold a special place in the American psyche.  On the one hand, the assurance of “one man, one vote” (this month’s Supreme Court maybe notwithstanding) assures us that even the lowliest of the low have as much influence on an election as one of the Koch Brothers (sort of).  On the other hand, Boss Tweed once said, “I don’t care who does the electin’ as long as I do the nominatin.”  And there was Chicago Mayor Daley’s benevolence in making sure that no Chicago resident, no matter how long dead, would be denied a voice in democracy.

The latest election outrage concerns the baseball All-Star Game voting, which is taking place exclusively on-line for the first time.  To everyone’s surprise, there may be some chicanery involved.  If the voting stopped right now, 7 of the 9 American League starters would be from the Kansas City Royals.  The Royals are a good team, but not that good.

There are precedents, of course.  In Ichiro Suzuki’s first season almost all of the Seattle Mariners lead in the voting at one time, and four were eventually elected into the All Star game thanks to an abundance of on-line votes from Japan, where every Mariner’s game was televised but no other games were.  In 1957, long before the age of cyber-voting, Cincinnati Reds fans stuffed the ballot box with paper ballots enough to elect seven Reds to the starting line-up.  This outcome was (arbitrarily) overruled by Commissioner Ford Frick, who substituted vote “losers” Willie Mays and Henry Aaron for two of the Cincinnati players.

After the debacle of 1957 fans lost their voting rights, but the eventually got them back in 1970.  Since then the format has been tinkered with. On the one hand the Commissioner wants the voice of the fan to be heard; on the other hand most of the fans are idiots.  They either vote for all of their team’s players, or they vote for who was good last year, or they vote for old familiar names no matter how far they have fallen. 

I don’t expect Commissioner Selig Manfred (sorry, old habit) to override these results.  I expect other teams’ fans will respond in kind, and eventually the number of Royals starting at the All-Star game will be reasonable.  But let this be a lesson to anyone who seriously advocates for on-line voting in real elections; the last thing I want is for Microsoft to announce the name of the next president.

While we are talking about All-Star games, let’s talk about them mattering.  After the debacle (it is funny how often that word gets used when discussing baseball) of the 2002 All Star game ending in a 7-7 tie after both teams ran out of pitchers, Commissioner Selig (ahh, that just sounds right) decreed that the solution was to make the game “matter.”  It matters because now the league that wins the All Star game gets home field advantage in the World Series.

I have no problem with this.  Yes, it is silly that the outcome of an exhibition game featuring players mostly from teams that have a limited shot at the post-season should determine home field advantage.  But the alternative most often proposed is to go back to the old system of alternating years, with the National League getting home field one year and the American League the next.

I try to imagine a father explaining to his young son why their favorite team lost in the World Series in seven games.  He’ll say it was because the other team had home field advantage.  When the son asks why, the father replies, “Because, Timmy, this is a year that is divisible by two. If it was an odd numbered year, our team would have won”  I then imagine the son becoming a life-long football fan.

Now that intra-league play is ubiquitous, one could make a case for which ever league wins the most games against the other league should get home field advantage.  But what if it’s a tie?  Do you next go for run differential?  Eventually you’ll end up like the NFL, determining playoff spots by the team with the best non-conference record against opponents with winning records in December.  As long as the All Star game doesn’t end in a tie, you’re fine.

Except the All Star game DID end in a tie once.  None of the changes that were made means they won’t run out of pitchers again.  Maybe home field advantage for the World Series should just go to the league with the Home Run Derby champ.  That makes as much sense as anything.

What does Rashomon mean?

In the classic film The Princess Bride, the character played by Wallace Shawn keeps using the word, “Inconceivable!”  After several instances his compatriot, played by Mandy Patinkin, says, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”  That’s the way it is with language; a word enters the language meaning one thing, and then morphs into something else.  The word ironic used to mean one thing, then a hit song came out and suddenly it is a synonym for coincidence.

 I watched the classic 1950 film Rashomon the other day; not for any particular reason, it was just on TCM overnight and I decided to put it on my DVR.  I had of course seen the film before (according to Netflix I returned the disc in 2004, and I had seen it in revival houses at least twice before that).  Something always bothered me about the film, and this time I finally figured out what it was: Rashomon is not an example of a Rashomon-like plot.

When something is described as having a “Rashomon-like plot” we know what it means—scenes will be replayed from different character perspectives, and the reality of the scene will be subtly altered. The best example I can think of is an episode of The Dick Van Dyke show called The Night the Roof Fell In, written by John Whedon (grandfather of Joss Whedon; wow!).  In that episode Rob comes home late from work and he and Laura fight, except that from Rob’s perspective he’s gracious and charming and Laura is a nag, while Laura sees Rob as inconsiderate and oaf-ish while she is a saint.  The goldfish in the living room (who are never seen again in the series) see the whole thing objectively.

In this example, no one’s version of the facts differs greatly, only their interpretation.  Yes, in Rob’s version he avoids the famous trip over the ottoman and in Laura’s he takes a pratfall, but it is mostly about line reading.  The characters say the same lines, but just with different inflections.

The thing is, this is NOT what happens in Rashomon.  Rashomon tells the story of a death that takes place in a forest in medieval Japan.  There are three witnesses at the trial.  The first is the thief who admits he attacked the husband, tied him up, seduced the wife and then killed the husband in honorable combat.  The second is the wife, who tells a similar but factually different story, that she was raped by the bandit she doesn’t know how the husband died.  The third is the spirit of the dead husband, speaking through a medium, who says he committed suicide after being shamed by the bandit and his wife, who asked the bandit to kill the husband.  Lastly a woodcutter, who observed the scene but did not testify at the trial, comes forward with what supposedly really happened.

The point is that the stories are not different due to each character’s perspective; the stories are completely factually dissimilar! The witnesses aren’t slanting their testimony, they are objectively lying.  The bandit says that he fought a duel with the husband; the husband says he killed himself.  That is not a difference in perspective.  The bandit says the wife fought for her honor; the wife indicates she gave in willingly.  The bandit says he freed the tied-up husband, but the wife says she released him.  It’s all lies.

Maybe I should go back and re-examine old films.  Maybe the meaning of Rosebud is obvious.  Maybe Some Like It Hot is actually a serious examination of the perils of organized crime.  Maybe the third film in the Matrix trilogy makes sense.

All I know is that I am going to re-watch The Usual Suspects before I tell anyone that I’ve just been Keyser Soze’d.

In Memoriam: Christopher Lee

Veteran film actor Christopher Lee has passed away at the age of 93.  “Veteran” seems to be a bit of an understatement, as Lee had started acting in the 1940’s and was still active in the 2010’s thanks to an indomitable constitution and the sudden demand for older British actors in fantasy films like The Hobbit (where would Ian McKellen be without X-Men and Lord of the Rings?).

 Lee, like many other actors relegated to the horror bin (Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price), was a much better actor than his material in most cases.  His interpretation of Dracula shifted the focus from horror to sexiness, paving the way for the later Frank Langella interpretation that turned a centuries-old bloodsucker into a 19^th century Hugh Hefner.

 I always felt that Christopher Lee was a tremendous missed opportunity—he should have been cast as the original James Bond, not Sean Connery.  I know it is sacrilege to disparage Connery’s iconic performance as the world’s greatest spy, but Lee possessed the upper-class bearing that Connery lacked (author Ian Fleming preferred David Niven to Connery, and Lee is certainly closer to Niven than Connery in style).  Ian Fleming also happened to be a step-cousin to Lee, which would have made his casting all the more fitting (Fleming reportedly wanted Lee cast as the titular villain in the first Bond film, Dr. No).  Lee would have made a great James Bond; he was tall, athletic, suave, and had established his sexiness credentials with Dracula.  Oh well.

 Lee did achieve his dream of appearing in a Bond film with his role as Francisco Scaramanga in the Roger Moore film The Man With the Golden Gun.  While the movie has its dated elements (the MacGuffin is a “solex agitator” that makes solar power economical) it features a great henchman (Herve Villechaize as Nick Nack), two great Bond Women (Maud Adams and Britt Ekland) a great stunt (the car that does a 360 degree roll while jumping over a river), and one of Bond’s greatest villains.  This is one of the rare Bond movies that actually gets into the backstory of its bad guy; Scaramanga was the son of circus performers and became a trick shot artist. He shot and killed an animal trainer who had killed an elephant that Scaramanga had befriended, and he decided he liked killing humans and became an assassin for hire.  Lee brought greater depth and intelligence to his portrayal of Scaramanga than the typical actor playing a Bond villain (*cough*Kurt Jergens*cough*).

 Despite all of that, The Man With the Golden Gun was the lowest-grossing Bond film and nearly ended the series.  Again, oh well.

 Despite his roots in the Hammer studio’s production of horror films, Lee’s greatest contribution to the genre occurred in 1973 with his role as Lord Summerisle in the original version of The Wicker Man (not to be confused with the wretched remake starring Nicolas Cage many years later).  Once again, Lee took what could have been a one-dimensional role and made him intelligent, rational, and sympathetic.  The film is a step up from most modern horror films that emphasize shock and gore instead of tension and character.

 Of course Lee is best known to modern audiences as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings series, unless you prefer Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels (I don’t).  The casting of Lee as a heavy is, I suppose, inevitable, but what could he have done with the role of Gandalf if McKellen hadn’t been available?  Maybe he lacked the mirth needed for the early Gandalf scenes, but he certainly had the gravitas for the later movies.

 IMDB lists 281 acting credits for Christopher Lee.  He worked into his 90’s and had roles in pre-production when he died.  His IMDB bio just goes on and on and on with fascinating facts.  He lived quite a life.

Hope Solo isn't Ray Rice

Gender issues and sports have been in a state of flux for some time.  Mo’ne Davis made the insult “throws like a girl” obsolete.  The 1976 Men’s Olympic decathlon gold medal winner is now named Caitlyn.  The WNBA has a problem the NBA doesn’t have, namely two of its players involved with domestic abuse charges against each other.  As the character Willow Rosenberg said on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, “It’s a turvy-topsy world.”

 Domestic abuse charges have involved another woman athlete, US Women’s Soccer goalkeeper Hope Solo.  The charges, which were dismissed because of the non-cooperation of the victims, have led some of the cognoscenti on ESPN to question whether Hope Solo should be the goalie on the American team at the Women’s World Cup, given that other athletes charged with domestic assault saw their playing time diminished.  Ray Rice has been out of the NFL since his suspension (was that for two games, six games, or infinite games, Mr. Goodell?), and Adrien Peterson missed all but one game of last season over issues with abuse of his child.  Some are asking why does Ms. Solo get to continue to represent her country when male athletes in similar situations have not been allowed to play?

 It’s almost a Pavlovian response now with sports reporters—they salivate at the words “domestic abuse.”  But let’s back off from labels and try to apply some perspective.  Generally speaking, I don’t think it is sexist to submit that the primary purpose of domestic violence laws is to protect women from men.  Yes, they can apply to people in a same-sex relationship and yes, an athletic woman can commit violence against a man.  But that’s not the norm in the vast majority of cases.

 It isn’t fair to Hope Solo to play the “If she were a man she wouldn’t be allowed to play after domestic abuse accusations” card precisely because she’s not a man.  I’m not saying she’s not capable of committing violence against a man; she’s a professional athlete who could probably beat the crap out of me without working up a sweat.  I won’t even get into the fact that one of her alleged abuse victims was her 6’9” nephew.  Domestic violence laws are about eliminating one element of a patriarchal society; the idea that a man’s wife is indistinguishable from his property, or his dog.  In some Southern states a dog might have greater protection than a wife.

 The reason why so many domestic abuse cases come to light is precisely because men who hit women often don’t cover it up because they feel entitled.  Ray Rice knocked out his girlfriend and then dumped her unconscious body on the floor of a casino, clearly not expressing any remorse over possibly injuring someone he supposedly cared about.  In his mind, she got what she had coming, so why should he get upset?  He didn’t try to conceal what he did because he didn’t think he did anything wrong.

 You can apply domestic abuse laws to women, but that just shows how far we’ve come since the days when a majority of states did not apply rape laws to husbands and wives.  Men tend to be bigger than women (especially professional athletes); they tend to make more money, have more authority, and have more connections to people in power.  The number of abuse cases before the NFL just proves that we still have a long way to go before women have the same rights as men, and domestic abuse laws are one way to try and level the playing field.

 I found it interesting that in 2007 sports reporters did NOT play the “If she were a man” card when Hope Solo complained about not starting for the US in the semi-final World Cup match against Brazil.  Solo was criticized for not being a “team player.”  But if she had been a man, wouldn’t she have been praised?  Wasn’t she just doing what Keyshawn Johnson did when he wrote an auto-biography titled “Just Give Me the Damn Ball”?  Don’t we lionize male athletes like LeBron James, who disregarded his coach's instructions to in-bound the ball on the final play of the game and instead received the in-bound pass and shot the winning basket?

 Also, the US lost that game 4-0, indicating that Solo was correct that replacing her with a 36 year old goalie who hadn’t played in three months was (my words now) incredibly stupid.  Given the success of Solo’s subsequent career the decision to replace her is even less defensible eight years later.

 I am not defending Hope Solo’s actions.  From the reports I’ve read, she sounds like a jerk that may have alcohol problems.  Maybe if the abuse allegations were more clear-cut there would be a case for keeping her out of the World Cup.  But sports reporters shouldn’t use the label “accused of domestic violence” to equate Solo with Ray Rice and any of a dozen other alleged abusers in the NFL.  Given her career and the murkiness of the charges, she should be allowed to represent America in the Women’s World Cup.

 Besides, our Women’s team might actually win; it’s not like our Men’s soccer team will win a World Cup anytime soon.

TV Review: Stitchers

TV Review: Stitchers

In the history of television, there have been blind detectives (Longstreet), fat detectives (Canon), bald detectives (Kojak), old detectives (Barnaby Jones), Polish detectives (Banacek), detectives with perfect memories (the seemingly unkillable Unforgettable), even mentally deranged detectives (Gaines, not to mention the current Perception).  But the new sci-fi series Stitchers breaks new ground—a detective who can’t tell time.

Stitchers stars Emma Ishta as a grad student named Kirsten who suffers from “temporal dysphasia” meaning she can’t feel the passage of time.  I say she suffers, but actually everyone around her suffers as apparently this condition means you can’t feel emotion or interact with anyone cordially.  Kirsten explains to the police officer who informs her that her “father” died that once she saw his body, it was like he had always been dead, so there was no point in feeling grief.  I’m not sure that’s plausible, but I’ll go with it for now.

Kirsten is abducted by a clandestine government agency who describe themselves as “NSA-ish” to participate in a unique investigative technique.  Government scientists have discovered how to hack into the memories of a recently deceased person in order to glean information.  For some reason they believe that a woman with temporal dysphasia might be able to do this better than the first participant (all Kirsten is told is that she “is no longer with the program” with ominous looks).  They need Kirsten to tap into the mind of a dead bomber to find out where he planted two bombs before he killed himself.

This is an excuse for some attempts at interesting editing as Kirsten goes bouncing around the memories of a corpse.  Of course it is like a TV series where a detective talks to the dead—if they could communicate clearly and succinctly there’s be no show, so all the information she gets is elliptical.  But since anyone with temporal dysphasia is used to having to deduce how long she's been someplace or what people are feeling, Kirsten is able to zero in on the important clues.

The whole thing is preposterous but helped by a couple of welcomed familiar faces. Salli Richardson-Whitfield, late of the classic Syfy show Eureka, stars as the head of the secret government agency.  After her stint on Eureka she is accustomed to uttering techno-babble convincingly and issuing stern ultimatums.  The other familiar face is Allison Scagliotti, who single handedly saved Warehouse 13 from dying of boredom, as Kirsten’s exasperated roommate.  She once again plays a hacker, so her recent acting background comes into play as well.

The whole thing is immensely silly, but it seems to have a sense of its own silliness.  Kirsten is required to wear a skintight black suit when “stitching” which she refers to as a Catwoman suit; when she makes an arch comment about the suit, the tech guys who designed it seriously intone, “Don’t worry, we’re men of science” and then do a no-look fist bump.

The pilot suffers from “pilot-itis” a disease that happens when shows with complicated premises have to establish the basic scheme of the series, introduce all the characters, and have an intelligible stand-alone episode, all in 45 minutes of screen time.  I found the pilot to be passable, but I’ll have to be convinced that the creators know what they are doing.

The pilot episode beats the “temporal dysphasia” drum with a big stick.  Would someone with that condition be a non-empathetic, emotionless drone?  How does she “will” a door open when in someone’s memories? Why does she see memories from a third person perspective?  I’m willing to cut the show some slack (you can either enjoy shows like Eureka or you can spend your life on chat boards pointing out the inconsistencies) but they better have plans for making things more interesting on a weekly basis.

Stitchers is on ABC Family, which is weird.  Not as weird as when ABC Family showed Middle Man, an awesome sci-fi show that was brilliant but on the wrong network.  I don’t know if ABC Family will cut this science fiction show more slack, or whether there is another one hour drama about an unconventional family waiting in the wings.  I enjoyed the pilot of Stitchers, was happy to see two good (and good-looking) actresses like Scagliotti and Richardson-Whitfield find some work, and am curious to see where the show goes from here.

TV Review: Community finale "Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television"

Series finales are strange things.  They used to be rare, back in the days when television series were theoretically going to last forever.  There was the final episode of The Fugitive in the 1960s, the most watched TV episode until that title was taken away by MASH (although at 2 ½ hours that was less a finale and more of a miniseries).  The British series The Prisoner fascinated and alienated most of its audience with an ending that explained everything and nothing. 

Lost was one of the first TV shows to want to know its own end date, so it could plan accordingly.  At some point, we all decided (or it was decided for us) that we needed closure.  Any successful series (either critically or monetarily) had to produce a last hurrah so all the fans could come back for one final thrill.  Sometimes it worked (Mary Tyler Moore Show) and sometimes not (Lost). 

Sometimes finales were far stranger than the shows they were wrapping up (Newhart, St. Elsewhere) and sometimes they just . . . ended (The Sopranos).  Some were actually so bad the seriously diminished the quality of all the prior episodes (How I Met Your Mother).

Yet another neo-classic TV series has apparently closed up shop.  Community, despite very long odds, managed to reach the first part of its mantra, “Six seasons and a movie.”  Okay, the show ended on Yahoo, not NBC, but given that currently NBC’s longest running sit-com is Undateable, that may be for the best.  The good news: Community sticks the landing, nailing it with one of the best and most internally satisfying TV episodes of all time, Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television.

Which is not to say it is a great episode of Community; Community is far too quirky to be reduced to a ranking of episodes.  Even the best episodes of Season Six were not nearly as funny as the pinnacles the show reached in seasons one and three (two was just sort of there; four was produced without showrunner Dan Harmon; season five was some sort of apology from NBC to Harmon that ended with a whimper). Season six produced a couple of very good episodes (Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing, Modern Espionage) and some real drek (Intro to Recycled Cinema, Basic RV Repair and Palmistry).  But mostly it was about seeing the gang some more.

Community has done a great job of replacing cast members on the fly, and the additions of Paget Brewster and Keith David have helped ease the losses of Donald Glover, Yvette Nicole Brown and Chevy Chase (okay, Chase’s absence didn’t need easing).  But for the final episode they mostly ignore the newbies and find emotional strings binding the long-term characters together in ways they (and we) weren’t aware of.

That is one aspect of the Community [season/series] finale that makes it stand out compared to most other episodes of the show: it has a surprising amount of heart.  They have toned down the ‘shipping a lot since the early seasons when there was an intermittent but on-going Britta/Annie debate taking place in Jeff Winger’s head.  Season one set up the straw man of a Britta/Professor Slater choice only to end with Jeff and Annie memorably locking lips in the final episode.  Meanwhile, one of the funniest moments of a lackluster season two was the reveal near the end of the season that Jeff and Britta had been hooking up in secret during the entire season, the audience just never saw it.

 

Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television brings appropriate closure to the matter, as Jeff now fantasizes about being married to Annie only to realize that his moment has passed and that Annie’s no longer an option.  Community typically focused solely on the sexual aspects of (pardon the phrase) coupling; the disastrous Britta/Troy hook up was based on nothing but the fact that they were both good looking heterosexuals.  The attraction between Jeff and Annie was initially physical; she was an insecure but incredibly hot 18 year old, and he was an older, worldlier man dissimilar from the boys she’d known in high school (her high school crush Troy was the opposite of worldly).  But as they grew into the characters they became in season six, Jeff’s feelings for Annie blossomed into something far deeper than lust, while her feelings matured and became platonic.  It is to the writers’ credit that they acknowledge the rift instead of shoehorning in a stock happy ending with Jeff, Annie, their imaginary son Sebastian and a white picket fence.

Of course this being Community, the final episode has to be meta, or rather it has to be meta about being meta, coming up with the most meta plot since Cabin in the Woods.  Each character pitches what they’d like “Season Seven” to be like, which results in Jeff leading a study group of hot/nerdy redheads and Britta running a rogue nation state in international waters.  Mostly Dean Pelton runs around in a diaper.

But ultimately the pretense is stripped away.  The two brightest characters, Annie and Abed, leave for the FBI and Hollywood, respectively.  Elroy takes off to visit an old flame in California.  And the rest . . . they sit in a bar and toast themselves.  When anyone announces they are leaving, they are asked if they are coming back, only to answer, “Maybe. Probably. Maybe.”

Given that two of the cast (Ken Jeong and Paget Brewster) are already signed for other series debuting in the Fall, season seven seems unlikely.  But Community always lived by its own terms, even if that meant surviving on corporate support from Subway instead of millions of dollars of ad revenue from the network.  But I guess there is the pesky issue of the movie . . . .

Community produced some great episodes, from the first paintball episode Modern Warfare (directed by Fast and Furious Five director Justin Lin) to season five’s animated GI Joe parody, GI Jeff.  It won an Emmy for animation (Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas) and was nominated for writing in a comedy (Remedial Chaos Theory, which was also nominated for science fiction’s Hugo award).  It was erratic, and often some shows were sacrificed so the cast and crew could put more effort into other episodes.  IIRC, according to the DVD commentary the role-playing game episode in season five, Advanced Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, was more or less responsible for the last two episodes of that season sucking (in creator Dan Harmon’s own estimation).

Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television is one of the most satisfying series finales I can remember.  No grand send off, no mystical whoozits, just the characters being themselves for one last 30 minute ride.  What happens to Jeff Winger, Britta Perry, Craig Pelton, Ben Chang, and Frankie Dart is left up to the fates that control these things. 

Will the prophecy be fulfilled?  Will six seasons be followed by a movie?  Hey, if they can make Entourage into a movie, Community deserves a shot.