The Best British Films/TV Series You Haven't Seen

Jeremy Brett is the quintessential Sherlock Holmes.  Once you watch The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, you will never be able to read any Holmes stories without hearing Brett's voice.  Available on Netflix Disc.

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Sir Alec Guinness is masterful as George Smiley in the ORIGINAL adaptation of John LeCarre's novels.  First watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then follow it up with Smiley's People.  I can't say enough about the quality of the acting in these two BBC miniseries from 1979 and 1982, respectively.  The 2011 remake is significantly inferior.  Don't bother with it.  The original is available on Netflix Disc.

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When I was a boy, my family would sit together and watch All Creatures Great and Small on PBS.  To this day, it is still one of my favorite shows.  In fact, as you can see above, I visited the real Yorkshire town where the real "James Herriot" practiced.  The museum has the original BBC set, which you'll notice when comparing the photographs above.  The true adventures of veterinarian James Herriot in England's Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s and 1940s are family-friendly and a real treat.  It's just a shame that the original actress that played Helen, the lovely Carol Drinkwater, left the show after three seasons. Available on Netflix Streaming and Disc.

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The 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House is a wonderful BBC miniseries!  Available on Netflix Streaming and Disc.  Features Big Daddy Lannister and Wedge Antilles from Star Wars!***************************************************************************

Island At War is a British miniseries about the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II.  A great dramatization of a difficult time for the Englishmen of Guernsey and Jersey.  Available on Netflix Streaming and Disc.
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Another fantastic adaptation of Dickens by the BBC.  I highly recommend this 2008 version of Little Dorrit. Not currently available on Netflix.
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Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave dazzle as Winston and Clementine Churchill in The Gathering Storm.  Available on Netflix Disc.
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Anthony Kitchen is absolutely perfect as Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle in Foyle's War.  A great view into life in England during and just after World War II.  Available on Netflix Disc.

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The Up Series (7 Up, 14 Up, 21 Up...all the way to 56 Up) follows a group of British children from age 7 to age 56 through a series of documentaries that started in 1964.  What a fascinating study of the lives of these human beings.  Available on Netflix Streaming and Disc.

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Behold the greatest detective in medieval England...Brother Cadfael of Shrewsbury.  Available on Netflix Disc.

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Long Way Round chronicles the real-life adventure of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman to travel round the world on BMW motorcycles.  Watch it, you'll love it!  Available on Netflix Streaming and Disc.

John Kerry...The Belle of the Ball

"It’s the buzz from Boston to the Beltway: What the heck is going on with Secretary of State John Kerry’s face???  The former senator’s usually craggy puss is now smooth, puffy and showing no sign of the laugh lines, crow’s feet or deep forehead creases that were evident in his 2004 official Senate portrait."  

-- Boston Herald, September 20th, 2013

ALL the international diplomacy fashion blogs were abuzz about it.  It was on the tip of the tongue of every diplomat, fashionista, and designer in and around Foggy Bottom.  Vladmir Putin blogged about it.  Bashir Assad wondered about it in cabinet meetings.  David Cameron and Francois Hollande gossiped about it ENDLESSLY.

 

The topic of conversation?

Was John Kerry pretty enough to bring about world peace?

Sure, his friends always reminded him how beautiful he looked in an ascot, or wearing a collared shirt with a few buttons tastefully undone.  But a Secretary of State can grow jaded about these kind of compliments.  I mean, it's one thing to have your friends say this kind of thing, but it's another to have a European foreign minister undress you with her eyes in front of everyone at the Palace of Versailles.

The problem is that everyone in the diplomatic community over-glamorizes physical beauty.  Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat received endless fan mail from teenage girls after the Oslo Accords.  Neville Chamberlain couldn't get Tiger Beat to leave him alone after his peace agreement with Hitler.  Screaming Parisian girls constantly disrupted the Paris Peace Accords whenever Henry Kissinger would appear outside for a smoke break.  Warren Christopher received so many marriage proposals after the Dayton Accords that he shaved his head and refused to appear in public without a disguise for six months.

Despite all the compliments about his soft skin...Despite the comparison of his eyes to the color of a patrician's private lake...Deep inside, John Kerry didn't really believe he was beautiful.  Many wonder if his diplomatic skills would have completely collapsed if Simon Cowell and Bruce Jenner hadn't taken him aside and shown him that there was another way...a shortcut to beauty, and therefore, diplomatic excellence.

The procedure didn't take long.  But the effects were lasting.  America's status in the world has skyrocketed.  John Kerry has been hailed as perhaps the prettiest Secretary of State since George Schultz.

Dreams really do come true.

To The Moon, To Mars, or To Nowhere?

This Blargh Post contains a link to some more information on the state of NASA.  I found this article incredibly dispiriting, but hope that policymakers change course in the next few years...  

Adrift - From the Houston Chronicle

To Infinity and Beyond

45 years and two days ago, approximately six years before I was born, America launched a Saturn 5 rocket towards the moon.  This rocket contained three human beings: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.  Over the next 3.5 years there would be five more successful Apollo program moon landings.  Then it all stopped.  In the last 42 years, no men have walked on the moon.  And there is little chance anyone will walk on it anytime soon.

NASA's Constellation program was intended to be the next leap to the moon.  But President Obama cancelled it.  If only NASA were as important as the "Obamaphone" program.  Perhaps you can tell that I am bitter.  I find it shameful that our federal government continues to spend money on programs best left to states, localities, or private enterprise, instead of funding programs uniquely suited to the federal government's abilities.

Dams, interstate highway systems, and a space program are the sort of federal program I can get behind.  I believe in the idea of human progress and I don't think it lies in increasing the dependency of our citizens on a government check.

Also, if you think the moon landings were a hoax, I hope Buzz Aldrin punches you in the face.

To The Stars Through Westeros

Thanks to the Reddit user boo-yay, we now have a Westeros-esque sigil for every state of the union.  House Kansas, as you can see above, utilizes our state motto, "Ad Astra Per Aspera".  The unicorn is, of course, a reflection of the widespread worship of Ehlonna in most parts of eastern Kansas.  Here are some more Kansas/Game of Thrones metaphors:





Johnson County = Casterly Rock:  Rich?  Check.  Perceived as arrogant?  Check.  Sisters and brothers sleeping together?  Nope, that's Missouri.



BTK = Ramsay Bolton: Do they both like to torture?  Um, yeah, that's the "T" in BTK.  Were they both in law enforcement?  Sure, Bolton Jr. was given enforcement tasks by dear ol' dad.






KU College Republicans = Brotherhood Without Banners:  They fight the good fight surrounded by a host of enemies...they are few and the odds are bad.  They sometimes return from the dead?  Yes, actually, I saw it happen in 1993.




The City of Topeka = Hodor:  Both incapable of rational thought, difficult to understand, and frumpy.  Biggest Difference:  Hodor is well-intentioned.



Kansas Cowboys = Wildlings/Free Folk:  Keeping it real beyond the civilized parts...keeping it real beyond the Wall.



Wilt Chamberlain = Gregor Clegane: The Mountain That Rebounds vs. The Mountain That Rides

Roy Scheider, BAMF

Tonight, I had the good fortune to be invited to a screening of William Friedkin's 1977 thriller, Sorcerer.  Friedkin is most famous for having directed The Exorcist and the Oscar-winning The French Connection, both of which belong in the pantheon of great films.  After the closing credits, the organizer of the screening arranged to have Friedkin participate in a Q&A session with us via Skype.  He quipped that Sorcerer star Roy Scheider became more difficult to work with after his great success in Jaws...which leads to this Blargh Post.

There are many overrated actors in Hollywood, but fewer underrated ones.  Scheider is one of the latter.  If you haven't seen The French Connection (Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, etc.), you are missing out on many fine performances.  Scheider was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Buddy Russo, and he earned it.  He is very believable as a rough-and-tumble police detective, and expertly plays the "Robin" to Gene Hackman's "Batman".

Scheider as Amity Police Chief Martin Brody is the decent, middle-class average guy who provides the human center of the cast of Jaws.  With larger-than-life Robert Shaw as Quint, and Richard Dreyfuss as the rich biologist Matt Hooper, Scheider provides a character that the audience can relate to.  This cast was one of the best of the 1970s.

The undisputed star of Sorcerer, Scheider plays an Irish-American teamster who participates in a robbery gone wrong.  Forced to flee the country, he ends up in a hell-hole of a central American country.  Desperate to flee to a better hiding spot, he and several others in similar predicaments agree to transport by truck a decaying cache of dynamite through the jungle and mountains.  As you might expect, it is a precarious situation.  Scheider's sly humor always comes through in his characters, and this role is no exception.

After Marathon Man and All That Jazz (which resulted in a second Oscar nomination) Scheider never really had the opportunity to play many interesting roles.  The 1980s saw him work, but not in films of the same caliber.  The 1990s were even worse, with gigs in a number of straight-to-video flicks and a starring role in a less-than-impressive TV show featuring a talking dolphin:

Roy Scheider died of blood cancer in 2008.  I, for one, will always appreciate his talent.

Two Steps From Hell

A couple years ago I encountered one of the most bizarre types of dance known to humanity.  The Two-Step, or Texas Two-Step, is the preferred dance style for country music.  Personally, I encountered it at a local country bar (don't ask why I was there) and found it to be highly infuriating. I had no idea that I was going to encounter a dance style that stands in opposition to all reasonable definitions of rhythm and movement.

I don't mean to BRAG, but I'm a pretty good dancer.  By that, I mean that I have a good sense of rhythm and can move to a beat.  But don't worry, you don't need these skills to do the Two-Step.  In fact, you don't really need music.  Instead, you only need muscle-memory, memorization, a hatred of natural rhythm, and legs.

Two quick steps, two slow steps...in a circle...foreverrrrr.  Just don't go the wrong way...it will remind you of that wheel in the Turkish prison from the movie Midnight Express:

I tried the Two-Step that night, but found that it is so inimical to natural rhythm that I couldn't perform it properly.  I have never felt so unnatural on a dance floor in my life.  In order to better understand this strange custom, I watched a How-To video on YouTube.  The money quote by the instructors: "You need to Two-Step for about 5 miles before it starts to become ingrained in your muscle memory."  WHAT!?!?  In other words, this type of dancing is so far from the natural movement of the body, you must practice it endlessly to overcome any natural sense of rhythm you might have.  This is fine for people with no rhythm, but what about those of us who are able to dance?  My body needs to move...it calls out to gyrate...it yearns to GROOVE.

Should it be banned?  Probably.  No, definitely.  In some countries, political prisoners are forced to Two-Step as punishment for various crimes.  Here's footage:

But what would replace the Two-Step?  I enjoy a lot of roots country music, and you've got to dance to it somehow.  You can't blame country music for the Two-Step, but there aren't a lot of other dance style alternatives. In the meantime, the key to dancing to the Two-Step, when you must, is to first suppress all internal rhythm.  Ignore the music, it won't help.  Memorize your steps, go counter-clockwise and ride it out as long as you can.  The song will eventually end.

I hereby call on someone to please create a better form of dance for this type of music. Perhaps a style that can utilize natural rhythm would be best.  Sorry, non-rhythmic white people, this outrage must come to an end.  The hardest part of a revolution is taking the first step...and avoiding the 2nd.

The Bastards of Fantasy...

Today, my battle-scarred companions and I begin our journey.  The road is hard and the obstacles are many.  There will be heartache and tears...and triumph.  When it all comes to an end, the victors will shout to the stars and the losers will crawl back into their holes.

I speak of fantasy football.

The road to the draft begins today.  The League of Gentlemen Bastards begins its yearly campaign of smack talk, bad draft choices, untimely injuries, and waiver-wire heroics.  When I clicked "Renew League" today on Yahoo, an electrified shiver pulsed through my body.  I could hear the faint echo of old battle cries..."Flacco in the 4th!"..."No girls in our fantasy league!"..."This never would have happened if we had fractional points!"..."return yard points are of the devil!"...

The Gentlemen Bastards do not brook failure...we do not tolerate those who forget to set their lineups...we exude fantasy football excellence through our very pores.  Mostly.  We give no quarter to the weak or the crippled...there is no code of chivalry for our lone Lady Bastard.  She accepts no sympathy or special treatment and gives none in return.  The jibes and jabs are thrown her way just as cavalierly as they would be towards any other Bastard.  Why, someone even questioned her child-bearing hips last season.  Mercy is for the weak.

We Bastards laugh at your lineup...we chuckle at your draft day failures...we mock your trade proposals.  We know more about Knowshon Moreno's skill set than Mrs. Knowshon Moreno (or his 3 mistresses in Vail, NYC, and Santa Fe, NM).  Our knowledge base is roughly as deep as the Marianas Trench, or as thick as Eric Decker's...little black book.

You want to join?  [chuckles]  GET IN LINE.  Our rites of passage rival that of the Army of Sparta.  WE...ARE...BASTARDS!

Our entrance exam takes longer than the MCAT.  Our secrecy rivals that of the Mossad.  Our rituals are discussed in hushed tones from the Kremlin to Langley, VA.  Ancient texts refer vaguely to our superstitions.  We will not be mocked.  We can not be imitated.  Our virtues are worshipped.  Our vices are feared.  And now we return for another season.

It has begun.

False Blood: Why I Quit on Sookie Stackhouse

  True Blood has been my guilty pleasure these past few years.  If you read my blargh posts, you'll know that I focus on the acting performances and an engaging story when I look for a good film or TV show.  But I need both...or else it just doesn't move me.  Sometimes I'll be drawn to a show because of the plot/subject matter, but eventually turn away if the performances are subpar.  I often find this to be the case with network television or stuff on the SyFy Channel, specifically Warehouse 13 and Eureka.

The problem with True Blood is different.  The cast is outstanding.  In particular, Anna Paquin (Sookie Stackhouse), Alexander Skarsgard (Eric Northman), and Ryan Kwanten (Jason Stackhouse) consistently deliver.  No, True Blood doesn't have an acting problem.  It has a politics problem.

Let's be honest, the politics of the people who develop and produce television shows is pretty much uniform.  Most of the time it doesn't matter, and when it does rear its leftist head, it is often easy to ignore.  However, I find that I can no longer ignore it in True Blood.  It's not so much the actual politics, but the ham-handed way a particular, highly overdone theme has been used so clumsily in True Blood.

Tell me if you've heard this trope before:  fundamentalist right-wing Christians are intolerant of anyone who is different and use Gestapo tactics to stop those immoral people that oppose them.  They constantly judge everyone and are particularly prudish about anything having to do with sex.  Plus, they are racists.  This describes the vast majority of the population of Bon Temps, Louisiana on True Blood.  The show's writers have been beating us over the head with this for years now...

1. Normal humans hate vampires because they are different.
2. A human televangelist starts a group called "Fellowship of the Sun" that attempts to turn people against vampires.
3. The intolerant Fellowship of the Sun turns violent and starts killing vampires.
4. The state of Louisiana imprisons vampires in camps and experiments on them...because they are different.

At its core, the show is an allegory about gay rights, which is fine, but it has become so cartoonish that I can no longer stand it (no matter how hot Lillith the vampire goddess is).  Yes, we understand that vampires are a minority that shouldn't be mistreated.  But great fantasy and science-fiction is great because it depicts human beings as they really are, not as caricatures.  If your Iraqi war veteran inevitably participated in war crimes and has PTSD, and every religious character (except for some black ones) hates, hates, hates...then MAYBE you need to reevaluate how you portray the people that you can't identify with.  A little tolerance might be in order.

The Bridge to a True Detective

The rise of television as an equal peer to film has been the big story of the past several years in the entertainment industry.  Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Mad Men have taken television to a whole new level.  The detective drama subgenre has also benefited from this trend.  In fact, it has produced the best television show of 2014.

True Detective stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as detectives with the Louisiana State Police investigating a serial killer who turns out to be connected with a group of men involved in child sex and ritual child murder.  Needless to say, this is not a subject for the easily disturbed.  I was so riveted during each episode that I found myself literally on the edge of my seat while watching the show.  The performances of the main actors and the supporting cast were so fantastic that I will never again look at those actors in the same way.  The wonderful Glenn Fleshler plays the bayou degenerate so well that I can't believe he won't be hitting it big very soon.  Then there's the haunting theme song:

I can only describe True Detective as hypnotic television...it draws you in and won't let go. 

Down the channel dial, on FX, you can find The Bridge, a show I just recently discovered.  Diane Kruger and Demian Bechir star, respectively, as El Paso and Chihuahua detectives brought together by a dead body found on the bridge between the two communities.  Kruger's character, Sonya Cross, is a detective with Asperger Syndrome, and is considered by her colleagues to be a bit weird due to her difficulty negotiating the emotional complexities of human interaction.  The outstanding (and Oscar-nominated) Bechir plays Mexican detective Marco Ruiz, an honest (except when it comes to his romantic relationships) policeman who has to negotiate the complex politics of a city run by drug cartels.

The political and social commentary in the show is often fascinating; a city split by a national border, with remarkably different experiences on each side.  However, what drives this show are the performances.  In particular, Tom Wright as Steven Linder, the oddball loner who travels to Juarez for reasons that are at first unclear, and Ted Levine (whom you might recognize), as Lt. Hank Wade, Cross' boss and the only human being she is close to.  

[Wright and Levine pictured below]

The first season is exclusively on Hulu Plus, which I didn't have.  However, they are currently offering a free 7-day trial, which I used to binge watch the entire first season (sorry, not sorry).  Season 2 premieres this Wednesday (July 9th) on FX.

Flags No Longer (and soon-to-be) Waved

On this occasion of the anniversary of American independence from what is my personal favorite of all colonial powers, it might be a good time for the remembrance of some nations that haven't happened yet, are no more, or probably should never have been.



Kurdistan has never been...but probably will be soon.  The Kurds are the largest nation in the world without a nation-state.  Split between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the Kurdish people have been gassed, imprisoned, tortured and generally crapped on for a very long time.  But their time is about to come.



In 1965 Rhodesia declared independence from the British.  The circumstances of their independence would turn out to be highly controversial.  The 223,000 white Rhodesians, wary of the chaos that had accompanied majority rule in other former colonies all around them, kept power for themselves.  Of course, this left the almost 3 million black Rhodesians without any political power.  A long guerrilla war eventually led to an political settlement giving blacks the right to vote.  Thus ended Rhodesia...and Zimbabwe was born.  It has been led by the disgusting Robert Mugabe ever since.  And now, it is an enormous pit of despair.  The white farmers have been systematically dispossessed of their land, murdered, or forced out.  The land has been given to blacks loyal to Mugabe, most of whom having no farming experience.  Thus, it has gone from the breadbasket of Africa to millions of its citizens facing starvation.



For a unique look at the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean experience I recommend several books:  Journalist Peter Godwin's Zimbabwe/Rhodesia books, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When A Crocodile Eats the Sun; and Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat.



Poor Czechoslovakia...even the coolest president in the world, Vaclav Havel, couldn't keep it together.  "Chikety-Czech! Slovakia was just slowing us down!"  At least, that's what my t-shirt says.  The Czechs had always been a little richer and a little less religious...and they always had Prague.  But mostly the split was about national identity going back a very long ways.  Despite sharing a language they went their separate ways in 1993.



A: "One ticket to Zaire, please."
B: "Sorry, sir, Zaire no longer exists."
A: "Well, is Kinshasa still the capital?"
B: "Not of Zaire."
A: "Wait a sec, I forgot that it's now called The Congo!  Ok, one ticket to The Congo please."
B: "Republic or Democratic Republic?"
A: "I don't know what kind of government they have!"
B: "Sir, there are two different Congos."
A: "Which one was Zaire?"
B: "The one that Kinshasa is in...it's called the Democratic Republic of the Congo."
A: "Oh.  What's difference?"
B: "The Republic was a colony of France and its capital is Brazzaville.  The Democratic Republic was called the Belgian Congo, and at one time was a wholly owned subsidiary of King Leopold II.  It's where the Rumble in the Jungle took place."
A: "Never mind, just sell me a ticket to Rhodesia.
B: [sigh]

Red's Dead, Baby...Red's Dead

It has become fashionable of late for people to pine for the days of the Cold War.  I am not the first to notice this phenomenon.  The anarchy of the post-Cold War world, with its lack of uniforms and greater difficulty in determining the motives of non-state actors, is naturally going to produce a longing for times when it was easier (unless you were one of the New Left critics like Sen. Chris Dodd or John Kerry) to determine who the bad guys were.  The historical distance from the collapse of communism in Europe (almost 25 years now) has enabled people to look upon those days with a certain kind of whimsy.



I am not one to pooh-pooh humor of any sort.  As long as it's a good joke, pretty much any subject is fair game.  However, lest we forget, communism killed about 100 million people in the 20th century.  But because it killed them in pursuit of the oh-so-noble goal of equality for all mankind, we are supposed to temper our outrage in ways that no one would ever do in regard to the other great killer of the 20th century, Nazism.

I just finished reading Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum, who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, her history of the enormous Soviet system of concentration camps.  Check out Gulag's 1-star review entitled "Neo Con Propaganda" for evidence that Soviet communism still has its defenders.  I highly recommend Iron Curtain for a view of the sickening ways the people of East Germany, Poland, and Hungary were oppressed immediately after they had just been traumatized by World War II.  For a wider, international view of the dark record of communism, read The Black Book of Communism, a joint project of French, Polish, and Czech historians.

One of the most fascinating revelations of both these texts is the consistency of the communist techniques, regardless of what part of the world they called home.  In order to achieve power, they would first form alliances, or "Popular Fronts", with Left and Center-Left parties to gain power and eliminate the threat from the Right.  Next, purge the government of the non-communist Left through violence and intimidation.  Once in power, they would systemically imprison and/or execute various classes of people, at various times, usually starting with the aristocracy and other elites and work their way through society.  A final step is the legacy of Stalin:  the purging of the Communist Party itself.  Often, it was a never-ending purge.

Communism was a real ideology that REALLY wanted to conquer the world and actively tried to do so.  For much of the Cold War, it seemed like the better bet to win in the contest with the western democracies.  The former communists who fought against it, and they were legion, often felt they had left the winning side.  And then it all collapsed in 1989.  We should all be grateful for that.

Three novels to help you better understand life under communism:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitszyn
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz