A Gentleman's Domain

Hollywoodland

I recently reviewed this movie as a guest contributor to the blog Just Eat The Damn Peach.   If you'd like to read it, please walk this way....

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If You Like This Sort Of Thing....

…which I do, you may well agree with me that this is absolutely brilliant.  Never mind the bit at the start when Cab Calloway is with them, doing a bit of scat singing.  He leaves them after a few moments, and lets them get on with it.  This is pure artistry and perfect co-ordination, and the Nicholas Brothers make it look so easy because they have worked very, very hard at their art.  They must have extraordinary lower body strength.  At one point, with seemingly no effort at all, they both do standing jumps up onto platforms at least three feet high.  At other moments, they make a man’s eyes water! How long did they have to practice doing the splits like that before they could do it without hurting themselves?  Fred Astaire, no mean dancer himself, called this the best dance routine ever filmed.  This was from a movie called “Stormy Weather” (1943) ( Note the all-black audience – that’s the way things were in America then.).   If you like this sort of thing, which I do, watch this and then compare it to the second rate crap that people fawn over these days in “Dancing With The Stars” and similar wastes of time.  If you don’t like this sort of thing, I’m sorry to have bothered you: please click onto something else.

Words & Music

One of my regular ports of call when strolling through the Thursday Thirteens every week is  The Story of Me.  If you don’t know it, go have a look and prepare to be entertained.  Chelle’s most recent TT was a list of thirteen of her favourite TV theme songs.  Like most people, I know lots of them and can call them to mind instantly.  In fact, I suspect that Chelle had people humming softly to themselves as they looked down the list.  I didn’t grow up in America and my TV watching habits were obviously different from Chelle’s, so there are some that I don’t know, but others brought back memories. 

Then I remembered a fact of passing interest – I say “passing interest” because I am about to pass it on to you.  Some of those themes songs that we heard every week (or every day if we watch the shows in syndication) have words, even though they are never heard.  In some cases, I suspect, they were not meant to be heard. They were a way for someone to get royalties because, when a song that has words and music (duh! They all have music) is publicly performed, both the composer and they lyricist receive a royalty. Hypothetical example:  if you hear “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”  played by the 55-strong Baltimore Comb & Toilet Paper Marching Band on your radio (I said it was hypothetical), without words,  it generates a royalty payment to both Andrew Lloyd Webber who wrote the music and to Tim Rice who wrote the lyrics.   Those two very successful and rich gentlemen are no doubt both happy with that situation but it is not unheard of for someone not normally associated with music to dash of a quick lyric and attach it to the music of a TV or movie theme song in order to get royalties when the music is played.  The composers are often people under contract and not in any position to protest.  If they want their music published and performed, they just have to put up with it.

Another reason, of course, that we didn’t hear the words was that they were deemed quite unsuitable for a TV audience.  For instance, Johnny Mandel’s theme music for M*A*S*H  which I am sure you are all hearing in your heads right now, as you read this.  All those figures in army-issue green uniforms running uphill to meet the incoming helicopters. We all remember that, right?  Music playing in the background.  It was a very effective tune, because when the programme started, it sounded poignant and rather downbeat, matching the images of wounded men on stretchers and harassed looking doctors.  Half an hour later, when the show ended, usually after a final witty retort from one of the characters and a freeze-frame, the same theme sounded jaunty and cheerful, rounding off a fun half hour (incidentally, if I may be slightly partisan here, I much preferred watching M*A*S*H in England because there were no commercials and the BBC removed the completely unnecessary laugh track: I didn’t need anyone to tell me what the funny bits were).   Some of you may not know, if you didn’t see the movie M*A*S*H with Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, that the title of the theme, is “Suicide Is Painless” and Mike Altman’s downbeat lyrics match the title. In the film, one of the medical orderlies sings it to the accompaniment of a guitar while the camp dentist, who has decided to kill himself, has a last meal with his colleagues (the visual parodies of The Last Supper would definitely get today’s fundamentalists in a tizzy) and then climbs into a ready prepared coffin as the whole camp watches, before swallowing the fatal dose that Hawkeye has supplied him with. I won’t bother you with the why or wherefore.  Anyway, when they decided to make a TV series of M*A*S*H a few years later, they concluded that the music would be perfect but, rightly in my view, that the words just would not do for home TV audiences.  The TV show was as firmly anti-war as the film, but not nearly as bitter.  And that’s why right now you are hearing the M*A*S*H music in your heads, but probably not the words.

One equally memorable TV theme that had unheard words was the theme to Star Trek (I mean the real Star Trek, with Captain Kirk, Spock and the gang).  I suspect that these fell into the category I mentioned above, of words that were probably never intended to be heard.  I certainly have never heard them performed anywhere, by anyone.  Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek wrote them.  They are not exactly up to Cole Porter or Irving Berlin standard.  In fact, they seem a bit clumsy to me, with one or two syllables unaccounted for, hanging loose on their own.  However, the man created the show that gave us “The Trouble With Tribbles”  and “The Corbomite Maneuver” so I’m not complaining too much.  And in case you’re curious, here are the words:

Theme for “Star Trek”
Music by Alexander Courage, lyrics by Gene Roddenberry
© 1966. All rights reserved

Beyond
The rim of star-light
My love
Is wand’ring in star-flight.
I know
He’ll find in start-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.

I know
His journey ends never.
His star trek
Will go on forever,
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.

And as the Starship Enterprise reaches warp factor five and whooshes off into the distance, I suspect that we all agree it was probably just as well that those lyrics were never performed. 

Did I have you all softly singing to yourselves as you read those words? I do hope so!

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And Another Thing...

The new TV season is starting, I am reminded of something that irritated me a year ago, when I first wrote this, and it still irritates me. It’s not earth-shattering or anything, but it’s one of those niggling little things that does bother me. Whenever they announce an episode of a TV series, often showing a trailer, why (if it isn’t a re-run) do they describe it as “all new”? Of course it’s all new! Either it’s a re-run, or it’s something we haven’t seen before. It’s the use of the word “all” which is redundant that I object to. No one ever heard of a show that is new up till the second commercial break, and then a re-run from then on. In the sense of TV shows that have never been broadcast before, the adjective “new” is a singular quality. It’s new or it isn’t. The word “all” serves no purpose, insults the viewer’s intelligence and I’m sorry but I want something done about it!

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A Blonde Moment

First of all, take a look at this.  Some of you may have seen it before.  It has been all over the net in the last couple of weeks; all over the media in the USA and, for all I know, in other countries too.  I first saw it on Bill Maher’s program "Real Time" on HBO last week.

Now, before you all shake your heads in disbelief, let me quote to you something that comes from the September 10,  2007 edition of Newsweek.  The writer is their columnist George Will.

Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction.

With respect to Mr Will, I can not find it within myself to agree.  This woman, for that is what the law says she is, has passed through the education system of this country and I think we are entitled to believe that after all that schooling she should at least be able to speak in actual sentences.  She was taking part in a contest of a kind that encourages the belief that if you look pretty you are somehow better than other people, of a kind that has been jettisoned in so many countries, but even beauty contests usually do make a pretence of including intelligence and character as part of the winning criteria (which is why it was a running joke for years that beauty contestants used to say that  their ambitions were to work with children or animals and to help bring about world peace) when in fact of course they simply provide an excuse for middle aged men to leer at attractive young women.  If the contestants and audience understand that, and are happy with that, then by all means let’s have these shows.  On the other hand,  if you are going to pretend that the girls taking part have to have reached a certain  level of intelligence, then surely creatures like this one shoud be weeded out during the selection process.  Is she really the best that South Carolina can do?  Does anyone feel that she does her state credit?   Those are two perfectly valid questions, I feel.   And in deciding the answers to them, I believe we are entitled to see how this girl answered what was, after all, a very interesting and important question.  Nothing to do with standards of decency – all to do with the way the education system prepares young people to face the world today.

This post also Appears at Buck Naked Politics.

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A Gentle Touch of Murder

There’s a rather pleasant little TV show I enjoy watching, imported from Britain, all about murder.  It’s called Midsomer Murders and stars John Nettles, who used to be Bergerac (only Brits of a certain age will understand that reference; others please just pass by on the other side).  Now, there are many earthy, in-yer-face British police shows – all the Prime Suspects, Wire In The Blood, Rebus, Waking The Dead to name but a few – but Midsomer Murders is gentle, easy stuff.  Definitely a pastoral version of  the English detective story, but set in the present day with real policemen, not in the 1930s with interfering amateurs.  And thoroughly unrealistic.  The programme is set in a rural area around the fictitious town of Cawston, and its location is never identified, though I like to think of it in either the Cotswolds or maybe Hampshire.  A charming place, full of big old houses, thatched cottages, and isolated farms which are mainly inhabited by eccentrics, the sexually repressed or the wealthy but troubled types you run into all over this atypical English landscape.  It’s a very dangerous place.  So far there have been over one hundred murders in this little corner of England (an England where, apparently, it never rains).  This makes it even more dangerous than Oxford was when Inspector Morse was on the job and the city had a murder rate higher than the rest of England put together.  Not to worry – Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby and his sidekick Sgt. Troy manage to solve every single one in the  space of each two-hour episode.  Someone needs to tell the scriptwriters that in the real world murders are solved by the combined efforts of whole police departments using  every resource at their disposal, not by a pair of detectives plodding about.

Still, no matter.  The show is an undemanding bit of fun and for someone like me who enjoys spotting them, a feast of British character actors.

“Oh look!” I exclaim to my wife, “There’s Frank Windsor.  He used to be in Softly Softly.” 

She nods patiently as I go on.

“That’s Eleanor Summerfield. I was in the audience when she did an episode of Just A Minute.”

“Yes, dear.”

“That’s Peter Jones.”  I remark , and she looks up.

“Peter Jones who was the voice of the book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”  she asks.

“Yes!”   

“That’s not how I imagined him at all.” she remarks, in a tone that suggests that she wants them to send this Peter Jones back and get another one.

“That actor is a direct descendant of the Duke of Wellington; the one who beat Napoleon.” I say, as Jeremy Clyde appears on screen.   She nods.

“Now that, “ I point out. “is Phyllis Logan.  I remember her when she played Lovejoy’s girlfriend.”

Lovejoy, of course, got very bitter and twisted in his later years and went on to become Al Sweringen in Deadwood, which was a fave of my wife’s, but this tenuous connection fails to enthuse her. She just watches quietly with me and as almost always happens we manage to guess the ending before it comes. Quite often the murderer kills himself just as the police are closing in on him. That must save a fortune in court costs.

The thing is, though, that Midsomer Murders is put out on channel 261 every Saturday morning at seven o’clock.  I don’t watch it then.  I shove a tape into the VCR the night before and set the timer, so we can watch it while we relax in  the evening.  And this is the point of all this blather.  I don’t think anyone should be watching television at seven o’clock in the morning.  I can’t explain it, but it just doesn’t seem right.  As anyone who has macheted their way through the various entries in my blog that deal with such matters will know, my instincts and sympathies  are entirely hedonistic – pleasure for pleasure’s sake is my motto.  Even so, I can not shake off the feeling that it is in and of itself wrong to watch television before you have had lunch.  This flies in the face of our twenty-first century, I know, when television watching at all times is possible, or even compulsory.  Try finding a doctor’s waiting room, in Gainesville anyway, where you aren’t subjected to CNN, Fox News, ESPN or even the 700 Club at full volume.  You want to sit quietly and read? What are you; some kind of a freak?  And what about those parents who like to plonk their children in front of the TV as soon as they get up, in order to keep them quiet and in the process blot up every drop of creativity or individual thought they may have?

So, in our household, the TV stays off until lunch at the earliest, and neither of us feels at all hard done by. Breakfast television might as well not exist. And when it is switched on it is because one or both of us wants to watch something, not because we want noise in the background.  Some people seem almost scared of switching the box off.   In the mornings it is as though it doesn’t exist.  I don’t think I will ever suddenly get an urge to drape dark cloth round table legs or to go looking for witches to burn, but I do have this one puritanical streak.  It’s rather worrying.

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Infuriating Television and Movie Cliches we all know and despise.

I've dredged this up from  over a year ago, from the days when I only had about about one hit a week.  If you want a smile or two, look at this site, which lists twenty-five movie clichés we have all seen a million times. The one about eye-closing really irritates me. In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I offer the following examples of more movie clichés we see all the time – screenplay writers must be a very unimaginative lot.

1. The overweight, middle-aged cop in jacket and tie who is able to outrun a slim teenager in jeans and tee-shirt, even giving him a twenty-yard head start, and is also able to overpower and restrain him after catching him.

2. In chick flicks, the inevitable cool, funny, yet unpopular best friend who is also a Goth, a lesbian, or both (invariably far above the fray till betrayed by friend trying to be popular).

3. The cop whose wife/girlfriend doesn't understand the demands of his job and either sulks constantly or leaves him during the critical point in an investigation.

4. Rewinding a tape recorder or VCR always produces a high pitched squeaking, as of voices played very fast (which just doesn’t happen with real machines). What’s more, whoever is doing the rewinding is always able to get to the exact spot they want, at the first attempt, with no trial and error.

5. Whenever the villain leaves a time bomb, anything from an atom bomb to a cluster of sticks of dynamite, the hero always manages to defuse the bomb with 3 seconds to go. The bomb usually has convenient digital timer on the outside to tell the hero how long is left.

6. Alternatively, if it is a small bomb, the hero is able to pick it up and run to the nearest lake or river and hurl it in, half a second before it explodes.

7. The simplified movie procedure for giving CPR, i.e. breathe once into the victim’s mouth, press two or three times on his chest, and mutter something encouraging like “Come on!” The victim will then cough twice and sit up, as good as new. For a touch of gritty realism, the victim may drool very slightly after coughing.

8. The team of absolute no-hopers in a sporting event wins the key game after coming from behind. The lamest player of all scores the key goal/basket/touchdown/home run with 2 seconds to go, often in slow motion.

9. Soldiers on sentry duty at night who say how much they are looking forward to going home on leave in a couple of days are guaranteed to be garroted or knifed in the back within two minutes.

10. With the same inevitability, anyone who agrees to testify against Mr. Big because the police have guaranteed their safety and given them round-the-clock protection, will definitely be shot, stabbed, blown up or thrown out of a high window before the movie ends.

11. The fight between a young girl and her parents just before she stomps out the door into the path of a serial killer.

12. Walking alone through restless city streets to moody alternative music to point up a failed relationship

13. Mad killers are always able to stage elaborate ritual murders in midst of city without attracting attention

14. The driver of a car who, in rush hour in the city, can glance into his rear view mirror for half a second and announce “We’re being followed.”

15. The hero involved in a life or death fight with the villain while his girlfriend/wife stands on sidelines looking worried.

16. Anyone (usually the hero) who gives 100% assurances that he will finish what he has to do in plenty of time to attend his wife’s poetry reading, speech to civic group, kid’s school play etc will arrive just as it is ending. Kid in tears, wife in a sulk – no excuses accepted. Also, no wedding plans ever run smoothly. Either the bride or groom will arrive at the very last moment after a long series of mishaps, usually when the priest is looking at his watch and complaining that he has another wedding at three o’clock and a funeral at four.

17. Finally, the one that irritates me most of all. That line that hardly anyone uses in real life but scriptwriters, with a stunning lack of imagination, put into the mouths of their characters over and over: “Let’s get outta here!”

This list isn't exhaustive. I'm sure some of you have your own suggestions

Ba Da Bye!

For those of you who don’t watch The Sopranos, this won’t mean a thing.  And if you have recorded the final episode but haven’t watched it yet, then read no further.

Some people were expecting a bloodbath,  or at least a tying up of loose ends.  We got an idea of how things were going to go for Tony and his immediate family, but it was by no means the definitive explanation to everything.  The meaning of the end was unclear, and I suspect that was deliberate.   Tony looked almost directly into camera, tapped his finger on the counter and then there was a sudden, silent blackout for a good ten seconds before the end credits rolled, in silence.

Earlier in the show, at the end of one of the many phone calls people made to each other, I observed that no one ever says goodbye in this show.  They tend just to hang up when they have said what the have to say.  I think that’s what Tony did.  He looked out at us and hung up.  Silence.  Another theory is that the blackout came when he was shot dead by one of the many suspicious looking people hanging about in the ice cream parlour, but I like my first  theory better.

Either way, just imagine how many people across the country screamed in anguish because they thought their cable had gone out at the crucial moment!  That was brilliant!

The Race was Amazing

So, The Amazing Race is over. Eric and Danielle have won.   Of all the reality shows that infest TV these days, this is one of the very few that I watch, and I’m totally hooked.    I am usually very resistant to such things, but once a season of TAR gets under way, after an episode or two, I become by turns a fan, an enthusiast and then a fanatic. It was my wife who put me on to TAR.  She has long since lost interest, while I remain a seriously devoted. Now I know why soap opera watchers think of their characters as their personal friends.  I engage with these people, and remember with a shock that we don’t actually know each other.

This season just finished was the All-Stars edition, so there was the added attraction of seeing teams from previous seasons, though some of them I could not for the life of me remember. I am happy when teams I like make it through to the next round, and I am pleased when the ones I dislike are eliminated.  Especially pleased was I at the end of round four when Rob and Amber, whom I couldn’t stand, were given the boot.  I rather suspected they would be because, I have noticed, reality shows often love to dwell on hubris before someone is kicked off  (That happens on The Apprentice a lot, for example).  There were many instances of Rob talking to camera during that episode, saying how sure he was that he and Amber would win.  “I haven’t even started to peak.”  Then with glee we saw them knocked into last place by Mirna and Charla, for whom they appeared to harbour a particular dislike.

Last night, the team I was rooting for didn’t win.  They came in second, which was a very creditable effort, and I have a great deal of admiration for them.  Mind you, it was only in the final 15 minutes of the final episode that I at last worked out which one was Dustin and which was Kandice. It was nice to see that of the three final teams, two were all female, and the third was a couple.  No all male teams  on the finish mat this time.  To me, the final episode of a TAR season (except that disastrous family edition – whose stupid idea was that?) is physically draining.  During the final scenes, when all the teams are congratulating the winners (no shots of Rob and Amber cheering or applauding, I noticed) I suddenly realise that that’s it.  No more teams, no more Phil explaining what a Road Block is, no more following the players through the airports of the world as they try to find a flight that will get them to Warsaw or Guam or wherever, half an hour before the others.  The CBS site has a page where you can nominate previous teams for the next All Stars edition, and I rather like the idea of an All Winners edition, or maybe all the teams who were eliminated in the first rounds of all previous seasons and hardly got a chance to play.  But whatever form it takes (except another family edition -- leave the  kids at home please), I’ll welcome any TAR as long as we don’t have to wait too long.  I’ll allow you a brief rest, CBS, but pretty soon I expect you to get working on the next TAR.

TV & FILM: Keep It Real

I see the Italians are getting rid of reality television (click here if you don’t believe me). Well, mama mia and well done, I thought, when I read that.  I wish they would get rid of it here too.   It’s the done thing to sneer at reality TV these days.  It’s vulgar and nasty, after all, and an insult to anyone of intelligence and I spit upon it with contempt.  Then once the knee-jerk reaction was over, I had a little think and I realised I watch quite a lot of reality shows, and that led me to the inescapable conclusion that I rather like reality TV.  What exactly is reality TV anyway?  Anything that isn’t drama, documentary or educational and which features members of the general public as its main protagonists perhaps, though that would include game shows and quiz shows of all kinds. 

Anyway, I have revised my opinion since the start of that previous paragraph. Now I wish they would get rid of the reality shows I don’t like, or don’t watch, but don’t let them even dare touch the ones I like.  My favourite programs these days are all on BBC America and HBO (especially Rome and Extras and latterly The Sopranos but, try as I would, not Deadwood), but my fave prog of all is The Amazing Race on NBC.  I’d even apply to take part in that if I didn’t have the wrong sort of passport.  I could give up all other reality shows and not mind too much, but not that one.  I enjoy The Apprentice though I don’t really relate to any of the contestants and it is utterly beyond me why  any of them want to work for that Trump person (I have never seen the British version with Alan Sugar but I’m very curious about it).   In even more detached mode I like the Wednesday competitions on Bravo:  Project Runway, Top Chef and the latest, Top Design.  The people I root for in these never win.  In the last Runway my favourite contestant came back after being eliminated due to a new rule, but sadly she was eliminated again that same week. Top Design, the weakest of the three, is almost over, and my favourite was knocked out last week. Bravo is about to show a reality show based on hairdressing.  Do I hear the sound of barrel bottoms being scraped?

A couple of years ago Fox TV showed an entertaining bit of reality called Joe Millionaire. A good looking twenty-something nobody was given the task of pretending to be a multi millionaire, complete with chateau in France and Australian butler. Then they brought in about a dozen young women from across the USA to compete to be his wife.  Young, handsome, filthy rich, and he has to find a wife on a TV show?  Didn’t the penny drop?  Anyway, week by week we saw these women all trying to impress “Joe” by doing the various tasks set them, all saying they liked him for himself, not his untold millions.  Come the end of the show, he makes his choice, then tells her he is just an ordinary joe, and we have the joy of seeing her jaw drop. Actually, she carried it off quite well and stuck with him, for a little bit, after hearing the news.  The unexpected prize money of a million dollars might have helped.  Fox tried the same thing again a year later, but since there wasn’t a single woman in North America who would be taken in now, they imported women from Continental Europe, who had not seen the show, and tried to get them to compete for a fake millionaire. They chose a good looking farmhand doofus from Texas, picked for his torso not his brain, and since the women were sophisticated, poised, educated, professional, and worldly, and he was as thick as two short planks, the whole thing degenerated into farce and Fox never tried that again.  However, since part of the fun of watching reality TV is pleasure at other’s discomfort, I enjoyed these and the schadenfreude they engendered.

Then there’s Ramsay.  The American version of Hell’s Kitchen, with real chefs competing, not celebrities, was definitely  reality TV, and it was riveting.  My favourite contestant actually won that one!   Gentle, soft spoken Gordon Ramsay also gives us his Kitchen Nightmares (reality or documentary?) and Ramsay’s F Word (reality or chat show or competition or food documentary?).  There’s something compulsive about these essentially lightweight shows.

In today’s world of cable, satellite, podcasts, etc. there is room for just about every kind of broadcasting.  However, if they ever do feel they have to get rid of reality TV here, by all means take the ones I don’t watch (like Survivor, Big Brother, American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, The Bachelor) and cast them into the pit, but please don’t touch the ones I like.