A Truly Peculiar Practise...

Academe is really fascinating these days. You have your celebrities at the top, academia's version of Tom Cruise or Jack Welch or The Donald Trump. Some of the bright stars in this heavenly firmament, those captains of the knowledge industry, inhabit those high status endowed chairs (thrones) in America's "great" research universities. At the bottom are temp workers, the lumpen academitariat, who do the grunt work, i.e., introductory level courses, in the satanic mills of academe because middling academics don't won't to be kicked off the yellow brick road to tenure and the way of least resistance to the Emerald City is not to teach intro classes. All the while real intellectual life suffers under the weight of academic pretense, irrelevance, and McDonaldisation, and the increasing corporatisation and taylorisation of the "pissant swamp". I suppose we should thank our lucky stars that at least we some semblance of public intellectual life here in America thanks to sports radio...

Ah, if only life were like a mediocre sitcom like The Big Bang Theory...Hot waitress lives in same apartment complex as nerdy PhD.

The Present of a Delusion: Musings on an American Television Remake

And the remakes just keep on coming...

The Bridge now running on F/X is yet another American remake of a "foreign" series. The original, Broen/Bron (2011-) which focused on a case in which a Swedish female cop who may or may not have Asperger's syndrome, Saga Norén (Sofia Helin), and her laid back male Danish partner who is having a mid life crisis, Martin Rhode (Kim Bodnia), investigate the murder of two bodies they find lying on each side of the Danish and Swedish border on the bridge, the Öresund Bridge, that connects Denmark and Copenhagen to Sweden and Malmö. The American "creative" team, after toying with a Canadian and American border setting moved their remake of The Bridge south to the Mexican and Canadian border and made their cops, Sonya Cross and Marco Ruiz, American instead of Swedish and Mexican instead of Danish.

As far as I can tell the American remake of Broen/Bron has kept much of the original intact. One crucial thing that is similar between both shows, at least to this point, is a character trait of one of the protagonists of Broen/Bron and The Bridge, a character trait that neither series, at least at this point, makes explicit, Saga's and Sonya's, Asperger's Syndrome or autism.

At least one critic, John Elder Robison, "The Bridge and the End of Asberger's on TV", Vulture, 12 July 2013, takes Sonya Cross's supposed Asperger's Syndrome as the focus of his essay on the show. As I was reading Robison's essay which focused on the representation of those with Asperger's on recent American TV, an interest apparently stimulated by Robison's own Asperger's, I couldn't help but think of the recent reclassification of Asperger's as Autism Spectrum disorder by the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The fact that the DSM once classified homosexuality as a mental disorder and still, if memory serves, classifies cults as mental disorders has never been free of cultural and political ideology, made me want to play along with this penchant of many in the psychological and psychiatric community for classifying social phenomena as biological disorders. So I thought I would offer a few of my own. So off I go. Will the DSM, I wonder, at some point classify the American television xenophobia related to subtitles as a kind of phobia? Will the DSM classify the American need to remake foreign television shows as a kind of narcissistic disorder? Will the DSM after tracking the American penchant for making mediocre versions of foreign television programmes they remake classify this delusion, I say delusion because the track record of Americans in remaking foreign television programmes is less than stellar, that they can just do it better as another type of narcissistic disorder? On a broader issue will the DSM classify the apparent American film and television penchant for literal mindedness as a form of infantile disorder?

It is a pity that Americans have really not been able to easily see the excellent Broen/Bron anymore than they have been able to see the equally superb Danish series Forbrydelsen (2007, 2009, 2012) and Borgen (2012-). As for me I won't be watching the remake. I have better things to do with my time than watch another American remake of yet another foreign television programme like watch third and series of Forbrydelsen, the second series of Borgen, and the upcoming second series of Broen/Bron.

Fancy A Pint Sir?: Musings on Morse and Lewis

I became an avid viewer of Morse (ITV, 1987-1993, 1995-2000) after I saw and fell in love with it after seeing the first episode of the series, "The Dead of Jericho", on PBS probably sometime in 1987. I loved Morse's intelligence. I adored its literariness. Unlike so much on American television I learned something every time I watched an episode of Morse. I loved the central characters of the bright, cynical, yet romantic, and very lonely Oxford educated Morse (John Thaw) and his rough-hewn down to earth Geordie partner Lewis (Kevin Whately). I adored the quality of its writing and its acting. I loved that it was set in the beautiful leafy college town of Oxford. I loved the fact that so many of the murderers committed in Oxford were by its dons, its academics. I was saddened when Morse died in 2000, bringing the show to and end, and John Thaw died two years later. But I was delighted when ITV and PBS's Masterpiece brought a little bit of Morse back to us viewers in 2007 thanks to the Morse spin-off series Lewis (ITV, 2007-2013).

As was the case with Morse I became an avid watcher of Lewis through its seven series, the last airing this year. Recently I rewatched every earlier episode of Lewis thanks to the series one through six ITV box set I recently purchased and an all region DVD player. The reasons why I initially watched and loved Lewis are much the same as the reasons I watched and loved Morse. Like Morse Lewis was superbly crafted by a host of writers Stephen Churchett, Russell Lewis, and Alan Plater amongst them. As with Morse I learned some new obscure reference to some historical and literary fact every time I watched Lewis. Lewis like Morse assumed I was intelligent and that it didn't need to ignore my mind's intellectual functions in order to get me to watch it. Like Morse Lewis was superbly acted down to its minor recurring characters like Laura Hobson (Clare Holman) and Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent (Rebecca Front of The Thick of It Fame, another one of those British actors who can so easily and superbly jump from comedy to drama to tragedy) and its guest stars (far too many to list). Like Morse Lewis had a wonderful and memorable old school musical score by Barrington Pheloung). Like Morse I loved the main characters of Lewis, Lewis and his somewhat Morse like brilliant former Cambridge Theology student partner James Hathaway (Laurence Fox). I loved the repartee between the two, the portrayal of their developing and caring relationship with each other, and the tidbits that we learned about their back stories as the series progressed. As with Morse I loved the fact that it was set in Oxford, a city that reminds me so much of the gorgeous college town where I did my undergraduate work, Bloomington, Indiana, that we got to see some of that Oxford, and that most of the murders in Oxford, or at least the ones Lewis and Hathaway investigated, were committed by Oxford's mostly arrogant dons or its arrogant sense of entitlement elite going to bes. As with Morse I loved how Lewis took its time to get to the dénouement of who the murderer was and that it showed us viewers the intellectual work that went into solving the intellectual puzzle of the most recent Oxford murder. It is, as characters in Lewis occasionally say, Oxford after all. As with Morse I loved how Lewis jumped effortlessly from comedy to drama to deep tragedy.

Like many other lovers of British television and British detective fiction I have been avidly awaiting with some trepidation what appears to be the last Lewis's ever made, Lewis's that are running on PBS's mystery summer this year. I liked the first episode of series seven of Lewis, the two part "Down Among the Fearful", a two-parter which is being broadcast as a one parter on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery and which has no doubt been slightly cut as were previous episodes of Lewis on PBS to make it fit into the Masterpiece time slot. The second two part episode, again being broadcast as a one-parter on PBS, "The Ramblin Boy", was a bit odd, however. I don't ever recall being so aware of who the murderer really was during the opening act of the series as I was with "The Ramblin' Boy". Nor do I ever recall an episode of Lewis that seemed so hurried as this one was. It did tie up some loose character development ends, Lewis and Hobson finally get the romance many of us viewers were hoping they would. From the evidence of these two episodes I have to say that it is probably a good time for Lewis to go out, going out on a high note leaving many of us in the viewer audience wanting for more before it gets too tired and clichéd like one of those American television that goes on long after it has become less than fresh because it makes money for the commercial networks. It is still clear from series seven that Lewis, like Morse before it, was one of the finest television programmes or films, at least in my opinion, to ever grace the small or big screen in my lifetime.

In a way, of course, those of us who loved Morse and Lewis still have something to look forward to, Endeavour (ITV, 2012-), a prequel to Morse that takes us back to Morse's early days on the force and whose pilot episode, which I saw on PBS last year, was excellent. I am eagerly anticipating the first series (and hopefully many series to come). Endeavour, by the way, is part of the mystery summer PBS lineup along with Lewis and the most recent series of the excellent Foyle's War.

I want to end this brief blog with an appropriately heretical sentence. I like Lewis as much if not more than I liked Morse.

Capsule Film Reviews: The Princess Diaries

You have to love Walt Disney. This is the studio, after all, that made a fortune off of fairy tales in the public domain like Snow White and Cinderella and then turned around and lobbied Congress to change the copyright rules so that one of their best known meal tickets, Mickey Mouse, didn’t end up in the public domain in the 1990s. The Princess Diaries, yet another Disney Hollywood fairy tale come to celluloid life, was adapted from a book by May Cabot and directed by Garry Marshall, no stranger to fairy tales himself since he directed that 1990 Hollywood update of Cinderella Pretty Woman, a fairy tale film about a cheap street hooker who is hired by a Prince Charming corporate raider to hang on his arm and look pretty and with whom she finds true love in the end, and was the man behind the fairy tale versions of America in the 1950s and 1960s, Happy Days (ABC, 1974-1984) and Laverne and Shirley (ABC, 1976-1983).

The 2001 The Princess Diaries is yet another Disney fairy tale film entry aimed at the young teen female demographic. The Princess Diaries tells the fairy tale of one Amelia “Mia” Thermopolis (shades of the equally mythical 300?). At the beginning of the film “Mia”, Anne Hathaway in her break out role and doing her best Roman Holiday Audrey Hepburn, is living in a converted firehouse with her bohemian artist mother (Caroline Goodall) in hilly once upon a time hippieish San Francisco. She has a best friend who she spends a lot of time with, the even nerdier Lily Moskovitz (Heather Matarazzo), the standard plain Jane sidekick of the heroine of so many chick flicks and television shows (see Larue Wilson in the Gidget TV series). She has a pet cat named Fat Louie. She is devoted to a car she is having fixed up and which she calls her baby, a classic Ford Mustang. She goes to a posh school in which she and Lily are the requisite outsiders and butt of abuse of the equally requisite group of mean girls and mostly shallow boys, one of whom “Mia” romanticises about. Mia’s life, however, is about to change.

Mia is turning 16 and unbeknownst to her she is also about to become something many young girls, young female teens, and even female twentysomethings dream about, a princess. Mia’s father, you see, was King, until his recent death, of one of those mythical duchies that dot the landscape of operettas and Hollywood films, Genovia. Over the course of The Princess Diaries Mia is transformed from a nerdy, frizzy haired, bespectacled, lacking in confidence, and mousy not part of the in crowd ugly duckling, into the gorgeous, straight haired, increasingly confident Princess Clarisse Marie Grimaldi Renaldo with the help of a grandmother she hardly knows, the Queen Clarisse (Julie Andrews). Along the way Mia learns a number of life lessons from her grandmother and especially from her grandmother’s head of security, Joseph “Joe” (Héctor Elizondo). She learns, this is a fairy tale Disney film after all, life lessons about true friendship, the celebrity obsessed world (a world, of course, Disney helped create in real life), true romance (that other socially and culturally constructed romantic dreams of teenage girls), and responsibility, as she decides, happy ending ahead dear readers, that she will take up her duties just as her father did before her—his sixteenth birthday gift to her is his diary—as heir to the throne of Genovia. We have no doubt at the end of The Princess Diaries that Queen Clarisse Marie will be one of those humane monarchs to her subjects, humane monarchs that show up so often in Hollywood fairy tales. If only real life was like the movies!

Along the we viewers, well this viewer, learned several things as well. I learned that there are ugly ducklings who will never be anything other than ugly ducklings and who are the butt of Disney jokes when they are the alternative to the person we are rooting for so hard to become princess. At least the ugly ducking who will assume the throne if “Mia” doesn’t and her scheming father weren’t the evil others of classic Hollywood Disney fairy tales like 101 Dalmatians. I learned that the extras on the Disney DVD I watched (the double disc collector’s set of The Princess Diaries) aren’t worth the time or effort. Promotional drek for the most part. Disney ain’t no Criterion or Masters of Cinema. I learned that dreams really can come true particularly if they come from Hollywood and if you too look like Anne Hathaway. And I learned that I like romantic fairy tales despite all of my smacked in the face by reality cynicism. What can I say, I loved Roman Holiday (where princess escapes from the Roman consulate of her duchy, becomes a commoner, if only for a day, matures, something symbolised by her haircut, and eventually returns to perform her royal duties toward her loving subjects), and I liked The Princess Diaries.

The Princess Diaries is a good film even if it occasionally does slip into that patented disneyfornicated sugar coated almost rots your teeth sweetness and cuteness mode, and even though its comedy is sometimes way too sitcomy broad for my taste. Recommended. Just don’t believe all the fairy tale romantic hype.

The Princess Diaries, 2001, directed by Garry Marshall, screenplay by Gina Wendkos, 115 minutes, 1:85:1

Quick Reviews: The Sopranos, The Complete Series with Extras, HBO

The design challenged folks at HBO have struck again. Yes, the same folks who gave you that awful first The Wire collected set and that awful The Sopranos collected set where DVD's were stuck into cardboard slats so they could get scratched have struck again. They have decided that rather than stick the DVDs for their most recent The Sopranos complete set into regular keepcases and on multidisc holders as any Eric the half a bee with half a brain would, they would once again give us that bane of DVD collectors everywhere, a The Sopranos set in which plastic DVD's have been stuck into cardboard slats where they get scratched and buffed and generally abused. And to add further insult to consumer unjoy, they have created cardboard accordion season holders that, when you put the discs in and take them out of their cardboard holders, tear. I guess we should thank our lucky stars that HBO television is generally much better, though not that much better, than their design department. 

O stars for the packaging and a big raspberry for the zombie suited idiots in the design department at HBO. They have shown us once and for all that form does not follow functionality and that design is more important than protecting DVD's, at least for these corporate types.

Dear HBO, I hope you love the packaging of this set because it means that you just lost a sale because I just returned this box set for a full refund. I will not be buying another until your design department obtains their Ph.D's in rocket science, a degree which should, I hope, allow them to build a The Sopranos box set that actually protects the DVD's rather than looks sexy design pretty. Unlike you I don't judge a book by its cover.

Quick Reviews: Lewis, Series 1 through 6, ITV

The Show: Lewis (ITV, 2006-2013), which just finished its seventh and apparently last series on ITV and will be broadcast on PBS this summer, is the excellent spin-off of the wonderful Morse (ITV, 1987-1993 and 1995-2000). Lewis follows the investigations of Morse’s former partner Lewis (Kevin Whately) and his ex Cantab theology student partner Hathaway (Laurence Fox) as they uncover murderers in the college town of Oxford, most of them academics. Of the many joys of Lewis, scenes of gorgeous Oxford and its college architecture and the puzzle that is the murders, to pick two examples, it’s the academics as murderers one that I probably enjoyed more than any other. And while I realise most academics don't commit murders in the numbers they do in Lewis (and Morse) there is a dark side to the ultimately silly and petty power games that academics really do play behind those ivy covered walls. 4 to 4.5 stars.

The DVD: Very good transfer. Good clean audio. A bit difficult for an oldie like me on a few occasions. 4 stars.

The Package: Up to ITV’s usual standard for its larger box sets: Mediocre. Two of the discs in the second and third of the three keepcases were off their spindles. Thankfully they weren’t damaged much. One of the discs, the behind the scenes disc in series one (disc three) was scratched and buffed and didn't function properly freezing up, thanks to the scratches and buffings, periodically. 2 stars.

Miscellaneous: For those of you who don't have an all region DVD player the first series of Lewis put out by the sometimes incompetent PBS is the cut PBS version of Lewis, cut bizarrely in order to fit into the Masterpiece 1 hour and a half slot, not the full ITV version. So at this point you have no other option, if you want series one, than to go for the hack and hacked up PBS version of series one. So many DVD companies aren't worth the cost of plastic in the DVD's they peddle.

Quick Reviews: H20: Just Add Water, Flatiron Film

I haven't watched H2O: Just Add Water yet but I am told H2O, which ran for three series on Ten (and on Nikelodeon in the US) is an Australian show about three young Gold Coast women who find themselves trapped on an island and find themselves turned into mermaids with magical powers (a genre trope if there ever was one) while trapped on the island. This bildungsroman follows the trials and travails of Rikki Chadwick (Cariba Heine), Emma Gilbert (Claire Holt, who left in series two to be replaced by Indiana Evans as "Bella" Hartley) and Cleo Sertori (Phoebe Tonkin), as they deal with how the transformation from young women to mermaids affects their daily lives.

The show: I haven't watched the Flatiron H2O DVD yet so can't really comment on the transfer or the show itself. It was a why not purchase when the series was on sale. I want to see what this Aussie show is like since I have an interest in non-US TV.

The packaging: Mediocre at best. The set arrived with each and every one of the six discs on the left side of each of the four disc season keepcases off of their spindles. On the plus side a cursory glance suggests that no damage was done to the discs, a rare occurrence. I will look more closely in the future to see if this is the case. As for the slip case that the DVD's slip into, good.

Summary. If you don't care about potentially bad discs take your chance...