Does TV get much better than WAR AND PEACE?

The Cast of War and Peace

     We decided to tape War and Peace because it was going to be long and we weren’t sure we’d like it.  We started watching the first episode and thought we’d give it ten minutes or so.  After half an hour, we decided to keep watching and finished the first hour, then watched the second hour the following evening.  It plays simultaneously on The History Channel and, surprisingly, Lifetime and A&E.  I thought A&E had given up on quality fictional programming.  Produced by The Weinstein Company, it’s playing here a couple of weeks after being on the BBC.  

The Sweeping Napoleonic War

     The format is two hours each Monday at 9 p.m., though Lifetime shows the previous week’s episode right beforehand.  Covering an over 1,200-page novel in eight hours with commercials requires some concision (the BBC’s 1972 version was fifteen hours), but it captures the sweep of Tolstoy’s epic of the Russian aristocracy during the Napoleonic Wars and details of the family relationships that defined the culture of that era.  Tolstoy presented an entire world through his characters without a trace of sentimentality or condescension.  

Natasha and Andrei

     Besides the thrilling battle scenes that cleverly suggested even more soldiers than they showed and the elegant, serpentine camera movement during the key ball scenes, there have also been suggestive dream sequences, a wild incestuous relationship between two of the most selfish characters in popular culture right now, a quickly glimpsed yet graphic childbirth scene, and richly delineated scenes of rural life.  Filmed in Lithuania, it strongly resembles St. Petersburg and Moscow and George Steel’s cinematography utilizes as much natural light as possible.  

Paul Dano

    The acting leads really bring it especially Paul Dano as Pierre, looking for a way to use his intellect and help his serfs; James Norton as Andrei, looking for a way to explore the depths of love after a near-death experience and a tragic first marriage; and Jack Lowden as Nikolai, always trying to reconcile his impetuousness with a stumbling strength. Are they the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion of 19th century Russian literature? It’s good to see Greta Scacchi 

Greta Scacchi's TV Family

after a long dry spell since Countess Rostova displays a sharpness that tempers her initial kindness, though as Neil said, “Gillian Anderson seems to be giving that Eleanor Parker performance” (Cate Blanchett seems to be resuscitating that acting style in Carol.  What’s with actresses lately moving into middle age and trading emotional grit for technical polish?)

    For those viewers that aren’t able to recap from the beginning, here’s hoping that War and Peace will be repeated in the near future.

Tuppence Middleton as Helene Kuragin

Female Friendship: Stage Door, The World of Henry Orient, Swing Shift, La Cérémonie

Tiffany Vazquez Hosting Turner Classic Movies

      Turner Classic Movies (yes, they show more excellent movies than any other channel) recently asked super fan Tiffany Vazquez to guest program works centering on female friendship.  If TCM gets really smart, Vazquez will remain in a long-term capacity with the network.  She’s young, smart, and offers some intriguing insights into the specific movies.  We checked out some of the selections:

     Stage Door (1937), one of those wise-cracking, heartfelt comedy-dramas that Hollywood produced like sliced bread during the zenith of the studio era – in this case, RKO – gave an opportunity for an extraordinary ensemble of young actresses to strut their stuff.  Not revived as much as The Women (1939), it’s far more positive about the support and genuine camaraderie that female friendship entails.  Competing in the alienating world of the Broadway theatre, the women share joy, hardships, personal hopes and dreams, and are there for each other in the best and toughest of times.

The Women of Stage Door

     Although RKO isn’t lauded now to the degree shown to other major studios, executives could assemble the following cast:  Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Andrea Leeds, Ann Miller, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Constance Collier, Gail Patrick, Adolphe Menjou, Jack Carson, and many others.  Leeds married and retired soon after its release to breed racehorses, but she’s lovely as the young actress, who’s experienced success, but is already being overlooked for the next model.  If this doesn’t presage the current TV singing shows and the eagerness to find the next thirteen year old with a thirty year 

Ann Miller and Ginger Rogers

old’s voice, then I don’t know what does.  Ann Miller, incidentally, was fourteen during filming, but she looks at least five years older and more than holds her own in a nifty tap number with Rogers, set in a swanky nightclub where Patrick sneers at them while trying to capture producer Menjou’s long-term romantic attention.

     There’s nothing dated about the movie, except for how fast, funny, and sarcastic the characters are.  Oh yes, and they seem like grown-ups dealing with unemployment, sexual exploitation, aging, balancing work and love lives, depression, and suicide.  They get all of this across in ninety minutes without cursing or showing much skin, though everything is suggested.  If only Judd Apatow and Tina Fey could edit their genius to move at such a pace.

     The World of Henry Orient (1964), directed by George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting), felt a little like a live action Disney movie from that period to Neil.  

Merrie Spaeth and Tippy Walker

That’s probably because it’s most focused on the two fourteen year old private school girls Val and Gil, played by Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, and because New York City feels like a big playground, rather than the dangerous and alienated metropolis it had become – this was the same year as the murder of Kitty Genovese.  Hill was known as a ‘buddy’ director and that already shone forth in the uninhibited friendship of the two girls, who play make believe games and display a naturalness that seems unscripted.  Fortunately, this friendship doesn’t turn sinister as the similar one in Heavenly Creatures (1994) between the girls played by Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.  Walker and Spaeth are the leads and they carry the production with their high spirits and honesty.

Spying on Peter Sellers (Henry Orient)

     Where Henry Orient went a little wrong initially on its release was in making a big deal of Peter Sellers playing Orient.  He’s a second-rate concert pianist trying to hide his Brooklyn background with what would later be termed a Eurotrash accent.  Sellers is very funny playing a two-faced jerk; where he’s not as successful is in tying his character’s paranoia about the affair he’s having with a young, wealthy married woman, played winningly by Paula Prentiss.  He believes the girls are stalking him.  At first, they’re not, but coincidence turns into a new game and they look at him as a new fad.  Sellers’ performance is not big enough or maybe the story of the girls is more compelling.  

Angela Lansbury

     Angela Lansbury, however, in a small role about halfway into the story, may be a revelation for those who only know her from Murder, She Wrote (1984 – 1996), her cozy amateur sleuth detective series on which she employed either has-beens from Hollywood’s Golden Age that older viewers may have thought were already dead and intriguing newcomers who got a solid TV start.  In 1963, she was sick of the harpy roles she’d played incredibly well from her teens and was disappointed that her great performance in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was nominated for but didn’t win the Oscar.  Yeah, I know Patty Duke was convincing as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, but I’ve seen others also play the role as well.  However, Meryl Streep didn’t do as well in the Manchurian remake (2004).  It’s because Lansbury could play yakky and daffy before turning it around to show Mrs. Iselin’s evil genius, while in the vulnerable spot of having to answer to the Soviet Politburo.  Lansbury’s frustration comes across as the ice queen mother, who’s emotionally withholding, but quick to pursue a meaningless fling out of boredom and spite.  

     Within two years, Lansbury became a major star while in Mame on Broadway.  Side note:  The Wiz!  Live on NBC a couple of weeks ago is the first of that annual series to work because they hired a cast that knew exactly how to perform.  We think Mame should be revived live and we nominate Anna Faris and Alison Janney as Mame and Vera Charles (Mayim Bialik would be a good Agnes Gooch too).  I don’t know if they can sing, but they can act, which is the most important element of performing in musicals, believe it or not.  Anyway, Mame features female friendships in a complex manner. 

     Swing Shift (1984), directed by Jonathan Demme, but produced by and starring Goldie Hawn, came out a couple of years after Connie Field’s Oscar-winning documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980).  When you see the non-fiction, you can tell what Demme was going after and when you remember Private Benjamin (1980) and The Sugarland Express (1974), you can see what he hoped for and almost got from her.  Hawn has a sharp-eyed, cutting edge that can be a tonic for her commercial daffiness.  However, she wanted the movie to be a cute comedy set during World War II when women built the machinery that basically saved democracy.  

Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell

     Hawn does a funny bit with a tablecloth in one scene, which was probably where she wanted things to go tonally.  She looks great and could pass for late twenties, though she was ten years older.  The problem is that both she and Ed Harris as her husband, who goes off to war, look and seem more mature than the high school sweethearts that haven’t been married very long.  In trying to seem young in the early scenes, their acting ends up one note and shallow.  When things become more complicated in a friendship with a tough neighbor trying to make it as a singer, played with conviction and heart by Christine Lahti, Hawn is up for the challenge.  She also has real chemistry with Kurt Russell as her supervisor and also trying to make it as a musician; Russell looks like he could be the right age.

Christine Lahti

     The relationship between Lahti’s character and Fred Ward as a music impresario, who uses her, has more levels than the other romances.  The other problem is that most viewers will hope that Hawn and Russell’s characters will end up together because they bring out so much in each other.  The ending is more about bringing together Hawn and Lahti’s characters instead.  Because the movie doesn’t work, it’s sort of fascinating.  Lahti projects depth, but there are scenes where she looks like she’s in the mid-80s, rather than the ‘40s so no element works consistently.

     Claude Chabrol adapted Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone (1977) with Caroline Eliacheff for his La Cérémonie (1995).  Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert, both contemporary French cinema legends, give deeply unsettling performances, respectively, as a newly hired maid for a wealthy family and a small town’s bubbly and surly postmistress.  Huppert, especially, can do things with her eyes and mouth that work against the rest of her body language.  I’ve seen her in three or four films and she never moves, looks, or repeats her performances.  Only the tone of her voice – more patrician and elegant than expected – remains a common element.

Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert

     The major difference between the book and the movie is that Rendell tells what will happen in the first sentence and the suspense builds because the reader keeps putting the clues together towards what will be a tragic and shocking conclusion.  The key element is illiteracy.  Chabrol doesn’t do that.  He drops hints in the plot and Bonnaire masterfully shows that her character has no imagination and, more importantly, very little empathy.  Since Chabrol directs, the viewer probably expects that this will be a thriller of some kind and there seems to be an element of class struggle.  

     What Chabrol does instead and it’s chilling is to show the banality of evil and the curt, casual nature of murderous violence.  I wish he had used a flash-forward of the final image, which involves a tape recording that inadvertently picks up the killings, at the very beginning of the movie.  I think it would have intensified the viewer’s identification with the characters and the nature of the class conflict.

    Anyway, cheers to TCM and Tammy Vazquez for going off the main line to check out some lesser-known or overlooked works that aren’t perfect, but deserve attention.

Another Period / Kevin (from work)

Two off-the-beaten path comedies 
show the sitcom is alive and well

     Comedy Central has aimed at the crosshairs of the cultural zeitgeist over the past decade with Chappelle’s Show, The Daily Show (or, as we thought of it, Jon Stewart four nights a week), The Colbert Report, and South Park (creative, yes, but I can’t watch it for more than ten minutes because the animation is metaphysically awful i.e. it’s ugly and is supposed to be).  But, right now, Comedy Central is hitting the bull’s eye with Tosh.O,  which deals with a male’s curiosity and panic about homosexuality while checking out computer videos to an extent that seems endless, especially since it’s repeated interminably, Key & Peele (finally up for Emmy awards), Inside Amy Schumer and new this season Another Period.

Key and Peele

     That’s a pretty heady line up.  No other show right now says more about America’s preoccupation with race, politics, history, and the male psyche (straight and gay) than Key & Peele, though Jordan Peele does some of the best drag work on TV since Flip Wilson or Lily Tomlin.  Inside Amy Schumer works in a narrower vein for women and sexuality, though she goes very deep and usually gets raunchier the further she goes.  Another Period skewers the higher brow soap Downton Abbey and the lower brow reality soap Keeping Up with the Kardashians.   Both series have entered the popular consciousness in a way where people who have barely or never watched know more about the characters than they may initially admit.

Creators Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhorne

     Another Period (Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m.), created by Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome, both of whom are probably familiar from their guest star roles on various shows, presents the decadently rich Bellacourt family and their servants in 1905 Newport, R.I.  A large, gifted ensemble work the darkest aspects of the vast gap between the wealthy and the poor – one in which the perpetual servants are not even seen as human by their masters.  The latest episode saw hissy fit thrower Lillian (Leggero) trying to buddy up to her brother’s fiancée by hosting a seventeen-course gourmet dinner for their dogs.  When the dogs refused to eat the food, it had to be thrown out immediately.  One of the servants sneaked a bite, though he knew he could lose his job, because he was curious what ‘food’ tasted like since the servants got by on gruel.  Like much of Monty Python’s classic work, there isn’t a drop of human kindness or compassion in the Bellacourt’s world.  If two characters – whether related, married, or working alongside each other – seem to get along, it’s only for a moment and it’s an anomaly.  

Jason Ritter

     It’s touched upon various hot topics including incest (Lindhome plays the drama queen idiot savant in love with her dullard Senator brother Frederick played straight by the darling Jason Ritter), homosexuality (easier for the family to address wrongly about Frederick than the incest, while overlooking the sisters’ actual homosexual husbands), abortion, women’s liberation, prostitution, capitalist exploitation, the sociopathic arrogance of the entitled and the self-abnegating response of their slaves – I mean, servants.  Whenever I watch a period movie or show, I always wonder about kitchens and bathrooms since these have evolved over time.  While Downton Abbey (and Upstairs, Downstairs before it in 1971 – 1975) have presented culinary detail like a fetish, Another Period showed servants having to transport feces buckets after a genteel afternoon event hosted by the Bellacourts and somehow played even that for laughs.  

Noah Reid and Paige Spara

     If Another Period doesn’t sound like your proverbial cup of tea, then ABC Family offers Kevin from Work on Wednesdays at 8 p.m.  Like other shows on ABC Family, the cast is very diverse in terms of ethnicity, body type, and age, though the lighting makes everything look like the most beautiful ice cream shop or gelateria imaginable. Like other shows on ABC, it moves lightning fast and it’s easy to miss a sight gag or the significance of a line of dialogue that might reverberate later.  Scrubs (2001 – 2010) was the game changer that transformed American slapstick into this high tech, quick cut format and it reached its zenith in the brilliant, frenetic Happy Endings (2011 – 2013).  Kevin has used some clever and beautiful graphics to show what’s happening on the characters’ computers in this work place cubicle comedy.

Reid and Sedaris

     The initial hook is that Kevin (Noah Reid) leaves his job for a dream one in Italy and he writes a drunken letter telling his cubicle neighbor Audrey (Paige Spara) that he loves her.  Italy falls through and he has to beg his crazy boss played to the hilt by the wild Amy Sedaris (remember when Stephen Colbert was her co-star on their collaboration Strangers with Candy?) before facing Audrey.  A variety of interesting characters have been introduced and ABC Family smartly ran the first two episodes back to back, allowing viewers to get a firmer grasp of where the show may go.

Mad Men: 6 more episodes and already it’s “Uh-oh”

We hope its best days aren’t behind a TV classic

     Yes, we’ve praised Mad Men up one season and generally up even more the next.  I wasn’t certain about season 6 since it got off to a rocky start until “The Crash” episode.  The second half of the last season just started and a tiny wretched crack of the English language showed up and in an episode written by no less than series creator Matthew Weiner.  One of Peggy’s

The Slap

Yes, I miss Edward Zwick 

and Marshall Herskovitz too

     The Slap started a couple of weeks ago on NBC and I keep hoping it will be better each episode than it turns out to be.  Focusing on eight characters connected through family or friendship ties, it examines the aftermath of an aggressive rich man slapping the incredibly ill behaved five-year-old son of people he doesn’t know well.  From a birthday backyard

Saturday Night Live at 40

It just keeps going, but maybe 

a new battery should be ordered

     OMG, I thought dinosaurs no longer walked the Earth, but boy was I wrong because they stumbled along in Studio 8H in 30 Rock.  Snooty Steve Martin (I think he really is that way and not just putting it on), squeaky Paul McCartney, the fossil Jack Nicholson, and the indefatigable and misguided Lorne Michaels led the way for a reunion of what started as a

SELMA and EMPIRE

     Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay and written by her and Paul Webb, excels in showing the many details, conflicts, and points of view that surrounded events in Selma and culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  DuVernay maintains an understated approach that refrains from

Laverne Cox Shops at JCPenney

NKU establishes itself 

on the map for LGBTQ issues

Laverne Cox at NKU

     As one audience member said, it was a historical moment at NKU when Laverne Cox presented.  She's been an Emmy nominated member of the Orange is the New Black cast.  She's also been a spokesperson for the transgender

The Lucy Desi Center for Comedy

A working museum honoring the couple

and poised for the future of comedy in Jamestown, NY

Desilu Studios

     I grew up watching I Love Lucy, as has every generation since mine. They were somewhat my pseudo parents and Little Ricky the brother I never had. When we picked Chautauqua Lake to be our "wedding destination", Lucy's

The Emmys

Yeah, TV may be experiencing 
a “Golden Age,” but so what?

     Seth Meyers told a joke about the 1976 Emmys, which was that four of the drama series that year were cop shows so the choice depended upon what hat the lead character wore.  It was cute, but I’d bet (and win) that a greater share of the TV

AMC Sunday: Halt and Catch Fire

What’s a network to do 
when the great shows go?

     AMC (formerly American Movie Classics, though they mainly showed the second-rate) took off in 2007 with Mad Men.  It was their highly successful attempt to become a buzzed about cable network in the manner of FX and follow the premium cable networks HBO and Showtime, which had pioneered the magic formula a decade earlier.  The “open sesame” is an original series that few actually watch, but critics, bloggers, and loyal fans can’t stop talking about such as Oz, The Sopranos, Rescue Me, Six Feet Under, The Shield, Queer as Folk, etc.

Megan and Don at Howard Johnson

     Unlike those programs, Mad Men was a period piece and it seemed literary.  I always thought it was as if a John Cheever novel had been turned into television and, as it’s progressed chronologically, it feels like a John Updike novel.  From the

Tom Perrotta: The Leftovers

Perrotta’s books have 
transferred well to film, but will this?

     Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2011) tells of a small town three years after 2% of the world’s population suddenly vanishes in what some believe was the Rapture.  Though it explores a number of residents in that town during the span of

Max Ophuls’ Lola Montès

A 1955 French cult classic that 
foretold contemporary celebrity degradation

     I’ve wanted to see Max Ophuls’ Lola Montès since high school, but it never played at my college film society or urban second run art house.  TCM ran it as part of their weekly foreign film series and I recorded it thinking, well, we’ll see if it lives up to its hype.  Ophuls’ mastery of camera movement is almost unparalleled, except for Welles, Visconti, Altman, and Scorsese.  He’s one of those directors where, if the volume is muted and the subtitles ignored, the long, elegant takes are a choreography that realize the underlying themes that always involve the relationships between women and men.

Personality Chef Carla Hall

Toot. Toot! Honk. Honk! Ah-Ooh-Ga!

Dexter Enjoys Carla's Reading

      That was Carla's call out from her first book Cooking with Love: Comfort That Hugs You.  It's what she says when she wants to give herself a pat on the back.  At the recent book signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers for her second book, Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World, her fans were ready to give her plenty of pats and

Another Beatle Anniversary

February 9, 2014 marks 50 years 

since their American debut

Meeting Ed Sullivan

      The Ed Sullivan Show was America's guide to pop culture for three decades.  If one appeared on his weekly Sunday night program, then there was cause for one to be noticed.  If that included a telegram prior to your performance from Elvis and his manager, Col. Tom Parker, then there was definitely going to some conversation on Monday morning at the office and school.  After weeks of anticipation, The Beatles would make their first of 3 consecutive appearances as they criss-crossed 22,621 miles across North America on their first tour here. That was all in a little over a month that sold 453,950 tickets.  For a front-row seat the cost was $4.

      The No. 1 song on Billboard's chart the week of February 1, 1964 was "I Want to Hold Your Hand".  For their first live performance in America, they chose to perform "All My Loving" to screaming female teenagers in the Ed Sullivan theater and across the country for those poised in front of their black & white TV sets.  For the three performances, they received a whopping $10,000.   It all became a life-changing time in our history that if one was lucky enough to experience first-hand, one can never forgot it.

The Super Bowl Concerts

Renée Fleming flawless, Queen Latifah sweet, 
Bruno Mars deserved the spotlight

Renée Fleming

     Yes, we knew Renée Fleming was a great choice to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” when it was first announced.  She delivered like the pro and leading American opera soprano that she is.  We laud her for repeating ‘the brave’ and hitting that high note from ‘free’ for a second time.  The NFL should ask her

American Horror Story: Coven

Is it All About Eve taken by the wind?

The Coven Mansion in New Orleans

     Glee hit a groove that turned into a rut that has become a ditch whereas Ryan Murphy’s other current major creation keeps being reinvented annually as a half season.  After the charnel house set of last year’s Asylum – so grim that I gave

August Wilson: American Master

Please, Library of America, 

publish The Pittsburgh Cycle now!

Playwright August Wilson

     August Wilson, who died too young at sixty in 2005, was one of the five best American playwrights of the 20th century.  I think the other four were Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard (grossly underappreciated and deserving of a major revival), Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams – the greatest

The Hollow Crown

Great British actors take on Shakespeare’s Henrys

     Last year, BBC America showed a series about a number of major British actors working on Shakespearean roles either onstage, or television or film.  Some of them – Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, and Ben Whishaw, among others – were

The Cozy and the Hard-Boiled

Yin and Yang or Yang and Yin:  
Broadchurch and The Bridge

     Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. offer two remarkable TV series – Broadchurch on BBC America and The Bridge on FX.  Thank you DVR or I’d never see them.  These shows are polar opposites, even though they are both crime shows.   

     Broadchurch comes out of what is patronizingly referred to as ‘the cozy’ tradition.  This is generally a crime sub-genre, usually by British (not always) fiction writers that concentrates