Category Archives: Television

Watching Parade’s End & Downton Abby and remembering Alien & Aliens

Television

Parades End

Michele and I just finished watching Parade’s End on HBO (on demand).  After a somewhat long courtship – first two hour episodes – when we made the mistake of expecting something like The Age of Innocence, we have fallen in love with it. OK, that may be a little too dramatic, but we both liked it and, increasingly, identified with and against different characters. The hero – protagonist may be a better word – Christopher Tietjens, seems to be an extra uptight Englishman, at first, but we begin to realize that he is trapped in a world that he has been born into. He may be the only one still following the rules but that doesn’t make it any easier for him to breakaway even as he see the problem, saying at one point, Everybody thinks me a fool. I am starting to come around to their opinion. 

Because Parade’s End takes place in the same time approximately the same location, and seems to deal with the same issues as Downton Abby, we expected the two to be similar. But they aren’t. Parade’s End is much slower than Downton Abby at first, but it gains in power and sucked us in. The characters are about three times deeper, probably because the story, adapted for TV by Tom Stoppard, is from a series of books, by Ford Madox Ford, that were written based on his real experiences before and during the war. In this England, the sense of noblesse oblige is dying out and all that is left is the overbearing restrictions of a society that is trying to resist the changing world.

A sort of weird thing about HBO is that its series are often made to shock with lots of nudity and swearing, think The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, and the movies are subtle to the extreme, think The Tuskegee Airmen or Everyday People. Parade’s End,  as a mini series, seems to be in the middle, especially compared to Downton Abby, but it does lean towards the subtle. Because I like  Parade’s End  better than Downton Abby, I want to say Check it out if only for the costumes and the gorgeous Rebecca Hall, but it is not for everyone. I keep remembering a friend’s comment about liking Aliens, the second Alien movie directed by Cameron, better than Alien – the first Alien movie directed by Ridley Scott which was my favorite – and thinking He must be nuts. But I have come to accept that some people are Alien people and some people are Aliens people and the same is probably true about Parade’s End  and Downton Abby.
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Tavi Gevinson was on Stephen Colbert!

Americana, Television

I think that Tavi Gevinson and Stephen Colbert are two of the most interesting people in the world. Colbert sets himself up as a ranting right-wing idealog but I have seen him, over and over again, set up lefties to tell their point of view better than they usually can do. And he can sing and he is friends – and tumbling-mates – with Amy Sedaris. Gavinson is a savant without the serious mental disabilities. She would be very accomplished for a 35 year old woman, but she is only 16. And I mean, really an only 16 year old kid. She looks like a kid and talks like a kid and takes English and History in Highschool and has an accomplished staff of 50 on a magazine she founded and, apparently, runs. Check it out.

A couple of thoughts on Women’s Beach Volleyball & Women’s Gymnastics

Sports, Television

I am not much of an Olympics watcher. There was a time when I was interested in track, primarily because I had run the 100 yard dash – now the 100 meter sprint – and the broadjump – now the long jump – in Highschool. But also because I went to college in southern California and southern California was a hotbed of track in the 50s and early 60s, the “Golden Age” of track and field . In those days all track was amateur, or club track – so the athletes were paid under the table – and the spectators at a meet sat very close to the participants. Close enough to hear the runners talk, to see them sweat in the hot October sun; close enough to feel part of it.

Because I had seen enough track to know the athletes, I was pretty disdainful of the Olympics where, it seemed, the spectators were the amateurs, really didn’t know the players, and were only there for the spectacle, not the track. However, I did have a chance to go to one major, Olympic level, meet. It was 50 years and two months ago, in June of 1962 when the Cold War was at its height, and it was between  the the United States and The Soviet Union at Stanford Stadium. I still remember the Highjump duel: it had started earlier in the day but was still going on at the end of the day and by then everything else was over. All that was left were 70,000 hushed fans watching U.S. champion, John Thomas and the Soviets’ Valery Brumel – who was the best in the world – go toe to toe. Then it was only Brumel going for a world’d record. When he cleared 7′ 5″, the place went wild.

But this years, I got dragged into watching Women’s Gymnastics and, now I am watching some Women’s Beach Volleyball. My first thought is it should be Girls’ Gymnastics and Women’s Beach Volleyball. The Beach Volleyball players are women, the gymnasts seem to be girls trying to be glamorous. That does not mean that they aren’t great athletes, they are, and what they are doing verges on the impossible.

But I keep remembering my dad saying that women don’t become interesting until they were at least 30 or 40 and, I guess, I have internalized that. The women volleyball players just seem to have more gravitas, to be playing for higher stakes.

The biggest surprise in the Women’s Beach Volleyball – WBV from now on – is that the Chinese women did so well in chaotic  situations. That is the opposite of what I have been told to expect. In the semi-final, between the Americans and the Chinese there were atleast six times when the rally went on, and on, and on, losing any semblance of a set play and deteriorating into chaos. In that chaos, I expected the American to dominate, but the Chinese won four of the six long rallies. The first four, it is true, with the Americans winning the last two which, hopefully, points to a learning curve, but still a surprise.

One more thought, a question, really. Why are there no old gymnasts and why are there no young Volleyball, players.

Sorkin and nostalgia

Americana, Television

I want to be clear at the start by saying that almost everything I think about Aaron Sorkin is probably colored by the movie, The Social Network, which is an hatchet job on Mark Zuckerberg.  In defending  The Social Network Sorkin said “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling”. I do want to acknowledge that it was good story telling, but it was fraudulent storytelling. Worse, it was fraudulent story telling about a real person – many real people, actually, especially Priscilla Chan who Zuckerberg is now married to – who is still alive.

As a liberal, I very much enjoyed The West Wing. Everybody was so right, as in correct, and so brilliant – especially President Josiah Bartlett – and they were so busy and quick witted. It all seemed so real. Of course it wasn’t, we didn’t have President Bartlett, we had President George Bush the Younger. When Studio 60 came on the air, I expected it to be great and I was very disappointed. It was pretty much the same fast talking gang but I was no longer particularly interested in them.

I saw some bad reviews of The Newsroom, but I still was looking forward to seeing it for all the reasons I liked The West Wing (and we have a subscription to HBO, so What the hell). The Pilot was very Sorkinesque – including the fraudulent part of Sorkin – with quick talking, witty, brainy people and maybe I should have loved it, but I didn’t. It replayed the BP Gulf oil spill and then played it in the same over the top way the press actually did play it, all the while inferring that the real news people didn’t cover it right. He is right, they didn’t cover it right because they covered it in the same breathless way that Sorkin pretends to.

Like Sorkin, they covered the oil spill as the worst ecological disaster in the history of mankind. And it wasn’t. But there is a real ecological disaster going on here and that is the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. The real newspeople aren’t covering that very much because it is not dramatic enough and Sorkin doesn’t even pretend to cover it.

But my biggest complaint is Sorkin’s nostalgia for the old timey news guys. Supposedly, they  were better at covering the news. One character – the wise old man, I guess – says We just decided to referring to covering the news with integrity which becomes the title of the episode, We Just Decided To. These are the newpeople who didn’t cover the deplorable conditions for blacks in the south for almost 100 years. They didn’t cover the lynchings, the reign of terror, until it was jammed down their collective throats. They didn’t cover President John Kennedy banging every woman in sight including many underage girls. Yes, they did cover the disintegration of the Vietnam War, but not as well as the disintegration of the Iraq war was covered.

The old timey newsmen were company men and the company was the white establishment. There is more information available, to even the most casual observer, today than ever before. More news and more real facts. In many areas, like the BP oil spill, the cable news channels probably dwell too much. Sure, it is harder to get information on the ecological disaster of the Louisiana coastline degradation than it should be, but nobody covered that 50 years ago at all. And this was when the Army Corps of Engineers was actively hurting it. My personal anger is that nobody covered the destruction of Glenn Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on earth, except to exalt Lake Powell. People who knew the area were screaming and the press ignored them while writing fawning articles about the Army Corps of Engineers.

I suspect that Sorkin didn’t set out to do  a hatchet job on Zuckerberg, he was just collateral damage in Sorkin trying to go after the web in his haste to glorify the good old days.