I’ve been relatively quiet here since I stopped listing my Netflix rentals. I could do that some more.
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) is “considered by many to be the best of the Charlie Chan mysteries starring Sidney Toler as the eponymous sleuth,” according to Netflix. Toler is no Warner Oland; his face is about as mobile as the villain’s rubber mask. The story is okay but has an unnecessary mind-reading scene at the climax. (In this story, fortune-telling is a scam but ESP is scientific reality.)
Weeds, a Showtime series about a widow who sells marijuana to support her two teen sons. The fourth season technically jumps the shark, by moving (after a fire) from an upscale “Little Boxes” suburb to a beach near San Ysidro, where unfortunately we don’t see much of the community. I’m not going to drop it just yet.
The Invisibles, with Tony Head and Warren Clarke as retired safe-crackers. That could be the premise of a tasty little “fish out of water” sitcom: mis-coordinating their cover stories, getting caught applying their special knowledge in innocent but embarrassing ways, and so on. Instead the first three episodes follow a tired formula: the lads are more or less reluctantly drawn into one more job by contrived circumstances, they pull it off with occasional gags about their age, and there’s a particularly ponderous Moment of Sentiment (also known to Hollywood writers as the Obligatory Moment of Shit, or so I’ve been told) in which some subset of the characters reaffirm their devotion to each other.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Top score. Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon and Zack Whedon whipped this up during the writers’ strike. It’s a musical tragedy, in comic style, about a mild-mannered mad scientist (“I have a Ph.D. in horribleness!”) who wants to join the Evil League of Evil so that he’ll be in a better position to save the world from itself – okay, that’s not the most coherent plan ever, but anyway. I only wish there were more than 43 minutes. The main cast: Neil Patrick Harris as Billy/Horrible; Felicia Day (‘Vi’ in the last season of Buffy) as kind-hearted Penny, Billy’s crush; and Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, the infinitely self-absorbed superhero who wrecks or poisons each of Billy’s dreams.
La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939) by Jean Renoir. I guess this is about the absurdity of the polite conventions in which the upper crust wrap their adulteries. There’s really not much to watch here.
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), by Alain Resnais, opens with a long series of tracking shots of the Baroque ceilings of a posh hotel or château, during which we hear a run-on sentence that loops back on itself about the atmosphere of a memory; and this is a fair warning. Who needs a story? This is Art. I dropped it after half an hour.
Reno 911, a spoof on reality cop shows (now in its sixth season). Not bad, but two or three episodes was enough for me.
Futurama you probably know: Matt Groening’s series in which a pizza boy is accidentally frozen for a thousand years. Particularly interesting for me is the first use I’ve seen of computer-rendered scenes of 3D models in cartoon style (for spaceships and for exterior views of the city, most prominent in the opening titles); these have some flavor of Hergé’s ligne claire.
Mr. Moto in Danger Island and Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (both 1939) are the last of the series. As a free trade purist I couldn’t sympathize with Moto’s mission in Danger Island to stamp out the diamond cartel’s clandestine competition! Vacation has a reasonably interesting villain but a really irritating supporting character, a well-meaning bumbler out of Wodehouse who loudly spills every bean he can find.
Murder Most English (Flaxborough Chronicles) (1977) is a collection of unassuming, easy-paced detective stories, set in a small town (said to be based on the first Boston, in Lincolnshire) where the characters are inevitably a bit quirky. In the first episode, a newcomer signs up with a lonely hearts bureau in the hope of scamming someone, and narrowly escapes becoming the third victim of a more ruthless scammer. I am told that the comic elements, quite understated here, worked better in a radio version; but it’s still enjoyable.
Children of the Stones (1977) is an amazingly cheesy miniseries about the sinister effects of an enchanted stone circle (shot at Avebury, a village built partly within a well-preserved circle, worth seeing if you’re in Wiltshire). The hero is said to be an astrophysicist, but appears to be concerned only with geology. His son measures the (very irregular) stones and announces that they point straight up, rather than to the sun or moon like other famous megalithic arrangements; so they consult a star chart to see what’s up there, never showing awareness that Earth rotates. That was enough for me.
Twelve Monkeys (1995) is easily the best of Terry Gilliam’s movies that I’ve seen so far. (He didn’t write this one. Hm.) At one point the time-traveler temporarily becomes convinced that his memory of the future is false; I love that kind of plot device when it’s done well. It’s never completely clear whether or not the past can be changed (the scientists say not, but in the circumstances one may doubt their knowledge); such ambiguity is risky but it works reasonably well here.
Jason King (1971) is an amiably lightweight series about a dashing and successful writer of thrillers, who is often mistaken for his fictional hero; one way and another he is entangled in adventures against his will.
Of Human Bondage (1934). An artist falls for a waitress with no appealing qualities that I can detect, who repeatedly treats him wrong and then comes back to him for haven. I dropped it midway.
Lost in Austen (2008). A modern London woman finds herself swapping places with Elizabeth Bennet, and struggles vainly to avoid derailing the plot of Pride and Prejudice. Good fun. To help keep it interesting, the writers successfully took some surprising liberties with the canon, without doing anything that ought to offend purists.
I did eventually get tired of Weeds.