Gucci on a Ritz

There have been a lot of retrospectives of The Carol Burnett Show in recent years. None of them ever include this splendid (and affectionate) spoof of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Roger musicals of the 1930s.

The songwriter Irving Berlin had a strict proviso against any parodies of his songs, so the songs here only hint at the Berlin originals - with the exception of the singing gondolier who warbles a garbled version of "Putting on the Ritz", which includes a reference to "Fred Austerlitz" (Fred Astaire's real name).

Other delights include Ken Berry's dancing (not what he was famous for in the television of the 60's and 70's), and Roddy McDowall's rather good impression of Edward Everett Horton.

Screen teens (write of passage number forty-two)

On a beautiful afternoon of what was probably the last warm Saturday of the year, I suggested lunch at a restaurant on the Rideau Canal, one which I've been meaning to try for years. This involved a hefty bus ride, lengthened by a re-routed crawl around the War Memorial, as Hades scrambles to get ready for Canada's sesquicentennial next year.

About half a dozen teenaged girls boarded the bus at the Rideau Centre, and artfully arranged themselves in the seats just ahead of us. They looked as if they'd been cast by an agency: willowy, various shades of blond - except for an Afro-Canadian, an Asian Canadian, and a prettily plump dark-haired girl who was reading the protest signs at Parliament Hill:

"'Stop execlutions in Iran... What's that?"

One of the willowy blonds looked down on her witheringly from her perch in the sideway seats.
"Executions.  There's no 'l' in 'execution'."

The subject was quickly dropped for gossip, continuing the length of Bank Street into the Glebe.

"Don't invite Max -- we hate him, remember?"
"So invite him and then we can all ignore him."

"Cassidy? I hate her!"
"So do I!"
"So do I!"
"I really hate her --- wait --- I don't think I know her..."

My phone tapped.  It was a text notification from elder daughter, seated next to me:

I wouldn't go back to high school if someone paid me.

Far-gone

I believe I'm on record as being squeamish.

This is why I can never quite figure out why I like Fargo, a movie that I've watched several times. I used to think it was mainly because of the performance of Frances McDormand, who is married to one of the Coen brothers who directed this film. However, the film also stars William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi and a host of wonderful character actors. The dialogue is quirky and clever; the characters are also quirky and often not so clever. And despite the body count, there is a great deal of humour, dark and otherwise.

Maybe that's why I watched the first television series of Fargo. Produced by the Coen brothers, it's a different story than the movie, but has similar characters: an innocent but skilled cop who is way smarter than she sounds, a sad sack loser who blunders into a life of crime and murder, a cold-blooded killer, a whole raft of people who, for the most part, don't deserve to die the way they do. Like the movie, the writing is superb, the camera work is spell-binding, and the acting is fabulous.

So when the Resident Fan Boy sat down with me as I was watching the penultimate episode of the second TV series, he was mystified.

"If I were watching something like this," he declared, "You'd be telling me this was soul-destroying."

I'm pretty mystified myself. It's very well done, though. As with the previous two incarnations of Fargo, it has many of the same elements, but is set in 1979 -- and gives Lifespring the respect it deserves.

Oh, and as far as I can tell, very little of the action in the three stories actually takes place in Fargo. They're set in Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota, where it's always mid-to-late winter.

Chilling, but oddly fresh.

Memories of Mackers

When I was seventeen, my Grade Twelve literature class had a field trip to go see Roman Polanski's infamous version of Macbeth which was playing at a local cinema as part of a Shakespeare-on-film festival with matinees for school groups.

When Polanski made this flick, it was only a year or so after his wife had been butchered, among others, by Charles Manson's disciples in Los Angeles. On top of this, Polanski added in images born of his boyhood memories of the Nazi persecution of Jews, including his own family, in Poland. This version of Macbeth omitted no opportunity for horror: the Thane of Cawdor was executed before our eyes, King Duncan's murder was shown in every gory detail, as was the rape and murder of MacDuff's household. Early on in the film, Macbeth and Duncan were having a little chat, while in the valley behind them, struggling men were being dragged to a huge gallows and strung up.

I spent most of the movie with my fingers in my ears and my head between my knees (I could do that when I was seventeen), but I could still hear the gasps and groans of my classmates. Plus sickening crunches.

The corker was when I emerged shaking into the lobby where a knot of girls from my school were in deep conference, punctuated by "EEEEEW"s. When I got close enough to hear the discussion, my life changed. They were disgusted by the fact that the witches were naked. It was then I knew that something was fundamentally wrong with society. More than two hours of rape, decapitation, skewering, and they were upset by nude old women. I wish I could say that attitudes have changed in the intervening years.

Anyway, last week, I finally received my library hold on Patrick Stewart's recent portrayal of Macbeth. It was on PBS a couple of years ago, but I only managed to catch bits of it, enough to know that I'd like to see the whole thing. Unlike Polanski, Rupert Goold (who directed this for the Chichester Festival Theatre and eventually brought the production to Broadway before it was adapted and filmed for television) elects to suggest rather than show -- which can amplify the terror. The one aspect that is rather more graphic than Polanski's version is in the interpretation of the witches who here are the Weird Nursing Sisters.

A YouTube contributor going by the handle tizerandchips has thoughtfully put together a comparison of our first glimpse of the witches from Polanski's version, Goold's version, and in the middle, from Australian Geoffrey Wright, three diabolical Melbourne schoolgirls.
Wow. After all that, we need to counteract the evil charms, don't we? Rather than sending you outside to turn around three times and spit, I offer my best-beloved scene from the third season of Black Adder where the Eighteenth Century incarnation of Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) explains the "Scottish Play" superstition to Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and then puts two supercilious actors (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Connor) through the wringer. Hugh Laurie is the baffled Prince George.


And as a final antidote, counter-curse, or what you will, this delightful ditty by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, the same team who brought us the hilarious and heart-breaking musical "The Drowsy Chaperone". This was the opening theme for the second season of "Slings and Arrows" - one of my favourite TV series ever, and is sung here by the late great Graham Harley:
Call me superstitious or cowardly or weak
But I'll never play a character
Whose name one dare not speak

I'll play Hamlet
In doublet and hose
Or either of the Dromeos
But sorry, I won't play Mackers

I'll play Richard the Third
With a hump and a wig
Or Henry the Eighth
That selfish pig
But sorry, I don't do Mackers

Every soul who plays this role
Risks injury or death
I'd rather sweep the bloody stage
Then ever do
Mac-you-know-who

So give me King Lear, Cleopatra,
Romeo, Juliet, Doesn’t mat-ra
I’ll play them all for free
But I’d be crackers
To take on Mackers
Y'see I’m skittish about the Scottish Tragedy
Och-ay!

Daytime viewing

I've blogged about ghosts before:  ghosts in houses I've been in, my husband's dream encounter with his recently deceased mother, and, most unnerving of all, a haunting by someone who is still alive.  Do I believe in ghosts?  Let's just say I've never actually seen one, nor do I particularly want to.  But I will admit that one of my guilty pleasures is Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Biography Channel.  I guess I don't mind other people's experiences of the paranormal.  Frankly, I feel rather the same about family weddings -- they're great if they're happening to someone else's family...

I've just had a birthday recently and a rather ghoulish theme emerged in the presents I was given.  This was not by design; the Resident Fan Boy has found it simpler to consult a rather ancient wish list I set up at Amazon.ca, and thus I was rather startled to receive an old Granada Television anthology of ghost stories first transmitted in the early eighties entitled Shades of Darkness and the audiobook version of The Woman in Black.

Just as well the days are getting longer because there was no way I'd be working through these at night.

So I settled myself down with the DVD which features six stories, and discovered I'd remembered two of them well (which was why it was on my wish list), one vaguely, and the other three not all.  These are very old-fashioned ghost stories, none of them set any later than the 1940s, and filmed in the leisurely detailed way  which is verboten these days when the greatest crime of all is to keep anyone waiting.  The two I remembered the best were the two I found the creepiest:  The Intercessor, based on a short story by May Sinclair, with John Duttine (above) encountering the pitiful spectre of a little girl , and Afterward, based on a short story by Edith Wharton about a ghost which isn't revealed to be a ghost -- until afterward...

*Shudder*

About six years after these stories appeared on television, some bright spark came up with the idea of dramatizing The Women in Black, an 1983 novel by Susan Hill, for British television --- on Christmas Eve, of course.  (Is this a British thing?  Why does their Christmas programming involve vampires, murder mysteries and Doctor Who?)  Being a Canadian, I didn't see this production until a year or two later (and definitely not at Christmas), but I remember being scared rigid by it.  I don't remember being quite so frightened by anything else on television with the possible exception of the Gulf War.

Based on the memory of that, I headed off to an early evening show of the latest incarnation of The Woman in Black starrng Daniel Radcliffe, having made a pact with Friend With Whom I Have Coffee.  (I figured this film might be a bit too intense for younger daughter.)

 I understand that many showings have turned into adolescent scream-fests.  I'm happy to report that this was not the case where we were, although FWWIHC and I may have cried out involuntarily from time to time while futilely attempting to climb into our medium popcorn bags.  For most of the flick, I coped by watching the action through my fleece top, and concentrating on the anachronisms (example:  death certificates would not have been typed; I'm a family historian -- I know about death certificates), and clinging to them like lifelines.  At one point, I willed myself to imagine the film crew in the haunted nursery with Daniel Radcliffe, anything to take myself out of the story.

So yeah, the movie was scary. FWWIHC told me, as we worked on suppressing our shivers during the drive home, that she would definitely not be taking her three daughters who range in ages from eleven to fifteen.  Smart move.  I've met her daughters. No point in giving them more ideas. They share a macabre sense of humour.  At least, I think they're joking...

By the end of the week, I'd calmed down a bit and wondered if the 1989 production (which stars, ironically enough, a young Adrian Rawlins who would later portray Daniel Radcliffe's father in the Harry Potter movies) was indeed as scary as I remembered.  I found it on YouTube of course and spent a cold afternoon watching it.  Like Shades of Darkness, the story-telling is at a slower pace, aimed at viewers from an era of  longer attention spans and perhaps a lower threshold of squeamishness. It's a quite different story from the current movie, set in a later time and featuring an ending that doesn't resemble that of the film in the slightest. (And the book is something else again, by the way.)

I found it creepy but not quite as terrifying as I remembered.  Until I walked into the kitchen and glanced out into our neighbour's backyard and saw someone standing by the fence....

It was a sagging line of coloured pennants which had somehow tricked my eyes.  I fixed myself a warm drink and sat down until my heart stopped pounding.

The episodes of Shades of Darkness are also available on YouTube.  Take a look if you have a taste for that kind of thing.  But I'd recommended viewing them in the daylight.  With someone in the house.  Alive, that is.

They didn't keep on killing Rory

At last. Something to make Saturday evening television watching bearable. The Space channel has made this season's Doctor Who available for Canuck Whovians within hours of the episodes' airing in Britain. Of course, we have constant commercial interruptions and promos for Space's vast array of blood-spattering vampire shows, but at least we don't have to illegally download the series anymore, which saves us both time and bandwidth.

How does it look so far? Let's start with the stuff that I find distracting. (Note: anything that pulls me out of the willing suspension of disbelief is a liability):

1) We're starting with a two-parter. Now, I can understand why, because the plot requires that the Doctor has not seen his companions for a matter of months. (Or weeks. Or years. I probably need to watch this a third time.) However, every single other New Who season opener has had rather more levity to it. The world has always been in danger, that's a given, but the season traditionally starts with a light-hearted romp. Two-parters tend to be a bit more serious. This one certainly is.

2) Historical bobbles. Granted, these are petty, but they put me off. The hair is way too long for 1969, especially for government types. Long-hair really didn't become mainstream until the seventies. Plus, we have an African-American Secret Service agent issuing orders. Really? In Richard Nixon's White House? Kennedy hired the first black secret service agent in 1960 (he lasted about three months), and African-Americans make up something like ten percent of the Secret Service fifty years later, but I doubt there were many, if any, serving Nixon in the late sixties, and they certainly would not be yelling at Nixon about "engaging with the suspect". (Or whatever he said. I'll definitely have to watch it again.)

3) An American lady (played by an American actress, as it happens) says: "Hang on, didn't I just say that?" Wouldn't she say something like "Wait a minute"? Americans do say "hang on", but not in this context which is a British usage. Again, it's petty, but it knocks me out of the story, and I have to waste time getting back in.

The good stuff:

1) Steven Moffat and his twisty-turny, timey-wimey complex plots. It usually means I have to watch his show several times to wrap my poor excuse for a brain around them, but he's also very, very funny, so it's not a hardship.

2) River Song. Gawd, I love River Song. River Song and Emma Thompson are the closest I've come to girl crushes. If we can't have Elizabeth Sladen anymore, can we have Alex Kingston in her own River Song spin-off series? Please?

3) I do like Matt Smith as the Doctor, particularly when he drops his voice. I'll never fancy him, but I didn't fancy Christopher Eccleston either and he worked, too.

4) They promised to kill off a major character in this episode and it wasn't Rory. Thank goodness. That really would have been over-kill.

I guess the "ayes" have it. Not one of my top ten episodes, but it passes the Persephonic Doctor Who Multiple Viewing Test. And by the way, I'm not promising to review each episode. Aren't you relieved?

Wanna make thumbthing of it?

Oh, but I'm damp and crabby. In the true and vicious tradition of April in Hades, we were forced to walk to the bus stop this morning through a precipitation which Environment Canada describes as "wet snow" but that is actually thick white missiles that go plop-plop-plop like a blizzard of bird-droppings. By the afternoon, I was forced to go out again in what was now cold, pelting rain.

I hadn't had enough sleep because I stayed up to watch The Killing and The Borgias. The former is an American retelling of a Danish murder-mystery series filmed in Vancouver. I recognise next to no one in the cast, but so far, it's compelling. The latter is clearly a very expensive production, features three fabulous actors: Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, and Colm Feore, and each shot looks like a High Renaissance painting. Then they lost me. In a beautifully photographed, sumptuous recreation of Rodrigo Borgia's procession on his way to being crowned Pope, I listened in disbelief to the background music which was Zadok the Priest. You know, that coronation anthem that George Frederick Handel composed in 1727? They even played it kind of softly, as if hoping no one would notice. Well, they didn't sneak it past me, and then they killed off Derek Jacobi's character, so to heck with them and their bleedin' anachronisms.

Boy, I'm cranky. So I'm putting myself to bed early tonight and leaving you with this gem which is undoubtedly long past its expiry date in Britain:I like this so much, I've friended Bertram Thumb-cat on Facebook. So there.

Wasps, watering and werewolves: more obstacles to blogging

A bit over a year ago, I managed to see the pilot episode of Being Human on YouTube. I have been waiting for the rest of the series ever since, despite several major changes in cast. (The picture is of the original cast.) The series (sans the pilot episode) is being telecast on the Space Channel this week.

It's witty, well-acted, and, oh dear, quite violent. I hope I don't have nightmares tonight....

The cheese stands alone

We've finally got younger daughter a lift to school --- but only for Fridays. Nevertheless, that meant I could hang around the television set and look frantically through the crowds that congregate outside NBC in New York during the weather portions of the Today Show. Elder daughter's school tour was scheduled to stand out there this morning. I'm not sure if they did; it was listed in the itinerary as optional. At any rate, I didn't see them.

I used to watch the Today Show quite regularly when I was much younger. Was it always this bad? We had the show on for two hours, and I learned four things:

1) President Obama is in a sweat over the discovery of an "underground nuclear facility" in Iran.

2) A pretty woman has disappeared after being in police custody. The fact that she was young and pretty seemed to weigh heavily.

3) Apparently children who have been spanked have lower IQs than those who haven't.

4) Michael Jackson is still dead.

They spent quite a bit of time on the Obama item, a little bit less time on the disappearance, less than three minutes on the spanking; and tons of time on Michael Jackson. The rest of the programme, totaling about ninety minutes I'd say, was spent on weather reports, local news (we get the Detroit feed), and commercials. Interminable, loud commercials, the longest of which focused on some guy who sits on his deck reading and petting an animal while the voice-over details a very long list of side-effects to the drug being advertised.

I turned off the set at 9 am, having failed to glimpse elder daughter and with the feeling that my brain had been turned to cheese. There are people who routinely begin their mornings this way. How can they bear it?

The sixth day of Christmas

We're halfway through the festival, then we're flung out of the cozy harbour of the holidays into the grim open seas of the school year, with no sign of bus service anytime soon. The temperatures have plummeted and there's a thinnish cover of snow on the ground, just enough to brighten up the muddy berms and need shovelling from the front paths. For the first time since December began, younger daughter has selected a non-Christmas DVD for her daily viewing.

Actually, what's considered holiday viewing in North America baffles me. Even the so-called Christmas specials back-pedal so furiously from being about Christmas that you end up with odd kind of soulless stories with a vague moral. One of the few new offerings this year was a thing called Shrek the Halls in which Shrek apparently learns that spending time with your friends is the most important thing, no matter how annoying, destructive, overbearing, loud, etc. those friends happen to be. It wasn't quite clear what holiday these friends were supposed to be celebrating, but apparently, it was important to do it together...

Educational channels seem to think anything by Dickens is Christmassy so we got The Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist. Channels aimed at female audiences think anything to do with Jane Austen is Christmas fare, and family channels think The Sound of Music is a Christmas movie. Summertime. Nazis. Sure sounds like Christmas to me.

While we're at it, when did "My Favourite Things" become a Christmas song? As far as I can tell, it's because of "brown paper packages tied up with string" "silv'ry white winters that melt into spring" and "snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes". But "raindrops on roses"? "When the bees sting?" What is this? Christmas in Australia? And don't get me started on "Jingle Bells", "Winter Wonderland", or "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Sing them if you like, but please stop calling them Christmas carols. A) They're not carols. B) They've nothing to do with Christmas, even in a secular way. (Oh yeah, and Marilyn Monroe never recorded "Santa Baby"...)

If we're going to go for secular Christmas music, here's one that isn't played nearly enough: Oh, sing it, Chrissie Hynde. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go shove some more mince tarts in the oven. It's time to open the sixth day of Christmas present...