Change Your Image
nigelgspencer-466-739460
Reviews
Slow Horses (2022)
A very un-American treat...till now.
Nigel Spencer:
A very un-American treat...till now. Anyone who likes Charlie Muffin will love this.
So far, the series is incredibly good and remarkably true to the novels, even to the point of being filmed in the "actual" locale discovered by author Mick Herron, one of the few masters of this genre not really having lived as a spy himself (well probably, possibly). Jackson Lamb is delicious and represents a side of us all we would probably love to act out and even nurture.
OK, I would, in any case.
Gary Oldman is obviously enjoying himself hugely as the man we all hate to love. There are two basic mistakes here though:
first, Roddy Ho is more of a nasty egomaniac and less of a goofy closet superhero (totally out of touch with reality) than he is in the books;
secondly, the wonderfully explosively psychotic and sugar-bingeing Shirley Dander from the books is nowhere to be found in the lightweight underwhelming version of her character we are presented with onscreen.
Archetypes anyone?
They are part of the deep, unspoken power of these novels.
Lady Die (Taverner) is the flip-side of the original Lady Di. The former is calculating, cold-blooded and unscrupulous, where the latter was spontaneous, sensitive and vulnerable.
Lamb, on the other hand, is a part of ourselves we are longing to let loose on the world: apparently chaotic, blind, unthinking and invulnerable, yet oh so shrewd. He's our Dyonisian side, as is Shirley (only as she appears in the books though). The original Shirley is so far off the rails, she wouldn't know them if she tripped over them and upchucked the cocaine and sugar she's been bingeing on. Unfortunately her side of the triangle has basically been trashed by writer Will Smith. Mick Herron knew what he was doing when he created her for the books though.
One word of caution: the final episode of Season Three also gets very violent, American-style, and we can only hope this does not bode ill for Season Four. Unfortunately, feedback from audiences who haven't read the novels and are addicted to computer-assisted superviolence in their movies may pressure the team into delivering a more violent and sensationalist version such as we are accustomed to in American films. Let's hope not.
Does anyone remember what robots, computers and Americans did to Pennyworth?
The Spanish Princess (2019)
Twisted History...why?
We have recently been on the receiving (and deceiving) end of at least two potentially brilliant historical dramatic series that have gone badly wrong. The first and worst is George & Mary, a falsification which turns the reign of James I into a sperm-and faeces-drenched eight-day-a-week sodomy fest. How on earth could The Guardian praise it so highly? Apparently nothing else happened after Elizabeth I died; how could it? Yet so much did. This neglected period holds so much else of interest that is rigorously withheld from us by Julianne Moore's vanity piece, for what else can one call it? For reasons best known to her forensic psychoanalyst, Julianne Moore has indulged and glorified her personal demons for no good reason, and in so doing has twisted history hard enough to break its neck.
The second series to do double injustice to a much-neglected period (the transition through Henry VII to the reign of Henry VIII) is The Spanish Princess. This one, at least, is entertaining and frustratingly well acted. Why frustratingly, simply because it is not true. Harry (the young Henry VIII) was NOT in love with Catherine...he was practically an infant! Henry VII never planned to marry Catherine upon Arthur's death, etc., etc.
Why have these little-lit corners of history been so badly victimised...along with the viewing public?
Pennyworth (2019)
It has fallen off badly after the first season-and-a-half.
The Batman tie-in doesn't really matter, and neither do the oh-so-boring-and-repetitively-flat characters of Thomas and Martha Wayne.
This once charming and surprizing show has been dumbed down and flattened out by swamping it with American characters and dead people that are resurrected as robots. (Three, count 'em three, if you don't count the fact that Alfie's dad dies twice!)
This week, we had hopes when Beth Sykes showed up and confronted Norman Salt after a long absence...but Salt is a Yank-style robot too, so really nothing matters any more.
Is it the mind-numbing influence of Marvel or DC Comics that turns everything to crap and everyone into robots?. Look at what the atrocious "Avengers" series has done to a once-fine actor like Benedict Cumberbatch.
This stopped being a good, imaginative British show a season and a half ago.
Heart of Spain (1937)
Bethune and Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.
(reprinted from International School History--YouTube.) Dec 2, 2015
American Herbert Kline collaborated with Hungarian photographer Geza Karpathi in this documentary on the Spanish Civil War. It focuses on Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian physician who gave up his practice to join the loyalists in Madrid and help create the much needed blood bank. Kline practically lived with Bethune's unit capturing footage of transfusions and other medical services. Under editors Strand and Hurwitz, who added newsreels and other source materials, the film was transformed into "a broadly-based study of the struggle against fascism."
(Category Education License Standard YouTube License Music "Danza Espanola No. 10 in G Major, Op. 37" by Andrés Segovia--Google Play iTunes)
=====================================================
On of the best films on the subject, along with "Los Canadienses" (NFB), though parts were used and denatured in the somewhat smarmy and condescending NFB biography "Bethune" (1964). The sacrifices of Canadians willing to defend Spanish democracy have never been adequately or generally recognized. Nor has the importance of Communist parties in Canada and elsewhere--the only serious opposition to Nazism and to the benevolent apathy with which the great powers (including the Allies) allowed Fascism to grow. The film also shows the huge innovation of taking medical care (along with blood transfusions) to the front, later adopted in WWII and the Korean War. His story, and Spain's of course, has to be seen in parallel with that of the MacPaps (the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion) Canada's own contribution to the anti-fascist International Brigades, though many Canadians, before its formation, served in the Lincoln and Washington Brigades, as well as the Republican government itself. The formation of a Canadian battalion distinct from the Americans in 1937 was in itself an additional hurdle our men and women had to face. The battalion was named for the leading Patriots in Ontario and Québec, William Lyon MacKenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau, who fought local colonial cliques for more democracy in Canada a century earlier, from 1837-1839, a significant pair of anniversaries in themselves.
Some MacPap graves are shown in the film.
Touring Canada with this film on a fund-raising drive, Bethune--counter to instructions from the Central Committee--admitted; "I have the honour to be a Communist." He later left for China, where he died helping the Red Army combat the Japanese invasion and face betrayal by its supposed Chinese Nationalist "allies".
======================== (reprinted from IMDb review)
Heart of Spain (1937) 10/10 Author: Arden Rynew (arynew) from Los Angeles 15 September 2005
Six years before the Motion Picture Academy awarded the first Oscar for a documentary film, Leo Hurwitz created "Heart of Spain", a film which recorded for posterity the early activities of Hitler's Nazi Party in Spain in 1936. Before the style and structure of feature film documentaries had been established, Mr. Hurwitz's masterfully demonstrated his story telling abilities. Well edited, this film is a must see for all those interested in the development of the documentary films. Years later, when the people of Germany claimed that they were not aware of what Hitler had been doing, this film was pointed to. "Heart of Spain" played widely in motion picture theatres throughout the United States and many other countries before World War II broke out. It is no wonder that in 1942, CBS Television appointed Mr. Hurwitz as the first Director of Film for this young television network. Under Mr. Hurwitz's leadership, CBS became a leader in the area of documentaries..... but that's another story. ===============================