NOTE: There may be insignificant spoilers.

You may have missed this. Or, like thousands of others, didn’t recognize the name from the obit. He’s been chiefly remembered recently for his friendship with Bill Cosby and their joint pioneering efforts to break racial barriers in network TV in the mid 1960s. They did so through the espionage send-up I SPY. This series, in the heyday of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the James Bond craze, stood out as a high concept drama (spy’s cover: world-class tennis player and his sidekick, a tennis practice partner and “valet”—thus making the world safe for Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, 17 years later) featuring a remarkable actor. By whom I mean Robert Culp. I remember him even more for the best written and acted episode of the late, lamented The Outer Limits: Demon With a Glass Hand, not surprisingly written by the great S/F writer, Harlan Ellison. Here mankind’s fate rests on Trent, a man without memory or direction, the consequences of which slowly unfold to a great climax. (Thrillingly so to this then 12 year old.) Later, he starred as the “handler” of a hero whose powers derive from the magical suit he wears in the satirical Greatest American Hero, Culp now past his leading man days. (One hopes his lasting imprint is not his role as Patricia Heaton’s father in Everybody Loves Raymond.) Culp’s genius was portraying an outwardly cynical man with a noble heart, delivering classy, stony repartee with subtlety and wit to his enemies and his friends, all the while placing the proper emphasis on moving the drama forward in a way that David Mamet would approve. Like David Janssen, they don’t make them like Bob Culp anymore.

How to Train Your Dragon

This is good visual story telling, plain and simple, escaping what could have been a very desultory treatment of dragonhood with crisp and endearing dialogue and scene-setting that yields eventually to an ever better climax. Simply put, unlike Disneyesque films, this one has a happy ending that has a cost from which its audience is not shielded (especially those around six). Quite scary most of the way, it’s the one film lately I wish I’d seen in3D first. Others have said it surpasses Avatar in depicting the grandeur of flight and I now can imagine how and why.

Justified

This FX “modern Western” drama is probably getting a bit over hyped after its debut and the two subsequent episodes. Still, as based upon one Elmore Leonard short story, its characterization and dialogue further inspired by his total output, Justified is an infectious character study of a U. S. Marshal who is forced to return to his Harlan County, KY, home against his own preferences. He’s “the angriest man” his ex-wife has ever known, but is portrayed with grace and determination by Timothy Olyphant, late of Deadwood and Hitman, and as the evil genius of Die Hard 4. The title refers to the constant struggle of a good man to rectify wrong through the judicious use of violence without succumbing to its siren seductiveness, tempted to solve all problems with a gun. He believe its use is “justified,” and his work is “justified,” and, in one session with a convicted criminal, even the Biblical notion of justification is broached. At the same time, there is humor both in the exchanges between Olyphant’s Raylan Givens and his prey, and within the very circumstances in which he is placed, though always with the ominous undercurrent of reluctant gunplay breaking out. Is Kentucky really like this? One could only hope. In any event, the show it most reminds me of is James Garner’s The Rockford Files. The difference is the body count, most of which arrived before the show started for Jim Rockford, whereas, in Justified, you have to keep track of it until the final scene.

Caprica

I am not going to say too much about this, lest I rob you of the joy of discovery as you immerse yourself in this engrossing secondary world, created primarily from the imagination of Jane Espenson, who collaborates with Joss Whedon an awful lot, to the benefit of both. Ostensibly a prequel to SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, which I have never watched, Caprica is the world before the future invasion by evil Cylons, who are human/robotic hybrids. In the first 8 episodes, all available for watching at the SyFy site, you become immediately acquainted with a strange echo of our own civilization’s intoxication with virtual reality, and what it would be like if a murderous genius had at his disposal the technology to bridge (i.e., embody) the gap between the virtual and the real. When I read a synopsis of this, I gave it little chance of being interesting, let alone riveting. But it is, and the reason lies in the care with which producers have enveloped the Caprican world with authenticity and what C. S. Lewis called “realism of presentation.” The set designers as well as the costumers have taken as their premise this question: what if this series were being conceived and brought into being not by a science-fiction saturated generation of movie makers, but by a band of suddenly awakened 1950′s smoking, hat-wearing, Rip Van Winkles charged with fusing (1) their last set of memories of what Western humanity were like before their suspended animation with (2) a vision of a futuristic society imperiled by apparent monotheistic polymathic terrorists who use analog tech to defy the hypertech society that lives more and more of their lives vicariously? That’s Caprica—to be enjoyed as much for how its plot unfolds as of what it comprises. And even that’s way above the level of seriousness and engagement of typical network fare.

 
Posted in Movies, Science Fiction, TV, Vintage TV, Virtual reality by Bruce Edwards

Share: digg this!