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.

Testing publishing from MacJournal.

NOTE: There may be spoilers.

Flannery O’Connor might have written this short story and called it, “A Serious Man is Hard to Find.” Cathleen Falsani has (literally) written the book on the Coen Brothers’ treatment of religion, but this time it’s personal, focused on growing up Jewish in Minnesota. I found this essay (film) a provocative meditation on growing up in a faith tradition one neither understands nor trusts, and wonders whether there is anyone in or out of its professional clerical class who does. God is in the whirlwind in this movie, the big bad wolf waiting to blow the protagonist’s house down. Whether He does, and whether that confirms or annuls this new Job’s faith is left open. Like the Minnesota skies.

Shutter Island

There is no getting around the fact that a B movie is a B movie, even if it is made by Martin Scorsese. The question is whether it was intended as such. Since Scorsese doesn’t need to make homages to anyone, maybe he wanted to cast and direct some of his favorite actors in a period piece that retraces some of the 1960′s “Is he or isn’t she mad?” sorts of movies. Movies like Polanski’s Repulsion perhaps. At any rate, because of the relentless trailers over six months and the earliest review telling us there is a “trick” coming, it becomes impossible to watch for suspense reasons, and becomes a “Memento” like puzzle to retrace after the final credits. I suppose it applies to every movie somewhat, but in this one it is absolutely essential to its presumed enjoyment NOT to know anything about this before entering the theatre, or, by then, it’s too late.

Moon

This first effort by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie (not that that makes any difference), is a heavily plotted conceit about a technician left on a commercially sponsored solo-manned Moon station. His journey and ours is made pleasant enough by a Kevin Spacey-voiced computer companion. The enterprise is focused on harvesting a new source of energy to be delivered to a now depleted Earth. Like one of its parents, 2001 A Space Odyssey, part of the interest within this movie is to uncover what it makes of the future into which this episode is situated, everything from how the new energy source is marketed, to how communication is maintained between Earth and its moon, and on to how relationships between spouses and children are maintained during long exiles, and what, by contrast, constitutes the ideal human life. For that quite achievable goal, Jones’s script handles it well enough, and, if I want to be generous, I would go on to suggest the movie is a parabolic treatment of human loneliness and what it takes to maintain mental health when you are the only person you truly have the ability to measure such health against. Were I not being generous, I would simply say, see Moon, knowing Jones’s next effort may be about the isolation of traveling salesmen amidst the loneliness of the turnpike.

District 13B

I am a profound late-comer to this 2004 French movie (which now boasts a sequel out in limited distribution) and its intricately plotted story driven by the phenomenon of parkour. This original, produced by Luc Beeson, is premised on a future Paris divided into district-fortresses to keep the bad guys in so the good guys never have to enter it. But what if there are some good, or, at least, less perverse, honor-bound residents left within, and, let’s say, somehow a nuclear weapon got smuggled in and needed to be reacquired by the good guys? And let’s say the noble policeman to be sent in desperately needs the help of that honor-bound resident who’s recently been imprisoned for trying to save his sister from being kidnapped into slavery? And let’s say this duo happens to have the most amazing athletic skills upon which to base their hairpin escapes and rescues while knocking out loathsome assassins and brigands on every hand in countless breathless sprints and marathons across buildings, viaducts, and scaffolds without the help of CGI? You have one of the greatest thwart-the-despicable, death-without-dishonor-anti-buddy buddy movies ever made. I am fiercely glad not to have known there was a name (parkour) for what I got to see fresh and yet somehow gratified that there exists a tradition and a holistic philosophy built up around it to justify its existence. I don’t reckon I will have to wait another six years to see the sequel.

I’ve installed a wordpress plugin called Buddypress that injects social networking features into WordPress. I was hoping it might give us a shot at making this site more interesting or fun to use.

The main goal, of course, is still just to host reviews front and center.

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

UPDATE: I’ve already changed my mind. I do think we should visually redesign this site and maybe inject a few features to make it feel more like a community. But the biggest thing we lack is CONTENT, I suppose.

1. BLACK SNAKE MOAN – Filmed in Memphis, 2005
2. WALK THE LINE – Filmed in Memphis, 2004
3. HUSTLE & FLOW – Filmed in Memphis, 2004
4. FORTY SHADES OF BLUE – Filmed in Memphis, 2004
5. 21 GRAMS – Filmed in Memphis 2002
6. A PAINTED HOUSE – Filmed in Memphis 2002
7. THE POOR AND HUNGRY – Filmed in Memphis 2000
8. CAST AWAY – Filmed in Memphis 2000
9. A WOMAN’S STORY – Filmed in Memphis 1998
10. THE BIG MUDDY – Filmed in Memphis 1998
11. THE RAINMAKER – Filmed in Memphis, 1997
12. FINDING GRACELAND – Filmed in Memphis, 1997
13. THE SORE LOSERS – Filmed in Memphis 1997
14. THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT – Filmed in Memphis, 1996
15. THE DELTA – Filmed in Memphis, 1996
16. TEENAGE TUPELO – Filmed in Memphis, 1995
17. A FAMILY THING - Filmed in Memphis, 1995
18. WITHOUT AIR – Filmed in Memphis, 1995
19. THE FIRM – Filmed in Memphis, 1993
20. THE CLIENT – Filmed in Memphis, 1993
21. TRESPASS – Filmed in Memphis, 1991
22. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS – Filmed in Memphis, 1990
23. GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
24. ELVIS AND ME – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
25. MYSTERY TRAIN – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
26. LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
27. HEART OF DIXIE – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
28. U2: RATTLE AND HUM – Filmed in Memphis, 1988
29. MAKING THE GRADE – Filmed in Memphis, 1983
30. THE RIVER RAT - Filmed in Reelfoot Lake & Memphis, 1983
31. THE RIVER – Filmed in Memphis, 1937
32. HALLELUJAH – Filmed in Memphis, 1929