weather, movies, etc.

[kindkit]

In news from the desert southwest of the US, it has been snowing intermittently all day. The snow melts as soon as it hits the ground, but it's still a bit of a shock in the middle of May. And tomorrow's supposed to be even colder.

Some folks were curious about things I included in the movie/tv meme I posted the other day, so, some explanations.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp made my list partly to represent the whole genre of WWII films, because the world wars have been a consuming interest of mine for several years now, and at least a vague interest ever since I was a teenager. Colonel Blimp also has a number of qualities that made me pick it out from the rest. To start with, it's simply a very good film in all respects. And because it was made during the war, it lacks the mythologizing and sentimentalizing that crop up in many (not all) WWII films made in the 1950s and 1960s. It has a strong m/m homoerotic element (always a plus for me), but it also has interesting female characters with agency and personality--which is probably another benefit of its being made during the war rather than during the postwar backlash. I've written more about the film here if anyone's curious.

An anon asked whether I think Brideshead Revisited (the miniseries, not the dreadful film from a few years ago) is worth rewatching. I can only say "I don't know." I haven't rewatched it for years, and I'm not sure if I could stand to rewatch the whole thing because I want to stop while Charles and Sebastian are happy and Charles is less of a complete git than he later becomes. But Brideshead was so formative for me that I had to put it on the list. When I was a young teenager in rural Minnesota, the only television station we reliably received was a PBS affiliate, and the things I watched then--Brideshead, Monty Python, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--marked me for life. They were a glimpse into another world, but they also resonated for me in a way that American TV never had (this was the era of Dallas, the Dukes of Hazzard, and endless reruns of Hogan's Heroes and the Andy Griffith show in afternoon syndication). In particular, Brideshead was the first really homoerotic thing I'd ever seen onscreen; I'd already developed a reluctant taste for m/m homoeroticism, which I fed on fantasies and any hints or implications I could find in any media, but in Brideshead it was all right out in the open, and with the emotions, at least, lushly detailed too. Brideshead gave me a fondness for men walking arm in arm, pairs of men punting on lovely English rivers, men wading barefoot with their trousers rolled up, and men wearing white flannel. Plus the show boosted my developing Anglophilia, so I think it explains a lot about me.

As for Hot Fuzz--I didn't like it the first time I saw it. But I couldn't resist Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's chemistry for long. I guess it's on the list as "what every buddy movie should be but seldom is"?

Finally, I listed White Christmas partly because I really love Christmas, and partly because I really really love Danny Kaye. I still haven't figured out how he managed to have a stage person that was that gay and still be beloved in 1940s and 1950s America, but he did. (And yes, I am convinced by the biographical claims that Kaye himself was gay or bi. Not sure whether I believe he was really having an affair with Laurence Olivier, but I badly want to believe it.) Anyway, in White Christmas Kaye and Bing Crosby have astonishing chemistry as showbiz partners and best friends, and the het romance for Kaye's character is so blatantly tacked on that I find it ignorable. Plus, there's a bit with Crosby and Kaye sort of in drag. Yes, really.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for replying : )

I read Brideshead about fifteen years ago and must admit that I haven't picked it up again since then. After a certain point, it just becomes so horribly bloody depressing. However, I'm toying with re-watching the TV series, if only because I've worked my way through pretty much every classic British series I could think of in the past few months and I'm rapidly running out of recommendations.

[kindkit]

I think the book is more depressing than the mini-series, because in the book you're basically stuck in Evelyn Waugh's imagination (not a happy place to be) for 200 pages, while the miniseries has perhaps a little more distance from Waugh's worldview.

pretty much every classic British series I could think of in the past few months

How about Raffles? Colditz? Blake's 7 is largely brilliant, though you'll have to grit your teeth through some bad stuff in the last two seasons, but the episodes that are good, are amazing. Manhunt is excellent if you can stomach some sexism, and it gets better as it goes along. (Skip episode 2. Trust me. You won't miss anything important and skipping it will save you from temporarily hating the entire world.) Oh, and Callan is fantastic, especially the early black-and-white episodes, not all of which survive.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for the recommendations! I've seen and loved Colditz, Manhunt and Callan. The sexism in Manhunt was, for the most part, too damn bizarre to upset me much. I'm thinking in particular of the "a woman suffering a post-traumatic breakdown can only be cured by sex" episode, which pushed the misogyny to the point where it just became surreal and I couldn't take it seriously enough to get angry. Episode two was horrific, though, and I wish I hadn't seen it. Overall, however, it's one of my favourite series. I finished it six months ago and find that I'm still haunted by it in ways that I can't quite put my finger on.

Having said that I love Callan, I have to confess that I've never seen the colour episodes. The early episodes just worked so well in black & white. Also, I felt that the last episode of the second series was, for me, the natural ending of the story and, in some ways, the only possible ending, so I haven't really felt any urge to watch beyond that point. Are the later episodes worth a look?

I must admit to struggling with the TV version of Raffles, mainly because I'm very attached to the books. I read them as a teenager when I was (reluctantly) living a long way from home, and I found that there was a kind of wistful ache and sense of exile in the later stories which really touched me. The TV version is fine, even charming, but it somehow lacks that undercurrent of melancholy.

I definitely need to watch more of Blake's 7!

[kindkit]

The third season of Callan suffers a great deal from the absence of Toby Meres (the glorious Anthony Valentine), but still has its good moments. Meres comes back for the fourth season. I think both season are well worth watching--the writing is usually good, Edward Woodward is always excellent, and when Anthony Valentine is there he's great, of course. Oh, and in S3 and S4 the character of Lonely gets a lot more development.

I agree that the book and TV versions of Raffles are different in tone. I have some issues with the TV series, in particularly because I don't think Christopher Strauli is very good as Bunny, but I'm a huge Anthony Valentine fan (you may have guessed) and I love his Raffles. Also, on the show Raffles is kinder to Bunny and the two of them seem emotionally closer, which I like. The show is also, sometimes, incredibly, more slashy than the books.

There is something haunting about Manhunt--I still think about it a lot and it's been ages since I watched it. For me it's partly the ending, which is if anything more ironic and downbeat than the rest of the series.

Have you watched Secret Army? It's a little like Manhunt only even bleaker, and in the first season less sexist. I'd recommend stopping after the first series, because in S2 (which I never finished) the show becomes more and more a vehicle for its creators loathing of communism.

Hmm, I'm trying to think of other things. Danger UXB is mostly good, though it suffers from an inability to write a woman who's anything but a soppy, brain-dead love interest. Inspector Morse is good to intermittently excellent if you like detective shows, and the first couple of seasons of Lewis are good, though thinking about the later seasons fills me with rage.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, that was another reason why I didn't feel any particular compulsion to make a start on the third season of Callan. The Armchair Theatre pilot episode really suffered from the fact that Peter Bowles just didn't make much of an impression at all (I actually had to Google who was in it because I couldn't remember), and I suspected that season three might have similar problems. I'm pretty sure I'll get round to ordering the remaining episodes at some point, though, especially if the writing stays at the same standard as the first couple of seasons.

I liked Danger UXB very much, except for - well, you can probably guess. Dear Lord, Susan. What bugged me was that her storyline should really have been quite interesting, but the writers seemed to assume that the audience would never sympathise with an adulterous woman unless she was presented as a simpering child-woman with the IQ of a hamster. I wasn't massively keen on Brian Ash, either, although that was probably just guilt by association because so many of his scenes were with bloody Susan. On the bright side, Maurice Roëves has the most amazing accent.

I watched Secret Army right through to the end and there was a lot in it that I absolutely loved, but I do agree with you about its politics. Leaving ideological and political considerations aside, the Communist characters were, for the most part, made of pure cardboard, so the bigger their role in an episode, the less it worked from an artistic standpoint. My other concern was that the writing sometimes seemed to strain too hard for bleakness and moral greyness. Maybe it was just the length of the series (over 40 episodes, I think?), but I occasionally had the sense of being beaten about the head with the bitter irony of it all. The ending of Manhunt, by contrast, was utterly bleak but felt completely organic and unforced, which is probably why it's stayed with me much longer.

I like detective fiction but have a bit of a prejudice against Morse because the Morse of the books (the early books at least) is such a colossal pervert. I gather the TV version isn't really like that, so maybe I should give it another try.

[vilakins]

I loved the series Brideshead Revisited which made the name Sebastian one of my favourites (and yes, I have a cat called that).

Hot Fuzz is also a favourite, along with Shaun of the Dead. I didn't much enjoy Paul and I haven't seen World's End

[(Anonymous)]

Sebastian is a marvellous name for a cat!

[vilakins]

He learned to come running to it for cuddles very quickly. :-)

I also call him my black bear, but I'm not fond of the name Aloysius. ;-)

[tree_and_leaf]

asked whether I think Brideshead Revisited (the miniseries, not the dreadful film from a few years ago) is worth rewatching

Well, I would say so.