Always on Sunday: Life of Pi

Hidden Tiger, Crouching Theology

By Jonathan Price

Go see Life of Pi. That’s the short version. Unfortunately, though I am a fan of movies and movie reviews I am caught in a conundrum or an oxymoron or some kind of Rubik’s Cube of intellectual difficulty in that: I love seeing movies, I love knowing about them, I love the series of surprises that a great or even mediocre moviemaker throws at me, I love sitting through the 4-10 previews or, as a friend of mine so anachronistically called them, “trailers” that precede virtually every movie I see.

Always on Sunday: Forks over Knives

"Parental guidance suggested: Nasty diseases and scary statistics."
    That's the cute but accurate way Lee Fulkerson's 2011 documentary Forks over Knives was rated for audiences by Jeannette Catsoulis in her May 5, 2011 review, "Soul Food, Vegan Style," in the May 5, 2011 The New York Times.

Always on Sunday: Henning Mankell's Wallander (Swedish TV)

Another week in which TV programs proved better than my sampling of feature movies, which included the following losers:

• The Hunger Games (2012), a dystopian post-apocalyptic fantasy whose derivation from a young-adult novel might explain its appeal to teenagers,

Always on Sunday: Upstairs Downstairs (TV)

It's over forty-one years now that Upstairs[,] Downstairs has been a part of our television lives. We began watching it when Upstairs, Downstairs was first aired in 1971, with all of its 68 episodes hosted by fatherly Alistair Cooke.

Always on Sunday: Call the Midwife (TV)

We didn't watch a feature film this week. In fact, my wife hardly watched anything other than what she could catch by looking up from a hospital bed after surgery on Monday, and back home since Thursday she is not supposed to have her left knee in a 90° position for more than thirty minutes at a time. Not that either of us has had energy left over from our altered routines to concentrate on a good movie—or TV program either.

Always on Sunday: Blue Bloods (TV)

I may need help. I seem to be addicted to the police drama series Blue Bloods on CBS. I haven't missed an episode about its NYPD cop family: grandfather and former police commissioner Henry Reagan (Len Cariou), father and current police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, who is only five years younger than Cariou), sons Danny and Jamie Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg and Will Estes, respectively), and daughter and assistant district attorney Erin Reagan-Boyle (Bridget Moynahan)—and Danny and his wife Linda (Amy Carlson's) two sons and Erin's daughter.

Always on Sunday: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

We must have seen the preview of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011, directed by John Madden) six or eight times, and we enjoyed it every time. It seemed to be a comedy, and it featured seven companionable English actors we'd grown old with: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Ronald Pickup, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Celia Imrie—listed oldest first, all born within 12 years of each of us. (Dench is only nineteen days older than Smith, who will be 78 this December.)

Always on Sunday: The Grey

Riddle: When is a movie review both easier and harder to write?
    Answer: When you watched only the first 28 minutes. It's easier to write about only 28 minutes than about 118, but it's harder to write about the other 90.

Always on Sunday: Puncture

You like the legal thriller genre? Fan of John Grisham? The 2011 movie Puncture (directed by Adam Kassen and Mark Kassen) isn't based on a Grisham novel, but it does have some similarities to The Litigators (2011).

Always on Sunday: Moscow, Belgium

"Aanrijding in Moscou" is the original title of the movie Moscow, Belgium (2008: Christophe Van Rompaey). Matty (Barbara Sarafian), a mother of three children, including 16-year-old Vera (Anemone Valcke), and mostly without art-teacher husband Werner (Johan Heldenbergh), whose midlife crisis is being tended by a former student, collides with a truck while backing out at the supermarket, and remains peeved and confrontational during the argument that follows, despite 29-year-old truck driver Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet's) evident personal interest in her.

Always on Sunday: Death at a Funeral (2007)

At some point, while my wife and I were enjoying ourselves with copious loud laughter while watching Death at a Funeral [2007: Frank Oz], I said, "I think this movie might be funnier than Four Weddings and a Funeral [ 1994: Mike Newell, with Hugh Grant, Simon Callow, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Andie MacDowell] and Keeping Mum [2005: Niall Johnson, with Rowan Atkinson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, and Patrick Swayze ]." And she agreed.

Always on Sunday: London River

Brenda Blethyn was the reason we decided to start watching the 2009 French film London River, directed by Rachid Bouchareb, but she and several other things too were the reason we continued to watch and much enjoy this quiet, stately film about two parents (Elizabeth and Ousmane) who have come to London to find out what happened to their respective missing children, following the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks there.

Always on a Sunday: Under African Skies

Two things I especially like about Joe Berlinger's 2012 documentary, Under African Skies, about Paul Simon's return to South Africa last year for a 25-year reunion concert with the musicians who participated in his 1986 "Graceland" album: the faces and the music.
    The faces, such as those of African jazz musician Ray Phiri and Joseph Shabalala, founding member of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and all of the faces of Ladysmith, are glorious, then and now, in their musically transported loveliness.

Always on Sunday: Cracker

Robbie Coltrane (born
Anthony Robert McMillan
in 1950) is the cracker

The word "cracker" as the title of the 1990's British TV series means several things:
    It's about a criminal psychologist, Eddie "Fitz" Fitzgerald (played by Robbie Coltrane), who cracks [solves] cases. The Manchester police are lucky to have him on retainer, even if they often ignore his advice, to their disadvantage.
    His conversation crackles with wit—not the same as making wisecracks, which are mostly flippant; there's nothing "sitcom" about this serious drama—Fitz's conversation sparkles with insight.
    A number of the characters (mainly the criminals, but also Fitz sometimes) seem to be cracked; i.e., somewhat crazy if not really so.
    Fitz is a brilliant, likable, witty, infuriating character, indispensable to police in questioning suspects, whose hearts he fathoms in a few minutes of conversation and observation. He's addicted to gambling, a tribulation to his wife of twenty-five years (Barbara Flynn), who nevertheless tells him that other men don't have a tenth of his head or a quarter of his heart.
    Comparable characters in their brilliance and self-absorption come to mind: Doc Martin and Dr. House.
    Episodes of Cracker are well and believably developed; they almost always come in two or three 50-minute parts.

At some point three or four episodes in to Season 1, I said to my wife, "Do you think that Robbie Coltrane ever did stand-up comedy?" He has such presence and his talent for improvisation is obvious.
    She agreed that he might have done stand-up and googled it to find out. According to IMDb, he's "one of Britain's most popular comedians."
    If you're a fan of wizards (which I am not), you might recognize his name for playing Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter films.
    Or do you remember his name from Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989)? Coltrane played Sir John Falstaff, "a fat, vain, boastful, and cowardly knight...primarily a comic figure...embodying a kind of depth common to Shakespeare's tricky comedy" [wikipedia].
    Cracker is something to enjoy highly. We access it via Netflix download.

Always on Sunday: Anonymous

Sunday's regular movie review.

The wondrous words of the writings attributed to William Shakespeare are the hero of the 2011 speculative-historical movie Anonymous. Scenes from eight or ten of Shakespeare's plays are portrayed, either in a royal court setting with the young (Joely Richardson) or old Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave, Joely's mother) in the audience, or on the public stage with their rowdies and a handful of envious younger writers (Ben Jonson [Sebastian Armesto], Christopher Marlowe [Trystan Gravelle], Thomas Nashe [Tony Way], Thomas Dekker [Robert Emms]) wishing they could write like that.

Anonymous (2011: Roland Emmerich) [A costume drama set in the period roughly 1575-1605 resting on a collection of mostly debunked speculations about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, whether Queen Elizabeth might have had one or two children, one of them by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), and whether the actor William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) might remotely possibly have himself murdered Christopher Marlowe to prevent him from exposing Shakespeare's willful fraud. Set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I and the rebellion against her by the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid).] VG [IMDB's plot summary

    The VG indicates that I enjoyed the movie and thought it better than just averagely good entertainment. But I can recommend it only for mature audiences capable of keeping their informed disbelief alive while possibly enjoying an Oliver Stone, JFK-type of historical fantasy. Fellow movie fan Ken Marks seconds that warning:

Snow White is a fabrication. Anonymous is a speculation. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it's a speculation that virtually no Shakespearean scholar takes seriously. Yet Hollywood has the temerity to offer the public supposed historical revelations! Will the multitudes who see it come away thinking, What a fanciful presentation? Not a chance. Their reaction will be, Well, well—for how many centuries have we been in the dark?

A few things I really liked about Anonymous:
    Vanessa Redgrave's utterly convincing impersonation of a doddering elderly woman (whether or not the historical Elizabeth doddered).

    Rhys Ifans's nuanced performance as Edward de Vere, the film's dashing, sensitive lover of a queen, father of one of her sons, skilled swordsman, and the actual genius who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare (however speculative these conceits may be—except perhaps for the swordsmanship).
    The rapt faces of the younger writers in the theater as they listen to language they can't believe the inarticulate, barely schooled actor William Shakespeare could possibly have penned (however much of a Mozartian genius the actual Shakespeare is generally believed to have been).

Always on Sunday: Woody Allen and others

Sunday's regular movie review.

I didn't think that I'd missed any of Woody Allen's nearly fifty films (other than his latest, To Rome with Love, which I intend to watch soon), even if I've not liked all or even most of them very much. I thought that many of them had suffered from a central character portrayed by Allen himself as a self-absorbed, nattering, whiny neurotic, who I always assumed was a version of the actor himself. I did not much enjoy the stories in which these characters figured.
    One of the gifts of Robert B. Weide's recent film, Woody Allen: A Documentary (which took him years to get Mr. Allen's permission to undertake), is that I now know that Woody Allen, in an interview at least, isn't much like those neurotic characters. Never, in the many minutes of interviews included in this long film, does he seem any more neurotic than I am myself. Maybe he's outgrown it (he'll be 78 his next birthday).
    Mr. Allen himself doesn't seem to like a lot of his films. And a number of them he disliked as soon as he had finished them. They just didn't come out the way he had hoped. Someone suggested that maybe if he took two years to make a film, rather than one year, then he could make one that lived up to his expectations. No, he wasn't having any of that. He says that he'll just keep making lots of movies, hoping that occasionally he'll make a good one. He's more interested in getting home on time and playing his clarinet.
    Robert B. Weide's documentary is excellent, We enjoyed it immensely. I was prepared to watch half an hour (less than a quarter of one of the two DVDs in the box) and return the movie to my local library. But both my wife and I were mesmerized by the tour through Allen's oeuvre, learning about his childhood, his parents, his sister, his wives (all of whom are interviewed), some of his friendships (particularly with Diane Keaton), and his long-time association with the producers and the cinematographer and others who have collaborated with him on most of his films. A very informative, even enthralling film. Excellently edited with many interviews interspersed topically.
    I learned that I'd missed quite a few of his films over the years. So far as I could remember, I hadn't seen You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), Whatever Works (2009), Anything Else (2003), Hollywood Ending (2002)—whoa, this is getting ridiculous, I'm only a quarter of the way down the list, and there seem to be quite a few I haven't seen, even several I've never heard of.  [I've not provided links to any of these titles, you can find them in the Internet Movie Database, in the list of films Allen directed.] 
    Have I been believing that I care more about Woody Allen films than I actually do care? Perhaps, but, well, there have been quite a few that I really liked: Midnight in Paris (2011), Match Point (2005), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Husbands and Wives (1992), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), September (1987), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Zelig (1983), Interiors (1978), Annie Hall (1977), and Sleeper (1973). At least I think I did, it's been a long time.
    I'll plan to check out the ones we haven't seen and maybe watch again a few that I think I remember with affection. In most cases, I mean "check out" in two senses, one of them being that I'll borrow the movies from a library.

The others besides Allen that I'm going to mention are Nicolas Winding Refn and Assaf Bernstein, whose films Drive and The Debt, respectively, we also watched this week—both of them also borrowed from our local library.

    I expected to enjoy Drive (2011) simply because of its cast, including Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, and Bryan Cranston [who plays methamphetamine manufacturer Walter White in the compelling TV program Breaking Bad, now in its fifth of sixth announced seasons]. But it was better even than I expected, an outstanding thriller. I have to rate Drive ExtraOrdinary.
    Gosling's character is a criminal, but with otherwise impeccable moral principles, which is what gets him into big trouble, primarily in the form of having to deal with a big mobster—Brooks's first role in which he kills people.

    HaHov, HaChov [The Debt] (2007) is an Israeli film, with subtitles. It is not a first-rate film, but its story kept my wife and me spell-bound, about the apprehension of "The Surgeon of Birkenau" by three young Mossad agents. The Surgeon is a Nazi monster who was never brought to trial in Israel.
    The official reason that he was not brought to trial was that he was shot in 1965 as he attempted to escape his Israeli captors. But today, 35 years later, a small article appears in a minor newspaper in Kiev, Ukraine announcing that The Surgeon is alive and admits his crimes....I rate The Debt Very Good.
    Don't overlook your local library as a source of laudable movies. DVDs include bonus material, you know. How else did I find out that Albert Brooks had never killed anyone before?

Always on Sunday: 2006 was a very good year

Sunday’s regular movie review.

I’m cheating. Sort of.

I discovered while researching Déjà Vu last week that I’d mentioned it in another post (dated July 7, 2007), in which I’d generally enthused over a fairly long list of movies that we (my wife and I) had then fairly recently watched.  I decided that it was incumbent on me to share the list with you and provide links to their Internet Movie Database (IMDb) pages.

You know the feeling you get upon reading a great novel or watching a great film. I know the feeling well, because I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies and try to not to miss the good ones. Movies like the following (listed most recently watched first) just exhilarate me:

The Human Stain (2003: Robert Benton) [When a disgraced former college professor (Anthony Hopkins) has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark, twisted past (Nicole Kidman), he is forced to confront a shocking secret about his own life that he has kept secret for 50 years. Adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2000 novel.]

Breach (2007: Billy Ray) [Based on the true story, FBI upstart Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe) enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.]

For Your Consideration (2006: Christopher Guest) [Hollywood send-up. No-name actors are making a low-budget period drama called “Home for Purim,” when an anonymous post on the Internet suggests that one performance is Oscar-worthy. Then, two more cast members get Oscar-related press....(Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy)]

Déjà Vu (2006: Tony Scott) [An ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms] agent (Denzel Washington) travels back in time to save a woman from being murdered, falling in love with her during the process.]

Blood Diamond (2006: Edward Zwick) [A fisherman (Djimon Hounsou), a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio), and a syndicate of businessmen match wits over the possession of a priceless diamond.]

Hollywoodland (2006: Allen Coulter), [A detective (Adrien Brody) examines the mysterious death of George Reeves (Ben Affleck), TV’s Superman. [George Reeves was among the very first actors I became acquainted with, as a boy in the 1950s.]

Infamous (2006: Douglas McGrath) [While researching his book In Cold Blood, writer Truman Capote (Toby Jones) develops a close relationship with convicted murderers Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) and Dick Hickock (Lee Pace). I liked this adaptation of the true story at least as well as Capote (2005: Bennett Miller), in which Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote, for which performance he won the Oscar.]

The Last King of Scotland (2006: KevinMacdonald) [Based on the events of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker)’s regime as seen by his personal physician (James McAvoy) during the 1970s.]

The Good Shepherd (2006: Robert DeNiro) [The tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency is viewed through the prism of one man’s life. (Matt Damon & Robert DeNiro)]

Keeping Mum (2005: Niall Johnson) [A pastor (Rowan Atkinson) preoccupied with writing the perfect sermon fails to realize that his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is having an affair and his children are up to no good. I “nearly split my sides” laughing.]

Running with Scissors (2006: Ryan Murphy) [Young Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross) absorbs experiences that could make for a shocking memoir: the son of an alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) and an unstable mother (Annette Bening), he’s handed off to his mother’s therapist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch’s bizarre extended family. Black humor.]

The World’s Fastest Indian (2005: Roger Donaldson) [The life story of New Zealander Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins), who spent years building a 1920 Indian motorcycle—a bike that helped him set the land-speed world record at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967.]

The Devil Wears Prada (2006: David Frankel) [A naive young woman (Anne Hathaway) comes to New York and scores a job as the assistant to one of the city’s biggest magazine editors, the ruthless and cynical Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). Stanley Tucci is particularly enjoyable to watch as Nigel, Priestly’s “fashion assistant.”]

I tingle and shift into a higher gear of aliveness while watching movies like these. I clap my hands, I fidget, I make side remarks. (I’m glad that my wife usually tolerates this and, especially, that she mostly shares my taste in movies.)

But when we see two movies in a row of the caliber I’m talking about, wow! We actually saw Breach and The Human Stain back-to-back, then a few days later had that glorious experience again. The first movie was the taut, dramatic, perfectly plotted, utterly gripping tale, Notes on a Scandal (2006: Richard Eyre) and starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. I was struck by the remark of Zoe Heller, the author of the book on which the movie was based, that she deliberately concocted a “bait and switch” with the sophisticated narrative device of employing an apparently reliable narrator (the Judi Dench character) who later proves to be unreliable....

The second was a brilliant twist on the fictional device of having characters literally take on a life of their own and become unruly, which was exploited so well in novels by Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, 1939, which James Joyce read and said delighted him) and Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, 1979). The movie was Stranger Than Fiction (2006: Marc Forster), starring Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, and Queen Latifa, with Tom Hulce (who played Mozart in Amadeus and, incidentally, is an alumnus of the UNC School of the Arts Drama School, Winston-Salem) in a delicious small part.

You might want to watch these films if you missed them. Or watch them again. I could watch a few of them again myself.

Always on Sunday: Safe House

Sunday's regular movie review.

I rented the subject of today's review from a local Redbox kiosk largely on the basis of its starring Denzel Washington and, to a lesser extent, Ryan Reynolds. I also liked that it was about spies.

Safe House (2012: Daniel Espinosa) [IMDb: A young CIA agent (Ryan Reynolds) is tasked with looking after a fugitive (Denzel Washington) in a safe house. But when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.]

    Before watching the DVD last night, I googled to get the IMDb citation (above) and happened on Rotten Tomatoes' rating ("Rotten") and was put on my guard by the comment, "Washington and Reynolds are let down by a thin script and choppily edited action sequences that betray the film's unfortunate lack of imagination."
    Then I watched the movie, paying particularly close attention to its logic, thinking that the editing comment might betray a lack of coherence in the movie's explanation of why someone wanted the Denzel Washington character (Tobin Frost) dead.  The explanation seemed coherent enough, if also more explanation than needed. I won't spoil your viewing by saying why I think it was "more" than enough. (But I will quote something Tobin Frost tells his young colleague: "Everyone betrays everyone.")
    As for the action, maybe the editing was choppy; I didn't care. My own complaint is that there was too much action—more car collisions, more shots fired than would have satisfied me. Your call. I rate Safe House VG (Very Good).

This morning, I thought I'd compare Rotten Tomatoes' ratings of a few other films with my ratings of those films, to see how serious our disagreement might be. I focused on Denzel Washington films. Rotten Tomatoes rated as "Rotten" Man on Fire (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009), all three of which I liked, especially the latter two. Rotten Tomatoes commented:
    "Man on Fire starts out well, but goes over the top in the violent second half." [I don't seem to have rated Man on Fire, but I remember it favorably.]
    "Tony Scott tries [in Déjà Vu] to combine action, science fiction, romance, and explosions into one movie, but the time travel conceit might be too preposterous and the action falls apart under scrutiny." [I don't seem to have rated Déjà Vu either, but in a 2007 post, I said, favorably:

It won't let me go.
    Without giving the show away, I'll say that the plot involves time travel. Right, how much more science fictiony can you get? Thing is, the technology and the characters are told so convincingly that it was no problem at all to suspend not only my disbelief but also my usual aversion to science fiction. I mean, Denzel Washington! And the best performance I've seen by Val Kilmer, who was perhaps responding to Washington and to Scott's direction? And James Caviezel (who starred in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, 2004), eerily perfect as the terrorist.]

    "Despite a strong cast [including John Travolta], The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 suffers under the excesses of Tony Scott's frantic direction, and fails to measure up to the 1974 original." [I rated The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 Excellent and think I enjoyed it more than the original, which I remember enjoying very much also.]

But "Fresh" was how Rotten Tomatoes rated Training Day (2001) and Unstoppable (2010):
    "The ending [of Training Day] may be less than satisfying, but Denzel Washington reminds us why he's such a great actor in this taut and brutal police drama." [I liked Training Day very much.]
    "As fast, loud, and relentless as the train at the center of the story, Unstoppable is perfect popcorn entertainment—and director Tony Scott's best movie in years."
    I rated Unstoppable Extraordinary, and perhaps it literally was Scott's "best movie in years." But Scott had directed The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Deja Vu in the preceding four years, Domino in 2005, Man on Fire in 2004, and Spy Game in 2001, and I can recommend all of these films to you. If you have the time to watch.

I seem to like films generally more than Rotten Tomatoes does. Or maybe I just rate more leniently? If anyone has watched (or will watch) a few of the films mentioned above, please let me know how you rated them.

Always on Sunday: The Iron Lady[: A love story]

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

I first laid eyes on Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, in the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vermont, which beautiful town I remembered fondly in yesterday's post. I read the memoir last year, and one of the many passages that fascinated me was Hitchens's account of meeting Margaret Thatcher. It must have been in 1974 (when Hitchens was 25 years old), soon after she became the leader of the Conservative opposition:

Always on Sunday: Lark Rise to Candleford

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

My wife and I haven't missed an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford, which is currently being broadcast by UNC-TV at 7 p.m. each Sunday.
    Here's the basic scoop:

Lark Rise to Candleford (BBC TV 2008-11, 40 episodes) [Wikipedia: A British television costume drama series, adapted by the BBC from Flora Thompson's trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels about the English countryside, published between 1939 and 1943...Set in the small Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise and the wealthier neighbouring market town of Candleford towards the end of the 19th century. The series chronicles the daily lives of farm workers, craftsmen, and gentry, observing the characters in loving, boisterous, and competing communities of families, rivals, friends, and neighbours. The narrative is seen through the eyes of a teenage girl, Laura Timmins (Olivia Hallinan [see photograph]), as she leaves Lark Rise to start a new life under the wing of her cousin, the independent and effervescent Dorcas Lane (Julia Sawalha), who is postmistress in Candleford.] [E]

    We're looking forward to the sixteenth episode (Episode 6 of Season 2) this evening. We love it. As one reviewer wrote on the Internet Movie Database website (IMDb.com):

Granted, it's a fairy tale, but it's a mighty pleasant one. And after all, what's so bad about having one show on television that actually leaves you feeling better about people?

I realize that syrupy recommendations like that get old fast. In fact, I read only a fraction of IMDb's viewer reviews. But here's another one:

This series is beautifully made with wonderful actors, it's wonderful Sunday night viewing. It is not complicated but is very addictive. Week by week you seem to grow to love the characters and the places more. It reminds me in a funny way of "Darling Buds of May," with its gentle pace and lovely scenery and a glimpse of a different bygone era, which although it probably never existed it is still nice to watch and imagine it did. And anything with the lovely Brendan Coyle in it gets my vote! [He plays Laura Timmins's father, Robert.]

    If the name Brendan Coyle seems familiar, he plays Lord Grantham's valet, John Bates, in the current BBC series, Downton Abbey, which I noticed in Woodstock, Vermont this week the public library is exploiting to raise money; they're selling "Watch Downton Abbey" bumper stickers or something.
    But Lark Rise to Candleford reminds me too of The Darling Buds of May (1991-93, with Catherine Zeta-Jones). We enjoyed that as well, spotted it in the Mebane public library's TV collection. It features the fine comic and dramatic actor David Jason (as the father of the Zeta-Jones character), whose1992-2010 detective series, A Touch of Frost, is reliably, suspensefully entertaining. We watched all of its forty-two episodes in (I swear) less than a month (by way of Netflix instant download).
    Another viewer reported something perhaps surprising about Lark Rise to Candleford:

There are many story lines yet they all link into one, the acting is superb and hilarious [?], an extremely worthwhile period drama and I am very pleased to say that my cousins who are 15 and 17 year old males, are absolutely obsessed[emphasis mine]. Who knows, we could have them watching Jane Austen next!

The writing, too, I think, is superb. For example, in the last episode we watched (Season 2, Episode 5), the postman Thomas Brown, played by Mark Heap, is feeling lots of pressure to marry Miss Ellison (Sandy McDade), who has made it clear that she very much wants to have children. Thomas, however, who is a punctillious Christian with a well-thumbed Bible, is horrified by the thought of being a father, despite his being manifestly very good at soothing the Timmins's new baby, whom the postmistress (Dorcas Lane) is taking care of for a few weeks to give Laura's mother a rest. He has even gone so far as to protest that God has made it very clear to him that he is not cut out for fatherhood. Dorcas shrewdly leads Thomas to question why, then, is he so good with the baby? Shortly, Thomas realizes that he is being shown signs and wonders and readily relents, to everyone's delight.
    "How true to the man's character," said my wife.