Lights, Camera, Action!

Two Poems of Old Age

By Moristotle

The first poem below more or less wrote itself one morning, in the moments after I experienced the internal argument whether or not to flip that light switch. In the days that followed, my ruminations grew to include the ideas of the second poem, and I thought at first that I could work those ideas into the first poem. But I soon learned that I couldn’t – or it would be better not to. For better or worse: “Practicing to Die” and “Rehearsing to Live.”


Practicing to Die

Don’t do it! 

Do it! 

No, don’t do it!
I yell at myself in the silence of my mind.
I remind myself I’m carrying a tray,
better safe than sorry.
I used to lift a finger to flip off the kitchen light
as I passed toward the dining table.
I have done it many times.

The Loneliest Liberal:Coping in our time

By James Knudsen

I can’t be the only one. There must be others struggling to cope. A nation of this size, there must be dozens of people like me looking for a way to deal with the fact that Donald J. Trump is our President. And unlike previous Chief Executives, who start to blend in with the hand-rubbed paneling, this one is just as front and center, just as exhausting, just as infuriating as the day he strutted down that escalator. Well, I’d rather shine a light than curse the darkness, so here are some coping strategies for those in a similar predicament.

The Loneliest Liberal:Putting reality TV aside

By James Knudsen

Before 2018 officially ended, I found myself writing a play, just sorta happened. It remains a work in progress, but how I wound up writing a play – which at the moment is still just a conversation between God (he's a she) and President Donald J. Trump – is something I’m still processing.

Sunday Review: The Crimson Field (TV serial)

Acting commendations

By Morris Dean

I dutifully watched UNC TV's June 21 – July 26 airing of The Crimson Field, BBC One's 2014 6-part drama about the lives of medics and patients at a World War I field hospital in France. More impressive to me than any of its story lines about the well-worked Great War are the commanding performances of three of the show's actors playing nurses. Creating memorable characters are: Oona Chaplin as Kitty Trevelyan, Alice St. Clair as Flora Marshall, and Kerry Fox as Sister Margaret Quayle.

Sunday Review: The two slaps

Australian
Broadcasting
Corporation

National
Broadcasting
Corporation

The Slap (TV series): Australian (2011) and American (2015)

By Morris Dean

The Australian and American TV series The Slap (2011 and 2015, respectively) are so similar, it's fun and interesting to watch them both and see how they're different. The opening episode of both series portrays a birthday party at which an adult male administers a sound smack to someone else's misbehaving child, and both series explore the aftermath of that slap, going on for a total of eight episodes, each told from the point of view of a different character. The story, in both series, includes a man's near fling with his children's babysitter, incriminating photographs taken at the birthday party by a teenage boy who's a friend of the babysitter, a family friend's becoming pregnant by a man half her age, a family feud, a court case, and threats of breakup in a couple of marriages and several friendships. The Australian series is set around Melbourne, the American around New York City.

Sunday Review: The reviewer

Can't get my mind around anything today

By Morris Dean

Sure I'm super busy today, trying to start on my income tax and preparing tomorrow's column. But my main problem when it comes to reviewing something is that I don't seem to be able to get my mind around anything.

Sunday Review: Black Mirror (TV anthology)

Dark sides of technology

By Morris Dean

The British TV anthology Black Mirror (created by Charlie Booker, three episodes each in 2011 & 2013, plus a special this month) is so inventively different, it's difficult to categorize, especially because each episode has its own cast and is independent and unconnected narratively to any other episode. I've seen only three episodes so far, but their dramatic power assures me that I won't be leading anyone astray by recommending Black Mirror.

Sunday Review: Happy Valley (TV serial)

Sarah Lancashire
as Sgt. Catherine Cawood

It isn't that happy

By Morris Dean

Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014, written by Sally Wainwright) is a police drama television series set in a small town in West Yorkshire. "Happy Valley" is what local police call the area because of its drug problem, although the action of the series centers on a kidnapping only indirectly connected to drugs.

Sunday Review: My Life as a Turkey (TV)

Obligations of re-enactment

By Morris Dean

In My Life as a Turkey (2011, directed by David Allen), the possessive pronoun refers to Joe Hutto, a naturalist who made mother-turkey sounds over an incubating basket of wild-turkey eggs and so managed to be "imprinted" on the hatchlings, one-by-one, as they pecked their way out of the shells and looked upon his friendly, nurturing face. In doing that, Hutto took upon himself the moral obligation to spend all his days for over a year raising the young turkeys to adulthood and beyond, in a remote wilderness of northern Florida.

Sunday Review: The Assets (TV)

Not an asset to ABC

By Morris Dean

ABC started running its series The Assets early in January. My wife and I watched the first two episodes and loved the program, which is based on the career of CIA analyst Aldrich Ames and how he was identified as the mole who had sold lethal information to the Soviets in the 1980s. The CIA officers who encouraged and led the investigation, Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, wrote the book, Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames, on which the series is based.

Sunday Review: Turn (TV series)

Strong and true

By Morris Dean

Yesterday I said to my wife, "I miss Anna Strong. I want Season 2 of AMC's Turn to be here already." Alas, it won't return until Spring 2015, according to AMC's website.

Sunday Review: Rectify (TV series)

Southern gothic

By Morris Dean

Rectify's first season left his Georgia town asunder,
was releasing Daniel Holden from the pen a blunder?
    Some wanted to make him pay,
    others rushed to bar their way;
Season 2 started Friday – how much longer must we wonder?

Sunday Review: Coupling (TV sitcom)

No jokes is very funny

By Morris Dean

I'm on record as generally disliking sitcoms, their virtually every line written and delivered as a joke. Not so with the BBC TV sitcom Coupling, which has no jokes.

Sunday Review: Last Tango in Halifax (TV serial)

By Morris Dean

The BBC's serial Last Tango in Halifax must have caught me in a stupor the first time I started to watch it, for I formed the superficial impression of a sappy love story involving a man and a woman even older than I am (Alan and Celia, played by Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid). I told my wife to go ahead and watch it, but I would skip.

Sunday Review: Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond (TV miniseries)

And already was

By Morris Dean

The Hollywood Reporter nails it when it comes to BBC America's recent TV miniseries Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond: "It's a fun romp that illustrates how desperately the dashing author wanted to live a large life – and tried his hardest." Fleming, of course, for those too young to have heard of him – even if they have seen any number of 007 James Bond movies and maybe even heard of Sean Connery – is author Ian Fleming.

Sunday Review: Questioning Darwin (TV documentary)

Charles Darwin at about the age of
his voyage on The Beagle

Thinking they've answered Darwin, rather

By Morris Dean

The fact that Charles Darwin's birthday was this week (he was born on February 12, 1809) sparked HBO's airing of 73-year-old British filmmaker Antony Thomas's one-hour documentary Questioning Darwin, which adroitly gives about equal coverage (1) to scientists and biographers appreciating Darwin's discovery of biological evolution's mechanism of natural selection and (2) to folks like Ken Ham, a founder of the "Answers in Genesis Creation Museum" in Kentucky, who are questioning Darwin. Of course, the creationists aren’t just questioning Darwin; they think they have definitively answered him by opposing the established, proven science of evolution with something they like to call “creation science^*.”

Sunday Review: An Apology to Elephants (TV documentary)

An appropriate prologue

By Morris Dean

I suppose you regard inventor Thomas Edison more or less as I used to: you sort of revere him, or have a pretty favorable feeling toward him.
    But maybe you don't know, any more than I did before watching the 40-minute 2013 HBO documentary An Apology to Elephants (directed by Amy Schatz), that he used an unwanted circus elephant to demonstrate the danger of alternating-current electricity. He hooked the elephant up and promptly transformed the stately beast into a tower of toppling electrocutional light and smoke. It's a horrific segment of archival black-and-white footage shown in the documentary. Nice, Thomas E., how instructive....

Sunday Review: League of Denial (TV documentary)

The end of football?

By Morris Dean

Sure, it's clever scheduling to review the 2013 PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis on Super Bowl Sunday, but what difference does it make? We're all (who are interested) going to watch and probably enjoy the game anyway, so who cares about the head butts (and the tears and twists and strains and breaks in other body parts) suffered by the highly paid men engaged in about as ferocious combat as you can find outside the military?

Sunday Review: Masters of Sex (TV series)

Actually slaves to love

By Jonathan Price

The season of sex has ended on Showtime. I mean of course, the series Masters of Sex, which I reluctantly got hooked on because it kept being advertised when I tried to tune in to Homeland. I had trivialized it and dismissed it from my gallery of pleasures as a knockoff of a popular book on a popular topic, sex, with all the limited appeal of a soap opera, but it is far better than that. And now you can binge on it if you get hooked, seeing it for peanuts on “On Demand” or on DVDs or by download from Netflix or another source.

Sunday Review: Shakespeare Uncovered (TV)

The Man even before he was the King's

By Morris Dean

After the inspiration of James Shapiro's Shakespeare—The King's Man [my review], I turned to the 2012 BBC/PBS TV Series, Shakespeare Uncovered, a 2-DVD set I borrowed from my local public library. (Hear, hear for the Alamance County Libraries! May you have a similarly accessible public library near you.)