Stuff and Moonshine

Yesterday I disassembled the too-wide bed frame and assembled a new one that’s the same length but a foot narrower, so Andrew has room to get into it from the side. I then packed the big frame into the new frame’s box, with the instructions, screws, and alan key, and took it down to the recycling room in the basement of our building. There’s a section there for people to leave stuff that other residents might want, so I set it there. Someone else had left a “Phantom-Line 100,” a vintage device for superimposing ruled lines on paper when doing calligraphy. I took it home, on the suspicion that it was a type of camera lucida. It sort of is—I would have to invert it and mount it at eye-level to use it as such, but in the meantime I’ve had some luck with balancing this tablet on it and using it to trace images from the screen onto a surface.

The device flips the image from the original.

Monday Andrew had been watching Blackadder, and I’d remembered that Rowan Atkinson had played Inspecteur Maigret a few years ago—ten years ago as it turns out. I’ve only been able to find two of the four tv movies they did before they pulled the plug. We watched Maigret Sets A Trap, and we’re saving the other for later. Nice work by Atkinson in a serious role. Budapest stands in for 1950s Paris. Very different plot structure from the police procedurals of the last twenty-odd years, in which the murderer is nearly always someone who shows up in the first fifteen minutes—Maigret and his detectives don’t find their suspect till the third act, and then it becomes a matter of how to confirm it.

Mackenzie Crook has ventured further into magic realism with Small Prophets, and I just watched the first episode of…six, I think? The best part so far is Michael Palin as the protagonist’s father, building Rube Goldberg machines in the common living-room of his care home. This is, so far, the kind of show where much of the storytelling is done through the set dressing—there’s a wordless scene that made me say ohh, out loud, because it’s so sad and it also makes it more believeable that the protagonist will (spoiler, but nothing that doesn’t come up in the trailer and most reviews) ( Read more... )

sovay  alerted me to the existence of a tv adaptation of one of H. C. Bailey’s Reggie Fortune stories, with Denholm Elliott in the lead.

Five minutes in and he’s definitely got down Fortune’s perpetual annoyance at getting dragged into crime investigations when he’d much rather be having breakfast and doing normal things.

ETA— he looks so doleful. C’mon, Inspector Bell, let him have some breakfast!

Further ETA—the intense longing with which he looks at that piece of cake.

Sunday I watched One For the Pot -- this is the Shaw Festival production from, I think, the late ‘eighties-- there was a revival at the Shaw in the mid-‘90s, but I seem to remember seeing this tv broadcast as a middle-schooler. Or rather, I caught the third act, was able to tape it on the family VCR, and watched it over and over.

Seeing the entire play for the first time, I’m struck by how provisional the set-up actually is. Oh, Mr. Hardcastle wishing to find Billy Hickory Wood, the long-lost son of his late friend and business partner, and settle part of his fortune upon him, makes sense enough. And Billy having a separated-at-birth twin, Rupert Hickory Wood, raised with a posh accent and little else—well, that’s just the rules of comedy. But half the cast have no real reason to be doing what they’re doing. Jugg the butler cheerfully demands bribes for each assist; but Rupert seems to just get caught up in the inertia of mostly-innocent Billy and his scheming boss Charlie. And there’s no reason for Hardcastle’s arty daughter Amy to fall in love with Rupert at first sight, except that she does.

It helps if you regard it all as not so much a farce plot as a parody of one, with all the tropes amped up. Identical twins raised separately? Let’s throw in a third as the curtain comes down on Act II. There are walk-on characters, offstage characters, and a running gag where one or another of the party guests is always wandering by in search of the ballroom. There are so many plot threads some of them have to be thrown away as soon as they’re introduced: Clifton’s blackmail scheme is foiled almost without effort, because  he's made the mistake of being a genuinely unpleasant villain in a story full of loveable comic rapscallions and they have the power of slapstick on their side. This is, after all, a play written in 1959 but set in a vaguely-Wodehousian, vaguely early-1930s country manor. Will somebody get doped up? tied up? forced to don drag in order to seduce a myopic family solicitor? Damn right they will.

By the third act (the part I saw as a kid) the whole thing has achieved escape velocity and everybody’s slamming doors too quickly for the audience to worry about whether any of it makes sense. We’re not watching it for sense, we’re watching for the pleasure of seeing the late Heath Lambert be a human shell game, swapping out accents and ducking into doorways so he can pull a Texas switch with one of his body doubles. Logic is for murder mysteries.

Just watched The Man In The Funny Suit (1960), and it’s the most meta thing ever.

This DesiLu production is a tv drama about an old vaudeville comic who takes a part in a 1950s tv play because it gives him a rare chance to work with his son, a dramatic actor; however he’s not used to doing anything but the corniest of comedy, or working without a visible audience, and nobody but the producer has any faith he’s going to get through the live broadcast without embarrassing himself.

The meta part is that this is all based on actual behind-the-scenes drama from the original 1956 Playhouse 90 version of Requiem For A Heavyweight, and almost everyone involved: Ed Wynn, Keenan Wynn, Rod Serling, and Ralph Nelson, who wrote and directed this— is playing themselves. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we can guess, because Wynn is doing such a beautiful job as a man struggling to make his son proud of him in a genre and medium he’s not (yet) used to; we could guess even if we didn’t know he was playing himself, because the actor is doing such a good job playing a bad actor that he must actually be a good one, and if a good actor’s been cast in the part of a bad one, that means the character is going to find his voice on the night.

And of course he does— the lines he muffed, that he couldn’t get through without laughing, that came out stilted, suddenly all work. But he can’t tell, and there’s a last little bit of heartbreak before the inevitable happy ending where Wynn wanders the set trying to find somebody to tell him if he was any good, as stagehands pull him out of the cameras’ line-of-sight and people such him because the mikes are still live, even as Rod Serling and Ralph Nelson widen their eyes at the believable and heartfelt performance. Keenan Wynn does a nice subtle two-level bit as he has to stay in character and argue with “Army, the old boxing trainer” even as we can see his shoulders and face relax slightly in the knowledge that his father is knocking it out of the park.

(The Playhouse 90 broadcast was such a hit it had to be recreated for a second broadcast and later became a movie, as well as obtaining enough cred for Serling that he was later able to make The Twilight Zone, in which Ed Wynn played the lead in the second episode, “One For The Angels.”)

This morning Andrew found 1970s tv adaptations of Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Dain Curse (1978) on Tubi or someplace. The former was pretty good, although fairly substantial changes had been made from the Chandler novel, which disappointed me a little, as I’ve always liked the chaos of the original plot. Robert Mitchum’s always fun to watch, although slightly too old to be Marlowe in this story; Harry Dean Stanton by contrast is about sixty years younger than I’m used to seeing him; Charlotte Rampling does a good pseudo-Bacall and Jack O'Halloran (Zog’s cohort in Superman and Superman II) is quite affecting.

The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn, had good acting and production values, but about halfway through I began wondering if I was particularly stupid today or if the plot was particularly hard to follow. A few more scenes and it was clear that the dialogue was referencing major events we hadn’t seen happen, which is when Andrew checked IMDb and confirmed that this had originally been a six-hour mini-series, and the version we were watching was three hours, seven minutes.

It wasn’t just that half the footage had been dropped — I think the abridged version kept all the scenes in which a character spends several days detoxing from morphine, unless that sequence was even longer in the original; and while it was interesting to see the recovery process handled somewhat realistically instead of being skimmed over, that was a part of the plot that the re-editing could have afforded to shorten.

Instead, going by what I could infer from the courtroom scene at the end, they cut out the whole middle section of the story, including a marriage, a kidnapping and at least three or four murders — I’m still not sure whose blood was on the knife the heroine was found, and I think one of the victims was a character we never even met in this cut. Also the big villain reveal, and a subsequent further bombshell that might partly explain the motive, may have been foreshadowed in the original broadcast but they come out of absolutely nowhere here. We spent the courtroom scene yelling what?!

(Brief Break from Current Events):
One of the things I always appreciated about the 1950s SF/Horror novel A Scent of New-Mown Hay was that some thought had clearly been put into how the villain’s mad-science would actually work. TIL that’s probably because it was based on a real thing, although afaik the real-life “gamma gardeners” had more peaceful intentions.

Finally gave in and started binge-watching Twin Peaks – have now seen about a third of the original two seasons; I gather I should also see Firewalk With Me before starting the 2017 Return.

I knew from clips and fannish references that there was a fair bit of deliberate humour -- always the more conventional stuff that subverts itself through the introduction of awkwardly realistic details. The example that leaps to mind is a bit in (iirc) S2, where Coop and Sherriff Truman come to the hospital room of a witness who’s regained consciousness, in the hopes she can help their investigation – totally normal scenario for a police procedural, but when the two lawmen try to sit by her bedside, they find their seats are the wrong height and spend the next minute or so trying to adjust them before they can begin showing her sketches of possible suspects and the scene turns dramatic again. By contrast, Coop’s weird visions are perfectly serious.

I realized after a bit that what it all reminded me of was Kids In the Hall, if the Canadian sketch-comedy series had leant even one degree more towards drama. I suppose it’s also partly because the two shows date from the same era, but they definitely share a vibe in which conventional realism is ignored, but stripping it away exposes a layer of emotional realism – the weirder the situation, the more sincerity the actors bring to their performances. Googling the two titles together finds a number of posts by other fans who seem to have noticed this.

ETA— Other notes on stuff I’ve been thinking about: parodies that show familiarity with the original work or era being parodied vs. ones that are based on earlier parody of the subject. Some of this is me having been on Tumblr long enough that when people start making fun of Tumblr posts from Back in the Day, I know what they’re refencing, but I also find myself trying to recall if I ever *actually* saw anybody address their readers as “tumblypoos," and if not, was it just because I was lucky enough to avoid those, or are the modern posters exaggerating the cringe factor? See also – actual slang from any era vs. cliched depictions of that slang*, mid-20th-century depictions of 19th-century popular culture (in which the melodramas are dumbed way, way down, and all magazine cartoons have the punchline “collapse of stout party".)

ETA2 – Also started thinking again about a difference between North American and British folk-horror fantasy, which I think can be summed up as “Anglican Magic.”

*then there’s the subcategory “real-life teen slang vs. advertisers trying to imitate it, and the latter being what generally gets recorded for posterity." I can't recall anybody actually exclaiming RADICAL! in real life during my adolescence, though perhaps there were originally youth subcultures somewhere where it was common. I do recall seeing a serious tv news piece in the early '90s that described a bunch of supposedly common teen slang expression which I had never encountered before and have never read or heard since -- I suspect the teens they asked were just making stuff up to troll the adults.

A couple of weeks ago I watched the HBO adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider, and want to write about it. I fully understand if you’re not in the mood right now to watch or read about a show with a cop as one of the main heroes, even if the other one is a Black, female, neurodivergent private investigator. There’s also a pretty sympathetic defense lawyer involved. They’re all up against a monster whose MO involves killing innocent children and then framing innocent adults.

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Andrew has begun watching Avenue Five, and it’s actually pretty decent as SF as well as situation comedy— they use stuff like the noticeable delay whenever they talk to engineers on earth as a running gag.

We already like the line “it’s Fate, and it’s freestyling with us! It’s, like, Jazz Fate!”

Also the captain (Hugh Laurie) has just dropped his American accent around the crew.

Cool end credits music.

Andrew spent the past few days binge-watching all five seasons of Orphan Black, having previously seen the first two-and-a-halfseasons in broadcast. Overall, very satisfying, although I thought I saw a late-Season-Five plot twist coming in Rachel’s storyline and then it didn’t, and I’m a trifle disappointed about that, although it would have made a difference to the overall plot.

Kind-of spoilers for a twist that didn’t happen:
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Oh well.

Meanwhile, I really want to see that upcoming Perry Mason prequel in which Tatiana Maslany plays a character who’s basically Aimee Semple MacPherson.

I have today off, so Andrew and I binge-watched episodes 5-10 last night. Slight spoilers, but probably not enough to ruin the plot:

Sales clerk in department store, to Heidi: “What’s your beauty regimen?”
Heidi: “Regimen?”
(Clerk gets terrifying gleeful look of “ooh! someone I can do a demo on!”)
Next shot: Heidi in car, with overdone makeup, sees herself in the rear view mirror, grimaces and begins cleaning it off.

Andrew: “Her beauty regiment is ‘being Julia Roberts!’”

Walter’s mom (Marianne Jean-Baptiste ) needs her own spinoff detective series.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems possible to read both Heidi and Carrasco as non-NT, though that may just be a side-effect of the series’ overall tone— the camera fixes intensely on details of the environment, ambiguous facial expressions, etc. Carrasco gives a really good speech about how yes, he’s just a cog in the wheel, but he’s a cog that turns other cogs, as he’s sprawled on the ground after having tripped over a rack of bicycles. Whigham’s described the role in interviews as “doing microsurgery,” and that he tried very hard to resist tipping over into cartooniness.

Some other reviewers have mentioned that there are no obvious changes in fashion or technology between the 2018 and the 2022 scenes, but anticipating future fashions/tech usually ends up looking corny, and would have distracted from the main storyline.

Yay Checkov’s Pelican!

Hong Chau gets a good scene in the last episode after seeming like a background character, and word is she’ll be back in S2, which is a separate story set in the same universe, like they’ve been doing with <i>Fargo</i>. I don’t buy the theories that she secretly *is* the owner of the Geist corporation, but she does seem to be, or have become, closer to them than her apparent (and now former) bosses.

I also don’t buy the theories that Carrasco looking at the leaf, or the shot of his office chair spinning after he gets up from his desk, mean he quits his job with the DoD. For one thing if he were quitting he’d have begun conscientiously typing up his letter of resignation. He’s just completed his investigation, made his report and elevated the complaint, and now he’s gone home for the day or the weekend. Maybe he’ll even have a celebratory beer. But I think he’ll be back the next day or on Monday morning, dealing with the next complaint on his docket.