dolphinfish

I give what could have been a ten star documentary series only five because excellent production values and direction is destroyed in the second episode when the agenda is revealed -- Orange Man Bad. A brilliant opening episode suckers you in with new insights on the end of the Second World War, something I didn't think possible after nearly eighty years of research and study. You're set up and ready for more, and then comes episode two, the fifties, the cold war and the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy. Incredibly, they manage to smear Trump with the execution of the Rosenbergs and the House Unamerican Activities Committee, notwithstanding that he was literally in short trousers at the time. An absolute criminal waste of talent and a contamination of history.

This was supposed to be actor Tom Tryon's breakout role, but the movie bombed at the time, and while Tryon went on to make a few more films, he ultimately left acting and became quite a successful writer. Based on a bestselling book of the time, the Cardinal is less about the titular character, but rather about the nature of the Catholic Church, particularly as it presented itself to the world in the first half of the twentieth century. This was the high noon of imperial Catholicism, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there was no salvation. Once exposed to it, you'll die a Catholic, even if you never step foot inside a church again after you grow up. That's really what the movie is about, and the life of the fictional cardinal of the title -- supposedly based on Cardinal Spellman, late archbishop of New York, whose reputation has not fared well since his death -- is merely the vehicle to display this. Despite the cosmetic changes since Vatican II, and the civil war that's currently going on within the Church, what Otto Preminger presented here is actually a good, if somewhat romanticised, picture of the true nature of Catholicism. If you watch with that in mind, you'll get more out of the movie than if you watch just to see a film. It's long, and maybe seven stars is generous, but it's a movie that perhaps deserved to do better at the box office than it did.

Having watched this movie twice now over the space of two years, I think I can say it's a missed opportunity. D'sousa's central premise -- that fascism is a thing of the left, not the right -- is certainly tenable, unarguable even, but this movie is not what's going to wake people up to that fact. Much of its hour and three quarters running time is given over to lingering shots of death camps and Nazi rallies and nowhere near enough time is given to arguing the case. It'll reinforce those of us who were already aware of the inherent instability of the left and its tendency to accelerate towards destruction, but the emotionalism of it will only solidify the left in their groundless assumptions of superior intellect. That's a shame.

British sci-fi of the 1970s, particularly TV sci-fi, didn't have a lot of money for special effects, so there tended to be a lot of gurning actors and paper mache monsters. Think Dr Who, TOS. The better ones tended to go for psychological thrills, compulsive characterisations and interesting, indeed, frightening, ideas. This show was one of the best. Running for only one series in 1970, it covered four separate adventures, interlinked, and together comprising a complete story arc, something which, to my knowledge, was never attempted in sci-fi again until Babylon 5, years later. This is all the more astonishing when you consider that it was a children's show, and it was broadcast at a time when there was no such thing as streaming or binge watching on demand. If you wanted to see it, you'd better get yourself home from school in time to catch it and follow the plotline over half a year, once a week. Trusting an audience like that is unheard of today, even for adults. Maybe especially for adults.

Simon and his friend Liz are teenagers on holiday with Liz's family near an unused old naval base where Liz's father had served 30 years before, in 1940, during the Second World War, where they find a "time barrier" which allows them to disappear into different periods of past and future. The first adventure sends them back to 1940, where they meet the base commander, Traynor, whom they also meet in his 1970 incarnation. Traynor appears in various stages of youth and age across two the the three subsequent adventures, two of which take place in possible alternative futures in 1990, and one in 1965. Traynor seems to be the link in the arc, but as the series goes on, he appears to change into an increasingly sinister character. Or does he? Traynor is played by the late Denis Quilley, a fine actor whose presence elevates the quality of the show and gives it a gravitas beyond a children's series. Also worthy of mention is another old school English actor, John Barron, who appears in two of the four adventures, and may or may not be a pivotal player. Despite the dated visuals, the series was amazingly prescient, predicting a future where technocrats rule and science is elevated almost to the status of a religion, and the moral problems this is going to present. Add to all this one of the creepiest theme tunes ever recorded and anyone who sees this show will never forget it.

The problematic bit can be summed up under the adage, "it was the seventies". Anybody who remembers the decade will immediately understand. It's the classic exemplar of the past being a foreign country, and they certainly did things differently back then. The first thing our more puritanical times would find difficult is how the character of Liz is presented. Cheryl Burfield was 18 years old when she played the part, and quiet honestly, it shows. Even at the time, I suspect, there was some unease about this, as Liz was originally written as being 13, and later made up to 15 because there was no way the actress could be made to look that young. This will be at its most uncomfortable for modern sensibilities in the second adventure, "The Time of the Ice Box" with regard to Liz's relationship with the much older Larry. I think there would be a lot of column inches in the newspapers if this were made today. This issue becomes even more apparent in the third adventure, "The Year of the Burn", when the wonkish Simon becomes the object of starry-eyed adoration for the character of Vera, who is played by an actress who looks about 10 years older than the then 16 year old Spencer Banks. Remember, this was a children's show. Like I said, it was the seventies. If you're the sort of person who worries about pronouns, you may have difficulties with this show. Nevertheless, it's still one of the finest sci-fi productions ever to come out of England, seventies sensibilities notwithstanding, and if you're a sci-fi nerd, this is one that should definitely be in your collection, if only to allow you to say that you've watched it. Classic.

There seems to be a vogue for transferring Harlan Coban stories to the UK. This is one of the better efforts, but it takes eight episodes to do a story which could be covered in a much tighter and more exciting fashion in five. It's a very well plotted out tale of murder stretching back over nearly two decades, it completely satisfies the "wow, I never guessed it'd be..." criterion and the final revelation, the very last secret exposed is a masterpiece in irony.

But it just takes far too long to get there. We're not dealing with Tolstoy here, and the story just doesn't merit this length of script. The result is, as others have noted, a real sag in the middle which is kept watchable only by Jimmy Nesbit's patented cheeky Irishman shtick . It IS worth soldiering on, because once the revelations come, everything falls into place with complete satisfaction. There are no deus ex machina solutions and it all makes perfect sense. However, sticking with it is difficult because, Nesbit's Sgt Broome excepted, none of the characters are very sympathetic.

Six stars is possibly a tad harsh. I've seen an awful lot worse than this, but it's the kind of thing I'd recommend binge watching over a long weekend. The characters are not likable enough for you to remember them longer than that and keeping all the convoluted threads clear in your mind becomes difficult the longer you drag it out. Pretty good TV, but not groundbreaking.

It really shouldn't have been. The German actors are particularly talented, but they should never have agreed to do this tripe. From the nonsense of a man masquerading as a serving US soldier who doesn't bother to shave off his beard, to the American MP who simply hands over his gun to the hero because he asks for it to the apparent final revelation that Pope Pius XII was the real mastermind behind it all, (don't worry, he wasn't) this is rubbish from start to finish. Forget it.

Buddy-buddy action movies have a long pedigree and a manual that comes in the box telling you how to put them together, a bit like IKEA furniture. It isn't rocket science. Either the thing works, or it doesn't. This one pretty much does. It's well put together and, like the wardrobe you built in your bedroom, it holds all the stuff it's supposed to hold in a relatively pleasant way. Spenser Confidential ticks all those boxes. Wise cracking tough guy lead (Mark Wahlberh)? Check. Hard core sidekick (Winston Duke)? Check. Wise old mentor bringing the two initially sparring and antipathetic leads together (Alan Arkin)? Check Sexy, ass-kicking female lead (Iizia Shlesinger) Check.

Now you need one of two things: a suitably oily, preferably British, villain (think Alan Rickman in Die Hard) or a corrupt police department. This one goes with the corrupt cops angle. Personally, I always find that the weaker option. It leaves the movie less focused and doesn't give the audience a single antagonist to boo. That's the thing that brings this one down, and the fact that the final ingredient required for these kind of movies -- exciting, well choreographed fight sequences -- IS present here is not enough to elevate it above a seven star rating in my opinion. Still that seems better than a lot of the ratings the movie has been receiving. So, why all the down votes?

Because the characters are badly named. Spenser and Hawk, the two leads, are based on the characters created in a series of novels in the seventies and eighties by the detective writer Robert B Parker. Parker was, for a time, the pre-eminent hard boiled mystery writer in the US, but in reality, he wasn't really all that much better (if he was better at all) than the great peloton of detective writers out there. Parker rose to prominence because he targeted a very specific audience of readers within the first generation of people who had gone to university en masse. People who fancied themselves as intellectuals, but were actually too lazy or too stupid to engage with heavyweight ideas like those of Thomas Aquinas or Friedrich Nietzsche. Parker's trick was to take a couple of stock mystery story types (Spenser and Hawk), invest them with a slightly medieval code of the warrior ethic, and then, mainly via the medium of Spenser's in-the-novels girlfriend, psychologist Susan Silverman, occasionally mix in a soupcon of serious intellectual concepts. Together with a few literary references ("The name's Spenser with an S. like the English poet"), he had the pseuds eating out of his hand. I know. I WAS one.

After I started shaving, I grew out of the Spenser phenomenon. Unfortunately, a lot of guys have stopped shaving since the seventies and many of them don't like the fact that the producers of this movie have bought the Spenser name off the estate and used it to make a move like this, which is actually pretty good on its own merits. They should really have just made the movie and called the characters something like, I don't know, Reilly and Boggs or whatever. A lot of the criticisms are from guys with their noses bent out of shape by the use of the Spenser name when this story bears no resemblance to anything Parker ever wrote about. It IS a bit cynical, but if you can forget that bit, it's quite enjoyable as an actioner.

Inspector Morse could, at times, be somewhat Gothic and perhaps a bit too murderous. This one, however, was just about perfect. A twenty year old unsolved mystery reopens with the murder of a retiring senior detective, on the verge of publishing his memoirs. Did he know the killer's identity? Was he about to to reveal all? Morse investigates and follows the trail back to the early seventies, and then forward again to a successful conclusion. Along the way, he has to deal with the misjudgements of colleagues and a slew of red herrings, but the important thing is that for once in a detective mystery, the unfolded story is not just logical, but eminently human. There are no unnecessary killings just to up the body count. Everything that happens follows in a logical sequence from what went before and all that went before grows out of simple, human vulnerability. It's not just a detective story, it's a drama. Enjoy this one.

If there's a trope the makers of this movie adaptation of the hugely successful TV show missed, I can't imagine what it was. Royal visit to Downton Abbey sees snooty Buckingham Palace servants strong-arming the doughty English yeomanry until put in their place by the resolute serfs standing up for his lordship's honour. This, apparently, was the "Brexit" element of the movie (the valiant rosbifs standing up to the smarmy cosmopolitans). There's the royal assassin lurking about the dales, the twinkly-eyed Irishman solving people's problems with his good-hearted openness, and the usurper who may or may not be inveigling their way into an inheritance they're not entitle to. It's all here, and it's all pretty predictable. However, it IS very well done, the production values are tremendous and it ties up all the loose ends of the TV series. It's brain candy, but enjoyable enough on a wet afternoon.

From a Roderick Thorp novel, this unusual and rarely seen movie from the late 60s tackled a touchy subject, the gay subculture of the time. Frank Sinatra is well cast as the tough, world weary detective investigating a murder in the gay community and under pressure to clear it up quickly and neatly. Edgy in its day, modern viewers may find the heavy, "there's another world we never see" overtones a little patronizing in an age like ours when gay culture is openly celebrated, but as a police procedural, it's a good one and Lee Remick as Frank's randy wife adds an interesting counterpoint to the goings-on in the gay world. As an aside, the Bruce Willis movie, Die Hard, is technically a sequel to this movie. Some years after it was made, Thorp took the Sinatra character, Joe Leland, and wrote another book around him called Nothing Lasts Forever, which is the basic Die Hard plot. By the time Hollywood finally got around to filming it, it was a completely different animal, right down to the lead character's name, which was now John McClain. Believe it or not, for contractual reasons, they had to offer the lead to Frank, who had the good sense to decline. Pity. Frank in a string vest might have been interesting!

Mystery, intrigue, action and machinations in a remarkably clean and well manicured medieval Europe. It's mind candy, but it's entertaining mind candy. Try not to let the history Nazis put you off. It's fast moving and the fight scenes are both plentiful and well choreographed. Just don't expect to learn much about the ACTUAL Middle Ages.

One of the problems with war movies is that they tend to attract reviews from military anoraks, all of whom have biases in favour of one or other army/force/grouping. "Yeah, the SAS would make mincemeat of them", or "they wouldn't last three minutes against the Navy Seals", or whatever. Scroll through the reviews of this movie and you'll find similar here. A certain amount of realism is important, but just how realistic were "great" war movies of the past, particularly the British war movies from WWII?

In reality, very few western soldiers ever fire a shot in anger, so in point of fact, stories like this, where peacetime soldiers are thrust into an actual firefight carry their own realism. Some here have argued the unlikelihood of a five day fire fight where hundreds of the enemy are killed and none of the defenders. Yet, that IS exactly what happened at Jadotville, with estimates of enemy losses ranging from three hundred to one thousand. The broad sweep of the story is true.

With that in mind, the only question is, is the action believable? The answer is, yes, it is. It's amazingly well done on what must have been a tiny (by Hollywood standards) budget. Commandant (Major) Quinlan leads a small troop of Irish UN peacekeepers holding a small outpost in Katanga. After the UN forces assault the Katangan rebels under the orders of Connor Cruise O'Brien (Mark Strong), the UN leader on the ground, the mercenary forces retaliate by attacking the isolated Jadotville outpost. There follows a five day siege in which the Irish defend their position to the last bullet while being left unenforced and unsupplied by their superiors.

The machinations of the UN are well covered, and the oily Connor Cruise O'Brien -- a real person who is not fondly remembered in Ireland -- is portrayed well by Mark Strong, who is a better actor than he is often given credit for, although I would have liked a little more on what happened after Commandant Quinlan arrived home and he had to put up with the insinuations of career soldiers who had never heard a gunshot. Ignore the begrudgers. This may not be a great movie, but it is a good one telling a more or less true but almost forgotten story.

Any lawyer without a dog in the fight will tell you that R v Wade is legal garbage. The Supremes at the time wanted it, so they made it happen. The judge can always find a way, and Roe was the ultimate example of judicial activism. That fact, the imposition of something without constitutional sanction by people controlling the levers of office, is the single most salient point of the whole abortion debate, and it goes completely unaddressed in this film. With that in mind, there can be little doubt that the movie is pro-abortion. Add to that the fact that the pro-abortionists are presented as the reasonable default and you are not going to like this film if you have any conscience over the issue of abortion.

John Christie was a monstrous example of the banality of evil, the kind of funny little man found in every street and apartment block in the world. Most of them are just that, funny little men who are perfectly harmless and eventually pass off to their reward without doing a single mischief to anyone. And then you get the occasional devil in horn rim glasses. John Christie was one such, operating in button-down post WWII England, and the whole, shocking story could have made a chilling series. Indeed, Tim Roth's portrayal of the murderer is desperately creepy and utterly believable, but the whole thing doesn't rise to the level of the 1971 Richard Attenborough effort, 10 Rillington Place. This can be put down to a single sentence - political correctness at the BBC. This organization is daily growing increasingly pompous in its portrayals of the past. Everything before the pill was dark and dank and hellish, and always accompanied by sinister music. And the subtext is always "it's the system, man", with nobody responsible for anything. This just ruins the performances of a stellar cast working at the tops of their game. Pity. Next time somebody films this story, let's hope it's someone who isn't intent on turning it into politics.

Good sci-fi is never about space battles or time travel. That kind of stuff is just something a good writer uses to mirror or illustrate something about our own society. To that end, Lost in Space DID make a noble effort to show a society in collapse due to the collapse of the family unit, and to give it credit, it didn't shy away from showing the darker side of feminism and its responsibility for this. Some commenters have claimed the mother (Molly Parker) is an appalling character: selfish, judgemental, know-it-all. She's all of that, certainly, and I think that was kind of the point. All the way through, pretty much until the last couple of episodes, she puts HER needs and HER wants ahead of the family as a unit. She wants to colonize space: the family goes into the programme. She wants to drag the kids along: they get drug. She decides she doesn't need her husband anymore: kids, we're all going to Alpha Centauri, oh, not your father...And yes, the show DOES try to depict men as not being entirely worthless creatures. The unhesitating willingness of the father, Toby Stephens, to go hand to hand with a bunch of giant alien eel creatures to save his daughter, for instance, is celebrated as a manly virtue. All in all, it should be an edgy and thought provoking series. But it isn't, for two basic reasons. One is the breakneck hurtling from one cliff-hanger to the next, often scenarios verging on the horror genre. The other is the fact that the characters are just so unsympathetic. You really don't care about them. I'm not sure why, but you don't, and that's death in a TV show.

One of a series of short cinema releases revolving around the UK legal system and which played as supporting features during the 1960s. Still fondly remembered today, this one was possibly inspired by the libel suit brought by the author Peter Wright against the sons of former British Prime Minister William Gladstone, although the twist at the end is purely cinematic. If you're of a certain age, the claimant, Jane Penshurst, may seem strangely familiar. Don't blow your mind trying to figure it out. The voice belongs to Tin-Tin from Thunderbirds.