Friday, December 24, 2021
Movie: Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967).
Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer.
TV: Holiday Baking Championship: Ultimate Holiday Party (Food Network); The Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World (Amazon Prime); The Witcher: What Is Lost (Netflix).
Thursday, December 25, 2021
Movie: Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985).
Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer.
TV: Money Hungry (Food Network); The Witcher: Redanian Intelligence, Turn Your Back (Netflix).
Jaskier (Joey Batey) is back! The snarky, motormouth bard is just what The Witcher needs to liven it up. One of the things that set The Witcher apart from the other current fantasy streamer The Wheel of Time, whose season-ending episode I watched on Christmas Eve, is the former's occasional lightness of tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without the antics of Merry and Pippin, or Game of Thrones without the sarcastic wit of Tyrion and you get something like the heaviness that often makes Wheel a bit of a slog. I will probably tune in to the next season of that series, but I hope its producers find a way to lighten up. Mat (Barney Harris -- the role has been recast for the next season) provided some darkly irreverent humor in the earlier part of the series before he got left behind, and there's some mild comedy inherent in the character of the Ogier Loial (Hammed Animashaun), but the show has mostly focused on establishing its places and characters and the nature of the central quest.
The Witcher did much of the expository work in its first season, so perhaps it can afford to get a little looser in tone, although there was humor even then, much of it centered on the role of Jaskier as sidekick to Geralt. In this season so far he's paired with Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) instead, which is even more of a mismatch than that of bard and witcher. Even before Jaskier turned up, however, there was some humor evident in the tensions of the relationship between Geralt and Ciri (Freya Allan). Henry Cavill is wonderful at showing Geralt's exasperation with her, as he did with Jaskier.
I complained about not being able follow the Yennefer plot in the first few episodes, but I'm getting the hang of it now.
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| Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) |
As for the movies I watched, Cool Hand Luke is one of Paul Newman's signature roles. Looking back at my comments on the movie in Oscar A to Z, I see that I regarded the film as somewhat pretentious in its treatment of Luke as a "Christ figure." I was less bothered by that on this viewing, although there is a shot of the beaten half-naked Luke with arms outstretched and feet crossed that's clearly a crucifixion pose, and a whiff of a suggestion at the end that Luke dies for his fellow prisoners' sins. But what one really remembers about the movie are its raucous moments like the egg-eating wager and of course Strother Martin's "failure to communicate" line.
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| Kris Kristofferson and Divine in Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985) |
Trouble in Mind is "stoner noir," a subset of neo-noir that also includes The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). It's not quite as good as the Altman film, partly because it doesn't have the underpinning of Raymond Chandler's novel. Alan Rudolph, who also wrote the screenplay, tries a little too hard to be cleverly off-beat. Still, it has Divine (out of drag) as its villain, managing to accomplish the film's eccentric aims more fully than its stars do. Kris Kristofferson and Geneviève Bujold sometimes seem like they don't get the joke; on the other hand, Keith Carradine does, maybe because he had worked with Altman and is used to this sort of thing.
