PBS’s ‘Lewis’ Explores Deeper Mysteries Beyond Who Done It

June 16, 2013
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PBS’s ‘Lewis’ Explores Deeper Mysteries Beyond Who Done It

The PBS series Masterpiece Mystery returns with another year of relatively thoughtful genre stories tonight, starting with a new Lewis mystery titled “Down Among the Fearful.” The series, featuring characters from Colin Dexter’s “Inspector Morse” novels and short stories and the Inspector Morse TV series that was based on them, tends to reside on the more thoughtful and less trendy side of the Masterpiece spectrum. Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis, formerly the sergeant assisting the now-deceased Inspector Morse, is an intelligent, sensible, mature, skeptical, and practical but not very imaginative…

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BYU Program Prepares Mormons for Hollywood Career and Cultural Influence

June 15, 2013
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BYU Program Prepares Mormons for Hollywood Career and Cultural Influence

Mormons have figured out one way to really penetrate and engage the culture from their decidedly counter cultural perspective. A recent piece in the New York Times tells how a Brigham Young University computer-animation program is earning respect and professional positions in Hollywood studios.

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‘Grave Passage’ Passes the Time Very Nicely

June 11, 2013
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‘Grave Passage’ Passes the Time Very Nicely

When you follow free and discount e-book blogs, you learn to have low expectations. Generally the free or low-priced books you get are worth the price (I leave it to others to make such judgments on my own e-books). But now and then you discover a gem. Grave Passage by William Doonan is, all things considered, a breath of fresh air, a well-written, often funny story with a genuinely original and engaging hero/narrator. Henry Grave is 84 years old, a retired archaeologist and one-time World War II prisoner of war. Somehow (it’s never quite explained) he got himself into a…

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Tim Tebow to Sign with Patriots

June 10, 2013
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Tim Tebow to Sign with Patriots

The team led by the NFL’s smartest head coach, the New England Patriots, has decided to take a flyer on free-agent quarterback Tim Tebow, ESPN reports. Tebow, a highly athletic Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback with great running ability and worrisome flaws in his passing motion, had surprising success in 2011 as quarterback of the Denver Broncos, leading the team to a shocking first-round playoff victory over the heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers. He has also been the center of controversy because of his high-profile Christianity and unconventional playing style. That led to a lost season last year when the New York Jets…

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TNT’s ‘Major Crimes’ Returns for Second Season

June 10, 2013
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TNT’s ‘Major Crimes’ Returns for Second Season

The TNT drama series Major Crimes returns tonight for the start of a second season (9:00 EDT). The show, which reprises characters from TNT’s hugely successful series The Closer, was last year’s top-rated new cable drama series, and it deserved its success. It presented good, solid mystery stories without excessive displays of angst and overhyped dramatics. Notably, it devoted just one plot-line to the central character’s private life, and in doing so it connected it appropriately to an ongoing criminal case. Thus Major Crimes paid obeisance to the contemporary custom of spending a significant amount of time looking at the detectives’…

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Divorce and Government Tyranny

June 8, 2013
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Divorce and Government Tyranny

We all know that marriage in America has been having a tough go of it in recent decades. The left is getting everything it has always wanted with what we can call the traditional family: mom, dad, married, with kids, is becoming increasingly rare. In fact the percentage of Americans who are married has reached an all time low. This all started a long time ago, but broke out in the glorious 1960s with the sexual revolution and the passing of no-fault divorce laws throughout the country.

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TNT’s ‘Falling Skies’ Soars with Classic Storytelling Approach

June 7, 2013
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TNT’s ‘Falling Skies’ Soars with Classic Storytelling Approach

Season 3 of the TNT action-drama series Falling Skies begins this Sunday at 9 EDT with a two-hour season premiere episode. With Steven Spielberg and Graham Yost among its executive producers, the series has a fine pedigree, and in fact it strikes me as rather superior to most of Spielberg’s prior work. It differs from his other science-fiction TV shows and movies in that the adult characters are quite mature in their approach to things—a fact greatly to be appreciated. The series tells the story of an alien attack against the earth and its human population, and the small bands of…

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Story Behind NSA Monitoring of Verizon Phone Records Shows U.S. MSM Remain Obama’s Lapdogs

June 6, 2013
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Story Behind NSA Monitoring of Verizon Phone Records Shows U.S. MSM Remain Obama’s Lapdogs

The Guardian newspaper of London has reported something vitally important to all U.S. citizens, which U.S. news media somehow failed to observe:  the U.S. National Security Agency has collected phone records “indiscriminately and in bulk—regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing,” from some 100 million Verizon customers in the United States for several weeks. According to documents obtained by the Guardian, a secret court order  requires the phone company to hand the information over to the NSA on an “ongoing, daily basis.” The order covered international calls in addition to communications inside the United States, and customers were not aware of…

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Death Decoded: ‘The Bletchley Circle’ on PBS

June 3, 2013
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Death Decoded: ‘The Bletchley Circle’ on PBS

I recently complained about the unlikely revisionist feminist rewrite in the new film adaptation of John Buchan‘s The Thirty-Nine Steps (shown already in Britain and scheduled for this summer in the United States on PBS). Well, here is a far superior film mystery series that does something rather more plausible with a period feminist slant, The Bletchley Circle. The three-part series, showing on PBS stations around the country, is about four women, all of whom were involved with English code-breaking during World War 2 at the government’s Bletchley Park complex.  Now it’s 1952, and life is much different (duller!) for them. The brilliant Susan (played by…

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Mark Helprin Delights ‘In Sunlight and in Shadow’

May 31, 2013
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Mark Helprin Delights ‘In Sunlight and in Shadow’

In the perfection of her song, by the voice that sprang from her, speaking words as he had never heard them spoken, he now loved her as he had never known he could love. He might never see her again, and decades might pass, yet he would love her indelibly, catastrophically, and forever. If half a century later he were alive, he would remember this song as the moment in which all such things were settled and beyond which he could not go. There’s a rumor about, colluded in by professors of literature, that literary works and plain storytelling exist…

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Religion on the Decline, Media Shouts, and Shouts, and Shouts

May 30, 2013
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Religion on the Decline, Media Shouts, and Shouts, and Shouts

I can’t help but thinking of Snidley Whiplash when I read stories of the decline and impending demise of religion in America. The rise of the so called “nones” has made big news, and I can’t help but think of journalists writing their stories as they as they twirl their mustaches in wicked glee (women can always use a fake mustache). Secular cultural elites and intellectuals in the West have dreamed of a post-religious thoroughly secular society since the so called Enlightenment, and now they think they’re close to finally getting it. But like Whiplash, they always have and always…

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Genre Classic at a Bargain Price: ‘The Adventures of Ellery Queen’

May 28, 2013
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Genre Classic at a Bargain Price: ‘The Adventures of Ellery Queen’

One of the classic books of the mystery genre is available now at a bargain price in a Kindle edition at amazon.com: The Adventures of Ellery Queen, by Ellery Queen. These classic stories from the 1930s are a cornerstone of mystery fiction. In these stories, the eponymous author team of Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, writing under their pseudonym of Ellery Queen (also the name of their detective), firmly established the outlines of a particular type of American detective story: the Great Detective tale which mixed realism with surrealism for a distinctly 20th-century American type of tale. The Queen stories and…

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Are All Artists Natural-born Socialists?

May 28, 2013
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Are All Artists Natural-born Socialists?

"Art is criticism of life. The nobler the life the finer the criticism. That is why the artists long for the reign of social justice."

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Movies for Memorial Day on Turner Classics

May 24, 2013
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Movies for Memorial Day on Turner Classics

Turner Classic Movies—cable TV’s old-movie channel—has another of its excellent holiday-themed marathons this weekend, a Memorial Day War Movie Marathon. The selection of movies demonstrates how much Hollywood has changed over the decades, from an overtly patriotic but thoughtful purveyor of serious entertainment with an intent to convey positive values, to one of increasing cynicism and loss of national, social, and cultural morale since the late 1960s. Whatever one may think of that transition, it is real and highly visible in the array of movies shown this weekend on Turner Classics. My recommendations tend toward evenhanded but ultimately peace-loving depictions…

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Eric Rohmer: Interviews edited by Fiona Handyside

May 21, 2013
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Eric Rohmer: Interviews edited by Fiona Handyside

I have written previously in this publication about the French film director Eric Rohmer (http://stkarnick.com/?p=4963) .  Rohmer (1920-2010) was a widely and deeply cultured man and his  marvellous cinema is one of the most beautiful and intelligent.  Its focus is on character more than plot and relies heavily on dialogue while at the same time is sensitive to the beauty of the world. Before becoming a full-time filmmaker, he was a critic and editor of Cahiers du Cinema, one of the most influential journals of film criticism.  This collection of eighteen interviews, chronologically arranged, published by the University Press of…

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