TV

Wait, Where’d It Go?

I’m rewatching The West Wing for maybe like the 20th time and I’ve been watching it on MAX because why not, I’m paying for it just to watch one different show. I’m up to about the middle of season two. This morning when I went to watch an episode there wasn’t anything sitting in my Continue Watching row. The row wasn’t even there. And I checked, by spending way too much time endlessly scrolling up and down looking for it. Eventually it dawned on me to search for it. The only result was for a West Wing Special from 2020 about getting out the vote.

Would have it really have been too much trouble MAX, to let me know you were losing the rights to show? Fortunately, I still have the digital copies of all the episodes.

The Diplomat

While watching Jimmy Kimmel Live the other day (on YouTube, so not really live) Allison Janney was telling him about her most recent acting gig. She has a 2-episode run at the end of the second season of the show The Diplomat as the Vice-President. She likens the show to an old favorite, The West Wing, because it is set in the world of high-level politics. She was also enjoying working with the creator, producer and writer of this show, Debora Cahn who was an Emmy Awarding writer while working on The West Wing.

Coincidentally that same night, the star of The Diplomat, Kerri Russel, was on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Okay, it probably wasn’t a coincidence because the shows second season had just come out the week before.

The show is on Netflix so I thought maybe I should check out season 1 and see if I’d like to watch the show. I’m three shows in and I’m hooked. It is very The West Wing like in that there is a lot of smart dialogs, a lot of walk-n-talks and a lot of very fancy English settings (its filmed in London.) My only complaint is, at the beginning there is a chyron telling the shows rating, TV-MA, and the reason why it is rated at that level, Language, Nudity, Sex, Violence and so far, there hasn’t been any of the Nudity or Sex. 😉

Update: The nudity and sex showed up at the end of episode 5 and there was a little more of it in the middle of episode 6.

Tagged:

Rumpole of the Bailey

During meals Donna I will fire up Discovery+ and watch something while eating. A few days ago we saw that Be My Guest With Ina Garten had a new episode, this one had a British actor Emily Mortimer on. Never heard of her, but her most famous bit, at least in America, is she was in Mary Poppins Returns. About 10 minutes in Ina starts ask her about her family and mentions her famous barrister and writer father John.

Cue the depths of Brian’s hazy memory – John Mortimer created and wrote a long lost favorite British TV show of mine about, surprise, a barrister called Rumpole of the Bailey. I enjoyed them back in the previous century on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery. I rewatched them again in the early aughts on Netflix discs. Somewhere along the line I managed to rip the entire series into cutting edge AVI files. Well, I still have them saved in the depths of my PC’s hazy memory.

While doing a little Internet sleuthing for the image above I found an article about how Emily and her younger sister Rosie are updating Rumpole and it may feature a female in the lead. Good luck to them, I wouldn’t be able to watch that and not because of the female lead (if it happens), but the show is to beloved in my heart.

Anyway, can you guess what I have been watching for the last few nights?

Fire in the Hole

In the early seasons of Justified this was Boyd Crowder’s favorite saying. It comes from an Elmore Leonard short story that served as the genesis for FX’s series Justified. I have watched all 6 seasons of the show a few times now and I also recently watched the new Justified: City Primeval. But this post really isn’t about that, it is more about the last couple of days where I have been sucked into an Elmore Leonard movie hole.

While stumbling around looking for something to watch on Peacock I saw the movie Out of Sight from 1998 and thought, “Ooh, I remember that. Might be fun.” How is i that Jennifer Lopez does look and any older after a quarter of a century, but George Clooney does?

I wondered if I could find some other of Mr. Leonard’s work. Nice, Get Shorty from 1995 is available on Max. This is a masterpiece of casting, all the actors totally inhabit their characters and the comedy tamps down the violence just the right amount.

There was a sequel of sorts 10 years later called Be Cool that had John Travolta’s character, Chilli Palmer breaking int the music business like he did the movie business in Get Shorty. I seem to recall that I did start to watch it on DVD back when it came out, but quit part way in because it was disappointing compared to the first flick. Hey, it is available on Max too, maybe I should try it again. Maybe.

I found the much newer Life of Crime on Frevee and once again I’ve seen it before, but is worth a watch again, if just for the big switch at the end. And Switch is the title of Elmore Leonard book that the movie is based on.

Another late 90s gem of an Elmore Leonard movie is Jackie Brown. A somewhat restrained Quentin Tarantino directed it, but it is only on Netflix and that is one of the streaming service I don’t subscribe to, so I can’t rewatch it.

Doing this research I discovered that Elmore is also responsible for 3:10 to Yuma. Wow, I have a digital copy of the 2007 version with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale. I have also seen the 5 decade older version with Glenn Ford and Van elfin. I’d rewatch the 1957 version if I didn’t have to pay $4 to rent it on Amazon.

Holiday Viewing

Did you know that Iron Man 3 is a holiday movie? I didn’t and I have watched it, albeit several years ago, and don’t remember any Christmasy stuff in it. Well, Plex remembers. When I open the app there on the home page was a section entitled “Home for the Holidays” and Iron Man 3 was right there.

I cued up the movie and watched it. Sure enough there are several scenes that have Christmas decor in the background. In my humble opinion there was not enough to push this to be classified as a holiday movie. I probably last watched it on DVD way back in 2013 when it first came out. Maybe I even got the DVD as a Christmas present that year…still not a Christmas movie.

There were 3 other titles, of the 150 or so movies I have digital copies of, in that “Home for the Holidays” category. And one of those is also a controversial pick, Die Hard. I say no, but the listing gave me an excuse to watch the movie again. Yippie-ki-yay.

Movie number three was definitely a Christmas movie, Elf and this movie is a yearly watch. And we watched it on Thanksgiving weekend when Donna’s brother and family were here.

The last of the four, but not least, was Bad Santa. And I didn’t watch this one this year.

What was conspicuously missing from that list, it even has the word Christmas in the title, was A Moody Christmas. There are two possible reasons for its non-inclusion in the “Home for the Holidays” list. IMDB lists its title as The Moodys without the C word. But probably it is because it is an Australian TV series and TV is already home viewing. This is also a yearly must watch for me during the holidays. There are just six half hour shows with each one covering a dysfunctional family’s annual Christmas lunch in 6 consecutive years.

Happy 200th Anniversary of Publication

The now famous Clement More poem ‘,’ was written in 1822, but first appeared in print a year later in the Troy (NY) Sentinel and has become better known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’. While the original version is still published annually in quite a few newspapers, , and here on Life of Brian in 2003, it has been adapted and modified by various groups trying to make it into their own holiday poem. In the early 2000’s, someone with a lot of free time collected as many (849) as he could find and published a webpage listing them all. It was last edited in 2013, so who knows how many more there are now.

Back in 2014 I found a Miata one of unknown vintage on the Flyin’ Miata website, purveyors of all kinds of Miata goodies…

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the Counties,
The Miatas were parked, warm and safe from the Mounties;
The driving gloves had been packed, with loving care,
Knowing that next Spring they would still be there;

His ‘n her Miata owners were nestled snug in their beds,
While visions of forced-induction danced in their heads;
And mamma in her FM shirt, and I in my cap,
Were planning next year’s drives on a dog-eared road map,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I dropped my Miata Musings to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

What I saw made me weep and shook me to the core,
It was a Velocity Red Mica Mazdaspeed Miata, a two-thousand and four!
With a tall thin man driving, like a bat out of hell,
I knew in a moment it must be Bill Cardell.

“Now, ELVIS! now, TRACKDOG!
now, FILOU and TORO!
On, ANGEL on BABY!
on, CUZI and PHOENIX!
To the point of that apex!
cut the driving edge fine!
Now make that last mad dash!
all the way to the finish line!”

And I heard on the roof the sound of much fun,
The squealing and chirping of Toyo RA-1’s.
As I grabbed the car keys, and was turning around,
Down the chimney Bill came in with a bound.

He was dressed all in Nomex, from his head to his toe,
With tight fitting driving shoes so he could shift just so;
The sunglasses he wore sparkled with a dancing light,
And I thought to myself “How the hell can he see at night?”

Around the room to the stockings he raced,
Leaving Hard Dog Deuce bars and a FM Cannon Brace,
I even saw under the tree, by a moon so low and so pale,
Nothing less than a Da’Lan hitch and a brand new Tire Tail!

Bill was ready to leave, “Other slalomers yet to go!”,
And make his way through the white winter’s snow.
But he left mine till last, ‘fore he went up the flue,
I found in my stocking a brand new FM-II!

He sprang to his droptop, blipping the throttle with a roar,
And I knew right away the 2.0L was stroked, not bored.
I heard him exclaim, ere he squealed out of sight,
“KEEP the needle at REDLINE and CUT the corners Tight!”

Harrowing Experience

I don’t know how I found the show Harrow on Hulu, maybe it was a recommendation, but it was a mystery of the week type show from Australia about a pathologist. The first episode opens with someone in a boat in the dark of night. They have a body in a tarp which they cover with some kind of powder before tossing into the deep. After the intro montage we get into the show and we get our autopsy case of the week going, but it is a cold case that has nothing to do with the show’s opening.

Early on we get a shot of where he calls home and it is a sailboat parked on the waterfront with a great view of downtown Brisbane. Wait a minute, coroner lives on a boat, where have I seen that before? I had to go back and look because I wasn’t sure, Jack Klugman in a nearly 50 year old TV show called Quincy, a rule bending coroner solving murders weekly who also lives on a sailboat. And while there are similarities, the TV landscape has changed in the intervening years, so that we now have almost always a thread that runs through all the shows in a season and there is always more ancillary, family & co-workers, characters that also get their own story arcs too. Oh, and we get a complicated love interest for the leading man.

Halfway through episode one Harrow is called to the scene of a body found in the water that was incased in cement, aah, the show’s opening. But for some reason our hero seems to be a bit worried about this concrete encased case. At the end of the episode we find out why – the man dumping the body is non other than our leading man, Doctor Daniel Harrow. After dodging what seemed like a thousand near misses in being caught for murdering his ex-wife’s husband and dumping his concrete encrusted body, by season ender he is totally in the clear. As Harrow celebrates with a glass of wine on the deck of his boat he is shot through the gut.

Episode one of season two he gets out of the hospital, a new girlfriend (who later turns out to be his new co-worker) and the gist of the second season’s over arcing story line. The fellow who shot him has a grudge against him because Harrow solved the case that sent him to prison. The kicker is that everyone in Harrow’s world, except him, believes that our villain died in a prison fire.

So, in between solving the case of the week Harrow tries to prove the man is alive all the while being tormented as the bad guy screws with his emotions by harassing and setting up his family members for arrests. In episode two our pathologist is hung off the side of a skyscraper, in the forth he has to swim in a dangerous crocodile infested river to get a body, in the sixth he gets locked in a refrigerated shipping container and in #8 he is buried alive by our “dead” villain. Of course at the very end of the season ender episodes he proves the bad guy is alive and he saves his daughter’s life from his nemesis. At the very end he hands this bad guy a rose that has some sort of poison on the thorns which kills the guy and we fade to black.

I was unsure if I was going to watch the 3rd and final season, but thought I’ll watch the first show and see how it goes. After about 10 minutes in and they are doing an autopsy on the case of the week Harrow wants to know why no one has done any lab work on the deceased. This triggered me to wonder why there was no mention of an autopsy or blood work on last season’s bad guy’s death. Surely if a just caught police prisoner dies after being loaded into a paddy wagon alive there would have been an investigation.

Season 3 of Harrow remains unwatched.