Reviews

I was affected emotionally - very strongly - by many of the 1st person narratives of their experiences. I think much of the criticism of the series comes from persons already familiar with the literature on the subject, who were expecting "more", and of course there are also many who find the ideas hard to swallow at all, and are looking for more traditional scientific counter-arguments.

There do appear to be missed opportunities, but the writers may already have been planning on addressing them in future episodes.

There is a great deal of legitimate theorizing in physics, with proposed explanations/descriptions of greater realities that easily surpass much of what modern science has long considered fantastical, even fabulist in religions. And there is coiincidentally similar research in the areas of metaphysics and sprituality, often coming to similar and even virtually identical theories, but through personal revelation rather than physical reasoning.

The science is already there both pro and con, at least with legitimate theories, but just as the biological sciences and medicine have yet to seriously explore the implications of the new physics, the series has not seriously brought this work into the discussion yet. Regarding metaphysical reseach and thinking, I would say the series presents only the most elementary introduction to this work, in spite of their in-house visits to research centers around the world.

As of the 6th episode, none of this has been brought forward in any substantial way. That leaves the personal stories. One of the individuals develops an interesting case of "addiction" to visiting mediums, in an effort to satisfy his desire to forego his life-long belief in a limited physical reality. This could have been explored more deeply, perhaps pairing it with a more in depth look at the similarly obsessive exploration, pro and con respectively, of Conan Doyle and Houdini a century ago.

But I found most of the other personal journeys compelling and quite moving. The series is based on a book by journalist Leslie Kean. Kean was very close to the Abstract Expressionist painter artist Budd Hopkins, who mid-life developed an interest in UFOs, and wrote the book Missing Time.

I met Budd a number of times over 25 years, and found him to be a beautiful human being. I have no strong opinion one war or the other on the true nature of UFOs, but his interest was genuine, and probably more rational than anyone I've met or read on the subject, including John Mack. Kean was with him (Hopkins) when he passed quite suddenly, and the experience apparently heightened her interest in NDEs and the possibility of non-physical life.

I did not know of Kean's book, or involvement in the show, when I began watching it, and it took my breath away to see footage of the two of them at a beach. As it happens, I've had a number of mysterious experiences myself, particularly in early childhood, and certainly not ending there. A good number of these have remained private. One that some close friends do know about relates to "last meetings" I've had with people I care about. There is nothing spooky involved, and no premonitions. But that's actually the part that gets me every time.

In retrospect, when the person passes, I remember the last meeting we had, and there are certain similarities to these experiences. I won't go into them here, except to mention that there is always an unusual calmness - or a sudden moment of calm - in the person and our last interactions. In short, having experienced this many dozens of times since childhood, I've come to believe we are saying good-bye. But I never realize it until after the fact, and after all these years, I now tend to find myself dumbstruck that I didn't recognize the moment when it happened.

In a small Belgian town near to bursting with dark secrets, everyone wants something from the new immigrant footballer. The series, excellent in all areas technical and artistic, employs a number of tropes of the genre. The crime is inexorably connected to ethnicity; nearly every racial bias toward young men of color is evidenced by some persons, and it takes a season to cover all the angles. The twist is that there is but one black man in town, and this beautiful young immigrant takes on all the abuse and attraction and false expectations alone. It's a play on the "everyone had a reason to kill him" scenario - but in this case, not a one of those reasons has an honorable justification.

Enter the very current and very over-used character of the detective who has moved back to his small town with his daughter for "a break", after losing his wife and some fellow officers in a major big city police mishap. Naturally, the mayhem begins practically before he gets in the door, and as usual much of his energy and wits are spent fighting resisitance from the locals - everyone is either knaive or corrupt, and no one wants the peaceful country facade disturbed. But he is our flawed hero, and form some time the victim's sole voice. While he never adresses race specifically, he is our stand-in (unless you're an awful person). When he finally puts it to his colleagues in terms of the village's shared culpability, it is as infuriating and thrilling as the horror and heroics we've been witnessing around the world the past few years. #BlackLivesMatter ... it's just that this story lays it all on one martyr.

There was one character's reveal that I didn't quite buy, and I did watch the full season a second time in. So I remained disappointed in that specific case, but still, it could be my own bias, and I wouldn't give it away beforehand.

It's all very well done, you couldn't ask for better performances, the photography by Olivier Boonjing is worth the price of admission alone...so if you can accept the plot as is, you've got a telling and moving morality play supported by host of excellent character studies.

A light screwball comedy, based on the play "The Hottentot" that had already been made into 2 films, it's now best known for a Youtube-popularized musical scene with Louis Armstrong playing trumpet to a horse.

With dialogue as fast-paced and clever as it is silly, it sets its tone at the outset, with a wink, in a shop specializing in riding outfits. As with the British 70s series "Are You Being Served?", distinct personalities and social classes set up the characters for farcical misunderstandings of all sorts, and before you can say "Jeepers Creepers" 3 times, we are off to the races - quite literally.

The music is from Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer. Several songs were cut that were good enough to later enjoy successful recordings, so they may have been planning a full out movie musical at the outset. What remains is a story with a handful of songs that all come out of the actual plot. An early scene of 4 of the leading players attempting to write a song at the piano is terrific - neither of the 4 are actual songwriters. The writing and the performances distinguish a very ordinary nursery rhyme of a tune, which serves as a plot motif throughout the story:

-Oh, what a horse was Charlie. Till he got a charlie horse!

"Jeepers Creepers", now a novelty standard, originated with this mostly forgotten film, and was even nominated for an Oscar. It introduces the great Satchmo, and the horse he serenades on his trumpet. Louis Armstrong plays the scene as always with such forthrightness as to transcend the cultural stereotyping of the part, helping us to suspend disbelief. He believes the horse responds to the song, and the 'choreography' of the horse's reactions is so clever, and we happily go along 'for the ride'. It reminded me of a scene in one of Katharine Hepburn's last films, "Can This Be Love?" Temporarily stranded with a horse in Central Park, she talks her way through her concerns about marrying again - with the horse. Like Louis, she plays it so cleanly that you could almost forget who she is talking to.

Which brings us to the 3rd and last musical interlude, a full-out production number starting off the 3rd Act. It's a smartly put together pastiche of actual nursery rhymes that travels amongst several of the different sets of characters at the horse race.

-There's music in the nursery, There's music in the nursery. 'Cause Mother Goose is on the loose, Her kids are swingin' out.

Led by Louis leading a band that looks like they are suited in waiters' jackets, it would be an amusing suspension of disbelief if slavery and prejudice had never existed. Maxine Sullivan appears as a maid opening window above, her voice as clear and lovely as an angel. A group of young Afr-Am men divided in to 3 trios sing and move with elan. And the leads, Dick Powell and Anita Louise waltz into the center of it all with all the innocence of new love. The whole scene is awash with joy, the centerpiece of the film, reminding us what its actual purpose is.

And finally, the great race itself, 25 cents to see a Steeple Chase. That is probably not far off from the admission price to the film itself.

Director Ray Enright started out cutting for Mack Sennett, and it shows. It's an impressive even thrilling action piece, as the horse has to leave the race per se (for plot reasons) and cut through a number of unwelcoming neighboring environments, and of course, this is many decades before CGI. In contemporary music terms - its all done "acoustic". Au naturel. Fantastic leaps, and the one that really got me - a course down and through and out of a construction gully in one take.

I was looking forward to seeing Harrison Ford's take on "Call of the Wild" last year, until I found out the dog was going to be CGI. It may be that we arent going to accept putting animals through the ringer to make these kinds of films anymore. I don't know enough about the matter to know if a film like either of these could be and sometimes was made without abusing the animal, but the real thing is as endearing as it is thrilling, and the horse sure looks like it is having a good time. if that's not the case, than kudos to the editing, and to the discontinuation of the practice. But like the ivory used for piano keys, I will miss it.

"All's well that ends well", as expected, and the 2 comic "heavies" of the story (stalwarts Harold Huber and Allen Jenkins placing bets for the Mob), get their comeuppance after providing comic relief throughout the entire picture.

My favorite moment: After a short and simple vaudevillian bit on pacing that takes place in a hotel lobby, Louis Armstrong has a brief encounter with one of the 2 Mob bettors, and his reaction to learning which horse the guy has placed his bet on :

-You got a bet on Jeepers Creepers? {Shakes head} Ummm. You've got misery. {Final look back, as he ascends staircase} Ummm.

I once met a survivor of Mengele at a grade school she'd come to talk to. She told us that the Allied Forces were so shocked and angered by what they found at the camps, that they arranged to force the townspeople in the neighboring town to line up on the streets and really look at the condition of the newly freed prisoners of the camp, whom they brought willingly into the town, presumably after some aid had been given them. (We were all too riveted to interrupt with practical questions like that.) At some point in this gruesome parade, a townswoman broke rank and approached her. With a dumbfounded look, she expressed her shock that "even the old and frail!" were subjected to this misery. Of course the villagers had to know a great deal about what was going on. The prisoners worked the camp, but still there were jobs that local townsmen had to be brought in to do. But - "even the old and frail!...I never could believe that!" And so the townswoman asked her, "How old are you? You must be at least 70!" "But I am only 14." And with that reveal, the fuller understanding of what "ordinary" Germans had allowed, abetted, promulgated began to come clear. Which was of course exactly the purpose of this exercise, as it was also the reason the US government sent in George Stevens, John Ford, and Samuel Fuller to document the liberation of the camps. From the beginning, it was understood that there would be deniers over time, whether out of malice or ignorance or dumbfounded disbelief. ... Good is an adaptation of a play that tracks the consequences of an "ordinary" person's choices to allow, then abet, and finally, effectively promulgate evil in Nazi Germany. It's not much of an adaptation, and I expect it works better as a play - I suspect it would be devastating as a play, with the right actors. The morality speeches, the sense of a series of scenes to indicate passage of time, the use of magic realism in the form of a recurring musical motif - all work better in the concentrated glare of lights onto a proscenium. In a film shot on location, their power is diffused. Neither a true screen adaptation, nor a film of the play, neither medium's advantages are used to bring something to the written word on the page. But good actors we have, and the great moral question of the 20th century - how could a civilized society allow this to happen? In the novel The Good German, the central question hovers over the titular character, a Werner von Braun type scientist who was, at the very least, aware of misery created in the wake of his research for the Nazis - was he "swept along" by the tide?...a tide, we forget, that began with ripples...was he a "good man" who made too many compromises before he realized the consequences?...did he deserve to be essentially rescued from the trials of post-war Germany, to be brought to work for the US government?...or, was he not so complicit as to embody evil to some degree in himself...? The title of the novel is clearly meant to be taken as a question. Soderbergh in his film dramatization left out the question mark, and thereby everything that made the novel interesting. He strangely made him into all but a saint, the glory of the story in his 'escape' through the Americans is the film's climax. Well, I like every other film Soderbergh makes - a lot - and even his failures I am glad to see. He always tries something interesting - this one was shot as a kind of film noir suspense tale. Did he read the book? Who wrote this? That's all fodder for other discussion. But... ...The Good German makes for an interesting foil for Good. In the former, the question of who is "good" is answered in black and white terms - literally film-wise, come to think of it. Here is a good German scientist, we are told, who never really meant to harm anyone, and thank goodness we get him out of that awful place. The suspense is in his rescue. In the latter film, Good, our main player is a literary professor who once espoused euthanasia in a novel - you can see why the Nazis latch on to this, the idea is to use him as a spokesperson to bring credibility to what becomes the early ripples of removing "undesirables". Our "ordinary man in an extraordinary situation" here is played rather clueless by the excellent Viggo Mortensen, as a character constantly buffeted about by life's events, with family, at work, and now by society/government itself. He resembles in this regard another fictional scientist in, yes of all people, David Schwimmer's Dr Ross Geller - who, luckily for Geller and appropriately for a 90s sitcom, never has to face consequences of his inaction affecting much beyond his small personal circle. Viggo's Dr Halder does not get off so easily. Neither with the turn of events, nor with questions of his complicity. The play, or teleplay (I haven't read the stage original yet), lays out its argument very effectively. Step by step, Halder makes choices that he tells himself and others are not real choices, to go along, get along, and finally to protect himself and his family. But the playwright does not let him completely off the hook. Time and again he gets warnings of where his actions are leading - and - particularly in the character of his close friend, a Jewish psychiatrist, he is told more than once in no uncertain terms just how awful his betrayal of principles is turning out. Not much of a spoiler to say where this is obviously all leading, but unlike Spielberg's true-life Schindler, Halder does not make the full moral leap back to "goodness" until it is too late. Schindler's List climaxes with the awful realization of the explicitly morally ambiguous protagonist that "good" is really all that matters, that he "could have done so much more". If you believe in a moral arch to the universe, a Force, a God (Good) Principle - then this is how said universe teaches us, through pain, to reach for our better selves. We learn the easy way or the hard way. "Sorrow has its rewards. It never leaves us where it found us." Halder gets his lesson in one of the hardest ways. He gets off scot free while those around him pay the price. And he is not "un-good" enough to take any satisfaction out of it, let alone the pleasure of the truly evil. We - audience - get these plays and movies and various arts and crafts, and we get to choose whether to learn from them or make similar mistakes in the future. Or in the present.

Presumably, the reason for this take on the subject of Arthur Miller's masterpiece was to give a broader overview as well as incorporate more recent historical research this into this oddly brutal chapter in American history. Odd not because of its brutality, brutality was of course so much a part of early American life, but odd because the brutality was of a community turned in on itself - rather than settlers against natives, slaves, the latest wave of immigrants, and so on.

Obviously made-for-tv, it accomplishes those objectives to some degree, but 3 hours is a long haul without the point of view of a master like Arthur Miller. Lacking that focus, it over-compensates with such ongoing hysterical screeching and writhing, that any moment of simple dialogue is a relief.

The teleplay is probably better than I can give it credit for. Outside of a public theater, I do most of my watching films while practicing piano exercises ( I no longer need sound after many years for this) or even physical exercise, to economize my time. But this one was too much to take even for that. So I was wandering in and out my screening room, working on various chores - I missed whole scenes, at least visually. Strangely, this one probably works better with actual commercials breaking it up - it was designed that way, as distracting as the ads would be.

What could have taken the place of the commercial breaks? Exactly what is missing here - the quiet of pre-industrial life, punctuated by the sounds of nature and the long hours of repetitive chores of peoples' daily lives. What a Terrence Malick could do here, he demonstrated amply in The New World. Against the backdrop of the natural rhythms of the settlers' lives, the hysteria of the children and consequent spread of madness throughout the community would be a hundred fold more terrifying than the onslaught of screaming we are subjected to.

And that's the rub. Like Miller's Playing for Time, which Joseph Sargent also directed for television, these are stories not meant to be told with commercial breaks for sodas and indigestion.

It has its moments, and a cast that can deliver them, whenever the screaming subsides. Shirley Maclaine has a beautifully directed scene in the cell with her fellow accused, which I would bet she had a hand in creating, as her Rebecca Nurse's spiritual transformation beyond the Puritanism of the times is a little on the money, when we know the actress's personal beliefs she's written extensively about. It's my favorite moment in the film, as she and Gloria Reuben and the women let their hair down and their true feelings out, something that would have been truly shocking at the time. In the misery of their circumstances, it is utterly believable, and I would even add, as revelatory for us as it is for the characters.

My 2nd favorite scene, or part of a scene, is the speech given to John Proctor before his hanging. I was curious to see how this would be handled, as this is the speech in Miller's play that delivers his great thesis - that play written largely in response to the McCarthy hearings, Proctor refuses to give up his "good name" by giving up "names" and confessing guilt to holding a belief he neither has, nor should be subjected to inquisition upon. The writer Maria Nation wisely avoids that angle, waits right up until the last moment - I'd given up on expecting her Proctor to have anything truly interesting to say - and just when I thought the scene had reached its climax with the noose, she gives Proctor a speech that preserves his dignity and miraculously as it were throws the culpability of the evil at hand onto the village participants and onlookers for all time.

To take in these 2 scenes again, I will save it on my List on IMDB, where it is available without charge. But the work as a whole is too arduous to go back and search for other great moments that I could have missed. Let me know if you find any, and where they are, and I'll gladly take a look.