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Stuff on TV
Last week I watched an old Fritz Lang movie Human Desire loosely based on Zola’s La Bete Humaine. The atmosphere was certainly Zolaesque, miserable, ground down people trapped in their miserable, animalistic lives with the industrial background an ever present metaphor. The industry in question being a railroad the metaphor was almost comically Freudian but the film positively dour, a reminder that America didn’t all miraculously turn Technicolor after the war. There was one white picket fence on show but blink and you’d miss it, looming larger on the landscape were the dead end bar where prematurely aged railway men numbed their inadequacies and the cramped hallways of domestic discontent. The cheap artificiality of the women’s lacquered hair and girdled waists managed to dim even Gloria Grahame’s sultry looks, she played the femme fatale part but came across more as a battered wife, drowning as much as luring.
In other news Heroes and the first of the Christopher Ecclestone episodes. I remember reading somewhere that he took the role because it gave him the chance to play a non-villainous Englishman on an American show and Claude gleefully defies Hollywood expectations from the bearded misanthropy to the (slightly toned down) accent straight outta Salford. I have to wonder if the pigeon-keeping were Ecclestone’s idea, in a British show it would have been a stereotype almost equivalent to having him grow giant vegetables (except that’s more a Yorkshire thing) but probably has quite different associations in the US. Alcatraz maybe? He and Peter make a wonderfully mismatched pair of birdmen.
Meanwhile I think I’ve managed to figure out a source of discontent with the Nikki/Micah/DL storyline, I’m not sure if it’s the acting writing or direction but for all that the whole plot is predicated on motherly love I don’t get the feeling, which I do with Mr. Bennet re Claire, that Nikki is looking at/thinking about Micah even when the script doesn’t require her to. As family storylines go that of the Hawkins/Saunders is in any case relatively impoverished by Micah’s being an only child. Bennet loves Claire but that obsession is rendered even more interesting by the implication that Lyle might as well be a cockroach for all he cares. The lab I did my PhD in was infested by escaped cockroaches, they used to come out every evening at 7 and hold parties in the radio. Papa Suresh abandons Mohinder in favour of a research obsession inspired by the sister he never knew and the same tendency to favouritism may have fuelled Gabriel Gray’s determination to prove himself when his patient zero status looked to be lost. Angela Petrelli names Peter her favourite in her very first scene but if Nathan knows it seems to make no difference.
The Sureshs’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory continues to amuse and appal (dude, there’s no such thing as an evolutionary imperative and if there were it would have nothing to do with the good of the species). It seems to be a problem Tim Kring has as well based on the Mohinder Unmasked documentarylet for which he hired a f***ing physicist to explain the Human Genome Project. Wierdly the wacky idea of Peter altering his DNA to match other people’s mutations, while it breaks the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, is actually right up with the latest findings on epigenetic modification and the role played by RNA (that single helix symbol is supposed to look like an RNA molecule isn’t it).
In other news Heroes and the first of the Christopher Ecclestone episodes. I remember reading somewhere that he took the role because it gave him the chance to play a non-villainous Englishman on an American show and Claude gleefully defies Hollywood expectations from the bearded misanthropy to the (slightly toned down) accent straight outta Salford. I have to wonder if the pigeon-keeping were Ecclestone’s idea, in a British show it would have been a stereotype almost equivalent to having him grow giant vegetables (except that’s more a Yorkshire thing) but probably has quite different associations in the US. Alcatraz maybe? He and Peter make a wonderfully mismatched pair of birdmen.
Meanwhile I think I’ve managed to figure out a source of discontent with the Nikki/Micah/DL storyline, I’m not sure if it’s the acting writing or direction but for all that the whole plot is predicated on motherly love I don’t get the feeling, which I do with Mr. Bennet re Claire, that Nikki is looking at/thinking about Micah even when the script doesn’t require her to. As family storylines go that of the Hawkins/Saunders is in any case relatively impoverished by Micah’s being an only child. Bennet loves Claire but that obsession is rendered even more interesting by the implication that Lyle might as well be a cockroach for all he cares. The lab I did my PhD in was infested by escaped cockroaches, they used to come out every evening at 7 and hold parties in the radio. Papa Suresh abandons Mohinder in favour of a research obsession inspired by the sister he never knew and the same tendency to favouritism may have fuelled Gabriel Gray’s determination to prove himself when his patient zero status looked to be lost. Angela Petrelli names Peter her favourite in her very first scene but if Nathan knows it seems to make no difference.
The Sureshs’s understanding of basic evolutionary theory continues to amuse and appal (dude, there’s no such thing as an evolutionary imperative and if there were it would have nothing to do with the good of the species). It seems to be a problem Tim Kring has as well based on the Mohinder Unmasked documentarylet for which he hired a f***ing physicist to explain the Human Genome Project. Wierdly the wacky idea of Peter altering his DNA to match other people’s mutations, while it breaks the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology, is actually right up with the latest findings on epigenetic modification and the role played by RNA (that single helix symbol is supposed to look like an RNA molecule isn’t it).