Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Detective Hole; Dexter: Resurrection; Fauda; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Reacher; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star City; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Showing posts with label Paul Simon. Show all posts

Friday, December 20, 2024

Dexter: Original Sin 1.2-1.3: "The Finger is the Message"

Paramount+Showtime was good enough to put up both the second and third episodes of the prequel Dexter series -- Dexter: Original Sin -- and the result was double all the things we enjoy about Dexter. Including at least two prime pieces of interior commentary from Dexter (the young Dexter) with the older Dexter -- voiced by Michael C. Hall -- speaking the commentary.

[Some spoilers ahead ... ]

One comes when Dexter, now working in his father Harry's Miami police unit, hears their Captain, at a press conference, comment that they had received a finger of the boy who had been kidnapped, sent to them by the kidnapper, with no other message. Dexter thinks/says in internal dialogue "that's because the finger was the message". A nice homage to Marshall McLuhan, intended or not (and I put the quote in the present tense because I wanted to emphasize the McLuhanesque quality of the line).

Dexter has another especially apt interior line -- "hello darkness my old friend" -- borrowed from Paul Simon -- and Dexter is honing his skills, managing to get back the earrings he took as souvenirs from his first killing, which Debra gave to Sophia. Here I'll say I'm not clear why Dexter is shown rebuffing Sophia's advances. The adult Dexter certainly was not immune to the charms of women. So what's the point of making younger Dexter not interested? He's too much in love with discovering he's truest love, which is murder of those who deserve it? If so, I think this aspect of the narrative is being handled a little too heavy-handedly at this point.

But it was good to see young Batista get so much story, and young LaGuerta introduced. In many ways, they were the most important characters other than Dexter and Debra, in the original series -- well, everyone was important -- and Batista comes back in the Dexter: New Blood sequel. One of the great strengths of Original Sin is how much most of the characters look and sound like their older selves that we came to know in Dexter. That applies not only to Patrick Gibson of course as Dexter, but to James Martinez as Batista. At one point in Original Sin 1.2, his voice sounded exactly like David Zayas, which made wonder if Zayas actually did that voicing.

In any case, as of the first three episodes, Dexter: Original Sin is doing one fine job, and I'm looking forward to more.

Reviews of Season 2: Dexter's Back: A Preview and Dexter Meets Heroes and 6. Dexter and De-Lila-h and 7. Best Line About Dexter - from Lila and 8. How Will Dexter Get Out of This? and The Plot Gets Tighter and Sharper and Dex, Doakes, and Harry and Deb's Belief Saves Dex and All's ... Well

See also about Season 1: First Place to Dexter

in Kindle and paperback

Friday, November 25, 2022

Why the "Flowers Never Bend" Performance in The Orville 3.9 Will Last Forever

This sweet soulful rendition by Gordon (Scott Grimes) and Charly (Anne Winters) of Simon & Garfunkel's "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" this past July on the 9th episode of the 3rd Season of The Orville certainly wasn't the first vocal performance in a TV drama or comedy that wasn't a musical. It's not even the first sustained singing in a Star Trek or Star Trek inspired TV show. Uhura sang "Beyond Antares" in a memorable scene with Spock (in "The Conscience of the King,” episode 1.13 of the original Star Trek series in December 1966) and a couple of other times on the USS Enterprise on television back then.

But "Beyond Antares" was an original song, from the 23rd century, when it was heard for the first time in Star Trek, and therefore couldn't evoke any of the memories and feelings that Simon & Garfunkel's "Flowers" brought forth a few months ago, rooted in the dozens of times in millions of homes and cars in which Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (the LP which contained "Flowers") was first released, heard, and loved in October 1966, enriched by the increasing number of people who would continue to hear that song in the years ahead, as Simon & Garfunkel, both together and individually, became and continued to be musical icons.

That was the main reason Grimes and Winters' beautiful performance really struck me the first time I heard and saw their performance in July. The other reason was the assembled group from The Orville, who were fortunate to hear this rendition in person. Not only who they were -- the species and role of their characters in the series -- but their expressions as Gordon and Charly sang for them were just perfect.

But this one minute and thirty seconds has really stayed with me since the summer. I now consider it easily the best musical performance in any science fiction on the screen. And I think I know why.

[Spoilers follow ... ]

It's because we learned, as season 3 progressed and concluded with its 10th episode, that Charly singing "my life will never end" had a meaning and resonance that Paul Simon couldn't have foreseen when he wrote those lyrics way back in the 1960s. In that 10th episode, Charly's life does bravely end. Her heroic sacrifice would have been hard to forget in any case. But making that sacrifice after singing that line was a masterstroke. Surely, Seth MacFarlane (and co-writers Brannon Braga and André Bormanis) must have known what would happen to Charly in the 10th episode when they decided to have her sing that song with that line in the 9th episode.

And I'd expect the actors in The Orville would have known about Charly's fate as well. Look at Kelly's face around 30 seconds into the video. She's standing next to Ed, both really enjoying the performance, smiling, but at 30 or so seconds she momentarily almost loses that smile. And that's right around the time Charly sings, "pretend, my life will never end". Coincidence? I don't think so. Was she directed to briefly lose that smile? I have no idea -- perhaps Adrianne Palicki, who plays Kelly so well, was consciously or unconsciously in touch with what she knew was going to happen to Charly, and was hit by that awful irony.

A beautiful, haunting song, brought to life by two beautiful voices and acoustic strings, strummed and plucked, in a scene that I predict will be seen and heard in the corridors of unique science fiction forever.

Renew The Orville!

Friday, July 29, 2022

The Orville 3.9: Why It's Become Better than any Current Star Trek

Having just watched The Orville 3.9, let me explain why I think The Orville is better than any current Star Trek series, as well as in the same league with The Original Series and The Next Generation.

It's because The Orville is not beholden to any prior or current Star Trek, not burdened with being true to all that was Star Trek before, and is Star Trek now. The Orville can plot its own course, take its own chances. And now that it's on Hulu not Fox, The Orville is also free fromall the network constraints, including length of episode and language.

Spoilers ahead ... ]

Episode 3.9 makes use of, and epitomizes all of those advantages. It was unafraid to kill off a semi-major character, Admiral Perry (played by Ted Danson) and a major, vibrant new character introduced just this season, Ensign Charly (played by Anne Winters). Charly was so impressive, she even sang some great harmony and lead when she and Gordon performed Simon and Garfunkel's "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" in Grayson's family cabin. And the lyrics of this song -- "I'll continue to pretend, my life will never end" -- have a special, pang-in-your-heart significance, given Charly's extraordinary sacrifice at the end of the episode. This accentuates the ethical incandescence of Charly doing this to save the Kaylon, whom she understandably hated up until the episode before last.

The story line was also top-notch, for a bunch of interlocking reasons. "The Orville" has increasingly become a continuing story this season. Episode 3.9 picks up on the Moclans leaving the Union, and they form an alliance with the Krill against the Kaylon. And by the end of the episode, the Kaylon (impressed by Charly's sacrifice) are aligned with the Union. These seismic shifts are conducted with subtlety and apt motive. For example, the Moclan at first balk at giving the Krill co-command of their military, because the Krill leader is a woman. And we see the Kaylon leader very aware of the enormity of Charly's sacrifice.

The battle scenes were also outstanding, especially the spaceship dogfights between the Union and the Kaylon vs. the Moclan and the Krill. All of this was reminiscent of an extended scene from a movie like Star Wars, and was possible because "The Orville" as been given room to the breathe on Hulu, in this case, an hour and nineteen minutes.

Next week is the season 3 finale. I'm very much looking forward to that, and to many seasons to come.

Joel McKinnon and I discuss Star Trek, The Orville and much more

watch The Chronology Protection Case FREE on Amazon Prime

Monday, May 10, 2021

The Girlfriend Experience 3.3: Real Fakes

The Girlfriend Experience 3.3 on earlier tonight on Starz is entitled "Deep Fake" -- a good name for this episode and for the series in general, because:

1. The very essence of the girlfriend experience kind of call girl is that the woman provides not only the real sex, but illusions that she likes of even loves the client. We saw this literally tonight when Iris says "I love you" after her john tells her "I love you".

2. Iris's day job is about deep fakes, too, as she and her colleagues try to boil down sexual attractions to a series of algorithms. (Algorithms, by the way, have a way to go in our reality to match human intelligence, let alone emotions. I know someone whose video, a critical report on Trump's lies about winning the election, was taken down from YouTube, because algorithms flagged it as spreading disinformation because it had a clip of someone spouting Trump's big lie about winning the election.)

But back to Iris, who is much more fun and for that matter interesting to consider, she also in this episode talks about a video clip of a German politician being a deep fake. So what we have is someone who is a deep fake in her reality, in two jobs, at all hours of the day and night, recognizing deep fakes in our off-screen reality, as she looks at a clip on a television or computer screen.

And I was writing this, I was thinking of a good theme song for The Girlfriend Experience -- Simon and Garfunkel's "Fakin' It", released in 1967, written by Simon, one of his/their lesser-known but I always thought very best songs. Now there were certainly prostitutes back then -- "man's oldest profession" -- and algorithms, too, but they were mostly used in slide rules. I don't know if there were girlfriend experiences for sale in the 1960s, though.

And see also The Girlfriend Experience 2.1-2: Two for One ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.3-4: Hard to Come By ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.5-6: In and Out ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.7-8: Sundry Seductions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.9-10: The End of Illusions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.11-12; One and One Is Less than One

And see also The Girlfriend Experience: Eminently Worth It (my review of Season 1)

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

Monday, November 23, 2020

Don Caron's "Fifty Ways to Leave the White House"

This seems to be my day to be writing about music. I just came across this yesterday, Don Caron's parody "Fifty Ways to Leave the White House". The lyrics are not only suitably barbed, but Caron's voice, his slightly annoyed, laconic, sarcastic delivery, does a fine and funny job of capturing Paul Simon (the Yiddish "farbissiner punim" captures that personna maybe a little better than the English adjectives). Enjoy!

Creds: Caron wrote and sings the song, for the Parody Project, executive producers Sally Headley, Jack Heighway and Jerry Pender.

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Vienna Blood 1-2: Demons in the Architecture

Took a few minutes (actually closer to 90) out of everything else to watch the first two episodes (actually, one episode, broken into two parts) of Vienna Blood on PBS (my wife aptly flagged it).
It's an excellent historical detective drama, set in 1906 Vienna, with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler making cameo appearances, and astute historical details (we see a disk not a cylinder on the phonograph - the disk, invented by Berliner, would indeed have been playing there and then, not Edison's cylinder, invented, earlier, in the US).

Max Liebermann is a young psychologist in the even younger field of Freudian psychology. Oskar Reinhardt is a detective with a difficult even harrowing personal story (his daughter died and his wife left him). Their superiors in one way or another are all calcified idiots. The two make an outstanding team.

Other important aspects of the milieu include anti-semitism - Max and his family are Jewish - and a city which, at this time, was one of the most impressive cultural capitals in the world. Art, music, and angels in the architexture (to quote Paul Simon) are very much at hand. But this world also contains demons in the form of human murderers, and that's what this little series is all about: how an early profiler and a more seasoned lawman can solve crimes and bring the bad guy to justice.

Give that this is a mystery, I won't say anything more about the plot. I will say that it was well developed and resolved. I did wonder about a few missing historical details - I didn't spot any automobiles or telephones. There had to be a least a few of them in 1906 Vienna. But there was a mention of Jung's "shadow self," which tracks perfectly with history, since Jung sent his Studies in Word Association to Freud in Vienna in 1906.

I'll try to be back here in two weeks with a single review of the next two-part episode.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Joan Baez at the Beacon Theater

There are so many ways I could begin my review of Joan Baez's superb concert at the Beacon Theater tonight -

This is the second time in less than a week that Tina and I attended a farewell concert - Paul Simon's at the Prudential Center in Newark last week and Joan Baez's tonight. In both cases, the concerts were so good that it's hard to believe these masters of music, voice, and lyrics are retiring from touring.
Joan Baez, always current and trenchant, sang a powerful Woody Guthrie song about immigrants. We couldn't help thinking about Joy Reed's interview of Jose Antonio Vargas at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn Wednesday night.
One of Joan's last songs was Paul Simon's "The Boxer" - also one of the last encores that Paul Simon sang last week. "I am leaving but the fighter still remains" was never more apt.

And all of those openers are valid. And there is much more to be said about Joan Baez's concert tonight. She said, after one song - a song her sister Mimi sang all the time - that it's hard to sing and cry at the same time. At several times in the concert, I felt the same way about applauding and crying. Especially after she sang Zoe Mulford's "The President Sang Amazing Grace". (Yes, that's exactly what the song's about.)

Baez sang one of her masterpieces early on - "Diamonds and Rust," her parting reflection about Bob Dylan. This was after opening the concert with a Dylan song. She followed with a wonderful rendition of Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune" - a lyricist who never received the recognition he deserved as someone right up there with Dylan. And she sang several more Dylan songs, including the incomparable "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," which Baez linked to the state of the nation and world today. After all these years, Joan Baez remains the best voice Dylan ever had.

And we do live in a world "where souls are forgotten," certainly by the White House and its minions. Which means we need Joan Baez's voice more than ever. I remain ever hopeful we can hear it again.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Paul Simon Farewell Concert at Prudential Center: "Don't Give Up"

Tina and I just got back from Paul Simon's Farewell Concert at the Prudential Center. We both thought it was one of the very best concerts we've ever attended - and that includes at least two concerts with Simon & Garfunkel decades ago.

Paul Simon was always as much a poet as a lyricist and songwriter, which is not something you can say about even the greatest lyricists, like Lennon and McCartney, whose words only occasionally reached the realm of sheer poetry. Simon does that almost every time, in every song. I knew that before tonight, but his words leaped even more out at me than I recall in the past. He has a nonchalant profundity almost rolling off his tongue, from "Call Me Al" and "Late in the Evening" to "Crazy After All These Years" (his line "I fear I may do some damage one fine day" has always been one of my all-time favorites).

And his new songs have it too. The fun and sass of "Rewrite" is as good as "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," the haunting beauty of "Questions for the Angels" as memorable as "For Emily," and the keen watercolor imagery of "Rene and Georgette Magritte with their Dog After the War" is right up there with the brush strokes of "Hazy Shade of Winter".

And if the music and singing and band weren't enough, Simon's repartee between songs was worth the price of admission. He talked about a song he gave to someone else, and he now wanted to reclaim as his own. I thought he was perhaps talking about "Red Rubber Ball," which he wrote and was a big hit for The Cyrkle. He wasn't. He was talking about "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the big Simon & Garfunkel hit, mostly sung by just Garfunkel. Talk about a dis - I don't why Simon harbors such anger for his former partner, but this was a rapier thrust all the way back to 1970.

But in many ways the best line was what Simon had to say about these Trumpian times we live in, without mentioning his name. "Don't give up," he said quietly to a cheering audience. And then he sang an especially meaningful "American Tune" ... "I don't know a soul whose not been battered ..." And we all were tearing not cheering, then applauding.

You know what - I don't think this and his next few, concluding performances on his farewell tour will be his last. The audience tonight had too much groove, and Simon far too much joy and commitment to his performance, for that to be true.

Look for my review here whenever he does his next series of concerts.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Masters of Sex 3.7: Going Ape

An hilarious Masters of Sex 3.7 last night - an outrightly laughing out loud episode in many parts - in which Virginia must use not only her savvy as a psychologist of sex but her feminine charms, literally, to motivate Gil the gorilla to do his thing at the zoo.

Simon & Garfunkel sang it's all happening "At the Zoo," but it wasn't happening for Gil, who sadly, just couldn't make it, and Masters and Johnson are tasked to find out why, and put in a cure, if possible. The key, it turns out, is a woman who used to work at the zoo, and talked endearingly to Gil as prelude to his foreplay. But the talk wasn't the thing - it was her copious bosom that ignited Gil, and Virginia needs to bare hers to get Gil right again.

That's about where the humor ends. Virginia's not pleased about what she had to do, Bill is not very sympathetic, but that perfume guy is, and the result is she's drawn closer to him, and with the result that now much more than a bosom is shared, and with increasing frequency.

There was also was an anachronism is this story line - a rare kind of mistake for Masters of Sex - which occurs when Virginia observes that gorillas are almost "99%" like humans. That's based on genomic analysis - the Human Genome Project, in particular - which didn't take place until 1990-2003, and in fact the human-great ape comparison wasn't revealed until the end of the project. True, DNA itself was discovered back in the 1950s, but no one in the 1960s knew the degree of similarity between ape and human genomes.

Hey, it's tough to get things right, and the main reason I know about this is the research I did for my first novel, The Silk Code. And the error didn't really hurt the story.

What does hurt - not the story, but Bill, and is a powerful marker for potential damage - is when his son partially burns one of Bill's prized football cards. I almost don't want to see Bill's rage when he discovers that, but of course will be watching the excellent series with rapt attention.

See also Thomas Maier: Masters of Sex and Biography Come to Life ...Masters of Sex 3.1: Galley Slaves ... Masters of Sex 3.2: The Shah, the Baby, and the Book ... Masters of Sex 3.3: The Bookstore

#SFWApro

Monday, March 9, 2015

The Walking Dead 5.13: The Horse and the Party

The tension of the normal ruled The Walking Dead 5.13 - the tension of ordinary life in Alexandria - with the biggest scene being the killing of a horse by walkers. Actually, that was a pretty powerful vignette.

But the rest of the action took place inside this weirdly cosy world - unsettling, precisely because it was cosy, with the zombie apocalypse proceeding outside. Rick kissing the doctor's blonde wife on the cheek, when he'd like to do much more. Carl finally talking to guys his own age about normal things. Carole offering to bake cookies--

Except, that sequence ends with Carole frightening the kid with a tale of monsters - all too true - in order to get the blonde's son not to tell her what he saw Carole doing, stealing some guns. Chances are, sooner or later, he'll his mother anyway. The Carole scene represents the limits of normalcy in Alexandria.

But in some ways, the most frightening depiction is of Daryl's domestication. He accepts the spaghetti invitation, consumes it with gusto, and then the offer to join the community as a recruiter. All of this is deeply disturbing because it rings so true, and so false, at the same time. Even if the series were ending for good this season, it couldn't and wouldn't end this way.

So what's going to happen? This is the same question that's been hanging in the air like "a floating question why" - to quote Paul Simon in "Cloudy" - all through last week's episode and now this one. And cloudy is a good description of where the future now resides for our heroes. Replacing the uncertainty of whether they'll live or die is what is going on in this town?

Just a few more episodes to find out this season, in what is shaping up, in its own way, as perhaps the most disquieting season we've seen so far on The Walking Dead.

See also: The Walking Dead 5.1: The Redemption of Carole ... The Walking Dead 5.3: Meets Alfred Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone ... The Walking Dead 5.4: Hospital of Horror ... The Walking Dead 5.5: Anatomy of a Shattered Dream ... The Walking Dead 5.6-7: Slow ... The Walking Dead 5.8: Killing the Non-Killer ... The Walking Dead 5.9: Another Death in the Family ... The Walking Dead 5.11: The Smiling Stranger ... The Walking Dead 5.12: The Other Shoe

And see also The Walking Dead 4.1: The New Plague ... The Walking Dead 4.2: The Baby and the Flu ... The Walking Dead 4.3: Death in Every Corner ...The Walking Dead 4.4: Hershel, Carl, and Maggie ... The Walking Dead 4.6: The Good Governor ... The Walking Dead 4.7: The Governor's Other Foot ... The Walking Dead 4.8: Vintage Fall Finale ... The Walking Dead 4.9: A Nightmare on Walking Dead Street ... The Walking Dead 4:14: Too Far ... The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale: From the Gunfire into the Frying Pan

#SFWApro

no cannibalism but at least a plague in The Consciousness Plague

Monday, November 3, 2008

Paul Simon's "American Tune" for Obama

Here is another beautiful Obama commercial.... from Progressive Future, with Paul Simon's "American Tune" the only haunting, so true sound...

Sunday, November 2, 2008

All in the Family on Life on Mars #4: Sam Meets His Mother

Meeting your parent or grandparent when you're traveling in the past is an appealing feature of time travel - I've played with that in my Loose Ends saga and in the sequel to The Plot to Save Socrates - does your mother or grandfather recognize any of your future self, which of course is much older than the version of you that she or he knows, do you do anything in that family reunion that can change the course of the future ... These are the kinds of questions that make time travel so much fun.

Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion" is one of the signature songs of Life of Mars (American style), Episode 4, titled "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?" The Stones and Paul Simon, and Sam runs into Jim Croce, too. Meanwhile, Sam's mother Rose Tyler is what later generations would happily say is a MILF (Jennifer Ferrin was fine in the role), and she's involved in some dangerous mob business that Sam needs to navigate her out of .... Nothing extraordinary here, though it was great to see comedian Robert Klein in a cameo as mob boss. Rose apparently doesn't see anything in adult Sam from 2008 that leads her to connect him with little boy Sam in 1973 - the closest she and we come is when she says that little Sam wants to be a cop when he grows up - and adult Sam doesn't seem to do anything that will change her and his life, except to keep her from getting killed. But this of course had to have happened, otherwise the adult Sam would have known at the outset that his mother had been killed. Flirting with the vortex of paradox...

In many ways more interesting is Sam's being drugged and slept with and photographed by one of Klein's molls, during which hallucinogenic state he not only sees this moll but Gretchen Mol's character Annie straddling him. I take this scene as, among other things, more evidence that Sam is actually in a coma from the car crash rather than time traveling.

But, of course, that may be just what the story wants us to believe. Which, again, raises a question: what ultimate difference does it make to the story if Sam is unconscious in 2008 and dreaming he is in 1973, or time traveling? Back in 1973, it makes no difference. But it would in 2008. For example, if Sam gets back to 2008, what would happen if he met someone he knew as a time-traveling adult back in 1973? Like his mother, is she's still alive... That would be a mother and child reunion squared.

I hope we see some more of Sam in 2008, sooner or later, to shed some light from yonder dimensions on this question.

See also Life on Mars Debuts in America ... Life on Mars 2nd Episode in America: Coma, Time Travel, Mars Rover ... Life on Mars Goes On in America: What Happens When a Time Traveler Runs Into His Earlier Self? ... Life on Mars #5 Meets the Wire ... Life on Mars #6 Meets Itself on Television ... Life on Mars #7: Is Annie Real, Or, Is Life on Mars a False Memory

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...

Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!