As the title suggests, so forth.
I can’t believe it’s not House
Watson, currently airing on Sky Witness in double bills, is a curious beast. Transparently a rip off of House, it purports to be inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle, but blatantly lifts from the 2010s series Elementary on which showrunner Craig Sweeny used to be an esteemed writer. One wonders who is more baffled looking at this oddity? David Shore? As he looks at a maverick doctor running a specialist clinic that only deals in diagnosing the trickiest of cases who encourages his hand-picked staff to root in patient’s houses to find out what they’re hiding and kind of has a thing going with the ball-busting head of the hospital? Robert Doherty? As he rummages thru his notes for later seasons of Elementary and finds post-concussion syndrome and Shinwell Johnson circled in red? And what is Craig Sweeny up to? How did a man responsible for the gleeful insanity of Limitless find himself shepherding such a bland creation as a Watson who is both a Watson without a Holmes, and a House without a personality. The only real reasons to watch this show are – a morbid fascination in to just how much they can rip off from others shows without getting into trouble – a curiosity as to what elements must always appear even when Holmes is nowhere to be found (Moriarty, Lestrade, Mrs Hudson, Irene Adler, Shinwell Johnson, Sebastian Moran). I’m honestly amazed it’s been renewed.
Who’s going to celebrate you, tonight?
People often rave about the bravura scene in Miami Vice where Tubbs and Crockett simply drive while “Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?” is sung repeatedly. So it’s surprising that nobody seems to mention in the same vein an extended sequence in the final season of Magnum PI. Magnum PI is a show with some exceptional transitions between scenes. Indeed one might say the showcase episode “Home from the Sea” that opens season 4 is built around transitions from character to character via chiming dialogue. The sort of showy and amusing trick, where a question is ‘answered’ in a different context, that Aaron Sorkin used to introduce all his characters in The Trial of the Chicago 7. But in “Unfinished Business”, as Magnum comes to terms with unimaginable loss, the dialogue stops. Magnum is bent on vengeance. And with the doggedness and methodical savvy of an intelligence officer he tracks down his target, then prepares his weapon and approach. All to the sound of the Genesis instrumental “The Brazilian”.
“Marcus Aurelius has already relieved you of the obligation to have a take!”
I came across that celebrated gloss on a passage of the Meditations earlier this year, and have been thinking of it a lot recently. The deaths of those titans of 1970s cinema Robert Redford and Diane Keaton should probably each have been marked by a piece on this blog, if I was invested in doing that kind of thing in defiance of Aurelius. Neither meant as much to me as Donald Sutherland though, who I had already written about elsewhere, so I didn’t attempt a timely piece to grab eyeballs because I felt I didn’t have enough extant knowledge to do it justice. Sometimes I come in late with off-kilter pieces like I did on Gene Hackman, or will at some point in the near future do so for Terence Stamp. Which is all prefatory to saying when Charlie Kirk died, I was stunned. To me he was a constant popping up presence on YouTube shorts as they vainly tried to imitate TikTok. I had read the Atlantic’s lengthy profile of him, but above all he was a voice. Which made the shock of seeing him being shot in the throat mid-debate all the greater, literally a voice silenced forever. I thought about writing something, but I didn’t feel I had anything to add. Not so other people… If you think that it is not disgusting and weird but in fact very moral and indeed charitable of you to say that it is regrettable someone died only because it robbed them of the chance to repent their life’s work, well, unless they are a war criminal or habitual denizen of the prison system, which Charlie Kirk was not, then you reveal only your narcissism and moral bankruptcy.
Talking Movies 