Fine BBC adaptation of Les Miserables though West seems miscast

I admit I have never read the book and have never seen the play or the musical, mea culpa, but it seems to me that the 6-part BBC/PBS English-language miniseries of Hugo's Les Miserables (2018) does a fine job presenting the highlights of the sinuous narrative, cutting this enormous text down to a fairly simple period piece, love story, and melodrama that follows the course of the eventful life of Jean Valjean (Domenic West), from imprisonment for a petty theft of a loaf of bread, his mistreatment in prison, his enormous strength and resilience, his provocation of the prison warden Javert (David Oyelowo) and lifetime of persecution and pursuit that follow on Valjean's release from prison: a tormented life of guilt, honor, bravery, over-reaching, and penance. The story is told with great clarity and efficiency - credit to director Tom Shankland and writer Andrew Davies - particularly with some of the scenes of the street fighting in Paris as a ragtag group of radicals and revolutionaries confront the Paris police brigade. There must be more to the novel than this series contains, obviously, but it seems that the series touches all the highlights - a fast-track course in the book. Oyelowo is particularly strong in his part; West is fine at times, but he has that weirdly mischievous grin that served him well in The Wire but that sometimes seems out of place here; plus, he's too much of a player to imagine that he could live what appears to be a completely chaste life, entirely devoted to the upbringing of the young woman whom he rescued from an abusive stepfamily - his attachment to her is weird and kind of creepy. The British, of course, excel at period pieces, and somehow the team has managed to film on a contemporary set and in non-Paris locales in a way that seems to capture the look and feel of a 19th-century French Paris and environs. The final brief segment - after the death of Valjean - is a surprising and powerful image, which I won't divulge.

The excellence continues in Season 2 of The Sopranos

It's rare that a second season of a great miniseries lives up to expectations, but going back 20 years and watching The Sopranos yields some insights into this monumental work: Yes, Season 2 is just as good as the first season, with some terrific throughlines and great episodes throughout: The continued estrangement between Tony and his mother, the arrival of weird sister Janice and the brutal and untimely end to her relationship w/ the demonic and spiteful Richie Aprile, Christopher's brief and unhappy career as a stockbroker, the shooting of Christopher and Tony's revenge on the punk who did so, Pussy's work as a snitch to the police and Tony's struggle w/ how to deal with the infidelity of his lifelong friend, Carrmella's flirtations, Meadow's college applications, the gambling addiction of the guy who owns a sporting-goods store and whose son was dating Meadow - and probably more than this. Most of all, the season continues to develop Tony's personality and his struggle to provide for his family in the most brutal and unseemly business; in fact, the season ends w/ a fantastic montage, intercut between photos and videos of Meadow's graduation and brief clips of those undone by Tony's businesses: prostitution, addiction, bankruptcy, victims of scams (price manipulation on penny stocks, sale of soon-to-be worthless phone cards to those who can least afford to lose $, etc.) and the unforgettable assassination of Pussy. A side note: Some have said they couldn't watch Season 2 of the Soprano's because it was "too violent," but coming back to it after 19 years - the violence pales beside what we see today in just about every crime show on TV or streaming. O tempes, o mores.

A terrific series on a prison breakout in which truth is stranger than fiction

The Ben Stiller 7-episode miniseries on Showtime, Escape at Dannemora, is a terrific prison breakout movie with exceptionally strong performances not only by the leads - Patricia Arquett,e Benicio del Toro, and Paul Dana - but also from just about all of the secondary players, so many props to Stiller for working so well with cast. Moreover, he really effectively captures the look and feel of a high-security prison (good musical score as well) and the look and feel of life in the far-north Broome County of New York. The series is based closely as a true escape from a few years back - in with 2 prisoners managed to cut out parts of their cell walls, enter a system of ducts, and manage to escape by crawling through an unused steam pipe that connected to a power station outside the walls - all w/ some key assistance from the strange, sex-addicted work supervisor played by Arquette. I honestly think that had this not been based on a true escape or had I not known that I would have stopped watching after a couple of episodes, thinking: This story is ridiculous; it could never happen. Or, to paraphrase Shakespeare: Had I seen this on a stage I would never believe it. But there you go - reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. Once you're in, the series will keep you going right to the end, thanks in part as well to smart and unconventional decisions by the writing team - Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin - to frame the series with post-escape interviews/investigations and to hold off till the penultimate episode to give us any of the back story on the prisoners and their accomplice.

Wim Wenders film that today looks pretentious and obscure

Wim Wenders's 1975 film, Wrong Move, seems to be a German-language follow-up, a decade behind its time?, to the Italian-French-Spanish new wave cinema - a story about a mysterious journey in which the protagonist and others he meets on his travels discuss in oblique conversation and in disconnected dialog issues of life, fate, politics, history, and art. What worked well, however, in earlier films - such as Breathless, 8 1/2, Discrete Charm, et al seems overwrought and pretentious here. The script by famously dire Austrian playwright Peter Handke will not sound to anyone like recognizable human conversation in any language; apparently it's a 20th-century update of a Goethe novel  (Willhelm Meister)- but it still has to stand on its own to be worth watching; maybe it's worth watching once, out of curiosity, but it's be no means great or groundbreaking. Plot such as it is in rough outline involves a young man, Willhelm (in his 20s at most? - one would think he should be a teenager and played by one - definitely not by an actor in his 30s!) - who wants to "be a writer" and sets off on a journey to find his talent; the trip will take him from the German lowlands to its highest peak; in the process, W meets on a train and in a restaurant, several people who will accompany him: an elderly street musician (whom we learn had a past history as a Nazi officer - W later tries to kill the man, but backs off); his female sidekick (debut of Nastasha Kinsky), a mute, and decidedly untalented though beautiful; a would be poet who's clumsy and awkward and whose verse is morbid and juvenile; a beautiful actress who keeps coming on to W and whom he keeps rebuffing. They also meet a wealthy, suicidal man who puts them all up for a night - and in the a.m. they all discuss their dreams. Yawn. There's no great climax or insight, there's minimal action, and overall the film is neither emotive nor instructive - although I will say that some of the photography is quite beautiful, especially a long scene with long tracking shots as the characters ascend a mountain via a paved walkway; also, the score is dissonant and in keeping with the discordant dialogue and the many missed connections that the characters endure on their journey to nowhere.

A classic film too little known today: De Santis's Bitter Rice

Giuseppe De Santis's 1949 movie, Bitter Rice, is a classic in every sense and would be much better known today, I think, if the director had made more films of this sort - but he never quite reached the levels of Di Sica, Rosellini, Anotnioni, Fellini or others who have come to define 20th-century Italian cinema. That said, Bitter Rice stands up to anything else from its era, as a social document and as a powerful drama. The film is about the women who work at the annual rice harvest and planting, 40 days of hard work in the wet fields in northern Italy. At the outset, we see the women boarding the trains that will take them north, and the film, w/ a brief voice-over narration initially has the look and feel of a documentary - and it's obvious that De Santis is eager to show the difficult conditions and the labor exploitation that was part of this work, then and perhaps today as well. He quickly establishes a narrative line, however, as one of the women is involved in a gem theft and boards the rice train to escape arrest; her partner in crime soon follows her to the fields, largely to collect the jewels they've stole, and the three strands of the narrative entwine - a jewelry heist, a love story, and an expose of the brutal conditions under which these migrant laborers work. Almost every frame of the movie is beautiful and powerful and could stand alone as part of a photo exhibit on this little-known harvest, and some of the scenes are fantastic cinematic movements as well, in particular the women singing as they plant the rice (the bosses forbid their talking to one another as they work, so they use song to communicate - such as their denunciation of the "illegals," the cadre of women working the fields w/out union certification). Even the more conventional story line, about the theft of the jewels and another planned heist has surprising twists and ends in a fantastic shootout among bloody carcasses in a butchery. De Santis's commitment and his politics - no doubt part of the leftists movement in postwar Italy - are evident throughout and keep us grounded in the reality: There's nothing romantic about these working conditions, but by working together the rice-harvesters achieve a degree of power. And don't miss the ending, as the women board the trains for return to their homes across Italy.

The hilarious yet disturbing comedy of Anthony Jeselnik

When you watch comedian Anthony Jeselnik's Neflix one-hour special, Fire in the Maternity Ward, it will be obvious that AJ is a star on the rise: perfect timing, great delivery, a good-looking guy, poised on stage, and most of all some incredibly smart material and will again and again defy expectations w/ impossible to anticipate punch lines (by the half-way point, part of the fun is trying to see where AJ is going w/ his material and to try to anticipate the punch lines - you usually can't). I'm not going to give any of his gags away, but will simply say that some of his best lines are in the cerebral tradition of Steven Wright and the late Mitch Hedberg. Unlike these 2, however, AJ builds most of his act around extended pieces and development of themes, most of which are surprising and many of which are so out-of-bounds as to be offensive, so be forewarned: the routine includes some riffs on dropping babies (I could not laugh at these jokes), abortion (clearly offensive to many in the audience), murder-suicide (OK, this one is particularly funny, but would not be so to anyone dealing w/ a tragic suicide), date-rape, and a range of other topics, some of which are more typical for stand-up acts, such as religion and racism - and no reference to current or topical events or political themes: an unusual act by any measure. Overall, he poses as a cynic, an ironist, and a man who doesn't like children - and we do sense that it's a pose and an act. This special is guaranteed that you will laugh aloud at many of these riffs and jokes and that you will be offended by or at least disturbed by others.