Broadchurch: Another BBC Winner

by Pa Rock
Citizen Critic

If there is one thing the Brits know how to do well, it is producing quality television programming.  Anytime I move into a new community and order cable or satellite television service, my first two requirements are PBS and BBC America.  Both have an extensive array of entertaining and intelligent shows. 

British television programs are often so good that they are quickly copied by networks in the United States.   Sanford and Son (known in Great Britain as Steptoe and Son), The Office, Skins, Life on Mars, Queer as Folk, Being Human, and Shameless all got their starts on British television with most making their first appearances as British imports on BBC America.  Several of those odious American reality shows also have British roots.

Occasionally the tide flows the other way, but not often.  I recently saw an episode of Law and Order:  UK and found it to be quite good.

Last night I had the opportunity to see the premier episode of a really engaging police drama on BBC America – one that has already been identified for American production next year through Fox.  The show, Broadchurch, had been hyped over the Internet for the past several days, and the reviews were effusive in their praise of the program.

And while the reviews may have been a bit overboard, the show is awfully good.  Actress Olivia Colman is a bit quirky in her portrayal of Elle, a female police officer who had been promised the job of boss (Detective Inspector) as she left on holiday.  She returned three weeks later only to discover that a man had been appointed to that post and had already been on duty for a week.  The usurping male, Shakespearian actor David Tennant (the unshaven Alec Hardy) had been shipped off to the scenic seaside town after some undisclosed trouble at his last duty station. 

Tennant (Dr. Who #10) is always a powerful screen presence, but he has, at the very least, met his acting equal with Ms. Colman.

The first episode of Broadchurch, involves the murder of an eleven-year-old boy who is discovered dead on the beach.  At first it was thought that he might have jumped or been pushed from the high cliffs overlooking the beach, but it is soon determined that he was strangled – probably by a male with large hands.  DI Alec Hardy is the first policeman on the scene, but he is soon joined by Elle who finds, much to her horror, that the boy is a close friend of her own eleven-year-old son.

There are lots of clues for viewers to process and a good group of possible murderers, but the first episode concludes with neither the motive nor the killer being known.  The story is compelling, however, and very well done – so I will be back next Wednesday evening to see where it will take me.

Thank you, BBC America, for another gem of a television program.  Here’s hoping that Fox doesn’t destroy it.

The Good Earth

by Pa Rock
Reader

Several weeks ago I heard a story on National Public Radio (NPR) that told of a recently discovered novel of famed author Pearl S. Buck.  Ms. Buck, the daughter of missionaries to China, was a prolific writer of over a hundred books (44 of which were novels) and thousands of personal letters.  She died forty years ago (1973) at her home in Vermont.  Unknown to anyone at the time, a completed manuscript was spirited out of her house just after her death.   Two copies of the work, The Eternal Wonder, (one handwritten by the author and the other typed) were found last year in a storage unit in Texas.  The person who found the copies of the lost novel contacted Ms. Buck’s son who runs a family business related to his mother’s work.  The finder offered the novel to the son for a price, but his lawyer responded with a more modest finder’s fee and ordered that the novel be returned to Ms. Buck’s rightful heirs posthaste.  It was.

The Eternal Wonder will be published this October.

The most famous novel of Pearl S. Buck was, of course, The Good Earth, which was published in1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1932.   The novel even went on to become a selection of Oprah’s book club several decades after its original publication.

I thought that I had read The Good Earth during my teen years and recently resolved to read it again.  I wasn’t many pages into the effort when I realized that the material was new to me.  It was, nevertheless, a very good reading experience and time well spent.

The Good Earth tells the story of Wang Lung, a peasant farmer, and his slow and steady rise to wealth and prestige.  All of his fortune was acquired through his wise stewardship of the land – the good earth.  The tale begins on Wang’s wedding day when he walks to town with a few pieces of silver that he has saved in order to buy a female slave from a wealthy family.   The slave is to be his bride, and he pays the price before ever setting eyes on his purchase, the plain and solidly built O-Lan.  Together through hard work and a bit of luck, Wang and O-Lan manage to make the farm profitable and are able to buy more and more land from the wealthy family.  As Wang Lung’s fortunes rise, those of the wealthy family decline, primarily due to opium use and gambling.

Together Wang Lung and O-Lan have six children.  One girl becomes seriously mentally handicapped due to malnutrition during a famine when she was a baby.    She becomes close to her father over the years, and he always refers to her as his “poor fool.”  O-Lan kills the second daughter immediately after she is born so that she won’t live a life of drudgery and be an economic drag on the family.  The remaining four children, three boys and a girl grow up under better circumstances.  The boys are all educated and two go to work for the family farm and related business, and the third leaves home to join the military and fight in the revolution.  The remaining daughter is betrothed to a boy in a wealthy family and goes to live with them when she is eleven.

Other characters of note include Wang Lung’s father who sits in the sun and enjoys his grandchildren,  and a villainous uncle and his lazy wife who are both banes to Wang Lung and his family - and eventually are neutralized by opium addiction.   The uncle and aunt have a son, also a sinister character, who becomes a soldier and, as he is fighting and fornicating his way through life, remarks (after getting one of Wang Lung’s servants pregnant) that he goes through life scattering seeds and others follow along to take care of his crops.   

Once Wang Lung begins to accumulate some wealth, he purchases a pretty concubine, Lotus, from a local tea house and brings her and her servant, Cuckoo, home to live.  O-Lan is disappointed at that turn of events because she had performed the most important duty of a wife by giving Wang Lung sons.  Toward the end of his life, when he is a widower, Wang Lung invites a servant of Lotus, Pear Blossom, to his bed where she serves as his new concubine.

The Good Earth is the story of land and working the land – and the effect that this relationship with the land has on one very ambitious peasant.  It is a paean to thrift, hard work, and living simply.  Wang Lung’s life begins to get complicated when he starts to drift away from those basic values. 

Pearl S. Buck was an amazingly good writer.    She aged her central character, Wang Lung, through his adult years in a seamless and very natural manner, leaving readers to feel that they walked through his life with him.  Her classic novel is also a very good period piece that shows life in pre-revolutionary rural China with exceptional clarity.

I look forward to reading The Eternal Wonder when it is released this fall.

The Twelfth Time Lord

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

BBC Television announced the new Dr. Who yesterday.  The twelfth time lord is 55-year-old Scotsman, Peter Capaldi, whose acting credits go back more than thirty years.  Capaldi will assume command of the Tardis beginning with the next season.

Dr. Who is legendary in television science fiction programming, even predating the equally legendary Star Trek by three years and outlasting it by over forty.  The original episode of Dr. Who,  "An Unearthly Child." was broadcast on November 23^rd, 1963, one day after the assassination of President Kennedy.  The show’s premier was actually delayed briefly due to a special news announcement regarding the assassination.

For those not familiar with the show, the central character is “The Doctor” or “Dr. Who" – a time lord who travels through time and space to handle unique situations.   The Doctor’s mode of travel is a blue police box called the Tardis which is much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.  The Tardis is, of course, every bit as high tech as Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.  The big, blue police box takes Dr. Who and his friends on some grand adventures.

Mr. Capaldi’s predecessors at the helm of the Tardis were, in order:  William Hartwell, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith.  I have watched the series, off and on, since the days of Tom Baker, and my personal favorite time lord during that period was Shakespearean actor, David Tennant.

Interestingly, Peter Capaldi recently played a WHO (World Health Organization) doctor in the movie, World War Z.

Several other actors of note have played Dr. Who during segments of the show's episodes or in other venues.  Some of those include Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, Joanna Lumley (“Patsy” of Absolutely Fabulous), and John Hurt.

Prince Georgie isn’t the only Brit with a distinguished lineage!

Welcome to the elite group, Mr. Capaldi.  Keep an eye on those Daleks – we wouldn’t want them to “exterminate” you!

Monday's Poetry: "The Whipping"

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

Robert Hayden grew up poor in inner-city Detroit in a less than ideal foster care situation.   Suffering from very poor eyesight, he didn’t play sports but instead pursued academics – eventually becoming a poet of some renown.  Hayden, who studied under W.H. Auden, was appointed to the post of poetry consultant for the Library of Congress in 1976, a position which later morphed into “Poet Laureate of the United States.” 

Hayden died in 1980.  He would have been 100-years-old yesterday.

A good portion of Robert Hayden’s work deals with growing up in a section of Detroit called Paradise Valley.  He chronicled a few historical figures in his poetry including Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X.  He also had things to say about the war in Vietnam.  It was, however, the anger and abuse directed toward him as a child that helped to form some of his most powerful poetic efforts.  The following poem, The Whipping, captures a lot of the anger and rage that undoubtedly had a profound impact on Robert Hayden during his formative years.

The Whipping

by Robert Hayden

The old woman across the way

is whipping the boy again

and shouting to the neighborhood

her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through the elephant ears,

pleads in dusty zinnias,

while she in spite of crippling fat

pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling

boy till the stick breaks

in her hand.  His tears are rainy weather

to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in a bony vise

of knees, the writhing struggle

to wrench free, the blows, the fear

worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I

no longer knew or loved . . .

Well, it is over now, it is over,

and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against

a tree, exhausted, purged - 

avenged in part for lifelong hidings

she has had to bear.

The Way, Way Back

by Pa Rock
Film Fan

I am beginning to have a great deal of respect for my sister's taste in movies.  The last movie she recommended to me was Silver Linings Playbook, a peach of a film that had me enthralled from beginning to end.  Last week she called with another recommendation, and again it proved to be a great pick.

Gail's latest cinematic choice was a wonderful coming-of-age story entitled The Way, Way Back.  The film revolves around a fourteen-year-old boy, shy and withdrawn, who is dragged off to a beach community for the summer with his divorced mother, her new boyfriend, and the boyfriend's older teen daughter.  The boyfriend is, as the lad describes him, "a dick" who constantly finds ways to denigrate and humiliate the youth.   As the film opens he tells the kid that he regards him as a "three" on a scale of ten.

The mother stays in the relationship with the overbearing a-hole, even after she discovers that he is cheating on her, because she feels that she and her son "need protection."  The boy would like to be living with his father who has remarried to a younger woman and moved across the country, but he knows down deep that his father does not want him.

So it looks like it will be one hell of a rotten summer.

But then the kid, whose name is Duncan, makes friends with a fellow named Owen.  Owen works at a rundown water park, and is possibly the owner.  He is an adult in body but an adolescent in spirit.  Owen gives Duncan a job at the water park, and things begin to get better for the troubled boy.

The Way, Way Back was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, and both also appeared in the movie as workers at the water park.  The duo of Faxon and Rash were exceptional in all three of those capacities.

Steve Carell was the jerk boyfriend, Trent, and played the role to perfection.   He exhibited absolutely no redeeming qualities from the first frame of the film to the last - and was so easy to dislike.  Toni Collette was the mother who often ignored the obvious needs of her son in order to maintain the safety of her relationship with the new boyfriend.   Allison Janney was the drunken summer neighbor, Betty, who provided a good portion of comic relief in the film.

But it was Liam James and Sam Rockwell who were the heart and soul of the movie.  James was Duncan, the depressed and rejected youth who was struggling to maintain in a world that offered little in the way of comfort or hope.   His world began to brighten when he connected the the neighbor girl who was suffering from a family situation similar to his own.  Then when he met Owen and got a job at the water park, his life suddenly began to blossom.

Sam Rockwell, who in my opinion has always been seriously underrated as an actor, gave a superb performance as the goofball Owen - the man who took the struggling Duncan under his wing and helped him to realize that he was much more than a "three."  Rockwell and young Mister James had some terrific on-screen chemistry.

All I can say is The Way, Way Back is a really great movie.  My sister was right again!

The Mystery of Cabin Island

by Pa Rock
Crime Reporter

It happened during the Christmas holidays of 1928.   The twenties were still roaring, Calvin Coolidge was still in the White House - though the Hoovers were busy packing their stuff and preparing to move in the following March, and it would be a little less than a year before the Great Depression would wreck the capitalist dream.

It was cold that winter in New England, bitter cold.   It was so cold that many of the bays and inlets along the Atlantic coast were iced over, a situation that provided much pleasure to the young people who populated the small coastal villages.  Many spent their school holidays on the ice either skating or sailing in homemade "ice boats," small crafts powered by sails.

It was one of these homemade ice boats that carried four high school lads and their camping gear  out across the frozen bay toward an abandoned island.  Though the boys had no way of knowing at the time, their winter camping trip was destined to be a very dangerous excursion- one where they would be pitted against ice and snow, hurricane gale winds, wild animals, and a determined criminal working in tandem with two local hoodlums.  Fortunately, they had taken the precaution of bringing along their rifles.

What the young men discovered on Cabin Island was so strange and bewildering that it took more than a year for an aspiring writer to record the incident in book form, and even then, a year after the fact, the writer thought it best to use a pseudonym.

The boys had planned to do their camping in an abandoned cabin that was owned by an older friend, a man who had recently given two of them a hundred dollars each as payment for some personal services.   They unpacked and got comfortable in the old cabin, building a fire in the massive fireplace  and fixing lunch.

After lunch the naive foursome decided to go out onto the bay and play around in their ice boat, a craft that two of them had built in a joint effort.  While they were out skimming across the ice, one of the lads thought that he saw a stranger walking around on Cabin Island.  That was worrisome because they were the only ones with permission to be on the island during the winter holidays.  When they finally got back to shore and climbed the steep hill to the cabin, they learned that there had been an intruder on the island, and he had stolen all of their supplies.

The following day two of the boys went to a rustic grocery store on a neighboring island where an aging shopkeeper told them a strange tale of a crime that had taken place in the area many years before.  The victim of that crime was the old man who had befriended the lads and loaned them the use of his cabin.

After returning to the cabin, the two boys, who happened to be brothers, joined their friends in a search of the surrounding area in hopes that they could find their missing supplies hidden someplace in the snow.  They ultimately were successful in their search because the load had been too heavy and cumbersome for the intruder to carry down the hill and to his ice craft.  But while searching for the food, they also came across something else of interest:  a notebook containing a mysterious cipher:

XZYRM. RHOZMW. XSRNMVB. OVUG. UILMG. MRMV. UVVG. SRTS.

With that important clue the chase was on.  Before the mystery was solved there would be a catastrophic ice-boat wreck, a cross-country race to track down a couple of marauding nocturnal thieves, and the cabin would be almost completely destroyed by a winter hurricane.  Biff the pugilist, Chet the over-eater, and Fenton Hardy's boys, Frank and Joe, were on the case!

Twenty-Five John Hancocks

by Pa Rock
Borrower

It was just a few years ago that several of the big banks tanked and almost took the country down with them.  At that time they were loaning money, with little more than a wink and a signature, to people that couldn't afford the properties they were buying.

Recently I took a trip back to the Ozarks where one of my goals was to find a retirement property.  I had a place in mind, but it turned out to be too run down, especially for the price.  My son, who lives in the community where I was house-hunting, then suggested a place that he had spotted about four miles from his house.  The little farm had a nice home, tight and in good repair, several serviceable out-buildings, a new pond, and ten lush, green acres with plenty of trees including a few hickories, a couple of Paw Paws (Ozark bananas), pines, cedars, and even a nice walnut tree.  The place was beautiful beyond description and it was priced to sell quickly.

So I bought it.

While I could have sold some stuff and bought the little farm outright, I chose instead to borrow a good portion of the sale price from a local bank - one with which I have a long history.  Today Fed Ex brought the loan paperwork, and I spent the better part of the afternoon reading forms and disclosures and signing my name.  I also had to write a letter explaining my last several addresses.  (The one in Japan apparently made the lender nervous.)  But I persevered and, twenty-five signatures later, had everything in order and ready to send back to the bank.

It would appear that the banks did learn something from their most recent debacle.

I hope to be in residence at the farm by April 1st.    Come see me and share the peace, serenity, and free-range eggs.  We might even play some dominoes or pinochle!  

Fox Proves Existence of God

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Reza Aslan is a religious scholar who has a doctorate in the history of religions – and he has studied the New Testament for over twenty years.    He is also a fine writer.  Aslan is clearly qualified to sift through the remaining evidentiary material and publish a biography on the life of Jesus Christ.

Aslan’s new book,  Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, reportedly goes a long way toward demystifying Christ and portrays him as illiterate rustic who was highly charismatic and had a strong message.  Aslan challenges some of the basic stories of the New Testament, many of which are contradicted other places within the Gospels.    He even has the temerity to suggest that Jesus was probably not born in Bethlehem.

The radical reassessment of Jesus should have provided plenty of fodder for Fox “journalist” Lauren Green to tear into the author when she interviewed him on America’s least fair and balanced television network.  Inexplicably, however, Ms. Green, who apparently did not even bother to read the book prior to the interview, took an unexpected approach to grilling the author.  Instead of attacking what he wrote or even his methodology, she sailed into a personal attack.

Reza Aslan, you see, while eminently qualified to speculate in print on the life of Jesus Christ, is also a Muslim.  How, Ms. Green wondered aloud, could a Muslim write about Jesus?   Like a dog with a bone, Ms. Green clung tenaciously to her point for ten grueling minutes, repeatedly pointing out that the author was Muslim, ergo incapable of writing accurately about Jesus – all the while ignoring the content of his book.

The American Conservative magazine was appalled with the interview and referred to it as “cringe-worthy,” “ignorant,” and “breathtakingly incurious.”  Or, as some might see it, standard Fox fare.

Lauren Green’s interview did produce results, however, though probably not what she and her corporate masters had hoped for.  “Zealot” was suddenly the book everyone wanted to read and it quickly shot to number one at Amazon . 

I’ve ordered my copy.

Obviously there is a God.