Guaranteed: many spoilers
I'mk such a snob I hate to admit I love a sitcom, but I'm obsessed with the Big Bang Theory these days (after ignoring it the first seven years it was on television). Instead of routinely humiliating its characters, it tells compassionate stories in which they mainly support one another, finding conflict and humor without resorting to coincidences and unbelievable behavior. While most shows start visibly fading after five years or so, this one has stayed remarkably fresh. One reason is that the basic set up allows more originality, more story lines, than would be available with a more everyday group of characters, like those on Friends. For example, sending Wolowicz to space as a mission specialist deploying a telescope he designed on the space station was inspired, but completely possible for a Caltech engineer. Even the minor set ups, stuff that would barely exceed routine set dressing on most shows, can be quite glorious. If you want to show the Friends charcaters goofing off, you put them on the terrace spying on their neighbors. But the Big Bang cast goes up to the roof and bounces lasers off the moon.
As Netflix loses interest in small, old movies and takes them off streaming, or DVD's break in the mail and aren't replaced, Turner's status as a national treasure increases. Its the last remaining cable station that screens old gems without commercials. Every once in a while I watch a random film I've never heard of and am very pleasantly surprised; one of these recently was Souls at Sea (1937), directed by Henry Hathaway, starring Gary Cooper and George Raft. The story mixes slave trading, espionage and shipwreck, and tanatlizes you with multiple characters on board ship, some from steerage but seen only for a few moments. It was apparently originally designed to be a three or four hour epic, but the studio lost confidence and it was re-edited to two hours and dumped into the normal stream of commerce. It culminates in an extended scene where Gary Cooper, who has been consistently steady and heroic throughout, saves a bunch of people during a shipwreck, but then dumps some of them out of an overloaded lifeboat, even shooting a few. There was a bit of a lack of back-story to establish that he was that person. Another wonderful noir I saw last week was The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), directed by Jean Negulesco, in which Peter Lorre, as a strange but sympathetic mystery novelist investigating a real life crime is so indignant when a gun is pointed at him that he slaps it out of the arch-villain's hand--not because he is courageous but because he is strange, a great little noir moment. Finally, I revisited a movie I have seen many times but long ago, The Glass Key (1942) directed by Stuart Heisler, an urban political corruption noir based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake almost set the curtains on fire just looking at one another. Ladd, though he is trying to save a morally striated friend, is the incorruptible man on mean streets. The movie contains one of the greatest lines of dialog ever: "My first wife was second cook in a third rate joint on Fourth street". I had an eerie experience late one night in my twenties when I watched Glass Key on television and Alan Ladd was unrecognizable. I thought I was having a neurological problem which would interest Oliver Sacks. But it was an earlier version I didn't know existed, starring George Raft, and with an almost identical script.
I am rereading one of my list of the "books that wrote me", that add up to my philosophy of life, history, ethics, politics, and all that. It is George Kubler's The Shape of Time (1962), about art history, but which really explodes the "Idea of Progress" narrative of any kind of history as an ascending line graph. It shows how ideas flower in a hundred places over the ages, and how the true narratives are more circular than linear. It is also beautifully written. "Like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past".