On the way, I discovered a series of podcasts from the Center for Creative Voices in Media, including this half-hour interview from 2006  with Stephen Bochco.  Bochco is the award-winning creator of Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser, Hooperman, and many other television dramas.

If you’re a fan of any of these shows, you’ll want to hear this audio podcast with interviewer Jonathan Rintels asking the questions, and Steven Bochco answering them.  You can listen to it on iTunes, as well as the web site; on iTunes, it’s at: Podcasts > TV & Film > Jonathan Rintels.

Bochco has given us some of the finest television there is.  He is worth listening to, articulate, intelligent, and with years of experience dealing with the realities of getting fine television actually broadcast.  He has no axes to grind; he tells it as he finds it.

I think you will want to listen to this glimpse into the world of network television.  Bochco is an excellent guide.

If not, better start soon. Lots of really fine stuff has already been on, and it’s good enough that you won’t want to miss any of it. In addition to the weekly broadcast times, the first season has been on DVDs for some time (Netflix fans take note), and I’ve just watched the 7th episode of Season 2 on Hulu.

For those holdouts who have decided there can’t be anything for them in a show about a high school glee club, think again. Boring plot?  No way.  Boring songs? Are you kidding?  Not to mention, this is the best dramedy writing, production and performances since Sports Night graced the airwaves, for me the most undeservedly under-watched and overlooked show on television. And in Glee, when rehearsing or presenting glee club numbers, the performers also sing and dance, and do both exceedingly well.

The choice of music is top-notch, too.  In the pilot episode, the song Don’t Stop Believin’, written and originally recorded by Journey, became the episode’s focus song, with a rendition of it near the end of the episode that absolutely wows you.

Not only has Don’t Stop Believin’ become the #1 download on iTunes — but, hands across the sea, the Glee cast version became #6 on the top pop charts in Britain, with the Journey version at #7, as of a January 2010 BBC report after Glee began showing on British TV.

And Journey, the band, has had a resurgence in Britain with the recent repopularization of the song in Glee.

Anything still keeping you from watching?  Whatever it is, get over it.  In this era of TiVo and all kinds of recording devices, web sites devoted to reruns, and DVD sets of shows all available to viewers, there are fewer and fewer excuses, including the infamous “I can’t find the time.”   My advice: find it.  Almost nothing else on television will seem nearly as interesting, once you do.

In 1966 I was out of the country and missed the chance to see this beautiful film when it first was shown in theaters, and by the time I came back, the psychedelic revolution had taken place, and few people I knew were interested in it.  It, and everything outside the psychedelic revolution, seemed to have disappeared entirely, condemned as mere old-hattery (old hats had ironically come back into fashion, temporarily) and vieux jeu.

And since there was no such thing, back then, as VCRs or DVDs, only a few rerun and artfilm houses showed films that were no longer first-run, so even if you had thought of this film and sought it out you would not easily have found it playing, except, perhaps, now and then in a few of the very largest cities.

Now, coming up on 45 years after its initial release, I finally watched it, for the first time, on DVD.  I was astounded at the beauty and the complex simplicity  — no other way to characterize it — of the film.  It, like many of the French New Wave films, has aged well and still seems fresh — Anouk Aimee’s stunningly simple-seeming precision haircut has even come around into fashion again, not because of the film, but in the ordinary cyclings of fashions — while the 1960s and psychedelia nowadays seem vieux jeu, mere old-hattery.

This award-winning film is shot beautifully — one of the most photographically beautiful of all films — some parts in black and white, even sepia, some in color.  In an interview on the disc, LeLouch tells us that he could not afford color film at first; during the shoot he found a sponsor who wanted color for television, so he shot parts of the film in color.  And of course, you’ll recognize its theme music.

Whether you’ve seen this film before or not, see it now, as soon as you can.  It is moving, poignant, triumphant. It is emotionally satisfying in a way that few films over the years have been.  Even the ‘extras’ on the disc are well worth watching; they include a making-of film shot during principal photography, and an interview with Claude LeLouch decades later.

Go ahead: be impressed by this film.  Be delighted, awed, thunderstruck — by what, did you say? Yes, origami as it is practiced today, around the world.

Wait a minute, hold it.  Isn’t origami that kid stuff where schoolchildren learn to fold paper and make little birds and fish and butterflies?  Isn’t it that thing you do with paper napkins to make little flower-like bowls and candy-dishes for kids’ parties?

Oh, viewer, think again.

Sure, it’s all of that, and it’s much, much more, especially nowadays. If you take origami as the art of folding a square piece of paper (without cutting or tearing it) into some other shape, representational or not, then, as Jimmy Durante nearly said, eveybody’s gotten into the act: sculptors, artists of all stripes, papermakers, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, educators, and many others.

Origami as a movement now has realists, abstractionists, an avant-garde wing, and even post-modernists who create non-folded (OK, crumpled or bunched) achingly beautiful and imposing works.  There are those who fold only once, then bend the result; or fold flat in many complex ways then cut once. There are those who fold paper wet, those who fold it dry; those who make pieces that fold and unfold themselves before your eyes (and yes, you see this on film) and those who make pieces that pull themselves into one or more specific attractor-shapes by the stresses of their own folds.

Other practitioners create computer programs that can produce diagrams of how to fold and shape the paper into any finished design you can convey to the machine.  Still others use origami as a way to begin to teach kids about geometry — and other things like focus and concentration, and feelings of success and achievement from their own efforts.

Between the Folds is a documentary film, distributed on disc by PBS.  It’s 56 minutes long, doubtless to fit into PBS broadcast schedules. You can watch it instantly here on Netflix, if you’re a member, or you can request the DVD.  Note, please, that on the DVD, they’ve done a great thing: they’ve put in the outtakes.

On many discs, the outtakes are slightly longer takes or variants of scenes in the film, scenes cut from the film, or bloopers and mistakes.  On this disc, they are the superb additional material that would likely have been in the film if the 56-minute limit hadn’t dictated otherwise.  There’s a good deal of this very interesting material, all of it touched on briefly in the film, and shown in more expanded form as part of the DVD extras.

Just make sure you see it, and soon.

That it actually happened is a fact; how it may have taken place (questions: in a land of shooting and snipers, which man came out first? and how did he manage it without getting his head blown off?) is a good story, told in this multiple award-winning film written and directed by Christian Carion, and funded jointly by French, Scottish, Belgian, German and Rumanian agencies and filmed on location in several of those countries.

No, “peace did not break out,” nor was it being sought by any of the countries with forces in the trenches at that time; this was a spontaneous and brief time of cease fire of the soldiers themselves, with Christmas songs sung, and soldiers emerging from their trenches to greet and to give some of whatever they had in their packs to soldiers on the other side — just for Christmas eve.

While good fellowship prevails among the men on the ground for just a little while, celebrating Christmas eve, officialdom of all kinds decide, then and later, what to think and how to handle the situation, in accordance with national doctrines and purposes.  The officers in charge in the various forces meet on the spot to nail down details of terms and duration, for the next few hours of what has already begun without them, and somehow find temporary amity.  Higher-ups, hearing of it later, and notably not part of the fighting forces themselves, perceive it as detrimental to their national imperatives to wipe out the foe.

Watch this film, please.  You will be moved, in the best ways a film can move you.

This film sits between two other superb films in French about WWI, The King of Hearts (Le roi de coeur) (1966) and The Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion) (1937), both considered classics. If you haven’t seen these films, do so, and as soon as you can. All are easily available on DVD.

Both men are indeed formidable actors, not only as The Doctor or as Captain Picard, but within the rigors and disciplines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now the Great Performances site is offering the film to be viewed online.

Some gifted actors, and generally the productions of the RSC itself, have a way of being able to give us Shakespeare’s lines — “talk Shakespeare” — so we understand them as conversationally as if they were penned yesterday, without changing a word or a syllable of Shakespeare’s text to do it.

When I was in high school, I had just been introduced to Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, and Hamlet (which became and remains my personal favorite). I could imagine the characters and the action as I read these plays just as I could when reading a novel.

Then I wanted to read Shakespeare’s other plays, and did so at home — and also enjoyed the repertory Shakespeare productions of the Phoenix Theater in New York, with a truly superb and unforgettable Hamlet starring the young Donald Madden; and Henry IV Parts I and II, where I first met the characters Hotspur (Madden again) and the inimitable rascal Falstaff.

One play remained opaque to my best armchair efforts, though: The Merry Wives of Windsor.  I understood the basic idea, with the wives’ hiding Falstaff and carrying him away in the big basket under his enemies’ noses, with many layers of double- and triple-cross and unmasking and excuse-making.  What stopped me was that the language of the play is a thicket of Elizabethan comedic jargon and contemporary references, impenetrable to me. Eventually, I gave up on it.

Then, a little later in life, as part of a group trip to London, I made sure to get tickets for whatever was playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company — which, I was disappointed at first to learn, was The Merry Wives of Windsor.   I felt sure that my time in the audience would be another round of ‘chase the possible meanings.’  To my  happy astonishment, the entire complex farce was not only completely clear and delightfully fast-moving, but howlingly funny.  Not just a smile now and then, or the occasional ha ha, or even a guffaw, but  pound-your-thighs, cry-real-tears and hold-your-aching-sides funny.  It was only after the performance was over that I could really catch my breath.

And if they know how to make you laugh at the RSC, they also know how to make you feel the weight of the country’s fate on the king’s shoulders, or feel the fiery resentment of the wronged, or feel the sadness of life’s bereavements and disappointments, the tragedy of great possibilites unfulfilled or of great characters overborne by fate.

See this Hamlet.  If you’ve already seen it, see it again.  It wears well.

Many thanks for sending this on to me!  What a great thing, all told: not just the amazing inventor/builder, the instrument itself and the musical and mathematical and instrument-playing and -building knowledge that went into thinking up and building the instrument, all clearly explained, but the video with fine sound at http://vimeo.com/11290879 itself with its awesome photography and visuals (great art choices, overall art direction, and film editing, as well as film-direction and camera skills) make this a great work all around.  A feast for the eye, ear, mind, soul…

Thank you, thank you, for sending this on to me!

If you want your movie-watching reset, back to what makes a film great, and you’re not basing your film ranking on CGI, bazillion dollar budgets, and ultra-high-priced Hollywood stars and directors, take a look — look again, if you’ve seen it before — at Iphigeneia from director Michael Cacoyannis, made in 1977.

It’s not the actual story itself, by itself — although the story is one key to the film’s greatness, literally a classic, based closely on the play by Euripedes; it’s not any elaborate sets or costumes — the thousand Greek ships, wooden cockleshells, getting ready to sail for Troy, are windbound on the coast and cannot sail, and they and the army that will sail in them have been there for far too long;  the shelters are rudimentary (as they would be in such a temporary camp on the beach); and the dress is barely casual, as among men spending too much time waiting around; and it’s not only the brilliant actors, most with names not terribly familiar to us in the U.S. — although Irene Pappas as Clytemnestra will wring your heart, and all the actors with speaking parts in the film are brilliant and compelling.

It is the script and vision of director Kakogiannis showing us the powerful story and bringing the performances, action, and visuals together that make this film overwhelming.

The film makes the people involved come alive, with all their background and motivation, showing us that even kings can be trapped into doing the one thing they wish most not to do — and the consequences of that action, most especially the awakening of the unremitting hatred of Clytemnestra for Agamemnon for this deed above all others.

It’s only by understanding the role and character of Iphigeneia herself, and her relationship to all around her, which in turn illuminates the background and relationships of her entire family, extending to Menelaus and Helen, her uncle and aunt, and of the interplay within the (literally) stranded army, as shown by Achilles and Odysseus as well as the priest Kolkas, that we get to understand the scope and interplay of the whole saga.  It comes alive.

Even if you think you know all there is to know about this story, and even if you’ve read superb translations of various aspects of it until you see this film you will not understand, really, deep down, what the story is all about — and understand what follows.

In Greek, with subtitles.  Don’t let that deter you.

If one of the things we got from TV, as from films, was to go outside ourselves, find stories that took us into them, with characters we grew to know a little and (sometimes) like a lot, we certainly got that from the Miami Vice TV show from the mid-80s (for a while, a lot of men in this country and elsewhere dressed like Sonny Crockett or Ricardo Tubbs).  From this film, we get Crockett and Tubbs updated by Michael Mann to the world of 2005-6, when the film was shot, with the style, look, color and music of today’s world, with great authenticity in plots and activities and settings, weapons, even the business models of today.  It wasn’t until, after the film, I went back and watched the Miami Vice TV pilot and a few favorite episodes, that I saw what a very different world we live in now, and what a very different city Miami is today than it was then.

The film pulls you in right away, the action is fast, the dialog is spare: no rehashing or explaining (these people know who they are, what’s going on and what’s at stake, and don’t have to stand around telling each other all about it), and Michael Mann makes sure you know, too, if you’re paying attention — and he makes you want to pay attention.

Mann uses colors like the master he is, and his visuals to go beyond background and mood and tell a large part of the story. The entire film is basically shot on locations, with almost no sets; some of those few interior sets are replicas of actual interiors found during location-scouting.  He’s not afraid to take his time with a scene, to show you what he wants you to see, stunning or subtle.  His action scenes are coherent and understandable while staying fast-moving and thrilling.  And his shots of nature, drenched in pure, saturated color, are unforgettable in this film.

Nature herself, according to Mann’s commentary, gets into the act.  The film was shot during the summer of 2005, a particularly busy season of tropical storms and hurricanes either approaching or leaving the Miami area during shooting: lightning effects in more than one scene, sunny days with piled-up clouds for planes to fly through, just the right amount of chop and swell for fast boats: major effects were supplied by Mother Nature.  In a scene where Sonny Crockett moves his weaponry and equipment from one car to another, getting ready for the next stage of the operation, lightning and some distant growling thunder provide a portentous background, courtesy of the skies themselves, beyond the possibility of cuing but eerily timely; then his phone rings….

Some things don’t change about humans and human motivations, even when details of stories, places and things do: people still love, hate, suffer greed and desire, may be morally ambiguous in one direction while completely dedicated in another; and tough, smart criminals have to be outthought and outfought if they are to be taken down.  Mann shows us these things, often without any words, or with only a few.  The message is in the character’s eyes and expression, or in a few pithy words or a phrase.  Or in Crockett’s dance in a club with Isabella.

After you’ve watched the film — and make sure you watch the unrated director’s edition — Michael Mann’s commentary track is well worth listening to as he takes us through his film.  It’s a great follow-up to the making of a great film.  Whether or not you think Miami Vice has set a new film standard — listen to Mann’s commentary before you decide — it’s certainly set a high one, and he has made an intelligent and tense film, one well worth watching.

Viewers of The Wire will understand at once what inevitably happens to a quiet, honorable husband and father when he travels to Moscow to try to sell something on the street and get a lot of money for it.

This is the only way left to him to get enough money to provide for his family’s future once he is dead — a matter of a few days.  How has such a good family man and steady worker, whose main care is his wife and child, gotten himself into such a terrible situation?

He worked for 12 years in the plant that developed the weapons-grade plutonium, and, seeing a leak and trying to stop it, was fatally poisoned by radiation.  The company lies to him, telling him he got only a low dose and will recover, but, finding his contaminated dose card, he verifies that he’s had a lethal dose.  They try to get him to sign a paper saying the leak was his fault, refuse to offer him compensation for his wife and small son to live on despite his years of service, and tell him he’s lucky they don’t prosecute.

In desperation, with no other alternatives open to him, and knowing he needs to raise a large sum of money to take care of his family after he dies in just a few days, he steals a canister of weapons-grade plutonium — Pu239 — and travels to Moscow to try to sell it on the street, knowing no one there.

Between the bureaucratic attempt to pin the tail on the sacrificial lamb and the street thugs in Moscow — even more quickly than from the lethal radiation dose itself — his life is over, the result of stupidity, greed, violence, and above all, ignorance.

At the beginning of the film, a joke is quoted.  One Russian asks another about how life has changed since Perestroika.  The answer: “The chain is still too short, and the food bowl is still out of reach, but now we are allowed to bark all we want.”

This is a moving film, not just in its tragedy, but in the love story between the husband and wife and their love for their son, and in its entirety tells what they both do to take care of him and his future.  Because the boy is fortunate to have two strong parents, who between them find their way through the maze.

2. The Secret Life of Words (2005), dir/written Isabel Coixet, with Tim Robbins and Sarah Polley.

It is not the future but the past that is toxic for nurse Hanna (Sarah Polley).  We hear her story winkled out of her — not easily — by her patient Josef (Tim Robbins), who has been blinded and partially burned in an oil rig fire, trying to save another man.

The patient, Joe, is a friendly man and a talker, telling stories, asking questions, guessing at the answers himself when, at first, she doesn’t talk about herself at all.  She is friendly enough to her patient, and takes excellent care of him, but she does not reveal anything about herself at first.

It is only after they get to know each other better — after he tells her about something he did, probably the very events leading to his burns — that she begins to share a few things about herself.  Eventually, she tells him her story.

Her story is never portrayed on the screen.  We don’t see it at all, except, searingly, in our mind’s eye, and that is more than enough.  Hanna is what we call today collateral damage, in this case of the Balkan war, 10 years of war that devastated the entire area of the former Yugoslavia.

In this film, what you see is life on a marine oil rig, and in a factory elsewhere which makes huge rolls of plastic twine.  And you will hear what life was like for Hanna during the Balkan War.

Why should you watch the film, if it is so searing?  Because the story of Hanna and Joe is a tender love story, never saccharine or false.  How can it be?  Isabel Coixet, who wrote and directed, has done a masterly and award-winning job of bringing this story to the screen.