Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through The Shelves. Join us as every week, we pick three titles that fit the week's theme and tell everyone a bit about them!
We are traveling again this week, this time through time, on the small screen. And I'll be honest, there's really only one TV show about time travel that I really care about right now, and it took some time for me to think of two others. But think of them I did, and they had something rather surprising in common...
Life on Mars (2008-2009) Based on the UK series of the same name, this one season wonder starred Jason O'Mara as a present-day cop who gets hit by a car and wakes up in the '70s. He's still himself, and he gets flashes of his life via his TV set somehow, but he's living in the '70s, no doubt about it! Thankfully, he's still working as a cop. But the style of police work is much different from what he's used to, as exemplified by the police chief played by Harvey Keitel - which should be all I have to say about the character for you to get the picture. A bumpy ride, perhaps a bit too concerned with the mystery of the time travel (although the way they wrapped it up was very clever, I thought), but it's a lot of fun once you stop worrying about that.
Terra Nova (2011) The one season wonder starred Jason O'Mara as a cop in the year 2049, who travels back in time with his family to the Cretaceous period, as their world has become near-uninhabitable. But he almost gets detained for trying to smuggle their newborn baby with them, and once he sneaks through, has to convince the leadership on Terra Nova that his skills as a cop are vital. Thankfully, there's a rebel group of settlers working for a corporate interest causing all sorts of havoc, so he's allowed to stay. When it fully embraced the sci-fi elements at its core, Terra Nova was kind of thrilling, but it was too simplistic and nonsensical overall to really hold together - although LORD did Jason O'Mara REALLY try!
Doctor Who (1963-1989, 2005-present) The world's longest-running TV series (I'm PRETTY SURE), by virtue of its lead character: A time-traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey, known only as The Doctor, who can regenerate himself into a different body when he "dies". The original series is fun in a kitschy, almost-campy, Saturday morning show for kids kind of way, but the new series ups the stakes and the visual effects to create something truly thrilling. This is long-form, serial storytelling at its absolute best, with tremendous performances from each of the thirteen men who have stepped into the Doctor's TARDIS (that's "Time And Relative Dimension In Space" to you, and yes it looks like a British police call box, and YES it's bigger on the inside), as well as from most of the pretty young things who play his earthly "companions" in his travels. In any given episode, Doctor Who can go anywhere and be anything, from horror ("Blink") to romance ("The Girl in the Fireplace") to allegory ("Cold War") to slapstick comedy ("The Lodger") and absolutely everything in between. But mostly, it's just a lot of fun, with overarching plots that actually hold together on both the macro and micro levels, and consistently satisfying individual episodes littered with great performances from a veritable who's-who of great British thespians.
Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!
And now, back to your regularly scheduled TMP programming: MOVIES!
This week, we must pick movies about artists, specifically painters. I've tried to pick three movies as different from each other as possible for this, so... ENJOY!
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (Raúl Ruiz, 1978) Look, I could describe the "plot" of this to you, but that really would kind of be beside the point. It's ostensibly "about" an art collector who six of seven canvasses of a legendary 19th century French painter who creates extremely elaborate tableaux vivants of each of the paintings he does have in order to try and figure out what the fourth in the series (stolen long ago) might have been. But really, it's about art itself, how we create it, experience it, critique it, and look at it. It's a viewing experience completely unlike any other I've ever had, and yes you may find it unbearably pretentious, but I don't care.
Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002) A bit of a mess, but then, could a film about the great, provocative Mexican painter Frida Kahlo be anything but? At least Julie Taymor's biopic takes risks most films would never dream of in both form and function. And Hayek, who nurtured this project from conception to completion, is great fun to watch.
Tim's Vermeer (Teller, 2014) Sometimes, life gifts you with a perfect story: Penn Jillette, one-half of the famous magician duo Penn & Teller, had a friend named Tim who was obsessed with the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, who many consider the greatest painter that ever lived. Specifically, Tim is obsessed with how Vermeer captured light so perfectly. So obsessed, that he builds a device that allows him to paint a perfect recreation of whatever is in front of him, like he believed Vermeer used. And Penn & Teller filmed it. It's an absolutely fascinating story, and watching it will make you view painting in a whole new light.
BONUS TV PICK
"Vincent And The Doctor" (Doctor Who, 2010, S5E10) I didn't pickthe long-running BBC program Doctor Who for our sci-fi TV edition of TMP last week, but I had to mention this episode this week, because it's one of my favorites. Our intrepid time-traveling Galifreyan and his spunky companion Amy Pond end up visiting Vincent Van Gogh, whose inner demons have been made thrillingly external as a scary black beastie. He is depressed because he is going through all these awful things and no one cares about his art, into which he pours his heart and soul. So in the end, just this once, the Doctor allows the person he helps to see his future, and this scene happens, and I turn into a puddle of tears. EVERY. TIME. Just beautiful.
