Screenhead

About three years ago, I joined most of the rest of humanity and got cable.  Dish Network, specifically–great stuff.  But it was about that time that I pretty much stopped caring about what network TV had to offer.  It seemed like they could never put out much that wasn’t already available.  Thus, when I got my hands on a box set of the second season of Third Watch on DVD, I found myself pretty surprised by what they saw.

Third Watch, so named for the period of time between three and eleven PM, follows the lives and adventures of various cops, firefighters and paramedics in the world of first responders.  And as they tackle situations of every size and variety, from the small ones of people with a penchant for dialing 911 over the least little thing and killer parakeets run amok to the nigh-apocalyptic of cop-killing snipers and kidnapping victims buried alive, we discover that life isn’t all about chasing perps and patching wounds.  These people who we call heroes are just as human as the rest of us.  They make decisions, just like we do.  They have tragedies, just like we do.  And over the course of several months, we’ll get to see a lot of them.

Third Watch is a strange little animal.  It manages to do two things, and equally well.  It manages to humanize the men and women of the police, fire and rescue departments of New York City, and it also manages to regularly annoy the viewer with more schmaltz than a chicken ranch.  In case you’re wondering, schmaltz is both the Yiddish word for chicken fat and a colloquial term for maudlin sentimentality, at least one of the two is well represented in Third Watch.

The worst part of it all was how differently this show would make me feel WITHIN episodes.  They would literally manage to make me glad I was watching, by putting in something really exciting or something funny or even just something interesting, and then they would proceed to blow all that solid good feeling by doing something so cheesy in an attempt at a tearjerker moment  that I couldn’t help but be put off.

There’s a lot to like here–if you were fond of shows like ER and NYPD Blue and suchlike, you’ll probably be into this one.  The real advantage is that it manages to combine several different subgenres–it’s part cop show, and part doctor show, and part firefighter show and even some comedy and drama thrown in for added flavor.  The only real problem with it is that some times they’ll jack up the drama a whole lot more than I care for myself, to where it goes past a slight extra flavoring and into an overpowering force that just goes way too far.

But if you’re okay with that sort of thing–if you can handle a little extra drama in your television, and if you like cop drama and firefighter drama and medical drama with just a little extra slug of comedy and of course that extra heaping helping of drama–then you’ll definitely enjoy Third Watch.

Season two will hit your DVD players July 7th.

Scene From "Love Exposure"

The New York Asian Film Festival has returned for its seventh year. Asia in this case mostly means the eastern end of the continent, with a particular emphasis on the area’s three film-producing centers: Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.  This is a genuine enthusiast’s event, programmed by a collective of Asian film buffs with eclectic tastes. There are more than 50 features jammed into two weeks.

The New York Asian Film Festival runs through July 2 at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 924-7771, with associated screenings July 1 to 5 at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan, (212) 715-1258. Go to: subwaycinema.com for a complete schedule.

Being a movie reviewer, especially one who is a horror film expert besides by sheer dint of having seen a number of  titles sufficiently large that I’ve lost count, allows you to see some of the worst villains Hollywood can dream up.  Monsters straight out of hell itself and from everywhere in between—even a few sent from heaven!  But out of the many, many such evildoers that I’ve seen in my day, there are precious few who can compare to the sheer insensate evil that was Albert Fish.

So when I heard about The Gray Man, a movie about him, I knew it was going to be an interesting ride, one way or another.

Indeed, that’s what The Gray Man is all about—in 1928, a ten year old little girl by the name of Grace Budd was kidnapped, last seen in the company of a kindly old grandfather figure by the name of Albert Fish.  Six years later, authorities arrest Fish for his role in the kidnapping…but what else they’ll discover is beyond anything they could have imagined.

This is a man who was so evil that he wrote a series of anonymous letters, detailing his crimes, and sent them to newspapers.  This is a man so spectacularly evil by human standards that one of his letters detailed a recipe.  The recipe was for “roasted child ass”.  It involved onions and carrots.

Watching this admittedly dramatized piece about the life of a man whose evil was downright shocking by any standard is at once difficult and compelling.  Getting a look at his family life is also a shocker, as nothing I had ever seen before focused on that angle.  It was a surprise to see these different angles, and they added to the whole thing with a certain depth and clarity that really made this interesting.

A word about actor Patrick Bauchau, the guy who portrayed Albert Fish:  this guy was absolutely amazing, nothing but.  He went from kindly old grandfather to raw meat eating psychopath in a matter of what seemed like minutes.  He could ooze elderly benevolence one minute and project a menace almost too thick and black to see through the next.  His range is beyond belief and must be seen to be truly appreciated.

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies involving true crime figures—the BTK Killer may have the most right now, and everybody from Jeffrey Dahmer to the Alphabet Killer and the Zodiac and all the rest have at least one.  But The Gray Man could easily be the best one I’ve ever seen.  Fuelled by Bauchau’s downright compulsive performance and riding a fearsome wave of source material that’s both brutal and horrifying, The Gray Man may well be one of the scariest, classiest, and most compelling pieces of suspense / horror I’ve seen in some time.  Even better is how, in the end, they actually manage to arrest Fish—but not on murder or abduction charges.

I warn you ahead of time, though—if you have a weak heart or stomach or constitution in general, then you’ll likely want to stay away from this one.  It’s downright brutal, even if there’s not a whole lot of blood.  But if you want to look into the face of an evil deeper than any Cenobite or Cylon or anything else Hollywood can dream up, then The Gray Man is exactly the movie you want to see.

Synecdoche, New York directed by Charlie Kaufman (Academy Award-winning writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Hope Davis. Clever set of circumstances which is a little hard to follow in the trailer, but some great actors.

Take a look at who is showing up for the New Yorker Festival that runs October 3 through 5. Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and Stephen Colbert are some to name.

Event hosted in various venues by the venerable magazine is a mix of 50 events, most of them panels and interviews venues.

New Yorker film critic David Denby will interview Stone about his work as a director and will host clips from the upcoming George Bush biopic W.

Cynthia Nixon has signed up as a cast member for British commercial web ITV’s drama An Englishman in New York, a follow-up to the 1975 TV movie The Naked Civil Servant.

Nixon plays a performance artist and playwright Penny Arcade in the drama and John Hurt reprises his role as English eccentric Quentin Crisp.

The drama follows Crisp’s move to New York in the early 80s, where the gay writer and raconteur was embraced by celebrities and artists, including Penny Arcade.

The two created the long-running performance/interview piece, “The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp.”

Also joining the cast is Jonathan Tucker (Veronica Must Die, The Black Donnellys), who stars as Crisp’s friend, the American artist Patrick Angus, and “Swoozie Kurtz” (”Pushing Daisies”), as Crisp’s agent, Connie Clausen.

Currently shooting in London and New York, the drama is directed by Richard Laxton and written by Brian Fillis.

Hot off the trail of her opening in “Sex and the City” co-star Kim Cattrall is returning to HBO with another sex-themed single-camera comedy project set in New York.

Cattrall plans to star and executive produce an adaptation of the British comedy series “Sensitive Skin,” which is being written and exec produced by Emmy-winning “The Sopranos” scribes Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green. Sounds like a winner.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, The project, in development at the pay cable network with a significant penalty attached to it (Ouch!), centers on a middle-aged wife and mother (Cattrall) in New York who rediscovers her sexuality and begins to question her place in the world and the choices she has made in life.

The original series, which aired on BBC Two for two seasons, was written and directed by Hugo Blick and starred Joanna Lumley as a well-to-do ex-model working at an art gallery in London.

 

If you are in New York this summer, here is a great article on “11 Shows to See” by Lind Winer on Newsday.com.  One show that stands out for me is Sean Hayes (”Will & Grace”) plays the devil in this 1955 musical about a baseball fan (Cheyenne Jackson) who sells his soul to beat the Yankees, and gets to play around with the Devil’s helper (Jane Krakowski) in the bargain. Another is at the Lincoln Center Festival, three Solos by Samuel Becket, where Liam Neeson does “Eh, Joe,” Barry McGovern stars in “I Will Go On” and Ralph Fiennes follows in “First Love.”