Christmas movie watching

I got Sparky a gift card to use on Amazon Instant and she picked out the first two films I'll briefly review here.

This is a cute little film about a kid who thinks he's suicidal and checks himself in a mental hospital before he can act on his thoughts of harming himself.  He meets all sorts of mentally ill people and he realizes that he's not so bad off after all, he's just been having a stressful time of it.

I liked all the leads, especially Emma Roberts, who was in the overlooked little gem Nancy Drew a  few years back, and Zach Galifinakis.  The film deals with mental illness but not in too deep a way and in a non off putting way.

Recommended.

 A once famous writer gets writers block.  He breaks it by writing about a woman he'd like to be in a love affair with.  All heck breaks loose in his life when his creation shows up in the flesh.  They fall in love and she's his maniac pixie dream girl trope come to life, literally.  But, when the end of the film rolls around, you have to ask yourself, did she really show up, or was it all in his head.

This is not the kind of film I would have picked to watch but I'm glad I saw it.  It's cute and sweet and a little creepy.  I found Ms. Kazan very cute and appealing and she makes the film a treat.  She also wrote the film in addition to starring in it, so well done you Ms. Kazan.

Recommended.

Sparky knows I love the BBC adaptions of Dickens so she got me a box set of ones we'd never seen.  We chose to watch The Pickwick Papers first because I knew nothing about it.  Turns out this was the novel, first serialized in magazines back in the day, that made Dickens famous.  And well it should because this one is a comic treasure.  The plot is simple, four old friends, led by retired businessman Pickwick, decide to set out to see some of the country and they get into all sorts of comic misadventures.  By the time they get done they've nearly fought a couple of duels, saved the virtue of many a female, made friends, been sued for breach of promise, and more.

This is exactly the type of character driven Dickens work I love.  But it's also one that I would never read because frankly, I find his written work a huge slog to get through and much of the humor is lost on me when I read the works because I get so frustrated with his archaic and long winded prose.  In these adaptations they cut the chaff and keep what's best.

I highly recommend this one.

A Monkey mini series review

We just finished watching this mini series on Netflix:

It's quite absorbing and very funny at times.  The main story is about a man who thinks his wife is being unfaithful to him so he goes to great lengths to prove his suspicions right.  The ancillary stories deal with the illicit love that the wife's sister has for a journalist, the sister of the journalist who goes to live with a wealthy maiden aunt, and the engagement woes a small town vicar encounters when he goes to marry.  Those may not seem to be much to hang a whole BBC period production on, but believe me what they do with these slender stories is amazing.  The thing is, even though this production is all about those stories and how they intertwine and weave around each other, what this production is really about is the plight of women in Victorian England.  Women had it pretty bad back then, and they still do today but back in the Victorian era they were little more than property of their fathers, and then their husbands.  If a woman had a husband who treated her as an equal then it was a rare thing indeed.  And not only were women the property of men, children were little more than chattel as well.  When the jealous husband in question kidnaps his son to spite his wife, there's little she can do about it.

These BBC productions are always first rate and filled with actors you recognize if you watch these things for any length of time.  The young women in this production are all impossibly beautiful and poised.  And the men are all dashing and handsome, except for the ones who are supposed to be of dubious moral character.  The real standout performance wise in this show was David Tennant as the engagement phobic vicar.  He steals every scene he vacillates in, and that's to say that's all his scenes.  Bill Nighy as the rakish old man who might or might not be porking the beautiful young wife is good in this as well.  The character I found annoying was the husband.

I highly recommend this one and I must admit this Trollope guy is growing on me, well at least the adaptions his novels are.

Love!

I missed this when it first aired but I finally got to see it courtesy of my local library. It's funny, sad, sweet, touching, and really really good. I highly recommend it and even if you hate BBC costume dramas, you'll like this one.

TV on DVD round up

We've been enjoying The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency like crazy. (It's available from our local library, see my previous post for a shout out to the good folks over there at the JCPL.) This HBO/BBC co production is a thing of beauty. The performances are smashing and the scenery is super as well. It's filmed on location in Botswana and it's filled with African actors, although an African American plays the title role.

I read the first two books in the series but I bailed on the third one because they were a bit too twee and precious for my taste. However the stories are perfectly fitted to being told on screen. And this adaption tells them very well. I love how they've adapted them and as soon as I saw that Richard Curtis wrote the first episode, he wrote most of the Vicar of Dibley series, co wrote three out of four series of Blackadder, and also wrote Love Actually, I knew I was going to be in good hands. All of the seven episodes of this series are well written, well acted, and well shot.

Jill Scott is terrific as the 'traditionally' built title character. I also love the bundle of uptightness that is Anika Noni Rose as her assistant and secretary. I'm not even done watching all the episodes in this series and I'm already itching for the next ones to come out so I can see them as well.
I can't imagine a more perfect contemporary Brit-com than Gavin and Stacey. This show is a slice of life about two people who meet through work and who fall in love soon after. Their story is complicated by their friends and family and the trials of modern life and somehow it's all a winsome winning laugh out loud wonderful series.

I'm in love with this show and it's going into our pantheon of British comedies that we watch over and over again. The two female leads in this show, Joanna Page and Ruth Jones, stand out and they really make it worth watching. Also great are Rob Brydon and Allison Steadman, as Stacey's uncle and Gavin's mom.
My good friend XUP mentioned that Hamish Macbeth was another good series from the BBC that is set in a small rural location. So I picked up the first series on DVD for a Christmas present for Sparky, she loves the BBC slice of life comedies set in small rural towns, and I'm happy to report that we both really like this show now. The accents take a bit of getting used to, they're very thick and almost unintelligible at times, but by and large this one is a winner. It's ostensibly a mystery series but the mysteries aren't like the ones we're used to from American TV, they're slice of life stories that feature a minor petty crime that gets solved while the story is being told. It's more about the town and the coterie of Scottish oddballs who live in it than it is about crime and crime solving, in fact Hamish Macbeth is probably the most lax policeman character I've ever seen on a BBC series. And that's what makes it so engaging.

Oh yeah, it also features my Scottish adopted actor Shirley Henderson as well, so it's got that going for it as well.

Coming this fall to FOX...

If you love the hit BBC drama Footballers Wives, then you'll flip for our rip off of that show. It's called Softballers Wives!



It goes behind the scenes of the glitzy and glamorous world of beer league softball and it lays bare the passions and peccadilloes of the upper crust sporting set. This one is sure to be a hit! A home run in fact!

We at FOX have assembled the finest acting talent for this show. Just look at who we've got:

Haley Duff stars as the virginal put upon wife of the team's slugger.

James Van Der Beek stars as the temperamental slugger with a dark secret!

Melissa Joan Hart is the scheming vixen out to screw everyone, one way or another!

Robert DeNiro is a can of soda!

Kerry Washington is the token black woman with big hair and a sassy attitude!

Vaclev Havel is the Czech intellectual with a passion for all things American!

Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein is the boy toy who played with fire but never got burnt!

Susan Sarandon is the team's aging tart with a heart of gold!

Sophia Loren is her mother!

Christian Slater is just glad to be cast!

The late George C. Scott is the crusty team owner who is really a brain eating zombie!

George W. Bush is the team's sprightly, impishly stupid little mascot!

Tony Blair is his poodle!

Naveen Andrews and Barbra Hershey are the mysterious couple from Des Moines!

And Jill St. John is the red head with a grudge!

Be sure to tune in this fall after the World Series on FOX for this groundbreaking TV show. We promise you'll love it, and if you don't so the hell what? We're FOX and we do what ever Rupert Murdoch wants us to, we have to, we sold our souls to him.

Let's all take a deep breath, calm down, and take a look at...

...this week's brunette o' the week!

This week's dark haired temptress is none other than Stirling Gallacher!

Who the hell is she?

Oh sorry, we thought everyone loved her as much as we do. Okay, then to bring you up to speed, she was in:

She played his boss. And did a damn fine job at it as well.

She's also in this:We're sure she's great in it but we don't watch it here at el casa de Monkey.

But we do watch this, and repeatedly we might add:

She plays the Prime Minister's wife in this great sketch comedy show, as well as doing the voice of Margret in one of our favorite recurring sketches of the series.

So lets all take a deep breath and enjoy la belle Stirling:

"You're too kind Dr. Monkerstein."

"Should I throw away my career in British television and film in order to be the love slave of Dr. Monkerstein?"

"Sadly, no, I must remain in Britain. I must content myself with loving him from afar."