Tag: pop culture

From December 6, 2014

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can watch TV shows that you missed the first time around.

And so we find ourselves watching House, a series that ran for eight seasons (2004-2012) and 177 episodes, winning cartloads of awards and consistently posting high ratings.

Okay, it’s a doctor show. Like Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey, from my youth. But this one is different because it’s focused on the title character, Dr. Greg House, medical genius, master diagnostician, and total pain in the butt,  played by Hugh Laurie. You’d never guess he was an Englishman. If his face looks familiar, you probably saw him a while ago in some episodes of Blackadder.

Why focus on this character? Because he’s so weird. He won’t obey hospital rules, he doesn’t like anybody, he will freely insult anyone at any time, he’s addicted to pain pills, and he’s brilliant. The show’s creators patterned him on Sherlock Holmes: and if you see a similar quirkiness in Laurie’s Dr. House and Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes, it’s probably intentional.

Now my wife finds this show richly entertaining because she’s into medical stuff. I’m not. In fact, I don’t even like to think about hospitals and such. Sometimes it seems there are more diseases than there are people, each of ’em just itching to get a crack at you. And when House and his colleagues get to yakking about what’s wrong with the patient, my eyes kind of glaze over. They might as well be talking backwards. Meanwhile my wife is enthusiastically nominating all sorts of diseases that I never heard of as candidates for whatever’s threatening the patient with a quick demise. It’s not unlike watching a football game with an avid and very knowledgeable fan who keeps predicting what play will be called in the huddle and what the defense will try to do about it.

I can’t get into the disease part of the show. But the performances are top-of-the-line and the characters are compelling. Every now and then a patient’s loved one has more than he can take and punches House in the nose. I’m surprised his underlings have never tried to poison him, or at least drained the brake fluid from his car. It makes you wonder why no one ever belted Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile, amazon has most of my books for sale with serious discounts. Surprised you with that, didn’t I? Just the kind of nervy thing that House might do. But it’s true–big discounts on the paperbacks, just in time for Christmas.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just click “Books” and see covers, blurbs, and sample chapters. They’ll speak for themselves.

I had never seen this classic horror (or is it science fiction?) film. My parents wouldn’t let me see it when it came out in 1960. Something somebody said recently made me want to try to watch it on my computer. That turned out to be harder than I expected, but eventually we managed it.

And it turned out to be two for the price of one: the original 1960 black-and-white British production starring George Sanders, and John Carpenter’s 1995 color remake starring Christopher Reeve. Both are based on The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), a novel by John Wyndham.

And both are quite good, too. You won’t get a lot of blood and guts thrust under your nose, and neither version tries to be “realistic” by depicting all the characters in the story as fools or degenerates, or both. The 1995 edition features truly gorgeous cinematography. The more subdued 1960 film is a little creepier. John Carpenter used the old screenplay for his model, and named it in the credits.

So what’s the story? For no reason that we can ever find out, everybody in the town of Midwich suddenly faints and is out for several hours before just as suddenly waking up again. A little later, it is discovered that practically all the women in the town are pregnant. This is awkward, as you can well imagine. The children who are born all have pale blond hair and freaky eyes, but are otherwise normal… not.

We soon learn that these children share a group mind which makes them more intelligent than adults and endows them with certain deadly powers. They are right scary little fiends. Think about it the next time you read a fantasy by some fat-head who thinks it would be cool if children had magical powers.

If I told you any more of the plot, I’d spoil the story for you. Both versions are excellent, and we enjoyed watching them on consecutive nights.

Unlike the news, the horror of a scary movie stops when the movie stops.