For an review of the way-too-long Winter Olympics opening ceremony, who better to ask than a journalist of the Vancouver Sun? Canada is a great country. I'd be happy to live there. But I agree with Mr Peter Martin in his comments about the ceremony. Some excerpts:

After the drum and cheering lesson, Official Opening Ceremony Host and Hot Weather Girl Tamara Taggart asked us to welcome, as the evening's first entertainment, The Irrepressible Jully Black, Canada's Premier R&B singer! To which I wondered: Who!

Who?

Ms. Black came out on stage to a hard pop beat and proceeded to scream a song, the words of which immediately floated up into the cavernous roof of BC Place Stadium, where they were lost forever. Then Ms. Black shouted out "Peace!" two or three times into her mike, then held her mike out for the audience to shout "Peace!" back at her. A few people humoured her, and then the music stopped, and Ms. Black, mercifully, left the stage.

Then some other guys came out and sang. I didn't catch their names

Neither did I, who cared?

Finally, the real show started . . .

Then came the Canadian flag and the national anthem sung by jazz prodigy Nikki Yanofsky . . . it was a disaster, the stately O Canada! mangled by the Warbling School of Pop Phrasing . . . the rendition robbed the ceremonies of what could have been one of its best moments.

The aboriginal part? Was it just me or did the giant translucent totems rising out of the floor look monumentally phallic? . . .

They did. Very.

But the people of the First Nations were dignified, spectacular in their costumes, and a fine part of the ceremony.

Then came the interminable march of the athletes—who knew there were so many letters in the alphabet?—which was marked by two remarkable moments: the entrance of the tragedy-touched Georgian team, which caused everyone, even the press corps, to stand up and clap, which seemed odd and appropriate at the same time; and the entrance of the Canadian team, the appearance of which touched off a roar so loud the kids on the Canadian team seemed cowed by it. . . .

Perhaps if the athletes had walked, not ambled, and the gap between each been country less? It was a good move to have the athletes enter early, and to give them seats, so they could see the show.

The floor show? The aurora borealis draped from the ceiling was nice, and the giant sparkling polar bear rising above the ice drew oohs and aahs from everybody. The Emily Carr forest was imaginative and beautiful

but the music and dance that accompanied it meaningless and too long

but the guy in the floating canoe, aka The Fiddler Under The Roof? What was with the Batman hairdo? And billions around the world are now under the impression that Canada is populated by punk step dancers that are into multiple piercings

—and Satanism.

The loveliest and simplest moment in the show came with the lone kid floating above a canvas of golden grain fields to Joni Mitchell's haunting rendition of Both Sides Now.

Just so, it was gloriously musical, and simple. Again, was the segment too long?

The "We Are More" speech about Canada and the outsized expression of nationalism it carried left me cold, because it was needless . . .

The speech of welcome was long winded. pompous, patronising and nationalistic, not what we seek for an Olympics.

The Olympic flag was carried in with dignity. But the opera singer's rendering of the Olympic Hymn was so large lunged and operatic that the tune was formless and not one word was recogisable."

As for the lighting of the flame? . . . when that fourth stylized icicle

—so that's they were—

failed to come up . . . was that the biggest snafu in Olympic history? The most embarrassing? Eight years to get things right and we get the Olympic Tripod?

Mr McMartin gives the ceremony a "not too shabby" B+.

My score is less generous:
the indigenous people: A
relevance to Olympics ideal: C
demonstration of Canadian culture and values: C
musically: A to F depending on the performer
as spectacle: A-
as non-boring television B.

Overall: C. Why bother? Just do the sports.

I enjoy good quality mystery thrillers. But I sometimes wonder what happened to the TV Western, which was main fare when B & W television first came to Australia. These were some of the best.

• Rawhide 1959 to 1966.
• Gunsmoke 1955 to 1975.
• The Rifleman 1958 to 1963.
• Bonanza 1959 to 1973.
• Maverick 1957 to 1962.
• Lawman 1958 to 1962.
• Cheyenne 1955 to 1962.
• Wagon Train 1957 to 1962.

James and I enjoyed Star Trek XI. I don't try to read deep philosophy into it—it's simply entertainment. And it's optimistic, despite the death of billions. Just before the movie, we we treated to trailers of two dark shock-horror sci-fi thrillers. What's the point of them?

As Dave Itzkoff writes (NYT 9 May 09)

It takes a certain mix of optimism and frustration to contemplate the possibility of space travel. To dream of navigating the cosmos is to assume that man has the resources and the know-how to propel himself into the heavens, but also some compelling reasons to exchange his home planet for the cold vast unknown.
[. . . ]
Forty years later, as Star Trek is returning to its past so is America: the country is again gripped by anxieties about entanglements abroad, compounded by the fear that the economy could collapse at warp speed. A cautious optimism has emerged in the afterglow of the election of President Obama (whose Vulcan-like composure has invited frequent comparisons to Mr. Spock), but a surge of foreign violence, a swine flu outbreak or any number of other events could easily dampen that mood.
[. . . ]
But at least one person closely identified with Star Trek argues that for all the ways in which the franchise has been affected by current events, its optimistic vision has persisted. "A lot of science-fiction is nihilistic and dark and dreadful about the future, and Star Trek is the opposite," Mr. Nimoy said. "We need that kind of hope, we need that kind of confidence in the future. I think that's what Star Trek offers. I have to believe that — I'm the glass-half-full kind of guy."

Similarly, in his review (NYT, 8 May 09) Manohla Dargis says that "Whether by design or accident," Director [J. J.] Abrams has succeeded in giving the forty year old concept new life for ", simply because in its hopefulness Star Trek reminds you that there's more to science fiction (and Hollywood blockbusters) than nihilism. " . . . The film comes down on the side of hope, but its apocalyptic interludes, including the image of a planet imploding into gray dust, collapsing like a desiccated piece of fruit, linger."

Despite all the high-tech wizz-bangery, the story is "fundamentally about two men engaged in a continuing conversation about civilizations and their discontents. Hot and cold, impulsive and tightly controlled, Kirk and Spock need each other to work, a dynamic Mr. Abrams captures with his two well-balanced leads. Mr. [Zachary] Quinto lets you see and hear the struggle between the human and the Vulcan in Spock through the emotions that ripple across his face and periodically throw off his unmodulated phrasing. Mr. [Chris] Pine [Pictured] has the harder job — he has to invoke Mr. Shatner's sui generis performance while transcending its excesses — which makes his nuanced interpretation all the more potent. Steering clear of outright imitation, the two instead distill the characters to capture their essence, their Kirk-ness and Spock-ness.

Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the story has plenty of chatter, but Mr. Abrams keeps the talk moving, slowing down only intermittently, as when Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) or the wryly smiling Leonard Nimoy (!) unload some paternalistic advice on Kirk. . . . By far his finest moments take place on the brightly lighted deck of the Enterprise, where against the backdrop of limitless space, Kirk, Spock and the rest of the young crew fumble with roles that — much like the young actors playing them, including Anton Yelchin as Chekov and John Cho as Sulu — they ultimately and rather wonderfully make their own.

Maurice Jarre, composer for film, died on 28 March 09, aged 84. I take note of this because of Jarre's astonishing list of film credits, with some of my all time favourites including The Longest Day, Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India.

The Economist's obituary (16 Apr 09) says this of Jarre's part in Lawrence:

The cinema, as he remembered it, was off Trafalgar Square. It was small, stuffy and dark. And there, over 40 hours in early 1962, Maurice Jarre watched the first rough cut of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The showings started at 9am on a Monday and did not finish till the Friday. And he was mesmerised. Peter O'Toole, the blue-eyed, white-robed Lawrence, rode his camel along a beach at dawn. He crested the dunes and gazed out over a landscape of shimmering oranges and greys. Cavalcades of Arabs, keffiyehs flying, raced across the sand. It was astoundingly beautiful. And it was completely silent.

Mr Jarre's commission was to write the music for it. It was extraordinary that he had been asked. Sam Spiegel, the producer, had heard only his ten-minute score for a French film called Sundays and Cybele, written for bass, counter-bass, flute and table-harp. Now he was supposed to produce, in six weeks, two hours of music for a 100-piece orchestra. Back in his room in Half Moon Street he tried to read all he could about T.E. Lawrence, including the huge Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as well as searching for that little swatch of notes that might turn into a theme. Search, search, search, search, as Stravinsky said. "Sam Spiegel told me, you have the job of Superman!" Mr Jarre joyously recalled.

New York Times also has a fine obituary.

In fact, of the five nominees for best picture—"Milk," "Frost/Nixon," "The Reader," "Slumdog Millionaire," and "Benjamin Button"—only "Milk," a bio-pic with a thrilling sense of history and lots of jokes and sex, has the aesthetic life and human vitality that warrant its nomination.
— David Denby, New Yorker 9 Feb 09.

 

The very act of awarding prizes seems to throw Tinseltown into a state of cognitive dissonance. As Tom Shone observes in his insightful book, "Blockbuster", Hollywood spends nearly all its money and energy working out what teenagers want and cravenly giving it to them. Then, once a year, it pauses to ask: "But is it art?". It is hardly surprising that its conclusions are often so dismal.
-- The Economist, 21 Feb 09