The heat index for today is 110° and it will apparently be like this all week. It is August, after all, and Texas. So it’s pretty much what one would expect.
We watched a good film this weekend, a BBC production called Page Eight. I can’t remember where I heard about it. Someone mentioned it somewhere recently. It stars Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Rachel Weisz, Alice Krige and Saskia Reeves, who was Luther’s boss in the first season of that show. All you have to say is Bill Nighy and I’m there. He’s such a stalwart actor. He plays an MI5 operative who’s trying to figure out who knew what when concerning American black ops. The title refers to part of an intelligence report that might cause problems for Downing Street. Ralph Fiennes is the Prime Minister.
As far as I can determine, there are absolutely no pictures of Peter Capaldi from World War Z anywhere on the internet. None. I can find photos of him at the premiere, but nothing where he’s actually acting in the movie. I so wanted a picture of him playing the W.H.O. Doctor, now that he’s been announced as the new Doctor Who. For the first time, the new Doctor is someone I’m familiar with. He was brilliant in the BBC series The Hour (he has one unforgettable scene where his bottled-up character has a restrained emotional breakdown) and he was good in the best part of World War Z. He was also in the “Children of the Earth” series from Torchwood. Also, for the first time in the 21st century the Doctor is being played by someone who is older than I am. That should give them something interesting to play with. I’ve never seen him as Malcolm Tucker, but this YouTube mashup is a hilarious (very NSFW) vision of that character as the Doctor.
I watched the rest of Bron this weekend—that’s the original Scandinavian show upon which The Bridge (FX) is based. It’s an impressive crime drama told in 10 hours. Whereas The Bridge starts out on the US/Mexico border in El Paso/Juarez, Bron opens on the new bridge between Malmo, Sweden and Copenhagen, Denmark. A nefarious serial killer has a series of social issues he wants to bring to the public’s attention and his way of doing so is to stage several crimes. Ones that get people more engaged. In one instance, he kidnaps five kids and then names five businesses that have been associated with child labor issues. If someone will burn the businesses, the kids go free. The two central cops are engaging and fascinating. Saga, the Swedish detective, has Aspergers. Martin, the Danish cop, is a happy-go-lucky philanderer whose roaming eye gets him in deeper and deeper trouble all the time. Even though Saga bewilders and frustrates him at first, he grows to appreciate her quirky behavior. The crime story is well conceived. It’s hard to imagine that the American version will end the same way as this one, but only time will tell.
I finished Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith this weekend. His novels do not make me want to visit Russia. It seems as dangerous, corrupt and gang-ridden as Mexico. He’s gotten a lot of mileage out of Arkady Renko, though, and he’s not done yet. Next up, I started The Abominable by Dan Simmons. It starts with what appears to be a 25-page introduction about how Simmons met and interviewed this old man about his Antarctic experiences, which led him to encourage the man to write down his story and, twenty years later, long after the man died, he receives the handwritten manuscript that is the novel. An interesting approach.
