Stevesees: New Amsterdam

We return to Stevesees just briefly, to take approving notice of the new Fox series "New Amsterdam," an offbeat New York crime drama featuring the main character John Amsterdam, who's three hundred years old, gifted (or cursed) with physical immortality by long-vanished Native Americans, who stipulated that time would find him when he found the one true love of his life.

We meet him centuries later, when he's a homicide detective in Manhattan (death, he says, intrigues him - "it's always playing hard to get"). In the first episode, he's somewhat predictably saddled with a sharp-tongued sassy new female partner and a fairly pro-forma crime to solve procedurally. And there's some interest in that, mainly as the viewers get more and more hints about the full dimensions of Amsterdam's long life - presumably he's been a detective for some many years, and thanks to the just slightly off-kilter physical movements and the can't-quite-place-it accent of lead Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, it all comes off as believably just a stitch away from placeably mundane.

He's seen so many partners come and go that he can't take her seriously. She's smart, sharp, and sensitive, but she faces an unbeatable edge of accumulated experience in her new partner, who's a little slow to acknowledge that she can even tell him anything, much less teach him anything.

Instead, he laconically taunts her with lines that are complete nonsequiturs to anybody who doesn't know his unbelievable past, like telling her he knows a bar was once a speak-easy in the 30s because he used to drink there, or that she reminds him of his last 609 girlfriends.

He's slightly sloppier elsewhere in his life, when he's confronting a young murder suspect on a subway platform and allows himself to be shot (he first calmly tells his young attacker what it felt like to be shot by the old style unjacketed bullet - that it felt like 'fire dropped in your veins' - as anybody unfortunate to be shot before 1921 could attest, if any such were still alive). As he's collapsing on the subway platform, he has the indistinct but immovable sensation that after all these centuries, he's come an armsbreadth away at last from the woman who can create inside him his much-dreamt-of mortality (as problem-prone modern day TV would have it, the subway platform security cameras - which he later scrutinizes - show an unhelpful plethora of beautiful young women flocking to his aid), and so the series gets its giddy-yap: at the thought that now, after all this time, his wait may be over.

His old (literally and figuratively - indeed, the two can't help but be the same, in this series) friend Omar, played pitch-perfectly by always-welcome character actor Stephen Henderson, can sarcastically comment all he likes "You meet your true love and the die? Doesn't sound too romantic to me," but Omar is less tolerant of the friend he's known so long that he can't help but be privy to Amsterdam's central secret. And when he hears about this subway encounter, he warns, "When you don't find her, you're gonna go crazy. And the last time you went crazy ... it was a long damn ten years."

Actually, in the first episode, the dynamic between these two is the best thing in the show (the dynamic between Amsterdam and his new partner gets much, much better in the next few episodes), comfortably handling the scam they've got going on the side: Amsterdam builds ornate desks that Omar then sells as 'antiques' done a century ago by a revered master - who was, naturally, Amsterdam.

His sloppiness on that subway platform - allowing himself to get shot, subsequently getting carted to the morgue and needing to sneak out unseen - sets in motion the show's other ongoing plotline, the suspicions of the doctor on call when he's brought in (she even notices that his blood type is " Rz/Rz," which was common among certain Native American tribes but is now extinct), a doctor who may be the very life-love he's seeking.

But sweetest aspect of the show is the nice ear the writers have for time. Time winds its way through this series like another character, and it's handled better and more sensitively than most TV shows usually do (the show's obvious ancestor, "Highlander," was so caught up in the hurly-burly of sword-fights and decapitations that it hardly ever paused to mine this very obvious aspect of its main character - the show did so only once to our recollection, with Duncan MacCleod comforting an old woman in her hospital bed who had once been his beautiful young lover)("New Amsterdam" nods in "Highlander"s direction, when in a future episode a kid asks Amsterdam if he's ever had his head cut off and he gamely says he hasn't).

Living forever and finding your one true love: mankind's two longest-running dreams, fused into one TV show. The Native American woman who gifts Amsterdam with immortality solemnly intones, "In all of time, there is only one person we are meant to be with," and the series buys into this idea completely, preferring not to face a much starker possibility: that an immortal would find the love of his life not once but a few times, and lose that love every time. The pilot comes close, when Amsterdam tells a grieving mother that he knows the pain she's going through: "He was six, my son - almost six. It's pain without end."

Obviously, a weekly TV show with any hopes for success can't take 'pain without end' as its tagline, but still: at times, there's a very appealing sadness to Coster-Waldau's portrayal of Amsterdam.

But it's a dogged optimism that wins the day and brings the first episode to its stunning 20-second last shot: we see Amsterdam hundreds of years ago, as he wakes up on the first morning of his new life. He's disheveled and bearded, and around him under a clear sky is a pristine wilderness. And as the camera pans, his appearance neatens - and the wilderness changes: villages appear grow and disappear, muddy streets appear and widen and become paved, buildings appear and grown and wildly multiply, cars appear, and people, and more people, in one sweeping arc that brings us back to the present, to Amsterdam walking his dog in the place where he was born all those centuries ago: Times Square. It's a bravura visual feature that's over ironically fast, and a great deal of historical care went into its construction - we noticed building facades and adornments that really did once exist, their recreations here flickering into and then back out of existence in an instant. If "New Amsterdam" can give its viewers even one such thrilling moment every episode, the show will amply justify its existence.

Stevesees! R.I.P. Roy Scheider

We revive Stevesees today despite the lamentable absence of our beloved Hippolyta to cheer us on (she vanished from the site at roughly the same time as the Reichmarshall did - do we detect Romance in the air? Perhaps a whirlwind trip to Argentina to visit some, um, old friends of the Reichmarshall? Alas, we'll probably never know...), and we do so not only to honor the memory of recently deceased actor Roy Scheider but also to sing the praises of sequels.

But first, Scheider, a perennially underrated performer who managed to impart an extra bit of grace, an extra ounce of believability, and most of all an almost imperceptible twinkle into even his most mediocre parts. He was the quintessential knockaround part-player, of a type the stage and screen will always have and always need - the character actor who turns in the work and eschews the histrionics.

Unfortunately, histrionics almost always gets the attention and wins the awards. This was the case in 1979, when he was nominated for Best Actor for his part in All That Jazz and lost to Dustin Hoffman vamping in primary colors in Kramer vs. Kramer - the one is a scintillating, bravura star-turn, the other a deeply boring assay at suburban ennui, of a type that's always popular with the Academy. And look at his most famous performance, as Police Chief Brody in Jaws: he's impossibly bracketed between the ham of Robert Shaw and the wry of Richard Dreyfuss.

Which brings us to sequels, because it's in a sequel that Roy Scheider's craft shows to perfect advantage. Of course we're referring to Jaws 2, the sequel to the record-breaking Jaws - and as in most cases, the sequel is better than the original.

Purists will howl, of course. Jaws 2 better than Jaws? Unthinkable! What about the stagecraft, the narrative, the filmic cohesion? To which we here at Stevesees say: there ain't no Muse of filmic cohesion. Jaws 2 wins out over Jaws because it resolves the mystery that's central to both movies and ignored by the first: the shark. In Jaws, a twenty-five foot great white shark starts eating humans off the shores of Amity island. After some initial reluctance, the town council agrees to pay professional shark-killer Quint (the Shaw character) to take a boat out after the shark. Police Chief Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper (the Dreyfuss role) go with him, and they quickly find themselves demoted from hunters to hunted by a shark who's always one step ahead of them, mysteriously canny and malevolent. Emphasis on mysteriously. The film tries hard to convey a sense of realism - scores of 'natives' are trucked in from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, and Scheider gives Brody a very appealing everyman fallibility - but the elephant in the room is the shark itself, a superhuman monster who's swum in from a different genre altogether.

In Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc directed it with a fine eye for visual contrasts, always violently juxtaposing violence onto tranquility), this mystery is cleared up: the shark in this movie is motivated by plain and simple revenge. It is supernatural, and almost no attempt is made to tell us otherwise. When a group of local kids find a killer whale carcass washed up on the beach with a giant bite taken out of it, Brody calls in a local expert and hesitantly asks her about motive, specifically whether if a shark were 'destroyed' off Amity, another shark might come along and ... to which the expert (the actress sounding exactly like the factual old biddy in Hitchcock's The Birds) tartly replies, "Sharks don't take things personally, Mr. Brody." Which, as all fans of horror movies will tell you, is the movie's way of lock-solid guaranteeing you that sharks do take things personally - or at least that this one does.

And just look at all the things it does in its brief reign of terror! It chases a water-skier and gulps her down; it plays peek-a-boo with a scuba diver; it successfully eats a Coast Guard helicopter; and, in the film's best, most emotionally satisfying sequence, it terrorizes the shit out of what has to be the most obnoxious group of teenagers this in film. The first movie's shark would have been pooped after twenty minutes at this pace.

And Jaws 2 has the requisite horror movie puritanism. The beginning of the young snot killing spree when the shark zeroes in on one sailboat that's straggled behind the others. And why has it straggled behind? Because young Billy and Tina want to do it without being ogled. In fact, he's in the very act of spreading a blanket on deck so she won't get bruises when the shark head-butts the boat and sends him ass-first into the ocean.

The movie is full of memorable scenes, and Scheider shines in all of his. Probably two are best, and they're connected. In the first, Chief Brody, his instincts tingling at the possibility he might be dealing with another shark, is positioned high atop a shark tower, ignoring the happy scenes down on the beach in favor of scrutinizing the water. There he spots a vaguely shark-shaped shadow, trains his binoculars on it, trains them again - Scheider's body-language is a perfect little depiction of a man whose fears are convincing him of something as we watch. In one quick decision, he knows he's looking at the shark he's begun to suspect is out there; he descends from the tower, pulls his gun (Szwarc drily shows us that nobody on the beach is at point afraid of anything but the gun-waving Brody), yelling for everybody to get out of the water. When he comes to the edge of the surf, he raises his weapon and fires - just past a boy still running to get out of the surf. And when the shadow turns out not to be a shark at all ("It's just bluefish!" yells a fisherman, thus christening a semi-popular band by that name that played Nantucket hot spots for a couple of years, until sharks got them all)(just kidding about that last part: it was boring old heroin). The crowds ignore Brody's pathetic calls for them to go back in the water; they drift away, leaving him alone on the beach with his little boy, both of them very quietly picking up his shell casings.

The scene that follows is very different and equally good: Scheider's Brody has been fired off-camera - and drunk a skinfull off-camera too. He comes home and tells his wife he's been fired - something that hasn't happened to him since he was a kid - and Scheider gives the confession a pained, bewildered tone another actor would have curdled.

So here at Stevesees salute Roy Scheider for a first-rate job entertaining us over the years, and we salute sequels - many of which, like Scheider himself, are a whole lot better than people think they are.

And we'll let Stevereads have the final word for now: Richard Sackler's novelization of the movie (he co-wrote the screenplay) is actually a first-rate adventure novel full of great lines and sharply-drawn characters. Many of you have received this book compliments of Stevereads; we suggest you dig it up and give it a try. You won't be disappointed.

SteveSees! Life-sucking fiends of sci-fi!

Yes, gentle sentients, you read that right: SteveSEES!

Call it a little experiment, nothing more. If I enjoy this sort of thing half so much as I do the other, perhaps I'll do it more regularly.

Certainly there are fewer groundrules than obtain at Stevereads! There, I am an all-knowing, even saintly overlord both feared and beloved, incapable of error or contradiction.

No so here! As some of you may know, I watch a great deal of TV - shows, repeats, VCR tapes, DVDs. And it's not mere background noise for writing or reading - I'm a full-throated enthusiast of TV, have a very high regard for the very large number of very talented people who do work in the medium (I came close to JOINING such people, a long time ago, when a friend of mine invited me to join the writing staff of a now-forgotten show called "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" - I quite sensibly declined, since in addition to deeply disliking the climate of LA, I'm also not that funny).

I hate the snobbery of 'Kill Your TV' bumper-stickers in Cambridge. I hate the knee-jerk snobbery so many people show toward the medium. I can understand if people more pressed for time than I am (I sleep freakishly little) rule it out of their lives for practical reasons. I'd argue that these people ought to train themselves to concentrate on more than one thing simultaneously - it's not a hard trick to learn (or I couldn't have mastered it myself), and it can double the amount of things you get DONE in an evening. But still, I understand if people want to cut it out of their lives just so they'll have time for homework and socializing and, in the case of the pretty people, even sex.

As with books, so with TV: I sift and sniff all the time for good stuff. TV doesn't have any MORE crap than any other medium - at least, that's my steadfast belief - and it's not the fault of anybody working in the industry that their overlords are venal and stupid. Most of us have venal and stupid overlords, after all - it doesn't make US venal and stupid. Good people everywhere are always trying to do good work. I like to look for their work on TV.

Fair warning: I also like crap, for its own sake.

Unlike over at Stevereads, here I'm not infallible. True, I've watched a very large amount of TV. And true, I put faith in the tenets of my own aesthetics (as everybody does). And true, I'll very tenaciously make my case for anything I like. But there's no authority here, only gamesome debate.

There's a good reason for this. The best TV critic I've ever read (the best pop culture critic just in general, and oh my, far and away the best movie critic) is currently silent, fed up with the litigious cynicism of the age.
In the meantime, here I am! Fallible, contentious, and happy to be both!

Our opening fair dates from last Sunday and is very comfortingly situated in the realm of science fiction, which suits me right down to the ground.

The extreme old-school science fiction (I trust none of you will commence a-quibbling about what constitutes science fiction! Listen carefully: if the AXIAL PREMISES on which your fiction depends are a) internally consistent and b) in any way different from the laws of observable reality, you're writing science fiction - and yet, I'm aware of the fact that under that definition, there's no difference between science fiction and fantasy... that's because there ISN'T any difference between the two) and the extreme new-school science fiction, head-to-head!

First up was 'Masterpiece Theater's new production of 'Dracula.'

As many of you will know, I deeply love Bram Stoker's novel, and I'm always eager to see it get adapted, especially with a special effects budget.

Although, even without one, Bela Lugosi managed to be the quintessential Count, urbane yet threatening, his malevolent face plastered on the covers of all the BEST editions of the novel.

'Masterpiece Theater' is to be commended for the idea of embracing science fiction, especially since their track record is so different. These are the people, after all, who gave us 'The First Churchills' and 'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'Brideshead Revisited' and 'I, Claudius.'

Their 'Dracula' is a curious affair. An almost complete dramatic failure, but a curious affair.

With a work as frequently dramaticized as 'Dracula,' you have to ask how many points there are in favor or against any new rendition. You gradually accustom yourself to the fact that your beloved work will NEVER be fully realized on any kind of video-screen, and you start counting casualties from that moment.

(Oh! The high hopes I had for Francis Ford Coppola's 'Dracula'! A strong, unconventional cast - by anybody's reckoning, Gary Oldman is an interesting choice to play the Count - a director capable of greatness, a comparatively unlimited special effects budget ... and when I saw it in the theater, I was bitterly disappointed. The directing is awful, the acting is mostly awful - of course leading the pack is Keenu "I know where the BASTUD sleeps!" Reeves, but there's also Anthony Hopkins, hearing and completely missing every cue he's offered, and Winona Rider, trying - and failing - to act like somebody who HASN'T been having sex since she was 8 - and the special effects were, well, weirdly used. But every subsequent viewing has made me like it more, so maybe Coppola knew what he was doing after all)

In Bram Stoker's perpetually underrated novel, the truth of the matter is PLENTY dramatic enough: an undying Carpathian count has set his eyes on England and is (legally, Stoker's little masterstroke) buying up derelict properties all over London, places that will serve as nesting-spots to house an increasing brood of undead.

You'll scarcely find any of that in the Masterpiece Theater production. Instead, there's a Count who's the focus of some kind of evil religion, and there's a Lord Holmwood who agrees to finance the Count's move to London because he's been lead to believe a blood transfusion from the Count will cure him of his syphilis - because as long as he's infected, he refuses to sleep with his new wife.

Stoker's plot is of course much better than this nonsense. In the original, Dracula's wants are elemental: he wants a new hunting-ground, one he can eventually come to rule as absolutely as he did Castle Dracula.

In this new 'adaptation,' it's extremely hard to know exactly WHAT Count Dracula wants. He detains Jonathan Harker at his dilipidated keep in Transylvania (this production has no idea what to do with Harker, so he dies early), but all he talks about is how Englishmen don't really believe in God anymore.

There's no good acting in this production (a shame, since David Suchet - who gets the here thankless role of Van Helsing - is entirely wasted), and that's curious in and of itself. Tom Burke turns in the most reliable (though still mediocre) performance as a thoroughly heroic John Seward (although since this production lacks Renfield entirely, it would have a hard time accounting for Seward's presence - if it bothered to try, that is) Dan Stevens shows a precocious predilection to chew scenery as Lord Holmwood.

And the biggest curiosity of all is in the center role: Marc Warren as Count Dracula.

Some of you will remember Warren as Private Blithe, from the great, the epic 'Band of Brothers.' Blithe lost his ability to see, temporarily, because he couldn't stand the things he was seeing. Blithe was a perfect 'wise fool' for the 'Band of Brothers' universe (at least, as long as such a simplistic contrivance could last in that universe), and Warren is wonderful in the role.

He's not wonderful as Dracula. This is no doubt the fault of the material, but nevertheless: this is a Count you're never either afraid of or sympathetic with. During the show's setpiece scene, where the Count erupts from Lucy Westerna's bed to, um, pleasure her right next to her sleeping, fully clothed new husband, the viewer has NO idea what's going on or what to think ... sad for her? Happy for him? Sad for both? Happy for both? Icky for watching?

It doesn't matter anyway, because there's no drama in the production. You're never for a moment compelled to watch. And sure enough, in due time and without much effort, Dracula dies (along with a requisite and clunky 'or DOES he?' final scene that's easily the worst thing in 'Masterpiece Theater's history). There's never any of the best parts of the novel - the ineluctable sense of growing doom, the gradual, seduction-like process by which Dracula infects his female prey, and most of all, the growing sense of comraderie between Van Helsing and his young friends against an evil neither they nor the world has ever seen before.

But fortunately, this tepid Dracula wasn't the only consumer of men's lives and souls on offer last Sunday, because as all of you should know, Sunday night is when 'Battlestar Galactica' airs.

Ah, I can hear the groans from here! All you Cantabridgian TV-snobs out there, matched in your legions by all the science fiction snobs out there!
Nevertheless, that's exactly what I'm talking about: 'Battlestar Galactica,' the best show currently airing on TV.

In last Sunday's episode, the Fleet takes on large number of refugees, including a great many Sagitarrons, who don't believe in modern medicine.

The refugees start falling seriously ill, and in their midst is a Caprican doctor played (with customary aplomb) by Bruce Davison, a doctor on a personal vendetta against Sagitarrons, although it requires our heroic Lt. Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) to detect it and root it out.

Far be it for me to criticize a true-blue (well, true-maple) Canadian actor who embraces science fiction (ulp ... where would ANY of us be without Captain Kirk?) (and certainly he has big - literally, they're enormous - shoes to fill in the whole Canuck-on-board-Galactica contest, after our late long-lost Billy was killed off, Billy played by goofy Canadian stoner Paul Campbell, who's currently enjoying the benefits of Youtube - snippets from his new pilot "Nobody's Watching" can be seen there and led - unprecedentedly, I believe, to the show's being given a shot at the fall lineup) but it bears pointing out that Penikett can't really hold his own with Davison, Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama, and the indomitable Donnelly Rhodes as Doc Cottle.

No matter, though - the episode is great enough on its own to swallow any such quibbles. As usual, Davison brings depth and plausibility to a role that could, in other hands (coughDeanStockwellcough), have been one-dimensional ethnic-cleansing, with a little mustache-twirling thrown in. And Richard Hatch continues to surprise and delight as Tom Varek - in this case worrying about the effect on the Fleet if Baltar is given a high-profile trial.

At the mention of such a trial - which, we're told, will be followed by hanging the guilty man - viewers can't help but hear a deliberate echo of Saddam Hussein's sham-trial and scandalous execution. That's the glory of this new revamped 'Battlestar Galactica' - it tackles big, real-world issues with exactly the wit and terrier intensity that's a hallmark of the very best science ficiton.

Come to think of it, that might have been what the folks at Masterpiece Theater were thinking, when they imported the whole foreign-religious-fundamentalism theme into their new 'Dracula' ... if so, they, like everybody else, could have benefitted from a close viewing of 'Battlestar Galactica.'