TV/Movies Megathread

[HVC]

The CEO of Paramount, Brad Alan Grey, is 58 years old. So, no.

always got to blame the boomers. Damn gen Xers can't take the blame for anything.

[CountDeMoney]

We're still stuck in Marketing, lol

[HVC]

We're still stuck in Marketing, lol

The whole generation thing is confusing anyway. Growing up I was gen x, then I somehow became gen xy, and now I'm a millennial.

[Neil]

There were things that I liked about the film.  The part where the main character was a galley slave did a good job of conveying the misery and some of the claustrophobia of such a terrible fate.  The sea battle was fun. 

Still, someone who hadn't seen the original Ben-Hur would probably be confused by the marketing.  The commercials are all chariot-racing and fighting, and there's virtually no fighting and the chariot racing is confined to the last quarter of the film.  I felt like Morgan Freeman was phoning it in, especially in the scenes when he's interacting with Pilate.  Everything just comes off flat. 

My two big gripes are as follows:  The miracle at the end completely eliminates any sense of consequence or depth from the movie.  It's easy for Ben-Hur to give up his hatred when he got his wife back, some random Roman saved his sister and mother, Jesus cured their leprosy and he's properly crushed and subordinated his adopted brother.  Of course he can live a life without the need for revenge, because he got his revenge and had every wrong that had been committed against him erased.  It's like in one of those Steven Segal movies where the criminals kill his wife and son and so he goes on a rampage of revenge, only after he beats up the final boss, his family comes back to life and him and the boss become friends.  And that leads into my second gripe:  Ben-Hur was kind of the bad guy.  I tend to take a dim view of separatist movements in general, so the Zealot fight for Judean 'freedom' left me cold.  And Ben-Hur realizes that the Zealots are going to bring about a massive reaction that will lead to the downfall of all the inhabitants of Judea, but won't actually do anything about it because for him his princely title isn't a responsibility, but just means that he can have everything he wants, the way he wants it.  So when his houseguest shoots an arrow at Pilate off of his roof ("Come at the king, you'd best not miss"), rather than doing the right thing and turning the murderer over to justice, he actively tries to cover for him and lets him escape.  He's counting on his friend to get him out of trouble, despite knowing that his friend is in a weak position politically and that his entire well-being rides on Pilate's support.  Messala isn't the author of downfall of the House of Hur.  Judah couldn't understand why anyone's actions should have consequences, and so rather than have a murderer pay the price for his crime, he spent five years on the oar, his father-in-law died and his female relatives escaped crucifixion only by chance.  Maybe he's not a villain, but he's one of those unlikable self-absorbed characters that you see showing up in modern films.

[Ed Anger]

We're still stuck in Marketing, lol

The whole generation thing is confusing anyway. Growing up I was gen x, then I somehow became gen xy, and now I'm a millennial.

Generation Eggplant.

[HVC]

We're still stuck in Marketing, lol

The whole generation thing is confusing anyway. Growing up I was gen x, then I somehow became gen xy, and now I'm a millennial.

Generation Eggplant.

[11B4V]

We're still stuck in Marketing, lol

The whole generation thing is confusing anyway. Growing up I was gen x, then I somehow became gen xy, and now I'm a millennial.

Generation Eggplant.

Now that's funny right there.

[celedhring]

Finished binging River (god bless British-length TV shows). Liked it a lot.

The main character feels a bit artificial and implausible, and in the hands of a lesser actor he would be extremely unrelatable - I.e.[spoiler] if he's been suffering these hallucinations since he was a kid he probably should know better by this point than to talk to them in front of other people. If he hasn't, one wonders how has he been able to become a police inspector - of all things - instead of being locked up much sooner[/spoiler] - but he's the show's premise so you take him or you don't. That said, the way the show uses his conversations with these hallucinations to showcase his fears, crushing sense of guilt, grief, etc... is simply fantastic. The case itself is pretty compelling too, and how the multiple layers that are peeled off change River's relationship with the "ghost" of his dead partner through the episodes is also magnificently handled. All in all, great show.

[Malthus]

Finished binging River (god bless British-length TV shows). Liked it a lot.

The main character feels a bit artificial and implausible, and in the hands of a lesser actor he would be extremely unrelatable - I.e.[spoiler] if he's been suffering these hallucinations since he was a kid he probably should know better by this point than to talk to them in front of other people. If he hasn't, one wonders how has he been able to become a police inspector - of all things - instead of being locked up much sooner[/spoiler] - but he's the show's premise so you take him or you don't. That said, the way the show uses his conversations with these hallucinations to showcase his fears, crushing sense of guilt, grief, etc... is simply fantastic. The case itself is pretty compelling too, and how the multiple layers that are peeled off change River's relationship with the "ghost" of his dead partner through the episodes is also magnificently handled. All in all, great show.

My guess is [spoiler]he was prone to very occasional hallucinations before, for which he 'self medicated' (in the show they reveal he was taking some sort of drugs for it), but it got a lot worse after his partner was murdered - and for various reasons they demonstrate in depth he's shown as not caring to 'self medicate' to get rid of them. So what had been a very marginal problem got a hell of a lot worse in short order. [/spoiler].

I do however think that [spoiler]a police inspector demonstrating that level of mental impairment, whether a "natural" effect of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or not, would be put on medical leave in short order in reality. [/spoiler]

[celedhring]

Yeah, people around him are faaar too forgiving of his condition - in particular the new partner and the psychiatrist. As somebody (forgot who) says in the first episode, "he should be in compassionate leave". It's my main objection to the show, really; his character is really extreme, and he doesn't really fit well in a realistic show.

But I'm usually pretty willing to suspend disbelief if the show is actually worth a damn, and this one is worth several damns.

[Sheilbh]

I have thoughts but on my phone.

Just to chip in and say I loved the sad disco.

[Malthus]

I have thoughts but on my phone.

Just to chip in and say I loved the sad disco.

It's great, and very ear worm-y. 

'I love to love, but my baby just wants to dance ...'

[celedhring]

Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute. Adaptation of the Mozart opera set in WWI, with the Queen of the Night riding a tank. It's... cute in parts and tacky in many others, partly because Branagh just can't stop trying to outdo himself in the visual gimmick department in every scene, with pretty uneven results. Plus it commits the unforgivable sin of translating the lyrics from German to English, which is the same reason I can't watch the otherwise sublime adaptation of The Tales of Hoffmann by Michael Powell.

[Sheilbh]

Sir Antony Jay, RIP

Sir Antony Jay obituary
Co-writer of Yes Minister, BBC TV's satire on the mechanics of government
Stephen Bates
Tuesday 23 August 2016 18.44 BST Last modified on Tuesday 23 August 2016 22.00 BST

Sir Antony Jay, who has died aged 86, was one of the two authors behind the influential 1980s BBC government satire Yes Minister and its successor Yes, Prime Minister. It was a broadcasting triumph that not only intrigued and attracted the civil service caste and politicians from Margaret Thatcher downwards, but has echoed around the world – with sales to 84 countries – and reverberated in spin-off books and a successful West End adaptation of Yes, Prime Minister.

The idea of a hapless politician, constantly thwarted, outwitted and occasionally saved by wilier, more devious, civil servants struck a resonant chord among viewers in democracies from Europe to Australia and the US, and taught viewers valuable, if cynical, lessons about the shortcomings of governments. While it did not make Jay's fortune – he and his co-author Jonathan Lynn were paid £1,200 an episode between them – it did establish him as an occasional media commentator of trenchant rightwing views on Westminster and Whitehall politics forever afterwards.

The series had its genesis in Jay's much earlier experience as a young TV producer on the groundbreaking BBC nightly news programme Tonight in the late 50s and early 60s. The live broadcasts were among the first to interview politicians robustly and to report the news occasionally irreverently. What it taught Jay was the conceit and vulnerability of ministers when viewed at close quarters. "You saw a lot of politicians were just puppets," he told the Irish Times in 2013. "I realised these compromises, driven by conflicts between ministers and permanent secretaries, had huge comic potential."

Nevertheless it took nearly 20 years for the programme to get off the ground, the 38 episodes of the two series between 1979 and 1988 coinciding with the Thatcher government. Its success was not only down to the crunchingly authentic-seeming verbal jousts between the main characters but to the casting of Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker, the harassed and permanently alarmed minister at the fictional Ministry for Administrative Affairs, and Nigel Hawthorne as his feline permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby, refereed by Derek Fowlds as the private secretary Bernard Woolley. Eddington, seeing where the laughs were, had originally wanted to play Sir Humphrey, but was persuaded of the comic potential of the minister. Nonetheless, he then watched Hawthorne win four Baftas without winning any himself as the series progressed.

The writers themselves were not even invited to the Bafta ceremonies at which the programmes eventually won a total of seven awards. Their partnership was successful despite their different political allegiances: Jay, the rightwing free marketer, researched and supplied the plot lines and Lynn, the left-leaning actor, provided the jokes and dialogue.

The scripts were closely based on detailed research and conversations with former political advisers and ministers, including Marcia Williams and Bernard Donoughue, who had been members of Harold Wilson's staff at 10 Downing Street, and the scenarios were sometimes derived from real incidents. The distinction between a ministry's policy and its minister's policy came from a Civil Service College lecture by Barbara Castle that Jay attended in 1972.

The undatedness of the plot lines arose because the original scripts were written well in advance of transmission – some actually during the era of the Callaghan government in the late 70s – so they could not take their topicality from current events later. "We often had to write months ahead of transmission ... it means you can't put in little topical jokes that will be funny tomorrow but meaningless months later," Jay said. "Our jokes were about permanent things rather than temporary things and they stayed relevant."

Thatcher became a fan, identifying so closely with the series that she even insisted on writing a sketch for the characters in 1984 before a National Viewers' and Listeners' Association award ceremony. Lynn, Hawthorne and Eddington were reluctant participants, not least because the prime minister's sense of humour was notoriously non-existent, but also because they did not wish to be associated with a partisan event, since the whole point was that Hacker's politics were never identified. Jay, however, was happy to indulge the prime minister: "I was a great supporter of Margaret Thatcher: she was very nice about it. It gave us lots of publicity," he said.

Jay and Lynn had met at a company called Video Arts that Jay had formed with John Cleese in 1972, after he had left the BBC. It was set up to make training documentaries about business management. The humorous approach, tackling issues such as how not to interview candidates and how not to sell things – described by Lynn as the comedy of cock-up – was wildly successful, and Lynn, who had been in the Cambridge Footlights with Cleese, was recommended to Jay when Cleese left to write Fawlty Towers. The company, which started with £4,000, was eventually sold for £44m in 1989.

By then Yes, Prime Minister – the sequel series in which Hacker fortuitously reaches Downing Street – had come to an end in the UK, and Lynn was leaving for Hollywood to become a film director. The two teamed up again more than 20 years later to write a stage play based on the same characters, though with new actors, since Eddington and Hawthorne had both died, and Fowlds was too old to return as Bernard. The stage Yes, Prime Minister came to the West End in 2010 and also toured the US. The afterlife continued in a spin-off television series featuring the same characters, broadcast by the Gold satellite channel.

Born in London, Antony was the son of Ernest Jay, a character actor who appeared in a number of British films in the 30s and 40s, and his wife, Catherine Hay, also an actor. He was educated on a scholarship at St Paul's school, west London, and studied classics and comparative philology at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He claimed to have spent his time at university playing bridge and cricket and writing for university magazines before knuckling down to study and being awarded a first-class degree.

After national service as a second lieutenant in the Royal Signals, in 1955 he joined the BBC and was in at the start of the Tonight programme as a producer. Broadcast live, with limited technical resources, the show centred on its unflappable presenter Cliff Michelmore, who could be relied upon to cope with films breaking down and guests held up in traffic. But it was also a training ground not only for onscreen journalists but also for producers and directors such as Jay, Alasdair Milne and Michael Peacock. Jay became the programme's editor (1962-63), and left BBC TV as head of talks features (1963-64) to become a freelance writer and producer.

Following the sale of Video Arts and the success of the Yes Minister series, Jay retired to Somerset, from where he produced a stream of works on management techniques, spin-off books including Jim Hacker's diaries and How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen's Guide to Fighting Officialdom (1997) and even a handbook, Not in Our Back Yard: How to Run a Protest Campaign and Save the Neighbourhood (2005), about organising community resistance to planning proposals for the likes of wind farms and road schemes.

There was also a regular stream of articles, many attacking his old employers at the BBC, for receptive papers such as the Daily Mail and Telegraph. He insisted that the corporation was institutionally leftwing, and in 2011 he called for it to be reduced to Radio 4 and BBC1: "What more do we need? The case for a drastic slimming-down gets stronger every day."

Jay was knighted in 1988, at about the time Yes, Prime Minister ended, though apparently for his much earlier work as a producer of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts. His final collaboration with Lynn came in the Guardian earlier this month, with Sir Humphrey welcoming a new Brexit minister.

In 1957 he married Jill Watkins. She survives him, along with their children, Mike, Roni, Kate and David.

• Antony Rupert Jay, writer and producer, born 20 April 1930; died 21 August 2016

Edit: Damn. Should've known, as ever the Telegraph obituary is better:

Sir Antony Jay, co-author of Yes Minister – obituary
23 AUGUST 2016 • 7:15PM

Sir Antony Jay, who has died aged 86, was a writer, broadcaster and director, and co-author, with Jonathan Lynn, of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, the political comedies which kept the nation laughing through the Thatcherite 1980s.

The guiding principle of Yes, Minister, which first aired on BBC2 in 1981, was a gentle satire on a governing system in which elected politicians are outmanoeuvred by their more worldly, unelected officials. The series starred Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker, the hapless, publicity-hungry but risk-averse minister for administrative affairs engaged in constant wrangles with the Civil Service in the form of his Machiavellian permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne). The minister was aided  and abetted (sometimes) by his private secretary, Bernard Woolley, played by Derek Fowlds.

With such gems as Sir Humphrey's alarmed response to Hacker's suggestion of an official enquiry: "A basic rule of government, minister, is never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be," and Hacker's perennial aversion to "courageous" decisions, the series became compulsive viewing, not least for the politicians and bureaucrats it satirised, including Margaret Thatcher herself.

Despite not being renowned for her sense of humour, the Prime Minister claimed that Yes, Minister was her favourite programme and once turned up at the BBC studios with her own script. The stars of the show, no admirers, had to be cajoled into acting out a slightly awkward scene, broadcast on the evening news bulletins, in which Mrs Thatcher was seen ordering Hacker and Sir Humphrey to ''abolish economists'' as a first step toward cutting the budget. '

Yes, Minister ran for three series, before the advancement of Jim Hacker's career (due to his valiant defiance of a new Euro directive redefining the British banger as an "emulsified offal tube"), led to its relaunch as Yes, Prime Minister, with the same cast (Sir Humphrey promoted to Cabinet Secretary), in 1986. The series ran until 1988.

Jay felt that some politicians laughed through gritted teeth, and certainly there were dissenters. Nicholas Ridley, in his time as Transport Secretary, turned down a Foreign Office suggestion that he should take a set of Yes, Minister videos to present to his hosts during an official visit to India, objecting that the programme gave a false and damaging impression of the true relationship between ministers and their civil servants. But Ridley was no Jim Hacker.

Yet the comedy had an international resonance and clones of the series appeared in numerous different languages, including Hindi. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe was said to be a No 1 fan.

However, not many, perhaps, were aware that the serial was commissioned with a serious political purpose: to popularise public choice theory. It is because it succeeded spectacularly that Jay received a knighthood in 1988.

Antony Rupert Jay was born on April 20 1930 and educated as a scholar at St Paul's School, London. He won another scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with Firsts in Classics and Comparative Philology.

After National Service in the Royal Signals, Jay joined BBC Television in 1955, and was a member of the team that launched the current affairs programme Tonight, which he edited from 1962 to 1963. After a further year as head of Television Talk Features, he left the BBC to work as a freelance writer and producer.

It was Jay's growing interest in public choice theory that helped to shape Yes, Minister, an interest that after he became a partner with John Cleese and two others in Video Arts, a company that makes comedy training films for business managers and campaigners.

In economics public choice theory assumes that all economic actors – businessmen, consumers, politicians and bureaucrats – are motivated primarily by individual gain. Thus, politicians pursue re-election and bureaucrats pursue budget-maximisation, while voters and interest groups chase free lunches. The trick is to know your enemy and exploit his self-interest to your own advantage.

Jay incorporated the public choice lessons implicit in Yes, Minister in a series of guides, including Management and Machiavelli (1967); Effective Presentation (1970); Corporation Man (1972); The Householder's Guide to Community Defence Against Bureaucratic Aggression (1972); and How to Beat Sir Humphrey (1997). In 1996 he edited the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations.

In later life Jay turned against his former employers at the BBC, condemning its anti-establishment mindset, and in a highly controversial report, How to Save the BBC, written for the Centre for Policy Studies in 2008, he branded the corporation "bloated, biased and creaky".

In 2011, Jay and Jonathan Lynn got together again to write an anniversary stage production of Yes, Prime Minister, updated for the era of spin, blackberrys and "sexed up" dossiers, and set in a country in financial meltdown. Starring Simon Williams as Sir Humphrey Appleby and Richard McCabe as Jim Hacker, the show was staged at the Theatre Royal in London, winning a Whatsonstage award for Best New Comedy.

In 2013 the two writers joined forces with UKTV's Gold channel to create a six-part remake of Yes, Prime Minister, updated for the era of coalition, with David Haig as Hacker  opposite Henry Goodman's suave Sir Humphrey. The satire was as sharp as ever.

Jay also wrote the BBC TV documentaries Royal Family and Elizabeth R, for which he was appointed CVO in 1993 for personal services to the Royal Family.

Antony Jay married, in 1957, Rosemary Hill, with whom he had two sons and two daughters.

Sir Antony Jay, born April 20 1930, died August 21 2016

[Tonitrus]

In 1957 he married Jill Watkins. She survives him, along with their children, Mike, Roni, Kate and David.

Antony Jay married, in 1957, Rosemary Hill, with whom he had two sons and two daughters.