Outside of Atlas Shrugged, which I’ve already discussed, my only film of the past week was ZELIG (1983), Woody Allen’s mockumentary about the eponymous human chameleon (played by Allen) whose teenage insecurities (“Everyone else had read Moby Dick—I pretended I had so I could fit in.”) manifest in adulthood as the power to fit with everyone around him: He’s an aristocrat around the rich, an Irish servant below stairs, a psychiatrist when committed for care (Mia Farrow plays the female shrink who treats him) and at one point a Nazi. All of this is done in a dead-one documentary style, presenting Zelig as the kind of once-famous figure PBS’ American Experience likes to spotlight. Watching this made me aware how much fantasy and SF Allen has done over the years, such as Sleeper, this film and Purple Rose of Cairo and Alice down the road. “I split with Freud over the concept of penis envy—he believed it only applied to women.”
While short on movies this week (partly because one of my Netflix rentals died midway through), I have, however, been following along with at least a little of the current TV season. You already know what I think about Revolution, so here’s capsule reviews of some others:
•Arrow: A very grim, Batmanish version of Green Arrow, but so far I’m enjoying it.
•Elementary: I like this, but it’s not up to the BBC’s Sherlock. In fact, it doesn’t really feel Holmesian at all: Emphasizing his mental problems and drug addiction makes him come off as much a version of USA’s Monk (a crazy detective assisted by his medical companion).
*666 Park Avenue: I think this is actually holding me less than Revolution. It seems very heavily influenced by Rosemary’s Baby, and one character’s death in the last episode seemed completely arbitrary and unrelated to any of the main plots. (it could just as easily have been done in Tales From the Darkside).
