Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 94
July 11, 2021
Virgin River 3: Good to Be Back!
The wife and I binged Virgin River 3, just up on Netflix. We really enjoyed it, which is to say, we got totally caught up in the romance, the heartbreak, the roller-coaster ride of soap opera life in this fictional town on a river with sunsets at least as beautiful as Cape Cod Bay, where were for all of June.
Here are some bullet points of what I most liked, and didn't (well, just one), and of course these are spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't yet seen this third season [spoilers follow]:
It was great to see Mel and Jack together for most of this season. Because that's where they belong. Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson did their customarily fine jobs in these roles, and it was a relief especially to see Henderson as Jack again after he played some weirdo bad guy in The Gloaming, which actually was weird across the board.Accordingly, I wasn't happy with Jack breaking up with Mel for her own good. It was necessary in terms of the ensuing narrative, but didn't make sense given how much he'd longed for her in the first two seasons.Tim Matheson as Doc Mullins was just outstanding, speaking truth to Jack and anyone who would listen at all the crucial moments.Hope was absent from this season, except for a Facetime call or two, because Annette O'Toole couldn't travel due to the pandemic. The narrative did a good job of working around her absence. There seemed several times when Hope might return from back East, but the pandemic said otherwise, and you could almost see the narrative being rewritten at those moments.The supporting characters and stories were all strong. My favorite was Brie (Zibby Allen) and Brady (Benjamin Hollingsworth), tipping at least a little into the criminal element of this narrative.Lilly's death was heart-rending, and was especially resonant with our world today, in which untimely death has been all too present.The very last words of this season were a letter-perfect soap ending, ending right in the middle of a conversation between Mel and Jack (my wife tells me such endings are hallmarks of soap operas).There's a winning joy woven deep into Virgin River, and I'm up for season 4 as soon as it's on Netflix.See also Virgin River: The Scenery, The Food, The Acting, and the Story
Cape Cod sunset
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July 8, 2021
Podcast Review of The Tomorrow War
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 185, in which I review The Tomorrow War. So, I saw today in The Hollywood Reporter that The Tomorrow War has been picked up for a sequel on Amazon Prime Video -- which supports my view that, contrary to some nitpicking critics, The Tomorrow War is one excellent movie! Listen to my review and find out why. (No real spoilers, except at the very end of my review.)
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July 7, 2021
24 seconds about Social Media
I offer 24 seconds about the impact of social media. Listen to the entire 23-minute interview here. Also in this interview: Mary Ellen Slater, Elena Valentine, Benjamin O'Keefe, Sven Smith.
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's musicJuly 5, 2021
The Tomorrow War: Cli-Fi, Interstellar, Time Travel
I saw The Tomorrow War on Amazon Prime Video late last night. Some myopic critics gave it mixed reviews. I thought it was just excellent. And not because of the time travel, which was ok, but because of the unfolding plot of the movie, which brings in interstellar species, climate change, and parent-child relationships in an original and rewarding way.
The time travel set-up is the most ordinary part of the movie. Humans from the future come back to our time to recruit soldiers to help in a desperate, losing fight against a species from outer space that moves around here on Earth so quickly they're very difficult to kill. Severing their heads from their body does the trick, but that's tough to do when dozens of these creatures are on screeching lightning attack for every one human soldier. So ... former Green Beret and biology teacher Dan Forester is pretty much sent on a suicide mission to maybe briefly delay the extinction of humanity when he's recruited aka yanked from 2022 and whipped three decades into the future.
Until he meets his daughter, Muri, whom he last hugged when she was a precocious little girl, now in the future a fighting colonel and a brilliant scientist working on some last hopes for humanity. Here's where the movie takes off. The relationship between the embattled Muri and her father is heart-rending and beautiful. Dan helps her develop a toxin that can kill the horrific creatures, but of course all they have is a small amount of it, so the only way it can save the day is for Dan to go back in time and kill the Whitespikes (that's their name) right after they first arrived.
But when did they arrive? Much earlier than anyone thought. And here I'll leave this recounting of the narrative, on the slight chance that you're reading this and haven't seen the movie.*[footnote spoiler] But the location and time of the interstellar arrival and why the monsters took so long to emerge is a compelling slice of cli-fi.
Meanwhile, the action scenes -- the battles with the Whitespikes -- are breathtaking and top notch. Yvonne Strahovski -- who was excellent in Dexter and 24: Live Another Day -- was even better as Muri in The Tomorrow War. J. K. Simmons is a pleasure to see in any role, and he was perfect as Dan's estranged father. And Charles Pratt was fine as Dan, reminding me at times of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
My advice: forget about the nitpicking critics. Sit back and enjoy an adrenaline pumping, thought provoking, A-1 summer science fiction movie.
a different kind of time travel=================================================
*I will say, for people who saw the movie, that we could call the world in which Dan goes into the future, before he destroys the Whitespikes, World 1. In that world, the adult Muri dies. The destruction of the Whitespikes instantly shifts World 1 into World 2, where the narrative concludes with Dan reunited with his family and young Muri. She probably will become a brilliant scientist, but she won't be fighting the Whitespikes and won't be killed by them, because they no longer exist. That part of the story is the best time travel part.
Paul Levinson's books ... Paul Levinson's musicJuly 4, 2021
Bosch Season 7: Can't Let Go
It's the theme song of Bosch (written by Jesse Nolan, performed by Caught a Ghost) because it's the story of Bosch's professional life. It's animated every season in this best cop drama ever on television, and never more so than in it's seventh and final season on Amazon Prime Video.
What Bosch can't let go of is satisfying his profound sense of justice, or bringing to justice the perpetrators of the murders he's investigating and haunted by, or haunted by and investigating. In season seven, the victim is a 10-year old girl who dies in a deliberately set fire.
The eight-episode season is powerful and memorable for other reasons, too. Episode six contains one of the most intense short shoot-outs I've seen on any screen. Paul Calderon is practically shaking with tension and fear as his Jimmy Robertson tries to protect Bosch's beloved daughter Maddie from a skilled hitman who has just taken out a judge who is Bosch's current lover. The acting, by the way, is superb on the part of every character, both in this scene and the entire series.
Titus Welliver in the title role gives the performance of his career. Jamie Hector as Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar may be even more than impressive than he was as Marlo in The Wire, which is the biggest compliment in my book, in case you didn't know what I think of The Wire. Speaking of The Wire, Lance Reddick is always good, and he's as good as ever in Bosch. I've seen Amy Aquino in a few prior series, but she became an essential character in Bosch. Madison Lintz has really grown into her crucial part as Bosch's daughter, and I'm looking forward to seeing her in the Bosch spinoff.
Bosch began on Amazon at the dawn of our age of streaming, and helped establish it. The series went out every bit as strong as it began, something you can't say about every great series. Similarly, it kept a consistency of character and focus, something you can't say about too many things, period, in this our uncertain age. But I'm certain I'll be watching the Bosch spinoff, and I'll see you back here with a review of that when it's up on Amazon.
See also Bosch: First Half: Highly Recommended ... Bosch: Second Half as Fine as the First ... Bosch Season 2: Dragnet with Uber ... Bosch 3: Best Season So Far ... Bosch 4: Delivering and Transcending the Genre ... Bosch 5: Room with a Killer View ... Bosch Season 6: The Best Police on Television ...
another kind of police story
Bosch Season 6: The Best Police on Television ...
July 2, 2021
Podcast Review of The Rain
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 184, in which I review The Rain.
Blog post review of The Rain
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June 30, 2021
"Merri Goes Round" Played on The Music Authority Today
Robbie Rist + Don Frankel = Sundial Symphony
That's right -- starting at 4 minutes 54 seconds into the first hour of today's Music Authority program, you'll hear Sundial Symphony singing "Merri Goes Round," a song I wrote with Ed Fox in 1971, recorded back then by a studio group I put together called The Trousers.
Sundial Symphony's version was recorded in 2016, and released on Big Stir Records in 2019. I should mention that Sundial Symphony consists of Robbie Rist (yep, Cousin Oliver) and Don Frankel. Don played keyboard on lots of the tracks on my 1972 LP Twice Upon A Rhyme, and accordion on "If I Traveled to the Past" and "Tau Ceti" on Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, released on Old Bear Records and Light in the Attic Records (vinyl) in 2020.
James Jim Prell, DJ for The Music Authority, says all the songs he plays are chosen by "algorithm". But I owe him a big thank you anyway, for presiding over that algorithmic choice!
listen to today's Music Authority (any time) -- Merri Goes Round starts at 4min54sec, and there are lots of other great songs in this episodeTwice Upon A Rhyme on Spotify and BandcampWelcome Up on Spotify and Bandcampreviews of these albums and more
June 27, 2021
The Rain: Lessons for Today
So, I watched all three seasons of The Rain on Netflix 2018-2020, and see that I somehow never got around to reviewing it at the time. I'll make up for that now.
The Rain is a Danish science fiction series, in which the rain carries a deadly virus that wipes out most of humanity. We learn that some group of people embedded the virus in the rain, which makes this a potent biowarfare story. And since in the immediate aftermath of the series, our species off screen in our world fell prey to the deadly COVID19 viral pandemic, The Rain has special relevance today.
As to the narrative, for a variety of reasons, teenagers are the ones who for the most part survive. I liked the first season the best, because it's mostly about stranded teenagers struggling to survive. Simone and her young brother Rasmus take center stage, after their mother succumbs, and their father, a scientist, seems to have disappeared. We soon learn that he was involved in research about the virus -- whether to create or counter it is not clear at this point -- and Lucas was somehow part of his father's experiment.
Although the quest for a cure continues in the second and third seasons, the narrative switches focus to Simone and Lucas's discovery of various groups of people who have survived the rain plague, in remote and sometimes militaristic communities. We also begin to see back stories of some of the major players, giving The Rain a Lost-like quality, which works ok but distracts from the central pursuit of getting a cure for the virus.
That quest puts The Rain right in our home territory, where we're trying to vaccinate as much of the world as fast as possible. The Rain is worth watching not only for its vivid drama, but for the lesson it provides about humans messing with nature, and failing to come up quickly enough with a remedy for their errors.
June 24, 2021
Podcast: Supreme Court Protects Student Right to Free Speech!
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 183, in which I discuss the importance of the Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. US Supreme Court decision yesterday, which found that a high school's attempt to punish a student for using obscene language on her Snapchat violated the student's (Brandi Levy's) First Amendment rights.
Read the Supreme Court decision here.
Read blog post about the decision here.
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June 23, 2021
Supreme Court Protects Student Right to Free Speech!
A very important and precedent-setting ruling came down this morning from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 that the Mahoney Area School District in Pennsylvania was wrong to try to punish high school student Brandi Levy for posting "Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything" on Snapchat in 2017 after she was not given a spot on her high school's cheerleading squad.
The decisive ruling affirms that the protection the Supreme Court gave students in its 1969 Tinker decision -- in which it held that students could not be prohibited from wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War -- applied to non-political statements made outside of school on a social media network like Snapchat.
The decision is significant for at least three reasons: (1) it recognizes that obscene language is worthy of First Amendment protection, (2) it protects students from school censorship for statements made outside of the school, and (3) it does not make an exception for First Amendment protection because the communication was on the Internet.
The first point, I hope, should from now on be taken as a precedent not to allow the FCC to censure and fine television and radio media for broadcasting obscene language, which, for example, has led CBS to lacerate rap and hip-hop performances during the Grammys every year. Today's decision can also be seen as a reversal of the Supreme Court's unfortunate FCC v. Pacifica decision in 1978, which upheld the FCC's right to censure and threaten WBAI-FM Radio for broadcasting George Carlin's seven dirty word routine.
The second point and the third point in effect reverse the Supreme Court's 2011 decision to not even consider Avery Doninger's appeal of the 2008 US Court of Appeals Second Circuit decision (made by a panel that included Judge Sonia Sotomayor, before she was appointed to the Supreme Court) that Doninger's high school was entitled to punish her after she called school officials "douchebags" on her Live Journal blog. (See my 2009 interview with Avery and Lauren Doninger for more). Now, just under a decade later, the Supreme Court including Sotomayor has spoken clearly and overwhelmingly on the excesses of school officials, who could use an education themselves on the First Amendment.
The one dissenter in today's momentous decision was Clarence Thomas, who (amazingly) found the Court's decision "untethered from anything stable". The First Amendment couldn't be a more reliable post on which to tether our freedoms.
Thomas, of course, was appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1991. In other words, every single one of Trump's appointees did the right thing in this hallmark case, demonstrating again the independence of our judiciary, which more often than not over the years continues to be one the pillars of our freedom and our democracy.
=== Read the Supreme Court decision here ====
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