THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

RIP to the beguiling and funny Mary Tyler Moore, passed on at 80. She was a significant and influential presence in my childhood, but that’s only saying what most people of around my age who grew up watching TV can say.

Many of the encomia that have been offered to her since the news of her death broke have focused, rightly, on how The Mary Tyler Moore Show pioneered the image of an independent single woman. Important as this was, I think the show’s magic and originality ran even deeper.

It wasn’t just that Moore’s character, Mary Richards, was a career woman, or even that her career wasn’t just something to do until a husband came along. The show depicted how Mary Richards built, from her coworkers and her neighbors, a true family that was entirely sufficient to a fulfilling life. This seems commonplace now—indeed, it’s the basic dynamic of most sitcoms—but if there was an earlier TV series that hinged on it, I can’t think of it.

There was no real sense that Mary Richards was a lonely person. She wasn’t averse to marriage, but even if it never came along, the lyrics of the theme song weren’t just a platitude—the pleasure of the series was Mary’s discovery that love really was all around, and there really was no need to waste it.

Time for one more 2016 list, Your Humble Narrator’s annual rundown of the books I’ve read over the past year (as always, excluding newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, poems, comic books, blogs, facebook posts, shopping lists, owner’s manuals, graffiti, etc.):

Slade House by David Mitchell

The Mommy Dearest Diaries by Rutanya Alda

Communion by Frank Lauria

Almost Interesting by David Spade

Night of the Trilobites by Peter Leslie

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Close to Critical by Hal Clement 

Kramer’s War by Derek Robinson

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett

Frankenstein Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss 

Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

A shorter-than-usual list this year—I’m a ploddingly slow reader even with short books, and the ponderous Cloud Atlas and Ben-Hur slowed me to a crawl this year. Both were wonderful, however. In Ben-Hur, for instance, Wallace offers this bit of 19^th-Century wisdom that the 21^st Century seems to be having a hard time with: “A certain facility of accommodation in the matter of religion comes to us after much intercourse with people of different faith; gradually we attain the truth that every creed is illustrated by good men who are entitled to our respect, but whom we cannot respect without courtesy to their creed.”

Note to Milla Jovovich: 

I know how you feel about me, so if there’s no review of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter on this blog Friday morning, please don’t be hurt: It’s not because I didn’t want to see it. It’s because the movie wasn’t screened for critics, at least not here in Phoenix. All the same, I did watch your convenient video recap of the series on Youtube, and greatly appreciated the refresher course.

In Milla’s honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week we acknowledge the Popokarimu… 

…a bioengineered flying abomination from the movie.

BEN-HURRIED

Opening this weekend: 

 Ben-Hur—It’s been a while, if ever, since I can recall thinking that a big-studio feature film was too short. But that, among other things, is what makes this newest version of Lew Wallace’s toga tale a dud.

As before, Jewish rich kid Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) comes to grief, separation from his family and enslavement as a galley oarsman via his Roman pal Messala (Toby Kebbell). Judah struggles his way back to freedom and solvency, eventually becoming a chariot-driver for a rich nomad (Morgan Freeman), all the while dreaming of revenge. All this takes place concurrently with the life of Jesus Christ (Rodrigo Santoro), with whom Judah significantly crosses paths now and then.

Most of us are probably most familiar with this yarn through William Wyler’s long and lavish 1959 movie version. As risibly corny as Charlton Heston’s grimacing performance in the title role can now seem, that film’s epic length, though admittedly exhausting, does result in dramatic payoffs. The same goes for Wallace’s pedantic, didactic, description-heavy yet somehow highly agreeable 1880 novel.

The new film rushes through the story in around two hours. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the talented Kazakh behind the bizarre, intriguing Night Shift and Day Shift, this Ben-Hur is adequately-acted, and it climaxes with a chariot race that’s brutal and pretty exciting (though tough on horse lovers). But it’s perfunctory—it hustles through episodes like Judah’s visit to his loved ones in a leper colony so fast that it’s almost funny.

Similarly, the scenes toward the end depicting Gethsemane, the Via Dolorosa and The Crucifixion are like a Passion Play on speed. Truly and without irony, nothing in this Ben-Hur was as spiritually moving to me as George Clooney’s speech earlier this year about universal brotherhood at the foot of The Cross in the movie-within-the-movie in the Coen Brothers spoof Hail, Caesar!

The emotional impact of the new Ben-Hur, by contrast, is nearly nil. The movie can watched painlessly enough, but that’s the problem—Ben-Hur without pain is like Singin’ in the Rain without dancing.