Film and Television

Lewis: Series One and Two

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching the first two seasons of LEWIS, the sequel series to INSPECTOR MORSE, one of my all-time favorite mystery series.

Lewis was Morse’s long-suffering sidekick in the original series. Now Lewis is the Inspector and he has a suffering side-kick of his own, former seminary student Sgt. Hathaway. The series features many of the same production team as MORSE, as well as the same Oxford locations and the Hitchcockian cameos by author Colin Dexter, who wrote the books that the series was based on. The commonalities end there.

The MORSE mysteries were rich, complex, surprising and intelligent…and were enlivened by Morse’s wonderfully irascible, embittered and brilliant bachelor and his strained, father-son relationship with Lewis, a simple-minded family man.  The writer/directors of MORSE included Danny Boyle and Anthony Minghella…there are no comparable talents on the new show.

The mysteries in LEWIS are plodding, padded and obvious…and worst of all, they are mostly the same story told again and again (a group of current students or former classmates share a dark secret that sparks a series of killings). Lewis and Hathaway end up solving the crime through coincidence and luck rather than deduction or cleverness. The suspects are all one-dimensional cliches.

The absence of John Thaw’s Morse is keenly felt…even more so by the unnecessary references to his character that are sprinkled heavy-handedly and awkwardly through many of the episodes. One of the biggest mistakes was trying to turn Lewis into Morse…by
killing off his wife and sending away his kids. So now he is the lonely
bachelor butting heads with his bosses…almost forcing the audience to compare him to Morse. Unfortunately, his loneliness isn’t nearly as interesting and revealing as Morse’s. It’s just dull.

And while Morse’s ill-fated crushes were sad reminders of his lonely life…and his inability to fit in…the gimmick in LEWIS of having a female suspect in just about every episode wanting to drag him into bed is ridiculous and embarrassing.

And yet…I enjoy the show and pretty much devoured the episodes. I find it oddly soothing…like a cup of hot tea. The primary attraction of LEWIS is the relationship between Lewis and Hathaway (who is, by far, the more interesting character of the two) which sort of plays like “MORSE light.” Hathaway is a fascinating character and actor Lawrence Fox brings far more depth to his performance than there appears to be on the page. Their gentle banter lacks the bite of MORSE, but it has its pleasures all the same.

Maybe it’s more nostalgia for MORSE than any real love of LEWIS that keeps me watching…

LEWIS would clearly like to be the successor to MORSE…and if ratings in the UK are any indication, they’ve achieved their goal…but in my mind, REBUS wins that honor hands-down.

I’m Waiting for the remake of Barnaby Jones

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TVSquad reports the surprising news that CBS is developing a remake of the Quinn Martin series THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, which starred Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as two SFPD detectives. Screenwriters Sheldon Turner and Robert Port are writing the script and Simon West is attached to direct if it goes to pilot. Can CANNON and BARNABY JONES be far behind?

Tempest in an A Cup

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Over the last two days, I’ve received hundreds of hits on a four year old post about Disney giving Keira Knightly bigger boobs in the KING ARTHUR publicity stills and poster art. So why the renewed attention? It turns out that Knightly has refused to let another studio do the same thing for her new film DUCHESS:

“Keira Knightly is essentially giving young women permission to stand
up in their communities and their schools and their families and say,
‘Look, this is the way I look and it is OK,” said “Perfect Girls,
Starving Daughters” author Courtney Martin.

The 23-year-old’s chest has been the subjected to scrutiny
before. In promotions for “King Arthur” in 2004, the actress’ A-cup was
morphed into a C-cup on posters. At the time Knightly admitted, “those
things weren’t really mine,” though she still went along with the
publicity campaign. “I think that’s incredibly brave and could have a
huge impact on young women,” Martin said of Knightly’s decision.

You Can’t Beat The Original

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LA FEMME NIKITA was a fantastic French thriller that was remade, scene for scene, in the American POINT OF NO RETURN and the Chinese BLACK CAT…as well as a USA Network pilot/series. But none of the remakes could match Luc Besson’s original.

Here’s the amazing “restaurant” scene from the original LA FEMME NIKITA (broken down into two clips) and the same scene in the U.S. remake.



What a Difference Acting Ability Makes

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Many years ago, Michael Mann wrote and directed a flop pilot for NBC called LA TAKEDOWN, starring Scott Plank and Alex MacArthur. The pilot would be a forgotten footnote in Mann’s career if not for the fact that he pulled off an amazing feat — he manged to remake it, almost word-for-word, scene-for-scene, as the big-budget feature film HEAT, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. This may be the one and only time a busted TV pilot has been remade as a feature film…with hardly any changes. Here is the original “restaurant” scene from LA TAKEDOWN and the same scene in HEAT.  Same words, better actors. What a difference acting ability makes…