**** The Wire, Season 1
*** Star Trek
* Honey West
*** The Shop around the Corner
**** The Prisoner
*** Mutiny on the Bounty
***** Touchez pas au Grisbi (aka Hands off the Loot)
** The Master Touch (aka Un uomo da rispettare)
** The Trouble with Harry

Everyone says how great the Wire is, but I didn’t really expect to be that into it. However, E started getting the first season from netflix and we were both hooked by the end of the first episode. It’s as good as everyone says.

I thought Star Trek was reasonably enjoyable, if pretty silly. The plot was senseless and was clearly contrived only to put together an alternate timeline and avoid all the baggage of the other series, and to shoehorn leonard nimoy in somehow. I like science fiction and am reasonably good at suspending my disbelief, but there were some moments that just made me giggle. Optimistically, I think it’s possible that a sequel could get over the series-plot and muppet-babies character requirements and just tell a good story. On the whole, I was amused but not deeply taken with it; I think this review does a good job describing the experience.

It’s probably a surprise to no one that Honey West was pretty rotten. The book was rotten. The show was just lame. It’s the kind of show that ends with the main characters making a rotten pun or joke of some kind and then laughing. It doesn’t even offer the gratuitous near-nudity that the book did (which would have been at least more interesting in pictures). How it has 8 stars on IMDB I could not say.

The shop around the corner was a very good classic romantic comedy, with the attendant cute storyline. Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan work in the same store, where they have an antagonistic relationship. But, unbeknownst to them, they’ve also met through the mail and are falling in love. It’s like the internet! Stewart and Sullavan are both very good, and they’re backed up by a great cast of characters.

I’ve been rewatching the Prisoner over the last couple of months (my third time through it I think). I suppose there are two kinds of people who like the prisoner: those who enjoy all the plots and counterplots of the earlier episodes and find the later more psychedelic ones boring or annoying, and those who get off on the surrealism and the TV rule-breaking and are less interested in linearity. I’m one of the first kind (which is why I also love Danger Man, probably more then the Prisoner). Anyway I was interested to notice on this run-through that it’s only the last few episodes that really get surreal. And rewatching the finale, I decided it wasn’t entirely as random and pointless as I thought (though the second to last episode is fairly rotten). Still, though, there’s a lot of silliness, but most of the show remains brilliant. In the end, I still prefer the more restrained Danger Man, but I’m glad I own both.

Mutiny on the Bounty was good. I’m not sure about the historical accuracy — it seemed to depart from the book I’d just read in several places, but then that book was itself fictioned up, so who knows. The movie is a bit cheezy in places, but satisfyingly epic.

Touchez pas au Grisbi at first appears to be another one of those cool French noir heist films from around this time, which of course is a very good thing. But you soon realize that’s not quite it. For one thing, the heist takes place before the movie starts — this one is entirely about the aftermath. And it focuses mainly on the relationship between Max, the brains of the outfit, and Riton, his well-meaning but ultimately naive and foolish friend. Max has carefully covered their tracks and planned the whole thing, but Riton screws it all up in his pursuit of a girl who doesn’t love him. And again trying to fix things, Riton makes them worse. Max loves his friend and knows he must watch over him, even if it costs him everything else. Great stuff.

The Master Touch is basically the heist-film equivalent of a spaghetti western. It seems to be filmed in Germany by a mostly Italian crew (except for Kirk Douglas). It’s the classic “master criminal plans one last job” story, with, as standard, a twist at the end. A lot of the heist details don’t make a whole lot of sense, but the plan and twist do unfold nicely, and it has a certain gritty charm. Also, enjoy the two-note ominous theme.

The Trouble with Harry is very silly. Four people trying to get rid of a troublesome body while romancing each other. The body, of course, keeps turning up. It’s all pretty goofy, and the resolution doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But whatever, it’s a light entertainment.