Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?

The year is 2006, and Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler works for the Greater Manchester Police. While on a case, he is struck by a car, and wakes up in 1973, where he is a newly transferred Detective Inspector working at the same police station.

The atmosphere of Life on Mars is spot on. Weed-choked vacant lots surround derelict factories in “pre-urban revitalization” Manchester. The color brown is ubiquitous; people wear brown clothes, drive brown sedans, and live in brown houses; the town itself seems to have a dreary brown cast over it. The police station is dingy, with surplus metal desks and cabinets covered in a disarray of paperwork, filtered through a smoky haze.

 

Tyler frequently clashes with Gene Hunt, his superior officer, regarding their different policing methods. Where Tyler is procedurally and politically correct, Hunt uses violence, corruption, and his gut instinct to catch criminals. In spite of their differences, they come to respect each other and develop a love-hate relationship.

If this was a simple time-travel story, it would be intriguing enough for its “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” aspects. Tyler misses his cellphone and longs to search a database instead of slogging through hundreds of case files. But is it really time travel? Sometimes when the phone rings, Tyler hears a voice imploring him to fight, to return to consciousness.

On the radio, he hears hospital equipment beeping, and a doctor telling his mother that his brain waves show no activity. Strangest of all, in the middle of the night he is taunted by the “Test Card Girl,” a young girl clutching a grotesque toy clown, who then dissolves back into the telly.

John Simm is brilliant as the scrupulous and tortured Sam Tyler, as is Philip Glenister as detective-on-steroids Gene Hunt. Is Tyler mad? In a coma? Can he return to 2006? Produced by BBC, the full two seasons are available through our library; check them out and decide for yourself!

What an education it was

During an interview on the BBC, well-known British journalist Lynn Barber cheerfully admitted to having slept with more than 50 men during her terms at Oxford. The listening public was shocked, but they shouldn't have been; Barber had already confessed all in a brisk little book called An Education.

In this memoir, Barber describes her lonely childhood and how, when she was still in high school, she was picked up by a charming and sophisticated older man. The flirtation developed into a two-year relationship with a man whose real name she didn't even know. Not only was the young Lynn seduced by him, but her parents were as well; the whole family was devastated by his betrayal.

This portion of the book was made into a very good movie, starring Carey Mulligan.

The movie ends when Lynn's relationship does, but the book goes on - to her adventures at Oxford, her years working for Penthouse Magazine, her unconventional marriage, and the journalism work that eventually landed her the nickname The Demon Barber.

It's a fascinating look at a young woman coming of age during a time when opportunities for women were blossoming - not just career opportunities, but personal ones as well. Lynn Barber certainly took advantage of them.

Angie, don't you weep

In Dennis Lehane's mystery Gone Baby Gone, private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are reluctant to take on the search for four-year-old Amanda McCready, who disappeared from her mother's apartment three days ago. The case is just too potentially painful: they don't want to find Amanda after three days in the hands of a pedophile. They don't want to find her corpse. It's too hard.

But they do take the case, which leads them down strange pathways, to drug mules, prison mobsters, gangland power struggles and revenge murders. They find a lot of people who don't care about the health and happiness of one little girl.

Gone Baby Gone is a tearing good mystery, gritty, violent and suspenseful. Kenzie and Gennaro are a great team, equal partners in detection and in love. And the novel has an aching moral conundrum at its heart. What could Angie and Patrick have done differently? What if some mysteries are better off unsolved?

It was made into a good movie, too. Naturally, the film is different from the book. For one thing, the book’s many characters and plot twists would be confusing in a two-hour movie. Some things were trimmed, but the powerful conflict was kept intact.

But one of the things they left out is Angie Gennaro, and I can't figure out why. Oh, she's present: she's played by Michelle Monoghan. But in the book, Angie is an independent, complicated, smart woman. In the movie, Angie has very few lines. Scenes in which Angie defends herself have been edited so that someone else is defending her. Scenes in which Angie is angry have been changed into scenes in which Angie cries.


I don't understand it - why did the filmmakers think that eclipsing one of the book's most interesting characters would make a better movie?

Two ways of telling a story

In 1931, the brilliant German filmmaker Fritz Lang released M, a movie about a child-killer, and about those - the police and the city's criminals - who hunt him down. Set in the shadowy streets of Berlin, the film presents shades of moral ambiguity: a killer who cannot help himself, judged by those who are no better than he. The best thing about it is the way it looks, the gray alleys and black shadows, the smoke-filled rooms. It's one of the most visually haunting movies I've ever seen.

Would a print version of the same story be as effective as the movie? I would have said no, until I saw the graphic novel version by the extraordinarily talented illustrator Jon J. Muth. This graphic novel, like the film, is almost wordless; its striking images capture the film's gritty intensity.


So is the novel as good as the movie? Why not check them both out and compare for yourself?

Sita Sings -- for free!

It's a movie that has won over 20 awards and earned a rare 100 percent Tomatometer reading (that means that it was liked by 100 percent of film reviewers tallied by the website Rotten Tomatoes). In spite of all this, copyright conflicts prevented the widespread distribution of Sita Sings the Blues, a film by Nina Paley.

I've wanted to see Sita Sings the Blues ever since I read Roger Ebert's review of it in 2008, but it seemed unlikely to come to Newport. Then I learned the film is now available for free online viewing or download through Nina Paley's website. I watched it on my home computer this weekend, and it is truly a charming and funny film.

Sita Sings the Blues is an animated film that tells the story of Sita, wife of Rama, from the ancient Sanskrit epic The Ramayana. There are musical interludes, during which Sita breaks into the songs of 1920s jazz chanteuse Annette Hanshaw. (It is these, apparently, that caused the copyright issues.) Interwoven into Sita's story is the story of Nina, a modern American woman whose husband breaks her heart. Each component of the film has a different animated style, from a loose scribblevision for Nina's story to a hilarious and wildly creative 2-D for the musical interludes.



Next time you want to see a great movie, you don't have to go out. You don't even have to come in to the library and check out one of our thousands of DVDs (although of course you're welcome to do that, too). Surf over to here, turn up the speakers on your computer, and watch Sita Sings the Blues. You won't be disappointed.

Moliere in Love?

Once in awhile a random movie I watch turns out to be so delightful, I wonder why I never heard of it before. This weekend I watched the 2007 French film, Moliére, and fell into a world of wit, romance, and farce that was totally enchanting. Loosely based on the life of the 17th century French actor and playwright, the story purports to explain the inspiration for Moliére’s comedic social satire.

After Moliére was tossed into debtor’s prison, Monsieur Jourdain offers to pay his debt if he will teach him how to act. Jourdain is a rich dilettante who hopes to win the heart of Célimène, a snobbish young widow, by performing a play he wrote for her.


Moliére moves in with Jourdain and his family disguised as a priest named Tartuffe. Elmire, Jourdain’s lovely and neglected wife, takes an instant dislike to him. French actor Romain Duris plays Moliére with all the glamour and passion of one of the Three Musketeers, and over time, Moliére wins Elmire’s friendship and love.

The movie has been compared to Shakespeare in Love, because it is a fictional biography fashioned in the writing style of the subject. It is never dull, is full of laugh-out-loud humor, and has a satisfying sense of moral justice.

Let the Right One In

This weekend I saw a really bad horror movie. I mean a boring, not-scary horror movie.

I won't try to explain why I like movies to be scary; but the experience did get me to thinking about what is scary, and what isn't.

The thing I learned from the bad horror movie was this: realistic gore does not scare me. It doesn't matter how genuine those entrails appear to be -- I know they're not real, and I'm not scared. Horror happens in the imagination of the viewer. A movie has to engage my empathy, make me imagine myself in the horrifying situation. Somehow, it has to get behind my skeptical thoughts and chill my spine. And showing me every bit of violent mayhem (enhanced with excellent computerized special effects) is exactly the wrong way to do this. Far scarier are the movies are the movies that don't show me much at all.

Take The Blair Witch Project (available from the library only on VHS), in which three college kids get lost in the woods and encounter something terrifying. The movie never shows us the terrifying thing, and it's not at all clear what happens to those kids in the end.

Or Let the Right One In, a weird little Swedish movie. In it Oskar, a lonely, desperate 12-year-old, meets Eli, his new neighbor. Oskar thinks that maybe Eli is lonely and desperate too. He may be right about that, but he's definitely wrong in thinking that she's human. Eli seems to like Oskar, but perhaps she just has a use for him. The fact that we aren't really sure is part of what makes this movie so unsettling.

All children are afraid of the dark. Spare me the entrails; the really creepy movies are the ones that just show you the darkness, and let you imagine what might lurk there.

Smilla's Sense of Snow

This movie is -- not good, necessarily -- but very enjoyable. It stars Julia Ormond as Smilla Jasperson, an antisocial, frosty Danish scientist. She wants to discover why a small boy, her neighbor, ran off the roof of their apartment building to his death. The child was one of Smilla's few friends, and when she examines his footprints in the snow, she becomes convinced that the boy was fleeing from something.

The mystery of the boy's death leads Smilla to some pretty strange places. The fact is, this movie doesn't actually make a lick of sense. But it is atmospheric and suspenseful, and Ormond really is terrific as the determined and icy Smilla. Watch it for her still, cool performance, and try not to slap your forehead when you get to the big mystery-solving reveal at the end.

[Note: The image I used to illustrate this post comes, not from the movie, but from a terrific photoblog by Joseph Holmes.]

A Few of Our Favorite Things – first in a continuing series

From now until the end of December, we'll be posting small reviews of the Newport Library staff's favorite holiday books, movies, and music.

First is Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster. Invited to write a Christmas piece by the New York Times, respected author Auster was stumped. Then his friend Auggie Wren told him a tale of a lost wallet. The result is this unsentimental and surprising little book.

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story is recommended by Martha, Newport Library's interlibrary loan clerk. If you like it, Martha recommends that you also check out the DVD Smoke, which Auster co-wrote, and which contains a film version of this same story. "It really is one of Harvey Keitel's better turns," says Martha, "and even William Hurt comes off pretty well." (Martha does not mince words.)

We hope you'll check back to hear what other members of the library staff like to read, watch, and listen to during the holiday season. And if you have a favorite, please put it in the comments!

The Edge Of Existence

As a kid, I used to love those Saturday morning adventure specials on TV. The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, The American Sportsman, Wild Kingdom, PBS specials like those on the Yanomamo of Brazil or the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Coupled with the then still exotic articles found in National Geographic, they introduced me to the great big world out there beyond the somewhat narrow confines of suburban Bethesda, Maryland where I grew up. I believed that the world still contained plenty of adventures just waiting for me to graduate from the 7th grade.

Lest you think that we’ve now become entirely tamed by cell phones, GPS and the internet, a new documentary series, the Edge Of Existence, proves that there are still a few places in the world where traditional cultures eke out a living from a dangerous land, or in one case, the sea.

Our intrepid host, Donal MacIntyre, is an Irish investigative journalist who spends time with some of the world’s last remaining traditional societies. Whether it’s hunting salt-water crocodiles in Borneo, cutting salt blocks from the Bolivian altiplano, or bouncing uncomfortably along with a camel trek across the Arabian desert to trade dates, MacIntyre joins in the work with plucky good-natured curiosity and a real respect for how hard people struggle just to put food on the table.

Some cultures, like the Omani Bedouin, take what they want from us, cell phones and Toyota pick-ups, and leave the rest, while others are forced to adapt with no power to choose. Out-of-work headhunters in Borneo are now reduced to distilling moonshine they call Steam, with a technology brought home by a returning college student. The Bajau Laut, Sea Gypsies of the East Indies, are citizens of no country who spend their entire lives at sea on the run from hostile mainland police.

The Edge of Existence is an entertaining excursion into the exotic: a reminder of how far we’ve come from a subsistence lifestyle. But it also reminds us that our comfortably modern lives aren’t the only ones that matter.

Click HERE to reserve Edge of Existence.

A Jihad For Love

The word "Jihad" in Arabic means "struggle," and in the DVD A Jihad For Love the struggle of gay, lesbian and transgendered Muslims might seem a daunting one indeed. This 2007 documentary, however, is less a film about sexual orientation than about Islam itself. It tells the story of how Islam is struggling to come to terms with a growing number of LGBT believers who insist on remaining true to their religion as well as living their lives as honestly and openly as they dare.



A Jihad For Love portrays the lives of gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims in nine countries, including South Africa, Iran, India, Turkey and Egypt. While a few of the film’s subjects live the closeted existences one might expect in these countries, a surprising number not only live openly, but also actively challenge their religious leaders in public debate on the question of Islam and homosexuality. Many of these leaders, unfortunately, seem all too antagonistic, no matter how finely their challengers parse relevant passages in the Koran.

And ultimately, that is the strength of A Jihad For Love. In the final analysis, it might not be what ancient religious texts have to say about same-sex love, but what today’s believers who make up the umma (or Muslim community) have to say, that really makes the difference and might bring about change and gradual acceptance. A Jihad For Love is a timely look at some brave souls searching for a way both to live within their culture, and to live with themselves: an admirable lesson for us all.

Click HERE to reserve "A Jihad For Love."

I love Angela Lansbury

My dad watched Murder, She Wrote on television throughout my teen years. I didn't like the show very much, and had no particular interest in its star, the certainly well-preserved but not-terribly-cool Angela Lansbury. Well, I was wrong about a lot of things when I was a teenager, and this is one of them: Angela Lansbury is very cool.

Want an exhibit of Ms. Lansbury's extraordinary talent? Start by checking out The Court Jester, a ridiculously entertaining 1956 Danny Kaye comedy. Though she was a lovely blonde in 1956, Lansbury is not the leading lady of this film. Ever a character actress, she has a smaller role as the scheming and spoiled Princess Gwendoline.

Then, for a complete change of pace, turn to the riveting 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh are ostensibly the stars of this twisty and surreal satire, but Angela Lansbury owns the film as Harvey's terrifying, megalomaniac mother. Lansbury is corrosive and brilliant; this may be my favorite film performance ever.

The British actress turns 84 this month. Why not celebrate by checking out one of her films?

(Incidentally -- if you have a favorite actor, you can find his films in the Newport Public Library's catalog by searching by Author.)

History Comes Alive: BBC Documentaries With Michael Wood

I am an avid reader of history: U.S., European, Asian, Ancient, Economic. you name it, I read it. Lately, I’ve also been checking out Newport Library’s collection of historical documentaries on DVD, especially those titles hosted by historian Michael Wood. Aside from his dashing good looks and nerdy English academic charm, what appeals most about Wood is the rapt enthusiasm for his subjects. Newport library has a number of his BBC programs, including several of the book tie-ins.

The Story of India is Wood’s most recent film. This two-disc series looks to India’s wondrous past to explain its current dynamic presence on the world’s socio-economic stage. Exotic and colorful, filled with music, art, warfare and religion, The Story of India is one my favorites.

On the opposite side of the globe, in England, Wood goes In Search of Shakespeare. So little is actually known about the Bard, his family and friends, that Wood’s inferences, based on the historical context of the times, fill in the color surrounding Shakespeare’s life. It is this contextual coloring that breathes wonderful depth into the world of the English language’s bravest writer.

One of Wood’s earliest films, first presented in 1985, In Search of The Trojan War, is an ancient history buff’s dream come true. Wood presents an in-depth examination as to the likelihood of the Trojan War. He wonders if history can prove the existence of its main chracacters, Agamemnon, Achilles, and the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy. You probably already know that most of these questions are unanswerable, but just for sheer depth of Wood’s historical imagination, I give In Search of the Trojan War top marks.

We also have:

In Search of Myths and Heroes

Conquistadors

Legacy: the Origins of Civilization

In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great

China: The Mandate of Heaven

(Some of the titles are available only in VHS format and downloadable video from Library2Go.)

Woods has a great talent for placing his subject in a broad cultural context and weaving disparate historical elements together to present an informative and entertaining television program. And his enthusiasm for his topic, be it a Spanish Conquistador pillaging across the Andes or the emotional depth of a Shakespearean tragedy, is sure to win you over.

Click on the highlighted title to reserve it.

Why are you like this? Like, how you are?

When I was no longer a teenager -- but when the memory of my teenage years was still fresh -- I fell in love with a television show called My So-Called Life. It gave a true, heartfelt depiction of the agony and enchantment of high school, and I adored it.

Claire Danes stars as the naive, exasperating 15-year-old Angela Chase. She ditches her old friends for a cooler crowd. She has a powerful crush on a boy who is probably not as deep as she thinks he is. She is sulky and uncommunicative and demanding. Her voice-over narration is perfectly self-absorbed.

She is also unexpectedly perceptive, and sometimes hilarious.

"People always say you should be yourself, like 'yourself' is this definite thing. Like a toaster or something. Like you can know what it is, even."

My So-Called Life was tragically canceled before the completion of its first season. It has an enthusiastic cult following, thanks in part to reruns on MTV; and the Newport Library has all 19 episodes on DVD.

(Cautionary note: I have a coworker who just said, "I hated that show!" So your mileage may vary.)

Here is a tiny taste of the show:



If you decide you want to learn more about Angela, her hopeless love, her clueless parents, her destructive friends, and the rest of her so-called life, click here to reserve the DVDs.

Olivier’s Ophelia

July’s Literary Flick is the 1948 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Directed and produced by Sir Laurence Olivier, the movie also features Olivier as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and Jean Simmons as his ill-fated love, Ophelia.

The role of Ophelia helped Simmons launch her career as a serious actress. Time Magazine featured her as Ophelia on its June 28, 1948 cover, and had this to say about her:

“A young (19) actress named Jean Simmons, who plays Ophelia, is a product of the movie studios exclusively. Yet she holds her own among some highly skilled Shakespeareans. More to the point, she gives the film a vernal freshness and a clear humanity which play like orchard breezes through all of Shakespeare's best writing, but which are rarely projected by veteran Shakespearean actors.”

Such poetry in their review! They go on to mention that Simmons received 2,000 fan letters a week, including multiple offers of marriage and a request from an Indian chiropodist for a photograph of her feet and a sliver of her toenail.

Many other versions of Hamlet have been filmed. The first, in 1900, was two minutes long and was projected simultaneously with recordings of the actors’ voices. French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt performed the role of Hamlet. Mel Gibson and Helena Bonham Carter played Hamlet and Ophelia in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 version. In 1996 Kenneth Branagh and Kate Winslet starred in the first unabridged theatrical film version of the play; and in 2000, Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles play the doomed lovers in modern day New York City.

Olivier’s Hamlet stands the test of time. Much of the dialogue was cut to shorten a 4 ½ hour play to 2 ½ hours, and the characters of Fortinbas, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were dropped. But Olivier added his own stark, psychological focus to the story, from subtle adjustments to the script to the bleak, noir atmosphere of the sets. These, in contrast with Ophelia’s vulnerable innocence, give Olivier’s version a permanent place of honor in the annals of Shakespearean film.

Hamlet will be screened Tuesday, July 14, at 6:30 p.m. in the McEntee Meeting Room. Admission is free and open to the public.

They're coming!

For me, Night of the Living Dead will always be the zombie movie. This black-and-white 1968 classic looks like it cost about a thousand dollars to make, including salaries for the no-name, never-heard-from-again cast. But you know how some low-budget horror movies have an air of amusing cheesiness? That air does not linger around this one. Night of the Living Dead still packs genuine chills, especially in the unexpected conclusion.
If Night of the Living Dead is the best of the zombie movies, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks is surely the finest zombie book I've ever read. Brooks tracks the menace from its beginnings through the world's descent into chaos -- all from the point of view of a journalist attempting to recreate events from after society's utter collapse. Each chapter tells a different slice of the story; they all come together in a mosaic of blood, desperation, and survival.

Both Night of the Living Dead and World War Z drive home the point that, in the zombie apocalypse, the zombies are only one of the threats. People in extreme danger turn against one another. Except at the public library! That's the theme of this short zombie film, which was submitted to a video contest run by Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2007. Enjoy.

Dead Again

A private investigator, Mike, rescues a mysterious, beautiful amnesiac woman whom he calls Grace. Hoping to learn the woman's identity, Mike brings Grace to a hypnotist. Grace's present identity does not emerge under hypnosis; instead they learn about the person she once was in a past life. They also discover that Grace is somehow linked to a murder that happened in the 1940s.

If you think this sounds like a noir thriller, you're partly right. Dead Again is a loving tribute to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, directed by Kenneth Branagh in 1991. It is one of my favorite movies.

Branagh stars as Mike, the detective; Grace was played by Branagh's then-wife, Emma Thompson. The film incorporates beautiful black-and-white flashbacks as the hypnotist takes them back to their past lives: Thompson plays Margaret, a vivacious pianist, Branagh her moody husband, Roman, who was convicted of murdering her. Both actors easily master the dual roles with their different personalities (and the different accents, American and British, required).

As far as I'm concerned, though, the film is completely stolen by Andy Garcia, who is wonderful as a cynical newspaper reporter. The scene in which the present-day Branagh visits the elderly Garcia in the hospital is a show-stopper.


It's tough to "do" Hitchcock, and the truth is that Dead Again is not a perfect movie. It's a very entertaining one, though, with lots of mystery, intrigue, and romance. The performances are fantastic -- did I mention that Robin Williams also has a cameo role? But I think it's worth watching just for Andy Garcia.

The library has Dead Again on DVD and VHS.

One Sick Tube: Surf Videos At Newport Library

Being the surf capital of the Central Oregon Coast, Newport has its share of good surf spots, surf shops, and a decent collection of surf movies and documentaries on DVD and VHS here at the library. From classics such as Endless Summer and Five Summer Stories, to recent low-budget releases and classics-yet-to-be, our surf video collection dishes out some tasty waves.

Bordering on the psychedelic, Zen And Zero chronicles a Cali to Costa Rica surf trip by a sometimes hapless lot of landlocked Austrian (Austrian?) surfers.

One of the more intriguing new films is The Lost Wave: An African Surf Story. Veteran waterman Sam George travels to the island nation of Sao Tome to report on a legend concerning a tribe of coastal villagers who, it is said, invented surfing completely on their own, free of any outside influences.

Beneath The Surface is pure surf candy dream journey. Film-maker Dana Morris packs a quiver of world-class surfers on a journey around the world, surfing 25 countries from Java to Japan, Hawaii to Jamaica.

Brokedown Melody, in addition to being a pretty decent surf flick with some of the world’s best surfers, has the added bonus of a soundtrack laid down by uber-mellow surf maestro Jack Johnson.

This is just a sampling of our collection. So, if the winter waves at Happy’s aren’t co-operating or summertime Agate is nothing but windblown slop, stop by Newport Library and check out a few of these titles. It’s the next best thing to being there. No wetsuit required.

Click on the titles to reserve them.

A Paradise Lost

The classic tale of Cain and Abel is recast in Elia Kazan’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden. James Dean stars as the brooding, ‘bad’ son, Caleb, who yearns for affection from his devoutly religious, self-righteous father Adam, played by Raymond Massey. Caleb and his brother, Aron, grew up in the Salinas Valley on a lettuce farm, believing their mother, Kate, was dead. When Caleb learns that she is alive and owns a brothel in Monterey, he visits her, setting in motion a series of events that topple the smug illusions of his brother and threaten to destroy his father. One of the film's posters exclaimed: “East of Eden is a story of explosive passions and Elia Kazan has made it into a picture of staggering power.”



In addition to Dean and Massey, the film also stars Julie Harris, Burl Ives, Richard Davalos, and Jo Van Fleet. Van Fleet won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The film also won the 1955 Cannes Film Festival award for Best Dramatic Film, and the 1956 Golden Globes award for Best Motion Picture Drama.

East of Eden will be shown at the library on Tuesday, June 9, at 6:30 p.m., as part of the library’s Literary Flicks series. Earlier the same day, at noon, the Reading Circle will discuss the book. Both programs will be take place in the McEntee Meeting Room of the library.

International Economics NOT for Dummies

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

A DVD on global economics. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Maybe “fun” isn’t the optimal word, but “impressive” just might be. Narrated by David Ogden Stiers, this three disc series follows the struggle between competing beliefs about how the world’s economic resources should be shared.
Disc one, “The Battle for Ideas”, contrasts the free-market philosophy of Austrian Friedrich Hayek against those of John Maynard Keynes, the English economist who believed that government had a responsibility to regulate the economy.
Disc two, “The Agony of Reform” chronicles the often catastrophic effects of free-market reform in Russia, Latin America, Poland and India during the last three decades of the 20th century.
Disc three, “The New Rules of the Game”, weighs the risks and the rewards of globalizations and poses the question “Is global terrorism the dark side of global trade?”
Using impressive historical footage and interviews with world political and intellectual figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Bill Clinton and many, many others, Commanding Heights is an intelligent yet entertaining look at contemporary economic problems, the historical and social context that engendered them as well as competing approaches to their resolution. Given the recent massive level of government intervention in economies around the globe, it seems the pendulum is swinging once again and the issues brought up in this series are all the more relevant. Highly recommended.
Click here to reserve Commanding Heights.