In his eulogy for our dear friend Alexis Tioseco, Paul Dumol thanked Alexis for his indefatigable efforts in championing cinema's finest undiscovered marvels "because art revitalizes, and every time I watch these films and experience the grace which art brings, I will be thankful for your persuasive enthusiasm". While my taste doesn't run to the sophisticated artistic fare that my colleagues bravely consume, I have come across some lovely works of art that could bear, in lieu of the graceful oblivion they are currently consigned to, the burden of more notoriety.
First, and more closely related to the medium that both Alexis and Paul adore, is the recently cancelled NBC series, Kings. A modern-day retelling of the story of King David, Kings is one of the few high concept projects involving the Christian faith that achieves a scope and power of truly biblical proportions. This series doesn't just boast sophisticated political drama, a rivetingly familiar vision of the modern world as a monarchy, or sophisticated narratives that largely succeed in making us care for characters based on well-trod biblical archetypes. It boasts, in my humble opinion, some of the finest actors and actresses currently working in television today. Reverend Ephram Samuels, played by Oz alum and critical darling Eamonn Walker, is alternately mellifluously soothing and quietly damning as the cleric who helped make, and will help unmake, a king. Brian Cox, as King Silas Benjamin's deposed predecessor, in the smattering of episodes that he appears in throughout the series, elevates all his scenes to a veritable master class on acting.
But this show belongs to Ian McShane, and rightfully so. As King Silas Benjamin, McShane gives one of the most indelible, forceful, elegant, and nuanced portrayals of a monarch in recent memory, in any medium. There are some fine, critically acclaimed Shakespearean performances of King Lear that were obliterated from my conscious memory by the performance that McShane gives here. No one radiates the fierce individuality, selfish sense of obligation, and pathos present in all human monarchs like McShane. His performance as King Silas is the axis upon which all the fine performances on Kings hinges. Without him, the terribly delicate conceit that informs the show's premise, would have fallen apart in the first episode alone. Truly remarkable.
Second, I just finished Ellen Kushner's fantasy novel The Privilege of the Sword, another delightfully understated, yet wholly subversive reconceptualization of a tired old literary genre. There is no magic in Kushner's world. Moreover, this is a world that doesn't need to be saved, at least in the grand, cosmic, earth-shattering way that previous forays in high fantasy always demand. Rather, we have a rambunctious, breezily literate, wickedly fun comedy of manners, only with swords in the place of the rapier wit that characters in such comedies seem to wield with equal efficacy.
Yet at the heart of all the polished repartee and the clever attention to social conventions that characterize a comedy of manners, there lies well, heart. The characters, which include an impoverished junior noblewoman forced to work for her seemingly mad uncle, the said mad, yet frustratingly intelligent and disturbingly kind yet cruel uncle, and an urbane young servant who is not below engaging in behavior just a hair's breadth above that of a guttersnipe, are not all quite the paragons of virtue that high fantasy requires, but their resulting stories of even partial redemption, are what all good coming of age tales live on.
Enjoy!
Photo Credits:
Picture of Kings comes courtesy of What's Alan Watching?
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