The best stuff coming out of the box these days are the movie production quality series mostly on HBO, namely Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and now Vinyl. Though I also have to give NETFLIX Peaky Binders a shout out.
Speaking of NETFLIX, I came across a 2003 movie before I was aware of any of those series, it was called THE STATION AGENT. A character study of a growing friendship between a sandwich truck owner and a lonely little person who was into trains. I was very very impressed with both actors I had never seen before, Peter Dinklage and Bobby Cannavale. Though the movie only make $8 million it got one of the highest ratings possible from Rotten Tomatoes.
Lo and behold they both ascended to the top of the serious actor heap with Dinklage the star of Game of Thrones and Cannavale playing the most horrid gangster ever imagined in Boardwalk Empire then going on to star in the new talk of the town, Vinyl.
But then again I have always been a bit out of touch with which movies are good or bad. 2001 and Cuckoo’s Nest aside, somehow I have came to think the most important movie I ever watched was THE SHOP ON THE CORNER. A 1965 black and white, closed captioned Czech film about the Nazi occupation of a small Czech town. Something about it that weighed heavy on me, perhaps it was finding both humor and brutal honesty in so terrible a story. Humans can adjust to anything.