Stay cool with these shows
Served up for your summer viewing pleasure this week: "Ice Road Truckers," the hep L.A. art history docu "The Cool School" and Sundance's most talked-about film this year, "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired."
Eleven years ago, suffering through my first Kansas City summer, I couldn’t imagine I’d ever say this, but: Gee, where’s the hot weather been lately?
Silly question. Soon enough the blasting heat will be here to stay. And then you’ll be wondering what you were thinking when you made that vow to keep the thermostat at 80 all summer long so that you could afford to drive to and from your adjustable-rate-mortgaged home in your 5-gallons-to-the-mile SUV.
If keeping cool this summer is a priority for you, perhaps I can suggest an idea that caught on during the last energy crisis 30 years ago: Think snow.
To be cool, you need to think cool. Here are three upcoming TV selections that will keep the chilly thoughts coming, even as your living room turns into a sauna.
“Ice Road Truckers” (9 p.m. ET Sunday, History). Brrrr! One of 2007’s breakout cable hits returns for a second season. And as if it weren’t cold enough along the ice road that the long-haul truckers drove their 18-wheelers, this year they’ve been persuaded to take their rigs 2,500 miles north to an even icier road in the Arctic Circle.
Let me answer those burning — sorry, persistent — questions you may be asking:
- It’s on History. What does this have to do with history?
No more than true-crime shows have to do with Discovery or programs about tattoo artists have to do with Learning.
- If the road is 2,500 miles north of the old one, doesn’t that kind of remove the danger of breaking through the ice that allegedly is the central drama of the show?
Shhhh! Yes, the road along the Mackenzie River route is certified to have at least 20 inches thickness of ice. But does anyone really tune in to watch Hugh Rowland cheat death, or do they really watch to hear him drop a bunch of F-bombs in that adorable Canadian-sounding accent of his?
“The Cool School” (10 p.m. Tuesday, PBS; not in all markets, check listings). This film from the acclaimed “Independent Lens” series will have you feeling the sea breezes that make southern California tolerable even in the hottest summer months. And cool? No one was cooler than Walter Hopps, Ed Kienholz, Irving Blum and all the other post-Beat cats who created an art scene in postwar Los Angeles out of a cultural backwater that banned most modern art because of fears of “communist infiltration.”
A stylish documentary shot in black and white with some grainy color footage mixed in, “The Cool School” re-creates the L.A. scene of the 1950s and ’60s with comments from personalities like actor Dennis Hopper and architect Frank Gehry. I believe women are permitted to watch the film.
“Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” (9 p.m. ET Monday, HBO). Maybe it won’t lower your body temperature watching this astonishing documentary. The opposite might happen.
But imagine being in Utah this winter, as I was (think snow!), when “Wanted and Desired” became the hottest — sorry, the most in-demand — entry in the Sundance Film Festival.
How did filmmaker Marina Zenovich do it? By cracking open the 30-year-old criminal case against the controversial director, she has cast new doubt on whether Polanski wasn’t justified in fleeing to France, where he remains a so-called fugitive from justice to this day.
Zenovich doesn’t dispute the particulars of Polanski’s involvement with a 13-year-old girl. Instead she explains how Polanski might not be a pervert but a man whose relationship to pleasure was forever altered by two horrifying events: the Holocaust, which he survived but his parents did not; and the slaughter of his wife and unborn baby at the hands of the Mansons while he was off making a movie.
And then Zenovich goes further, showing persuasively that the judge presiding over Polanski’s case was determined not to give him a fair shake, besides which he was a megalomaniac with Cecil B. de Mille tendencies inside his courtroom and chambers.
Polanski did not speak with Zenovich on camera, but seemingly everyone else did, including the victim, the prosecutor and Polanski’s defense attorney, all of whom agree that he got a raw deal.
Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn’t anymore — Polanski has done well since leaving the U.S., collecting an Oscar in absentia and being elected to France’s prestigious Academie des Beaux Arts.
But our memories of Polanski are warped, Zenovich argues, and that’s not right. And she lays the blame for that squarely at the feet of the U.S. news media. The tabloid culture was alive and well long before O.J. and way before TMZ.
Zenovich exposes it in her clever use of news footage outtakes that show TV and newspaper journalists hounding Polanski every step of his journey to and from the courtroom, sucking out a million little pieces of his soul with each shutter click and every 24 frames of film.
Last week you may have read that the city of Malibu has had it with celebrity photographers and has hired former White House independent counsel Ken Starr to draft an ordinance that would impose a tax on paparazzi who sell pictures they took at local restaurants and clubs.
You know, that sounds like a really cool idea.
This originally appeared in the Kansas City Star, June 8, 2007.
