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Reviews
Time Scanners (2014)
History Oversimplified to Falsification in Jerusalem Episode
While acknowledging the sensitivity of the subject of this installment...
yet referring only to the Temple Mount and never the Noble Sanctuary (as it's known to Islam)...
the date of the completion of the Dome of the Rock is rounded to a point where it's suggested it's younger than it is. "700 years" after Herod makes it sound like the Dome was completed c. 719 CE, when in fact it was the year 691.
Most egregiously and ahistorically, the builder of the site is referred to repeatedly and exclusively as King Herod the Great--who indeed expanded the mount to twice its previous size and built the Second Temple during the first decades of the Common Era, but neither conceived of nor commenced the creation of the massive stonework comprising the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount. That happened hundreds, if not over a thousand years earlier.
Just pointless sloppiness to overstate the role of King Herod. The opening narration of the episode refers to the four thousand year history of the site, then portrays the start of the major building to have started less than two thousand years ago.
LateLine: Buddy Hackett (1998)
One of the funniest sitcom episodes ever
I recorded this off a Dish Network satellite when it first aired and have watched it many times since, and it's simply one of the tightest, funniest sitcoms episodes ever produced.
Al convinces his boss to run with an important labor-union story, but before it quite gets on the air, the mistaken news breaks that Buddy Hackett is dead.
Even the real-life politicians Richard Gephardt and Robert Reich are funny, as Reich tells an entire Buddy Hackett story on Lateline while other (I won't spoil) hilarity ensues.
The photo on the main page looks like a DVD box. If so, I'd consider it worth it just to have an archival quality version of this one episode.
De Düva: The Dove (1968)
Don't forget the Yiddish
This short film would show up in Manhattan movie theaters every so often for ten years or more. We remember it so well because we treasured our first viewings of it, and were so flummoxed by trying to describe it to friends, that the subsequent viewings were often spent compiling mental notes. As the 70s wore on and Madeline Kahn's star brightly ascended, her big joke -- "phallica symbole?" -- became widely quoted. To be able to quote that line got used more than once to fake having actually seen this cool in-joke of cinemagoers. The more of us who saw it, the more we tormented our virgin friends over their having missed it yet again, while arming them with more details to fake their way through chuckling with the beaming cocktailers rather than in envy of them.
Kind of like an initiation rite, because the more pretentious the moviegoer -- those cocktailing cognoscenti -- the more humiliating the first viewing must have been, especially if one were not extra-attentive to the gibberishy narration/dialogue track (overstuffed with nature sounds, to further the verisimilitude).
Much as with actual Swedish, the first jokes detected were often squelched as inappropriate thoughts, distant Germanic echoes from a related tongue, so those who believed they were watching a meditation on memory had the hardest time catching on that they'd been slipped an unannounced comic short. Only well into the 70s did newspaper ads start billing when De Düva (The Dove) would be shown.
Even after realizing it's a comedy, what we took to be Swedishy gibberish revealed itself to be a pastiche of Scandinavianized English, Yiddishisms, and silly dirty jokes.
The climactic incest scene was the hottest screen action I'd ever seen to that point, satirizing the brief era when Swedish features showed more skin than US-released ones.