Woodward was best known for portraying stolid, highly principled characters who stood up for the defenseless and needy. His most prominent role for U.S. viewers was certainly that of former CIA agent Robert McCall in The Equalizer.

Living a simple and seemingly joyless life in New York City, McCall helped people in trouble who answered his ambiguous newspaper classified ads offering assistance. Every week the middle-aged former CIA agent would confront powerful, villainous individuals and gangs who were menacing and exploiting people unable to defend themselves. McCall’s shadowy past and evident contempt for corrupt authorities put him in continual jeopardy from his former government masters, yet his immense personal integrity and moral rectitude always saw him through–aided greatly, of course, by his CIA training and natural ingenuity.

McCall dressed impeccably, spoke clearly, stood straight and looked people in the eye when talking to them, and displayed exemplary manners. And then he overcame the most formidable criminals.

A memorable part of the show’s formula was the employment of a personal confrontation, at the episode’s climax, between McCall and the main villain or villains. McCall would stand firmly and tell the enemy precisely what was morally wrong with what they had been doing, and tell them what the consequences were going to be, and that McCall was going to make sure they paid the price. It was always a stirring moment, as McCall’s personal integrity matched his moral standards and his stolidity and skills were there to support them.

That connection was both morally satisfying and realistic. Criminals, after all, essentially take to crime because they want a short cut to the wealth regular people accumulate over time through hard work. Thus, instead of working at things, a criminal’s habit is to use force or stealth to take what they want. And since it’s easier to prey upon the weak than on the strong, the criminal life doesn’t encourage excellence in pursuit of one’s goals.

The bourgeois mentality, on the other hand, involves working at things to earn what one wants. Hence a hero such as McCall is much more likely to be well-trained and in top form than someone who expects to prey upon weaker people. Thus the dramatic convention of the hero typically overcoming the villain accords with both reality and common sense.

Woodward’s roles in films such as The Wicker Man and Breaker Morant added nuances to the type of character he played as the protagonist of the late 1960s UK TV spy drama series Callan. In addition, he was acknowledged as a master at acting in more explicitly serious dramatic roles, and his skills as as a singer were admired by Lawrence Olivier and Noel Coward, among others, and made him a sought-after performer in stage musicals. His final movie role was in the superb comedy Hot Fuzz.

Woodward was a brilliant, talented performer who consistently chose to invest his talents in service of worthy projects. He will be remembered fondly for The Equalizer, The Wicker Man, Breaker Morant, and the rest of his admirable body of work.

Disney studio representatives predict that this latest adaptation of the Dickens classic will do well over time, like Zemeckis’s 2004 The Polar Express. My assessment is that the biggest element limiting the film’s appeal in the pre-release period was the annoyingly frenetic and superficial quality suggested by its promotional trailers and commercials.

Jim Carrey’s noisiness appears to be wearing quite thin, and a film that features him as not only the protagonist but also three other characters sounds like far too much of a no longer good thing. Carrey would do well to follow the path of the equally obnoxious Robin Williams and move on to more serious film roles, even if it kills his career. Yes, I’m well aware that Carrey’s occasional serious performances have been pretty awful, but he’s dead either way, and it would be best to die with honor instead of ignominy.

Carrey is following in Williams’s footsteps in one way, however: the making of idiotic political pronouncements. Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:

“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed.. . .

Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:

“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge.
“Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”

Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.

Zemeckis, for his part, avoided making any big political claims about the film. That’s the wise course, and given the already annoying qualities suggested by the commercials and trailers for the film, the last thing his version of A Christmas Carol needs is for its star to blunder around the media with claims that this energetic fantasy is any kind of brief for socialism.

The program is just what one would expect from PBS: earnest, well-researched, skillfully presented, and eager to lick the boots of government while criticizing individual freedom for everything wrong in the world.

There are two important lessons to be learned from the Great Depression, in my view:

1. The government causes business cycles and downturns through its erratic, manipulative policies intended to benefit powerful voting blocs at the expense of those less able to fight back. The market works when left alone, and government interference should be limited to redressing actual harms done by one party to another. This includes combating fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and setting clear but liberal guidelines for transactions made across political borders. And nothing more.
2. The Great Depression brought on a cultural conservatism and moral regeneration of the American people. This is an aspect of the era which few people seem to understand. It was in the early ’30s, for example, that the movie industry was finally badgered into imposing a Production Code ensuring all widely distributed films would conform to a set of standard plot-lines, language restrictions, and limits on visual sensationalism (a move which undoubtedly had salubrious results but was probably unnecessary given the change of public taste in a more conservative direction; in addition, the movie studios engaged in it voluntarily, even if under the threat of state regulation; thus the Code was surely less drastic, damaging, arbitrary, and politically controlled than it would have been if imposed by government). During the 1930s the American people revolted against what they saw as the social and cultural excesses of the 1920s just as strongly as they did against what they saw as the economic excesses of the time. Earnestness and attention to the political, economic, and moral implications of human action were on the rise in all media. Breaking economic and political corruption was a major concern of the American culture.

The Great Depression was widely seen at the time as a punishment for the economic, social, and moral changes of the 1920s, when the nation had moved in a more classical-liberal direction affording greater economic, social, and personal freedom. The Roaring ’20s were seen in retrospect as a time of excessive license in all things (which they indeed were in some cases), and the Depression was viewed as an understandable payment that had to be made–the hangover after the party.

Thus the nation decided to swear off the booze of individual liberty altogether. As a cure, the people turned to government control of the economy and tighter moral strictures against individual freedom. If this sounds like today’s regnant political agenda, that’s because the two are indeed identical in means, motive, and opportunity. And they are both criminal in their stupidity.

I believe that both the moral reaction and economic impositions of the Depression era were overwrought and unnecessary, but the moral reaction was the more justifiable of the two because it largely avoided using government force for its implementation. As a result of its relatively voluntary, organic nature, the moral response to the Roaring ’20s managed to do some good, as noted above, while refraining from doing much harm.

Of the economic puritanism of the time, the very opposite was true. That is the way of government action.

Given PBS’s track record as a die-hard advocate of a statist, progressive agenda, it should surprise no one that the American Experience series refuses to incorporate liberal notions such as these, choosing instead to smother the truth in a miasma of irrelevant moralization.

Right at the beginning of episode 1, “The Crash of 1929,” the narrator refers to “the promise and the illusion of the 1920s,” setting the moralistic tone of the episode. Immediately thereafter, the noted statist economist the late John Kenneth Galbraith is shown saying, “Let us not think for a moment the illusion, the aberration of the 1920s is unique. It is intimately a part of the American character.”

In other words, people will go mad if not constrained by a gigantic, all-powerful benevolent government. We are undoubtedly supposed to be grateful for the warning.

Immediately thereafter, two commentators criticize the lovely Irving Berlin song “Blue Skies” as emblematic of the 1920s “illusion” that freedom was a good thing. The machinations of stock market manipulators in the decade are limned in some detail, and the commentators explicitly condemn the lack of government regulation.

What they do not note is that fraud of the sort described in this part of the program is illegal now and was illegal then. Thus while the perpetrators of such actions were morally responsible for their wrongs, from a social perspective the real culprit behind such market manipulation was in fact the government, in failing to perform its basic function of preventing fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and otherwise preventing people from harming one another.

Indeed, a commentator in the program explicitly states that such manipulation was legal at the time, which is quite wrong and would be deceptive even if true. Yes, it was the case that there were no specific laws explicitly criminalizing a variety of particular manipulative actions in the stock market, but those acts were fraud and could have–and should have–been prosecuted under existing laws. In addition, the failure to have laws preventing such fraud would be a failure of government criminal law, not of economic policy.

Economic regulation, however, is the agenda here, and every possible means is used to argue for it. The episode briefly criticizes New York Mayor Jimmy Walker for his fiscal imprudence, but the moment is conveyed as a critique of 1920s excessive exuberance and liberality, not as a matter of government corruption and a failure of government to do its duties.

Similarly, the role of the Fed in the 1920s bubble (which it fed by debauching the currency) and in the subsequent Depression (which it created and prolonged by tightening the currency far too much and excessively interfering in the markets, thus preventing the needed corrections from occurring) is alluded to but presented in moralistic terms, as another example of excessive liberality followed by a painful but necessary corrective action.

Individual investors are likewise presented in moralistic terms, depicted as greedily and foolishly chasing after “the one lucky break,” as one person puts it. One is given no understanding of how the investors’ actions could in fact have seemed at the time to be rational, not speculative. The reality is that, then as now, an individual must look at the possible returns and risks involved in investing one’s money and also in not doing so. If the government reduces apparent risk to zero–as the Fed did during the 1920s and 2000s–what on earth does one think investors will do but continue to invest in a wide variety of ventures based on increasingly risky foundations?

This is what happens in all bubbles, and it is what happened in the most recent one, but American Experience refuses to acknowledge this critical fact. Thus here too a failure of government is elided and its effects blamed on the allegedly free choices of individuals in an allegedly under-regulated market.

Tellingly, as the program describes the stock market crash of 1929 and the events that led up to it, nothing about Fed policy or the money supply is mentioned. Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has convincingly argued that the manipulation of the money supply caused both the bubble and the bust. That particular truth, however, does not contribute to and in fact contradicts the program’s agenda for government power and against individual liberty. Thus it, too, is redacted from the story.

Near the end of the episode, Galbraith blames it all explicitly on the investors–the “suckers” as he crudely and callously calls them–and says that such crashes happen every twenty or thirty years because that’s how long it takes for the “suckers” to forget that their earlier greed and foolhardiness led to disaster. The alternative explanation–and the true one–is not given any attention: that every twenty or thirty years the government’s renewed manipulation of the economy as a means of buying votes results in disaster.

The program concludes with an argument that what the stock market crash taught Americans was a great lesson in humility. Certainly that was the lesson that the American people took from it. The real lesson, however, is that governments’ attempts to manipulate the economy always bring catastrophic consequences in time.

Of course it’s true that many people did many bad things both in the stock market and in other areas of human endeavor in the 1920s. But that’s always the case, human beings being what we are. What was different about the 1920s and ’30s was the choices government made, and the consequences were world-changing.

The real moral failure to be found in American Experience: The 1930s is in many people’s continual refusal to recognize that freedom of choice is a good, and coercion an evil, regardless of who is doing which.

The visual style of the show is familiar from Bruckheimer’s many other policiers, such as the CSI series. It has the same tendency toward dingy, low-level lighting, moving camera shots, eccentric framing, and the like, though in The Forgotten it’s not as frenetic and flashy as in most of Bruckheimer’s shows. That’s a good thing.

The stories and performances reflect the earnestness of Bruckheimer’s TV productions, while avoiding the sensationalism the other shows tend to indulge in. Christian Slater is Alex, an ex-cop who leads the Forgotten Network, a team of private citizens in Chicago who investigate cases in which the police have run out of leads and can’t afford to devote additional resources.

Avoiding both cynicism and romanticism, the program makes a point of showing how many people around the nation are willing to volunteer their help. It also shows people who refuse to help, thus making each such instance a test of a person’s character.

Alex’s daughter was the victim of a crime and is gone; each member of the team has experienced such a victimization or some past relationship with a criminal. These experiences give each of them a superpower, as they jokingly call it, such as a special ability to spot lies.

Thus instead of being crippled by their personal trials and tragedies, they overcome them and use their hard-won wisdom to help others in trouble.

Slater is very effective in his role as the group’s leader—it’s easily the best role he’s had in years, even better than his dual role in NBC’ short-lived series My Own Worst Enemy. And he makes the most of it, infusing the character with a surprising amount of charisma. Just watching his character listen to people is interesting, as Slater conveys the character’s judgments and reactions entirely through subtle cues in his posture and facial expressions.

Also refreshing is the openly judgmental nature of the show’s protagonist. Alex is no moral relativist–he has no hesitation about rebuking people who do wrong, yet he never seems priggish or smug. On the contrary, his concern is always directed toward the team’s mission, not any personal, ego-driven agendas.

A gimmick the show uses effectively is to have the dead person talk in voice-over occasionally throughout each episode, explaining things about their former life, especially as they bear on what might have led to their death. These voice-over narration passages also make clear why these persons’ lives had meaning and they should not be forgotten. They also lead to some rather tender, moving moments at an episode’s climax.

The back story that led up to the murder at the center of each episode is explained by various characters who may have been involved. That’s rather standard for mysteries, but what The Forgotten does particularly well is show interesting relationships among the suspects which afford some nice insights into the choices they make and why.

Also important is the fact that the murders aren’t committed by investment bankers, fashion magnates, and the like, who of course almost never commit murder in real life. Instead, the murders in The Forgotten are typically committed by people of lower social status and economic means, as is the case in the real world.

That’s another thing that makes The Forgotten at least a little bit more than just a formula mystery. It’s not Tolstoy, of course, or even Agatha Christie, but it’s a serious attempt at meaningful storytelling, and that can make for memorable television.

Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.

Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.

Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success.

The concept of Hank is this: newly fired big-business CEO Hank Pryor—played by Kelsey Grammer—moves his family out of their now-unaffordable Manhattan apartment and goes back to his hometown, River City, to start over.

Without money and servants to take care of them, the family members have to live like actual human beings. And without a job at which to hide out, Hank has to deal with his family. Those are reasonable ideas on which to build a comedy. Unfortunately the pilot episode does not try to go for many really amusing jokes, and the second episode is funnier but definitely does not conform to the contemporary trend of trying to mine as many laughs per episode as possible.

If the standard for judging a situation comedy is simply the number of laughs per episode, Hank will not do well. However, that is not necessarily the best way to look at the genre. Older classics such as The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and Cheers were actually short dramas with varying amounts of humor deriving organically from the characters and situations, instead of cardboard characters and merely skeletal plots on which to festoon a string of double entendres and outright sexual references intended to be funny by virtue of their exceeding public vulgarity.

One could even argue that Seinfeld, far from being a “show about nothing,” did a fine job of showing the rootlessness of ‘90s America and the dismaying results of the lurch into relativism.

Thus one can surely make a case that the situation comedy can be more than just jokes—and perhaps that it should be. Hank attempts to do just that, affording some insights into the characters and their situation, in particular the title character. For example, Hank’s attempt to connect with his family, as he has never done before, rightly suggests that overcoming one’s selfish impulses is essential if one is to have a truly satisfying life.

A scene in which Hank awkwardly tries to connect with his son in the pilot episode illustrates this theme and is both funny and touching in the odd way the best TV sitcoms often manage such scenes, and it shows the series has the potential to be effective.

In this fish-out-of-water scenario, Grammer’s Hank becomes the type of clueless, would-be Autocrat of the Breakfast Table character made famous by William Powell (Life with Father) and Clifton Webb (Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) and reiterated by countless sitcom actors since then.

Like those predecessors, Hank also has a wholesomely attractive, smart wife who keeps the household running, and a pair of intelligent, quirky children who continually point out his personal shortcomings.

In addition, Hank’s attempts to get back on his feet and start up another business, suggested in the first two episodes, are both ripe for comedy and, if developed, will be a welcome treatment of an essential and characteristic aspect of American life which is all too seldom given positive attention by Hollywood: entrepreneurship.

Hank ultimately supports bourgeois, middle-American values, which is rather unusual for both ABC and contemporary TV sitcoms. As such is it quite refreshing. Mainstream critics, however, will not like it, for it does nothing to contribute to the devaluation of all values and the effort to transform the United States into an oversexed socialist paradise.

Quite the contrary. Hank doesn’t try to break any new ground, and it doesn’t grasp for too many memorable jokes. However, the characters are largely likable, and with Grammer leading the way, the show might survive if ABC gives it time.

But that’s a big if.

Set in the fictional small town of Orson, Indiana, The Middle (8:30 EDT) follows Hank in ABC’s new Wednesday night lineup and like the Kelsey Grammer program, it features a big sitcom star, Patricia Heaton, in a lead role. Also like Hank, The Middle takes a comic but sympathetic look at Middle America, described by central character Frankie Heck (Heaton) as “One of those places you fly over on your way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else but you wouldn’t live here.”

The writing of the pilot episode is particularly strong, and it even uses a couple of symbols to very good effect: a jet flying overhead, and Frankie’s new drivers license with its grossly unattractive photo documenting how badly life has been beating her down. Heaton’s willingness to make herself look silly and physically unattractive is used to great effect in the pilot episode and shows great sense on her part and that of the show’s producers. 

As in the late, great Malcolm in the Middle, the entire family is fairly messed up, and their lives are largely awful. They live on fast food, and Frankie’s days are a perpetually hectic blur. The youngest child, Brick, is described by his teacher as “Maybe clinically quirky,” and his best friend is his backpack. Their oldest, a son named Axl, is a surly jock. The middle child, Sue, is an appearance-challenged teen who fails at every extracurricular activity she tries. 

Yet despite all the comic horrors of their lives, they really do love one another, and in the end that makes their crises endurable and the show enjoyable. While showing the troubles of people who are striving to achieve the American Dream but not making it, the pilot episode of The Middle doesn’t make fun of their hopes and ambitions. 

As such, it’s ultimately a positive view of American aspirations while remaining realistic in acknowledging that the dream includes an ever-increasing list of material things that continually remains outside many people’s grasp. It also points us back toward the importance of personal relationships and the real source of happiness in familial love. This kind of comedy, tough but never cynical, is rarer than one would wish.

The Invention of Lying tells a fantasy story about a world in which people do not know how to lie. The conceit is that lying is the product of a gene no human had before it suddenly popped up in Gervais’s character, forty-something failure Mark Bellison. But instead of simply being a cute comedy based on a silly concept, The Invention of Lying is an ambitious, largely unfunny comedy based on a silly concept. It’s not nearly as cute, innocent, or funny as Gervais’s fans might expect.

In fact, it’s really rather dreary. Yet it does have some good points. Although the early scenes in the film, in which we see Mark’s sad, unsuccessful life, are pretty depressing, there as some funny moments after he invents lying. In addition, the philosophy behind the film is sufficiently confused and inconsistent to be more interesting than one might expect.

Before Mark invents lying, no one in the society is truly happy. They speak with brutal honesty toward one another, in particular calling attention to one another’s faults and their own very base desires, and no one seems to mind the situation too much.

However, there’s something more than just truth-telling going on here, as the characters in these early scenes seem like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There’s no love and no generosity. People’s lives have no meaning, and they don’t look for any. They live for the purpose of advancing the human race genetically, each person trying to find the most genetically superior mate they can catch. Love does not enter into it.

As it happens, the film posits that human beings have no concept of God, and hence do not see any higher purpose in life and have no hope of a life beyond death. This seems part and parcel of the depressing nature of the society depicted in these scenes, though it is difficult to imagine that Gervais intended to make that particular point, given his public statements about the film.

Nonetheless, it is a definite truth that the godless society is unpleasant and uninspired.

After Mark starts lying, things become somewhat interesting–and human kindness begins to make an appearance. Mark’s lies stop a neighbor from committing suicide, help a homeless man get money, bring a troubled couple back together, and give hope to a depressed woman and the occupants of an old people’s home.

Mark then uses his invention to enrich himself, as one might expect. But even that does not bring him happiness, because his real desire, to have the love of beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner), remains unfulfilled.

He sets out to become successful at his old job, writing screen documentaries, by telling fanciful stories that are much more interesting and fun than the true-life tales that had been produced thereto. The first big story he invents is a clearly mythical saga combining sci fi and other fantasy notions.

Next come the controversial scenes in which Mark invents God and an afterlife. (In the theater at which I watched the film, there were only two other people at the showing, and they walked out during this scene. Obviously they were not expecting the overt stance for atheism in the film.)

What motivates Mark to invent an afterlife is something we’ve seen nothing of to this point: love. His sympathy for his dying mother inspires him to tell her that there is hope beyond death. It’s important to note that neither Mark nor anyone else in the film shows actual evidence of loving another person until this moment, when Mark has already invented lying. The lying gene is strangely connected to the ability to love. As we will see, the key to both is imagination.

Mark is overheard while telling his mother the good news about the next life, and of course people want to hear more. Hope is in the air. So Mark explains further. There is a Good Place where good people go after death, and a Bad Place for the others. He says that doing three bad things will send people to The Bad Place instead of The Good Place. (That, of course, is nothing like what Christianity teaches, although one could see it as a misinformed atheist’s mistaken impression of the faith.)

Under a good deal of sincere but understandably confused questioning by a great crowd of people gathered on his lawn, Mark explains more about the Man in the Sky, the afterlife, and morality, in a scene reminiscent (perhaps too much so) of similar scenes in Monty Python movies.

This is all very difficult for the people to understand, as the early scenes and a park-bench conversation with Anna have established that what people lack most of all in this fictional world is imagination. They cannot see past the surfaces of things.

Soon after his invention of The Man in the Sky, however, people begin to lose their concerns about practical matters and set their thoughts on the next. (Here, too, the difference with Christianity is evident, as Christians are explicitly called to love one another and be good stewards of the blessings given to them in this world.) Their new concern for the next life is manifested in the same way as their previous concerns for this one, however, because they remain selfish and still don’t have love for one another.

Eventually, however, even that changes, as Anna comes to see that a fat little boy tormented by bullies is “so much more than fat little Brian.” She starts to imagine what is behind the boy’s dumpy, genetically unattractive surface.

This leads to a very affecting ending, as Anna finally makes a free choice to marry Mark. (The film, despite its odd concept, hews to a traditional romantic comedy structure.)

Yet there is a further irony in this. In reacting to Anna’s choice to marry a more genetically attractive man (Rob Lowe), Mark is given a couple of opportunities, including one at the dramatic climax, to lure her into marrying him regardless of her genetic preference. In particular, she asks him directly whom the Man in the Sky wants her to marry. All Mark will have to do is say yes, and she will marry him.

Mark refuses to tell her. Like God in dealing with mankind, Mark refrains from forcing or tricking Anna into loving him. She must do so of her own free will, or it has no meaning.

So what we have here are two worlds. One, without God and controlled by thoughts of evolution, is a spectacularly dreary, unhappy place without love or meaning. On the other hand, even a fictional God brings the world meaning, joy, liberty, and wonder.

Thus although Ricky Gervais has publicly said that his film takes an atheist position, it appears that even he cannot imagine a happy, emotionally fulfilling world that does not acknowledge a good many fundamentally religious thoughts, and in particular Christian ones.

New York Post critic Kyle Smith has seen the film and describes it as “a full-on attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. It might be the most blatantly, one-sidedly atheist movie ever released by a major studio, in this case Warner Bros.”

Although the commercials and theatrical trailers have presented the film as a cute comedy and made no allusion at all to any religious angle, much less a concerted case for atheism, Smith reports that the basis of the film is its attack on religion:

Gervais delights in what a faith-based society would call blasphemy, setting up an imaginary world in which no one ever lies. Except his character, who spreads what Gervais obviously sees as the biggest lie of all: Belief in God.

Smith’s description of the film makes it clear that the protagonist’s behavior represents a simpleminded atheist’s idea of the meaning of religion:

There is a “Man in the Sky,” he says, who is looking down at all of us and is responsible for everything that happens. Yes, he explains to one woman, he gave your mom cancer — but he’s also responsible for curing her. The people aren’t happy that “The Man in the Sky” is behind all human suffering. “F— The Man in the Sky!” cries one citizen, and the crowd begins to get angry. A magazine cover exclaims, “Man in the Sky Kills 40,000 in Tsunami!” But Gervais’s character insists that whatever damage the Man in the Sky causes, he eventually makes up for it all in the end by providing a beautiful mansion for everyone after they die, at least for those who don’t commit three or more immoral acts, and by making it so that everyone can reunite with their loved ones in the next life.

Smith concludes by stating that the film is mean-spirited overall and that audiences are unlikely to be pleased by Gervais’s attack on their basic beliefs while critics will enjoy this latest attempt to epater la bourgeousie:

Gervais is an atheist, which is fine, but his mean-spiritedness (even before the atheism theme enters the movie, it’s sour and misanthropic) and the film’s reduction of all religion to an episode of crowd hysteria are not going to be warmly received. Except maybe by critics.

In a comment on Smith’s article, a reader quotes from Gervais’s long, poorly written, and unapologetic but highly defensive and spectacularly clichéd response to the building controversy on the film, published on the actor’s blog. Here’s Gervais’s post, with some responses of my own (in brackets):

A couple more web sites have picked up on a few Christians (not all – most Christians have a sense of humour) saying that The Invention of Lying is blasphemous.

Here are my seven deadly sins of jumping to conclusions:

1. No one has seen the film. [False--SK]

2. Even if the film suggests there is no God, it is a fictional world. [a truly pathetic evasion.] One of my favourite films is ‘It’s a wonderful life’ and at no time am I offended by the suggestion in this wonderful work of fiction that there is a God. [Nice but irrelevant.]

3. If the film was not set in a fictional world and suggested there is no God then that’s fine too, as it is anyone’s right not to believe in God. [and it's other people's right to criticize a filmmaker for what he chooses to put in his movies.]

4. By suggesting there is no God you are not singling out Christianity. [but you certainly are including Christianity, so Christians have a right to answer back.]

5. Not believing in God cannot be blasphemous. Blasphemy is acknowledging a God to insult or offend etc. [Gervais's atheism is not the complaint: characterizing God as Gervais allegedly does in the film is what people are concerned about, and it is definitely a case of blasphemy if the film is at all as described.]

6. Even if it was blasphemous, which it isn’t [false], then that’s OK too due to a little god I like called “freedom of speech.” [freedom of speech is not at issue. Blasphemy and contempt for other people's beliefs are the topic of discussion.] That said, I am not trying to offend anyone [but offending them all the same, while hiding behind a fig leaf of good intentions.]. That would be a waste of such a privilege.

7. I am an atheist, but this is not atheist propaganda [Well, if it looks like atheist propaganda, and it walks like atheist propaganda, and it quacks like atheist propaganda...]. When creating an imaginary world you have to make certain decisions. We decided also that there would be no surrealist art, no racism, no flattery, no fiction, no metaphor, and no supernatural. However, we decided that apart from that one “lying gene”, humans evolved with everything else as we have it today. Joy, hope, ambition, ruthlessness, greed, lust, anger, jealousy, sadness, and grief. It’s just a film [another pathetic evasion]. If any of the themes in it offend you or bore you, or just don’t make sense to you, you should put everything right when you make a film [How revoltingly arrogant and elitist. As if the only way to answer a person were to go back in time, pursue the same career they have taken up, and answer them in the same form. This is a truly astonishing insult to his potential audience.].

I really hope everyone enjoys the film [Even though he lives in the relatively unchurched UK, it's quite amazing that he can be so grotesquely ignorant as to have imagined that the great majority of his potential American audience would not find this movie idea offensive.].’ and keeps an open mind [regarding whether they like blasphemy? That is even more arrogant than the last sentence of his deadly sin number seven.]. I believe in peace on Earth, and good will to all men. [Not all harmful things are done with ill will. Gross negligence can be just as destructive, and merits an equal response.] I do as I would be done by, and believe that forgiveness is one of the greatest virtues [but of course he claims to have nothing in his film that requires forgiving.]. I just don’t believe I will be rewarded for it in heaven [It seems likely he's right about that much.]. That’s all.

It will be interesting to see whether audiences take to the film as more people find out what The Invention of Lying is all about. Telling your audience that their most profound beliefs are stupid and wrong seems a fine plan for eliciting positive reviews from elitist movie critics but a very bad way to lure people into movie theaters.

The new drama Glee (Wednesdays, 9 p.m EDT) represents another approach and a bolder break with current trends–and it may point the way toward a welcome increase in variety among network TV dramas. 

Produced by Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck), Glee tells the story of high school teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) a married high school teacher in his thirties, who wants to restore McKinley High School’s glee club to its former glory, achieved when he was a member during his high school years and the club won the nationals. 

Unfortunately, glee is now way out of style and is just about the lowest rung on the school’s status ladder. But Will is not one to be easily stopped, even by the school’s powerful cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), who hates the glee club and wants it stopped.

The presentation of high school status issues and depictions of how peer pressure paradoxically enforces conformity to an odd mix of rebellious attitudes is both insightful about high school and American society in general, where the media and much of the culture tend to function like the higher-status kids in high school, enforcing a foolish, unfocused sense of rebellion and entitlement. 

Schuester, on the other hand, exemplifies what makes a good teacher: he takes great joy in developing young people’s talents–and the singing of the glee club is so entertaining that it induces the audience to share that feeling. 

“We’re all here for the same reason: because we want to be good at something,” says Finn Hudson, a glee club member and star quarterback who is forced to stand up to his coach and teammates in order to take part in the club, because of its unacceptably low status in the school’s social hierarchy. 

That scene, from the pilot episode, exemplifies the kind of drama and meaning the producers are able to find in this seemingly inhospitable subject. 

If comparisons to Disney’s High School Musical movies are inevitable, Glee can stand the heat. Its greater realism and recognition of the economic and social limitations of small-town life move Glee significantly beyond a mere show-biz story. 

In fact, the show of which Glee is most reminiscent is Friday Night Lights, the brilliant DirecTV/NBC drama series centered on a Texas small-town high school football team. Each show looks sympathetically but realistically at a social organization in an American high school and extracts drama and real social insights. Glee includes a good deal more humor than Friday Night Lights, and is less inclined toward the tragic view evident in that show, but the result is the same: a show that’s both enjoyable and edifying. 

Glee could be misconstrued as making some political points or working toward progressive notions of social transformation, but so far that hasn’t been its emphasis. It’s true, for example, that the season premiere, “Showmance,” mocks teenage celibacy programs and caters to the myth that public schools teachers are underpaid. It also includes an exceedingly vulgar song-and-dance sequence. 

Similarly, traditionalists might be tempted to take offense at the presence of so many references to homosexuality in the show, which could be taken as advocacy of it. One of the glee club members, Rachel, has “two daddies,” as the saying goes, and another, Kurt, reveals that he’s a homosexual, in episode two, “Acafellas.” Yet that is simply a function of the show’s realism: one could very well expect those particular kids to be among the few who would gravitate toward the high school glee club, given the low status of the group. Those of already low status have less to lose. 

In addition, all of the episodes shown so far have mocked political correctness shibboleths and satirized moral failings such as disloyalty, selfishness, and dishonesty. Although Glee displays a certain amount of surface sympathy with contemporary moral relativism, it’s really showing sympathy with the individuals, not their failings, and the first three episodes of the show suggest that it’s on the right side regarding general moral principles. 

Fox is taking a chance by going against contemporary TV drama conventions, but the rewards could be worth it–for network and audience alike.

I considered that a potentially baleful eventuality, considering that the new comedy seemed likely to be very anti-business, given the scenes shown in the trailers and the presence of politically active Damon and Soderbergh (director of Che, which lionized the Cuban Marxist revolutionary). I haven’t seen it yet, and so will reserve judgment on that score, but perhaps it makes sense that although The Contender did better than expected, it was clobbered by the animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Meatballs brought in a very healthy $30.1 million in North American ticket sales in its first weekend during the past three days (50 percent more than industry analysts had expected), far outpacing The Contender’s take of $10.5 million. The Damon-Soderbergh comedy finished just ahead of Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which brought in $10.1 million in its second weekend. Another comedy, Love Happens, finished fourth.

With three comedies leading the pack and two highly promoted horror-suspense films with attractive female stars in the lead roles tanking with unexpectedly low ticket sales (Jennifer’s Body, Whiteout), it’s apparent that U.S. audiences are tired of downbeat material and want a more positive, optimistic type of entertainment,

That’s especially important with the economy remaining in bad condition long after recovery typically begins (average of ten months after onset) and Congress and the President considering a multitude of expensive new initiatives guaranteed to make the situation even worse.

With so many comedies to choose from, the weekend’s total U.S. box office was up 14 percent over the same weekend of last year and 17 percent over the previous weekend. Clearly, the Hollywood studios would be smart to press their filmmakers to move toward a more optimistic, positive, pro-American, classical liberal approach to the stories they tell.

If not, they may find themselves in a recession of their own.