Trilby16

Season 5 has been made available again, and as it was one of my favorite shows some years back, I'm enjoying it again even though I've seen it. Except this time around I've had the thought that it should be called "I Did Something Incredibly Stupid." Or "I Don't Deserve To Be Alive." Or "Just Kill Me Already."

And what's with the very British narrator? I'm watching an episode about two Americans, stuck in a very American desert after their Jeep turns over on its side, and the narrator intones "It was getting to be almost 30 degrees. And they were kilometers from anywhere." We are Americans. Americans in the show, Americans watching the show. We don't want to hear Celsius and decimalization. How can 30 degrees be hot? You know why Fahrenheit makes more sense than Celsius? In the Fahrenheit scale, the range of 0 to 100 degrees is directly related to the HUMAN experience, not to a test tube on a Bunsen burner. That is the range within which most of us humans go about our daily business. And the old measurements which we Americans have stuck to relate to the human body. A "foot" is called a foot, why? Think about it. Then you have liters. Where does that even come from? Science, probably. I really don't care. Where does the measurement "1 cup" come from? From a cup. In less fancy times, you'd reach for a cup from your cupboard to measure a cup of something. Sugar. Flour.

But some like the precision of liters. Hah! Remember years back when we were getting warnings, hearing rumblings, about the coming change to our measurements? How did that go, eh? The only place it was implemented, and stuck, was in 2 liter soda bottles. Maybe beer, I wouldn't know.

And another thing-- the decimalizers seem proud of how easily these measurements can be divided, like how a kilometer is 1000 meters. So why stop there? How about hours that consist of 100 minutes? A day could be 10 hours followed by a night of 10 hours. So much neater, right? A week could be 10 days, with 10 months in year.

Anyway, back to the show! These poor ******s get themselves stuck, lost, whatever, in a lava field, a dense jungle, the side of a mountain peak-- in a storm! The middle of the ocean without a paddle, a canyon slot, miles from nowhere, have left no map for their loved ones of where they will eventually get lost. And you think, that's it then, they'll never get out of this predicament. There's no way.

But besides the actors in the recreations of these mishaps, the hopelessly-lost actual people are also IN the show, giving away the fact that they will indeed, against all odds, be rescued! Well, the title gives it away as well. But as a viewer you can't help being a bit on the edge of your seat when things look most dire.

But wait! Here come the helicopters (usually)! Or some other "dues ex machina," to save the stranded, lost, out of hope, almost dead people. I'm not giving away any spoilers when I tell you it's almost always helicopters. Or some emergency service. God bless those services! Really! Sometimes the predicaments these folks get themselves into are so painful and seemingly hopeless that I can hardly look, and I play a little game on my phone to distract myself.

Anyway, it a great show. The re-enactments of the dire situations are amazing. Like me, you may also find yourself wondering how they pull that off! And you may (like me) fervently hope that these people, the ones who survived, have learned a lesson from all that!

I must admit, I only got halfway through it-- which was already a great effort on my part. A bit before the halfway mark I started asking myself: what am I getting out of this, can I stand any of the characters, and will my life or even my day be any better if I stick it out to the bitter end? The answer was a resounding NO!

I cut my losses. There is no there there. And once we got to the castle, I was afraid we'd stay stuck for all eternity, or another hour-- whichever came first!.

I always enjoy seeing Richard E. Grant, but the rest of the boring cast can go enjoy their awards and hosannas in some castle or other and toast each other's amazing talent away from public scrutiny.

Yeah, I don't know what to say about this hot mess. You cannot fail to see it was an adaption of a stage play. And all the performances are equally terrible, not least of all, Connery's. And he was very mean to his wife, in the movie.

How was this film made in 1973? I remember 1973. I was around then. This seems like it was made in the early 1950's.

At first I thought it was going to be a crime movie, but the only crime is the movie (HAH HAH). But then it quickly settled into Theater of the Absurd. At that point, I'm like, OK, this is pretty weird, but I'm up for weird! But at 1 hour 20 minutes, I start pausing repeatedly to see how much more there is to go! And getting more and more impatient, I'm doing that "sunk cost" thing where I figure-- I've put this much time into it, I may as well see it through. But no! So wrong! So not worth it to get to the end.