Word: gambone
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...parts as it did onstage but will be rerun in one-hour episodes and in one six-hour shebang), but its high-literary and low--pop culture sensibility--it references Hegel and The Wizard of Oz--best recall Dennis Potter's British mini-series. (The Singing Detective's Michael Gambon even shows up as, of course, a ghost.) And it ranks in TV history with Potter's masterworks. The key to Angels is that it is realistic and fantastic at once--a miraculous event in mundane circumstances, like a biblical visitation--and Nichols' movie-series is appropriately epic and gritty...
...compressed; it needs TV's room to digress. And the director, Keith Gordon, doesn't really recapture '50s Los Angeles, where Potter reset his flashbacks. They feel perfunctory (and underbudgeted). Finally, Robert Downey Jr., who works hard as Dark, just doesn't have the weight, age and rage Michael Gambon brought to the role...
...that most unfashionable creature, a western--the story of two cowboys, Charley (Costner) and Boss (Robert Duvall) in 1882, caring for their herd and each other, wandering into town and into trouble. It is peopled with the usual suspects: the corrupt sheriff (James Russo), the mean rich guy (Michael Gambon), the warm, weathered spinster (Annette Bening). The plot is basically a real-estate wrangle: whether Boss and Charley have the right to graze their herd on land claimed by the rich guy. And there's a lovely interlude with Charley and the spinster, where the cowboy has to recall gentlemanly...
...Start with that first number: two. Two actors, but four characters: a man in his early 60s, Salter (Gambon), and three of his sons (all played by Daniel Craig). We are in the near future - say, the middle of this century. Thirty-some years before, Salter's wife had died and he was left to raise his four-year-old son Bernard, who had begun life as an angel ("You were the most beautiful baby everyone said"). But the father was neglectful, sometimes brutal to the boy; Bernard grew wild, sick. In anger and cunning, Salter took advantage...
...Gambon has played some monsters in his day - the gross thief in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," the tobacco company boss in "The Insider," the man everyone is dying to kill in "Gosford Park" - as well as the raging, pustulent fantast in Dennis Potter's miniseries "The Singing Detective." He can get at the agony of infamy as well as anyone, and does so here, though director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott") has given him too many props; Gambon breaks the four-century theatrical record for the most cigarettes smoked ostentatiously in a single evening. Craig finds subtle...