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Currently viewing entries by Madeline Bruce.
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Intelligent Commentary: Episode 11
The final episode of Season 1 of Intelligence leaves drug kingpin Jimmie Reardon stuck in the men’s room of a Seattle nightclub, as it dawns on him that this is a sting to arrest him, even though he has been cooperating with the Feds in Canada. Ted Altman (Matt Frewer) has sneakily thrown in his lot with the American Drug Enforcement Administration in a ploy to destabilize Mary Spalding in her career, the better to rise to the top himself. Mary is gaining important information about arms trading from her drug trade informant, whose trust she has earned. Jimmie drops his famous cool when he phones his wife and daughter on his cell phone, fearing that he may not be long for this world. Actor Ian Tracey gives a believable, riveting performance as this husband and father whose kingpin reign may well be over. It is moving to see the sudden shift from where he has been brushing off his daughter’s questions about his activities, to leveling with her, and saying, from his heart, “I’m sorry for the kind of life I lead.” Another surprise is when he tells his troublemaker wife Francine, “I’ve always loved you.”
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Intelligent Commentary: Episode 10
And, too, the soundtrack seems to absorb the personalities and the world in Intelligence, and the personalities and that world seem to absorb the soundtrack into themselves. How does this happen? I don’t know. It’s some kind of magic, like when you hear the zither playing in the movie The Third Man, and you know that Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is standing in that completely dark doorway.
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Intelligent Commentary : Episode 9
Along with the driving, adrenaline-soaked percussion, the beginning of this episode features some howling sounds that brought to my mind the terrible anonymity of the cosmopolitan city of Vancouver, and the sterility, the fundamental emotional coldness and disconnection of the world that all the characters in this series inhabit. These unique sounds spring from a combination of “a large percussion orchestra, and a combination of live performances and sampled performances.”
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Intelligent Commentary : Episode 8
Things move so fast in Intelligence, it is so full of incident - that your head is buzzing at the end of an hour. It’s a keyed-up, telescopic view of a very exciting movie that the characters on both sides of the law are living. It’s dangerous, and it’s exhilarating. People are betrayed, guys get bumped off, and this is the daily reality in that world. Contrasting with this speedball pace were a few glimpses of a floor polisher, in action, at floor level. It made me think of Mary Spalding, with her genius I.Q., head of the Organized Crime Unit, and how dull most other occupations, including housewife, would seem to her, now that she is honed to knife-edged proficiency in her job, and ready for even more responsibility as the probable next head of the Canadian Intelligence and Security Service.
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Intelligent Commentary : Episode 7
Episode 7 of Season One of Intelligence starts off with moody scenes of boats and lights in the Vancouver harbour at night. Artistically this series is superior, with the exceptional music of Schaun Tauser contributing so much to the unique flavour and freshness that makes it stand out so far ahead of the standard American crime shows that look and sound so much alike. The music consists mostly of an instrument that sounds to me sort of like a sitar played like a guitar, and percussion. But that’s all you need, if it’s done right. Case in point is the music in Orson Well’s classic film The Third Man, which has only one zither. It is considered by many, including myself, to be the best movie music ever recorded.
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Intelligent Commentary: Episode 6
In this episode we hear lots of talk about guns, munitions, gun-running, spying, and war strategy, on a street level, and on a global level, stretching all the way to Hong Kong. Take it down a level, and it’s the talk you hear on the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys, when Ricky and Julian decide that a loaded gun is the best way to solve a conflict in the Trailer Park.
Take it up a notch, and you can find Marcel Proust’s delight in talking very elaborate Military strategy with his friend in the French Military, Robert de St. Loup. Also, in War and Peace Leo Tolstoy gives a masterful description of the relish and zeal with which Napolean’s soldiers ride happily to their deaths, so loyal are they to this emperor and his cause.
Missing from each of these examples is the presence of women. In each case, men have defined the situation, the problem, and the solution.
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Intelligent Commentary : Episode 5
We viewers are learning how valuable intelligence, in the sense of secret information, is on the global stage, as we watch each subsequent episode of Season 1 of writer Chris Haddock’s TV series Intelligence.
This crime series is more exciting to watch than its American counterparts, because it is saying something about how the world works, something truthful. People speak of the deterioration in the quality of News, which is now “News as Entertainment”. Intelligence is entertainment as news, if you watch and listen carefully. American series are becoming ever more lurid, in an effort to shock and titillate, whereas Intelligence takes a more sophisticated and canny approach to the underlying truth, or what can be gleaned of that, about characters and situations that are actually out there, now.
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Intelligent Commentary : Episode 4
The characters on both sides of the law have very similar, if not identical values. Marriage, which is considered to be the basis of a civilized society, gets short shrift. In this episode Mary Spalding is flirting with the idea of having an affair with a married man. Francine visits her estranged husband Jimmie, practically begging him for emotional support. She sheds some tears, gets a bit hysterical at one point, and out comes Jimmie’s sneer, his holier-than thou response to just about everything. Big man – not. The importance of the family unit is denigrated, and very foolishly so. Jimmie has recently been shot at, and nearly killed, yet he wants sole custody of his young daughter, instead of realizing that it takes both a Mom and a Dad, working together and supporting each other, even if they are divorced, to raise a child, and even then it is not easy.
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Intelligent Commentary
The lives of all the characters in this series are highly circumscribed. On the one hand there is talk of millions and millions of dollars changing hands, of high level jobs being vied for, but the quality of life that the characters have seems paltry and banal - cheapened. One wonders what the point is to taking all these big risks of being killed or jailed, just to hang around the sleazy Chik-A-Dee Nightclub, which does not have even a chink of daylight anywhere. It’s like a vision of Hell. The only activity allowed there is drinking liquor, talking drug deals and paying for a Lap Dance. Women are there to do lewd dancing, nothing else. In an earlier episode Mike Reardon actually started to have a conversation with a dancer, and she angrily dismissed him, as she was expecting a lap dancing job. This is a highly restricted range of activities, and relationships.
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Commentary on the TV Series Intelligence, Episode 2
There is a lot going on here, with the various characters and plots and locales springing up. I’m going to step back a bit, squint my eyes, and think about how all this might be seen on a larger canvas. There are levels upon levels appearing, making this series worth watching 2 and 3 times, and more. It’s like my copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is dog-eared and falling apart. I always go back to it when I have run out of other things to read, and the richness of it never palls. Like that novel, there are themes evident in Intelligence underneath what is going on between the individual characters and their organizations, which are both legal and illegal and often a mixture of both. In Proust, the themes are art, time, and society. In Intelligence, the absence of certain components are themselves ongoing motifs. These have “incredible negative capacity” as Annie Hall says in the movie of the same name.
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