Season 5 of Game of Thrones is now on DVD and I saw the first episode of it last night.

Plot problems notwithstanding, I’ve had a good time with the series up till now, and currently, with Season 5, it feels like an old friend.  At least the first episode did.

The chieftan played by Ciaran Hinds is burned at the stake, and serious Jon Snow (Kit Harington) fires an arrow through his heart to put him out of his agony.  It makes me wish that people executed this way in actual history had been compassionately shot with fatal arrows.  ‘Twas not the case.

Much earlier than this, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) opines to the bald guy, the eunuch, that the future of their country is “s–t.”  With the Trump-Clinton phenomenon going on, I am tempted to say I know how he feels.

Sunshine (1999 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Istvan Szabo film, Sunshine (2000), gives us a Jewish family in Hungary as it encounters historical events of the 20th century.  This, however, is designer history meant to point up anti-Semitic politics and policy; history’s true density is missing.  Small wonder that the characters succeed more as types than as human beings, albeit there are exceptions—e.g. Adam Sors, one of the three men played by Ralph Fiennes.  

Adam is of limited interest, though, when he didn’t have to be.  Of course he falls in love since falling-in-love is one of the very few values this movie upholds.  Belief in God, on the other hand, it doesn’t know what to do with.

Cover of Shenandoah

The Virginia farmer acted by James Stewart in Shenandoah (1965) has every intention of keeping himself and his family neutral in the War Between The States, but abundant gloom descends after Yankee soldiers make a costly mistake, etc.  It is impossible to buy much of what James Lee Barrett‘s script proffers us, such as a group of Johnny Rebs escaping from Yanks on a wharf (ineptly directed by Andrew V. McLaglen.)  There are some gripping and pleasurable moments, though, just not enough of them.

Human relations can get so loathsome.  In last night’s Jane the Virgin, a very pregnant Petra treated Jane condescendingly, bitchily, before the unexpected childbearing, and Paolo (Ana De la Reguera), who seemed so sane at first, continued to keep Rogelio captive in a non-dingy locked apartment.  And then we hear that Xiomara has invited into the family’s lives a man who represents “bad luck.”  The telenovela problems and antics were strong—the episode was teeming with them.  Here’s one of the antics: Petra named her two newborn daughters Elsa and Anna, which names are from the animated movie, Frozen, though Petra didn’t know that.

I’ve been waiting for something meaningful to happen on Jane, as it has before, and last night something somewhat meaningful did.  Jane imagined, with images on the screen, what it would have been like had she never broken up with Michael.  She sees that human relations in this case would have been quite nice.