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Elementary, My Dear Bilbo

By on October 22, 2010 5

Martin Freeman

Very good news! After announcing only the other day that he was turning down the role of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit movie in order to return as Dr. Watson in Steven Moffat’s marvelous Sherlock series, Martin Freeman has apparently been cast as Bilbo after all – which strikes me as absolutely perfect casting. (Remember him also as Arthur Dent, like Bilbo a bewildered everyman thrown into cosmic adventure, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) This means he’ll be doing both Bilbo and Watson, I hope?

Addendum: Yup, he’s confirmed as doing both. And if you haven’t seen Sherlock, the first episode is playing on PBS’s Mystery! this weekend.

Possible Doctor Who Spoiler

By on October 7, 2010 2

Leaked evidence suggests that an upcoming episode of Doctor Who will be shot in the u.s.

But that’s not the possible spoiler. The possible spoiler, if actual, is fairly big, so I’m consigning it to the comments section. Proceed at your peril.

SPOILER WARNING:

Alongside Machete

By on September 24, 2010 13

Okay, Machete isn’t Hitchcock or anything; but it’s a fun movie. It also has some interesting libertarian aspects:

Machete

  • It’s explicitly in favour of open borders.
     
  • It’s implicitly in favour of the right to bear arms.
     
  • It dramatises countereconomic resistance to government (“the Network”).
     
  • It also dramatises the “Baptists and bootleggers” dynamic, as well as the role of government in helping to cartelise the very industries it claims to be trying to protect people from.
     
  • It explicitly endorses the Socratic-Stoic-Ciceronian-Augustinian-Thomistic-Spoonerite principle that an unjust law is not a law.
     
  • By contrast with Cory Doctorow’s (otherwise excellent) Little Brother, whose ending disappointed me, Machete does not end with a reformist exhortation to work within the system; on the contrary, it ends with two of the main characters renouncing forms of state authorisation that they have been given. (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers.)

Now we just need to convert Robert Rodriguez to agorism and we’ll be all set.

No Place to Hyde

By on September 7, 2010 6

Since I like what I’ve seen of Steven Moffat’s work (Doctor Who, Coupling, Sherlock), I thought I’d check out Jekyll. The two clips below are all I’ve seen so far (and probably all I’ll have time to see this week, since I leave for a Liberty Fund conference in Virginia on Thursday), but it looks promising:

(I’m pretty sure that what the second clip calls “Episode Two, Scene One” is actually Episode One, Scene Two.) If the actress in these opening scenes looks familiar, that may be because she was the star of the short-lived Bionic Woman reboot. Those who’ve seen the third episode of Sherlock may notice a similarity in characterisation between Moffat’s Hyde and Moffat’s Moriarty.

Addendum:

Oh okay, one more:

Fun stuff, except for Joseph Paterson’s painfully fake American accent. (I didn’t even realise he was supposed to be American until he made the crack about British people being funny.)

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