My being a Whovian is beginning to reap a few rewards.
I am guilty guilty guilty of having loaned our Doctor Who DVDs to Jeff, a very nice fellow who works in the deli at the store. What Jeff had originally wanted was to borrow our Torchwood DVDs, because he thinks John Barrowman is hot, but I insisted that Jeff would appreciate Torchwood more if he watched the first two seasons of Doctor Who first, in order to get the show's context right.
I have, of course, made a convert. Jeff now loves loves loves Doctor Who (and thinks Torchwood isn't quite as good).
Which brings us to the rewards.
Jeff has started loaning us discs. Specifically, he's loaned us his copy of a film by Julie Taymor, Across the Universe. The film didn't do too well at the box office, and I had my doubts - one more film using Beatles songs for the jukebox score, with all the names of course springing from names used in Beatles songs, and a story about the revolutionary '60s? Hasn't this been done before? No, Jeff said, give it a try.
So we did.
And it proved to be a lot better than my expectations had allowed. It is visually stunning, which I had expected (this is a Taymor film, after all). What I hadn't expected were well-drawn characters who had at least a couple of toes planted in reality. Nor had I expected Taymor to say "Bullshit" to some of the left-wing ideology that permeated the 60s - instead, she took the song "Revolution" to heart and followed a more moderate path.
We also discovered something I hadn't realized about der Brucer and myself - I'm far more aware of the Beatles ouvre than he is. "What's that song, I've never heard it before?" was something he said more than twice. And there were spoken quotes, like "She came in through the bathroom window," that had me howling with laughter but just got a blank look from him.
We may have to invest in a few Beetles albums, just to get him up to speed.
Anyway, back to the film. Is it perfect? No. But it's far better than Hairspray, far more intelligent and respectful of the intelligence of it's audience.
Maybe that's why it didn't do too well at the box office. Respect just doesn't get the respect it used to get nowadays.
(I'm thinking of insisting that Jeff, who doesn't like Shakespeare, give Branaugh's Hamlet a try.)