Fandom--Because I don't want to think about politics today

I don't write much about television or films, but that's not because I don't enjoy television or films. I love a good drama. Recently I've become a fan of the British television series Life on Mars, the story of a British policeman who is hit by a car in 2006 and "wakes" up to find himself 33 years in the past, in 1973. The series is being re-broadcast on PBS.  Although I root for the modern, methodical, more sensitive DCI Sam Tyler, the officer who is stunned to discover he's on almost alien soil in 1970s England, I have an awful soft spot for the often corrupt and bullying DCI Gene Hunt, but I would like to think that soft spot is more the result of my rather swooning regard for the actor who plays Hunt--Philip Glenister--than of any admiration for the ham-fisted Hunt.  But evidently Gene Hunt has a swooning effect on many women viewers, and I'm just one of many. Maybe it's that confident swagger and curling lip that attracts us so.  However, I first really noticed Glenister as an actor in his role as Mr. Carter in BBC1's Cranford, a very different role than that of DCI Hunt--and I immediately liked that character, too. So, yeah, though he is not traditionally handsome, for some reason, I think Philip Glenister has a lot of sex appeal. I think I'm a fan--or as much of a fan as I ever am of actors. Here is a list of some of my favorite actors/characters:

• As a child, I loved Eric Fleming's Mr. Favor in Rawhide, my first "crush" on a fictional character.
  
• Vying for second place were Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock from Star Trek (all those other women could have the captain!) and Patrick McGoohan's "Number Six" in The Prisoner.
  
• Kevin Kline--a great talent
  
• French actor Jean Reno--oh yeah!
  
• British actors Alan Bates, Bill Nighy, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, John Hannah, and Alan Rickman--all very sexy (and, yeah, I know that Everett is gay, but that doesn't make him less sexy!)
  
• I love Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes.
  
• Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, especially his role in Yojimbo
  
• Don Cheadle--not only a great actor but also very good-looking
  
• I first really noticed Forest Whitaker in Smoke and have enjoyed his acting ever since.
  
• Indian actors Aamir Khan and Ajay Devgan.

And that's my list of favorite actors, none of whom are really traditional heartthrobs--provided here today because I don't feel like addressing the really important news of the day, such as the execrable Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. Yep, taking refuge in the superficial and entertaining.

Dancing with Bollywood

The picture doesn't do the footwork justice, but these boots have been dancing to Hindustani films lately. One of my young co-workers loves Bollywood films, and she has loaned some of her DVDs to me. I had viewed a few films produced in India and liked one or two of them quite well, most notably Monsoon Wedding, but I really don't know much about "Bollywood" films. Now, however, thanks to Hijrah, my co-worker, I know a little more.

I now have a favorite actor, Ajay Devgan (with Aamir Khan running a close second). In the first borrowed film I watched, Deewangee, Devgan plays the villain; in the second, Chori Chori, he plays the brooding male lead in this romantic comedy. I think that I like Devgan and Khan so well because they are, of course, good-looking, and also because they have very expressive faces; they inhabit their characters.

Today I watched Dil Chahta Hai, a story of the friendship of three young men just graduated from college and the women with whom they fall in love. Those boots were dancing to one of the songs on that film, "Koi Kahe, Kehta Rahe." I just can't hear a tune such as this without tapping my feet, and if I am at home, I must jump up and dance around the room, despite the pain in my fifty-one-year-old knees. If I thought knee surgery would enable me to dance like those folks do in the dance scene to "Koi Kahe, Kehta Rahe," I'd make arrangements for the surgery immediately!

Here are links to other music videos from Dil Chahta Hai:

• "Jaane Kyon" (Aamir Khan is the male lead in this video.)
• "Woh Ladki Hai Kahan"

When I am Old[er]

There is a scene in the film Winged Migration that immediately captured my imagination the first time I saw it. Eurasian cranes settle into the waving grasses of a windswept field. Near this field is a stone house. A donkey peers from a fence around the house; a woman opens a gate. There are close-ups of the cranes searching for food, such as frogs, in the windswept grasses dotted with meadow flowers. A heavy old woman dressed in a blue patterned dress with a dark blue scarf on her head walks slowly toward the cranes, a metal bucket in her hand. I imagine that the woman comes out every year with this bucket full of grain, trying to get close to these beautiful wild birds that migrate so far, 2500 miles, we are told. The donkey brays in the background. In one close-up of the cranes' pecking in the tall grasses, one can hear chickens clucking in the background, a perfect blend of the domestic and the wild.

I imagine I am that old woman. I want to be that old woman, with the wrinkles around my eyes caused by squinting in that open landscape of grass and sky. When I think of growing old, of dying, I imagine my last years in a place such as this, in Aubrac, France. A low fire will be flaming in a fireplace inside the stone house. I will arise every morning to throw grain to the chickens and to take the excess grain across the fields to stare at the sky, waiting for the return of the cranes.

Other places I've seen on film arouse similar feelings in me:

• the scene of the Dashwood cottage in Andrew Davies' recent adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The cottage is set on a cliff by the coast in Devon, England. A lot of the country scenes there are of rain and dark skies and pounding waves against a desolate coast.
• Scenes from PBS's mystery mini-series Oliver's Travels, set in the far Orkneys of Scotland. The scenery is enhanced, of course, by the accompanying handsome, craggy visage of British actor Alan Bates.

Most of us probably have an image in our heads of where we would like to be in old age. I don't want to be in a retirement village or a bright home in Florida. I want to be somewhere desolate but beautiful where I can contemplate mortality and re-live memories among domestic duties and sky-gazing, "all passion spent."

As Michel de Montaigne wrote: "I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening."