Most Recent Posts

Syria's main opposition has elected a new interim prime minister: He's Ghassan Hitto, a naturalized U.S. citizen who until recently lived in Texas.

Here's more from The New York Times:

"After a prolonged day of maneuvering and voting on Monday that lasted into the early-morning hours, representatives of the opposition coalition, meeting in Istanbul, chose Ghassan Hitto, 50, a former information technology executive, who emigrated from Syria many years ago and until recently had lived in Texas. Mr. Hitto was heavily involved in volunteer efforts to help Syrians whose lives had been upended by the uprising against Mr. Assad."

Top of the Lake, a new seven-part miniseries premiering tonight on the Sundance Channel, was co-created and co-directed by Jane Campion, who teamed with Holly Hunter 20 years ago on the movie The Piano. Hunter is back for this new project, playing a mysterious New Agey guru of sorts. She's started a small commune for emotionally damaged women, on a remote strip of land in New Zealand.

That story could have been at the center of Top of the Lake, but it isn't. It's more like a running subplot, just like the story that opens the drama — the tale of a 12-year-old girl named Tui who is found walking into a frigid lake, presumably to take her own life.

She's taken to the authorities, who can't get any details out of her. So they call in a visiting detective who used to be a local. And Top of the Lake, especially after the young girl vanishes, turns out to be mostly about that detective.

And that's a good thing, because the detective, Robin, is played by Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy on Mad Men. No matter how good you think she is on Mad Men, I suspect you'll be unprepared for her complicated performance here — and not only because she sports an effective New Zealand accent, but because her character is so rough, so raw and so constantly conflicted.

The pace of Top of the Lake is so deliberate and the atmosphere so oppressive, that its overall tone is close to the moodiness of the AMC series The Killing. The beautiful but foreboding setting is a strong character here — but the strongest, in addition to the determined women played by Hunter and Moss, is Tui's father, Matt Mitcham, a local backwoods drug lord played by Peter Mullan.

Matt Mitcham is like a Kiwi version of Al Swearengen from Deadwood — charismatic and deadly all at the same time. Robin gets a taste of this when she first meets Mitcham. She's looking into the death of a local real estate agent named Bob Platt, and visits Mitcham's fortress-like property. He's around back with a dog that's tied to a post and a shotgun within reach. Within a minute of her arrival, he fires the gun — killing the dog, and freaking Robin thoroughly out.

Mitcham frightens Robin, but he doesn't stop her. The biggest mystery in Top of the Lake, it turns out, is what drives Robin — her own demons and hidden secrets, and why she connects so strongly with the missing girl. It's less a mystery than a character study — and despite the show's title, Top of the Lake, all the rewards in this miniseries lie way beneath the surface.

Well, At Least Her Name's Not Medea

Another TV drama premiering tonight, A&E's Bates Motel, is primarily a character study as well — but this time we already know the character. He's Norman Bates, the creepy killer from Psycho with a fixation on his late mother. Well, Bates Motel is a prequel to Psycho, showing Norman in his formative high school years. His mother is very much alive — and her name is Norma.

Enlarge image i

The subject of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with the Jewish community is complicated, multidimensional and contentious. On the one hand, the former New York governor won Jewish votes by landslide margins and led the Allies to victory in World War II, defeating Nazi Germany. Some of his closest advisers and strongest supporters were Jews, including Felix Frankfurter, whom he named to the Supreme Court, speechwriter Samuel Rosenman and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

In a Guatemalan courtroom Tuesday, prosecutors will present their case against a former military dictator who ruled during one of the bloodiest periods in the Central American nation's 36-year civil war.

Efrain Rios Montt is accused of genocide in the murder of tens of thousands of Guatemala's Indians. Human rights advocates and the families of victims have struggled for years to bring him before the court, and they say it is the first trial in Latin America of a former president in the country where he ruled.

Antonio Cava, an Ixil Indian with jet black hair, high cheekbones and a soft smile, remembers the exact date, Jan. 15, 1982, when his peaceful childhood high in the Guatemalan mountains came to an end. He was 11.

Enlarge image i