THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE

Just saw the documentary THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE with a Meetup group at the Bloor.  It's pretty disturbing:  the NYPD basically grabbed the first suspicious teenagers who turned up and pressured them into false confessions. (It reminded me of the treatment of Omar Khadr.)

We had a discussion about it afterward.  I thought it was really contemptible of Ed Koch to refer to "the alleged rapists," then add, "We have to call them 'alleged,' because of the regulation." (I've thought little of Koch since he pushed his support for the death penalty to get elected at the time of the Son of Sam murders.)

It was co-directed by Ken Burns, whose documentaries I've usually liked, though they can be sententious. (I was a bit disappointed by his World War II documentary THE WAR:  it started out well, but by the final chapter they'd ended up playing it safe and turning it into a "tribute" to wartime America.) I've seen his THE CIVIL WAR many times over the years.  It's very eloquent, though it lets Shelby Foote dominate perhaps too much:  I would have liked more of Ed Bearss.  I've also enjoyed Burns' documentaries on subjects like Mark Twain and Thomas Hart Benton.

Meanwhile, the parents and I have been downloading movies from Netflix.  In the last week we've seen two big, colorful Cinemascope productions from Twentieth Century Fox in the '50s:  A MAN CALLED PETER and LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING. (Our big widescreen TV, which we got about a year ago, is suitable for such epics.) Unfortunately, the latter movie starred the terrible actress Jennifer Jones, miscast as a half-Chinese doctor babbling greeting-card profundities.  And last week we saw Terence Davies' stunning film of Terence Rattigan's '50s play THE DEEP BLUE SEA:  if you can't see it in a theatre, be sure to see it on a widescreen TV.