Ken and Robin Consume Media: No, the Other Kind of Sea Lion

September 27th, 2016 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on our new podcast segment, Tell Me More.

Recommended

Everybody Street (Film, US, Cheryl Dunn, 2013) Documentary profiles top NYC photographers who prowl its streets in search of spontaneous images of people and city life. Each proves in her or his own way as rich a character as the subjects they capture on film. The HD format shows off their iconic images to fine advantage.—RDL

Traveling to Work: Diaries 1988-1998 (Nonfiction, Michael Palin, 2014) Journal entries cover a decade of film acting, writing, travel documentaries and inconclusive Monty Python business meetings, rendered much less boring than that sounds by Palin’s wit and insight. Ideal reading for any concentration-draining circumstance where you’d nonetheless like to have a smart book to devour in discrete snippets—standing in line-ups at a film festival, let’s say. Return to halcyon days when the first Gulf War was the worst thing happening in the Middle East, the bombs going off in London were set by the IRA, and Tony Blair inspired optimism.—RDL

We March Against England: Operation Sea Lion, 1940-1941 (Nonfiction, Robert Forczyk, 2016) Forczyk doesn’t quite manage to overturn the consensus opinion on Hitler’s mooted invasion of England: that it was doomed to fail, if not a bluff. However, his fully researched history does integrate Sea Lion far more fully into the whole story of the UK-Hitler strategic war, emphasizes that it would have been a closer-run thing than we think, and provides one or two roads-not-taken that could have made it the basis of a forced armistice if not a “swastika over the Tower” moment. –KH

Good

The Threat (Film, US, Felix Feist, 1949) Terrifying armed robber (Charles McGraw) escapes from Folsom Prison to kidnap the DA and cop he threatened with reprisals, along with the burlesque performer who let him down. Police procedural notable for its authentic grubbiness and the cast of lived-in faces inhabiting the roles of crooks and law enforcement alike.–RDL