THREE BAGS FULL by Barney Rosenzweig

If you want to be charmed … even, quite possibly against your will … then you might be just the candidate for The Sheep Detectives. For me it was not an easy sell; I am not a Hugh Jackman fan (FYI, he’s in it); nor am I particularly into talking animals of any kind (although, if ewes will forgive me, I am partial to lamb chops).

Puns and prejudice aside, the movie’s opening is objectively slow and particularly low-key with practically nothing more going on than a Hugh Jackman monologue. Somehow, I hung in. The jokes began to play. The characters became more believable … even, I dare say, interesting … and soon …

SPOILER ALERT

BE CAREFUL BEFORE CONTINUING ON

… the Hugh Jackman character dies. So, for me, the picture started to work and by the end I was … well … if not totally captivated, then at the very least, somewhat charmed. I will recommend this motion picture if you are ready for a G-rated sort of evening and/or could use some cleansing after the angst from The Bear (Hulu) or the gore from The Boys (Amazon Prime). This film could do for sheep what the now 30-year-old Babe did for pigs … although, candidly, I remain more than a little partial to bacon.

You may stream The Sheep Detectives on Amazon Prime or purchase it on Apple TV.

As to other shows with animals on the marquee, season five of The Bear surpasses even my own high expectations. The season opener, directed … as are most … by Christopher Storer, is a real tour de force for this filmmaker who found a way to make this oft-times claustrophobic series unusually cinematic. The cast, as you have undoubtedly heard, is simply terrific. This FX series is most certainly must watch TV … with this final (5^th) season, arguably, the best of the bunch.

House of the Dragon completes this week’s trilogy of entertainment featuring an animal in the title. Like Game of Thrones before it, this HBO series has its origins in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin; both are lush-looking and extravagantly expensive.

I returned to this franchise reluctantly, primarily because of the betrayal I felt as an audience member to the short shrift given the all-important conclusion of Game of Thrones by the show’s creators, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. It was as if they were in a rush to run off to their new career opportunities rather than honor the show that got them there and it did not sit at all well with this heretofore loyal viewer.

Having been a devoted fan of those 73 episodes over an eight-year span, that bitter aftertaste no doubt accounts for why I am so late in the game returning to Westeros and the 26 of the eventual 34 episodes of House of the Dragon currently streaming on HBO.

The resemblance between Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon does not take long to wane. The cast of this latest version (a prequel beginning 175 years before Weiss and Benioff arrived at the Seven Kingdoms) is not as compelling as its predecessor … understandable since Game of Thrones, by virtue of getting there first, pretty much had its pick of every top actor in the United Kingdom with the result being that House of the Dragon had to settle for the leftovers, which … by the way … are still an impressive group.

The drop off in the writing in this newer show is noticeable, mostly in the way the storytelling (especially the opener of season one) was structured. D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, despite their much-criticized mismanagement of the ending of Game of Thrones, would never have allowed the kind of clunky beginning that almost had me turning off House of the Dragon mid-episode #1.

Once again, I hung in and … not unlike Yellowstone, or any other TV soap opera … House of the Dragon began to weave its spell, overcoming the clumsy replacement of key actors mid-stream, without so much as an optical morph from the younger to the slightly older.

I had other “issues” with the new creative team, but … in the final analysis it did not matter much. That is the nature of these “family” dramas. No matter how far-fetched the atmosphere, or how high or low the dragon might fly, ultimately, like The Pitt, Dynasty, Dallas, or any number of their forebearers in day-time soaps before them, these series all come down to family drama. Add that to the medium’s ability to draw us in, to bring us … over time … to care about a leading character(s) in such theatrics, and you have the essential difference between the on-going television series and the stand-alone motion picture.

Adding a sheep, a bear, or a dragon to the title may or may not be a factor depending on the audience. Me? I find it sometimes helpful for these notes to have a theme. Accuracy is also important, and there was a mistake in my last piece concerning actor Stephen Macht for which I must apologize.

I wrote that, among other things, he co-starred with Sharon Gless in the TV mini-series, Centennial. My bad. It was The Immigrants, produced by Bob Cinader for NBC, which had Macht and Gless working together for the first time rather than, as I wrote, John Wilder’s adaptation of the James Michener epic in which Gless starred with the likes of Robert Conrad, Richard Chamberlain, Raymond Burr, Barbara Carrera, Richard Crenna, Timothy Dalton, Andy Griffith, Mark Harmon, Gregory Harrison, David Janssen, Alex Karras, Brian Keith, Sally Kellerman, Donald Pleasence, Lynn Redgrave, Robert Vaughn and Dennis Weaver. I am told cattle, horses, sheep, bison, and beavers were also featured which, happily or not, gets this piece back on theme. I thought it pertinent to point that out.