Monday, July 20, 2015

At Home With the Sheridans

Much more interesting than Greg Sheridan's predictable, Netanyahu-style denunciation of Obama's just-concluded nuclear deal with Iran in The Weekend Australian (A deal beyond belief) was his more personal piece for The Weekend Australian Review:

"Over three or four days we watched a gobsmacking 24 hours of [the crime series] Ray Donovan." (The Forum)

(For those not in-the-know, and I quote here from Wikipedia, "The show takes place in Los Angeles... where Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber)... works for the powerful law firm Goldman & Drexler, representing the rich and famous. Donovan is a 'fixer': in criminal slang, a person who arranges for bribes or payoffs of corrupt police or government officials, or other criminals, to enable a criminal to avoid punishment. Ray experiences his own problems when his father, Micky Donovan (Jon Voight), is unexpectedly released from prison, and FBI agents try bringing down Ray and his associates.")

What is it about Ray Donovan, I hear you asking, that can so deflect Australia's "most serious foreign affairs analyst," (or so the Australian's website hypes its foreign editor) from his intellectual labours? After all, is he not our dear leader's 'Suppository of All (foreign policy) Wisdom'?  And hasn't Tony Abbott muttered darkly that Daesh is "coming after us."

Quite frankly, in these dark days, you'd think he'd have better to do than waste his time with such nonsense.

But no, a mere whiff of Israeli pheromones, or in this case their audio-visual equivalent, and Greg Sheridan's out of it:

"One of its many clever tricks is to have almost all the significant roles played by big-time movie stars... Liev Schreiber (now there's an Irish name for you) plays an astonishingly powerfully played central character; Jon Voight as his father, almost equally so; while James Woods is repulsive as a truly ghastly gangster. One of the best characters is Avi, the former Mossad agent who is Ray's right-hand man. With his magnificent mellifluous Israeli accent, Avi is the most likable of all the gangsters, a soft-hearted mother's boy, the most emotionally in touch."

2 comments:

Vacy said...

Jon Voight's politics is pure Republican Washington, unlike daughter Angelina J. Sounds like The Forum is pure propaganda. Thanks for the warning.

Anonymous said...

No doubt Greg [Jerusalem Prize] Sheridan overlooked the the 30th anniversary of the murder of Juanita Nielsen by very similar "likeable gangsters".