If you do a Google Image Search for Prime Suspect you’ll find that the majority of the pictures are of Helen Mirren, not Maria Bello. That’s because the NBC version of Prime Suspect which premiered last week is a remake of the British version that came before.

Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren, was a watershed police drama which ran from the early 90′s until 2006. Mirren owned the role of Jane Tennison, a female police detective in what was then a highly exclusive boy’s club. Struggling against the rampant sexism, Mirren’s character faced down her own demons in the form of alcoholism and a swath of destructive relationships.

Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect was gritty, violent, and honest taking the characters into the seediest underbelly of London and holding nothing back. Even the camera work felt raw, often finding no qualms with getting right into the actors blemished faces.

Prime Suspect also broke another boundary. Seasons—or series, as they’re called overseas—consisted not of individual episodes and individual cases but each season was a case unto itself. Every 200+ minute season followed Tennison on a single case allowing for a significant amount of time to track down her “prime suspect” and for the case to unfold.

So, how does the NBC remark stack up?

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Win Win is a movie about a small-town lawyer who coaches a high school wrestling team. It’s about an old man in a retirement home, his grandson, and his wayward mother. It’s about relationships, how they begin and how they end, how they break down and evolve, and the consequences of our actions. It’s a creative and inventive story, full of the same kind of deep humour that packed a movie like Lars and the Real Girl or The Family Stone. It packs a similar moral punch, too.

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Back in 1988 a man named Jack Rebney and a crew of amateur filmmakers were under contract with Winnebago Industries to make an industrial promo film for Winnebago salesman to use across the country. The infomercial was filmed over the course of a dozen days, in the heat of the summer, in the middle of Iowa. Rebney, being a seasoned broadcaster whose career included two stints with CBS, quickly lost patience battling the scorching heat, the vexatious fly population, and his bumbling production crew. The result of Jack’s lost patience? The famous Winnebago Man outtakes reel. Outtakes peppered with so much swearing and so many breakdowns and brilliant catch phrases that it earned Rebney the title “The World’s Angriest Man” and became, arguably, the first viral video (originally passes around on VHS tapes).

Winnebago Man, the 2009 documentary, is the quest of one filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer, to track Rebney down and find out exactly what made him so angry. The resulting film is brilliant.

Steinbauer, while annoying and vexatious himself at times, hires a private detective to find Rebney and from there we begin an emotional, mysterious, and humorous adventure into the foothills of Northern California. Without spoiling too much I can tell you that this film packs a wonderful story, has a very good pace, and if you like human interest dramas about truly interesting people than you’ll enjoy this film. In fact, after watching it I thought how interesting it would be to see more of these “Where Are They Now” videos about former YouTube stars—those, of course, who didn’t intend to achieve stardom.

All in all, if you like documentaries, or even if you can mildly tolerate them, this is a great summer film to spend an afternoon or evening with. Oh, and it has a lot of swears.

I’m a pretty big fan of The Decemberists ever since I stumbled upon a band that sounded, to my description, like “the American Belle & Sebastian.” That was around the time of the release of their first full-length, Castaways and Cutouts.

Since then, The Decemberists have produced a series of solid records roughly maintaining the party line as a band that sings about rifles, tall ships, and cobblestone. The 2009 release The Hazards of Love, a dark and foreboding concept disc, saw a pretty serious departure from this format though. The Hazards of Love was a complete story, told in dark, enchanted forests, and broken up into a series of acts with characters, plot, action, and the whole nine yards. Musically, it was vastly different from what we’d heard from The Decemberists up to that point. The Hazards of Love was dark, electric, and chaotic. When I initially reviewed it I found it very difficult to enjoy—very tough to get into—and even when I was recommended to give it a second try I had a very hard time getting comfortable with the band’s sound. Listened to in one sitting, as I think it was intended to be, proved to be an onerous task for me and so I gave up.

But early buzz surrounding 2011′s The King is Dead made it clear that The Decemberists were taking a very different tact from their previous release. Indeed, the rumours were true.

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If Sufjan Steven’s performance of Too Much on Jimmy Fallon Live doesn’t cut it as one of the most memorable live performances you’ve seen in a long time, then I don’t know what funky stuff you’ve been watching lately. After taking a few years off to regroup after the critical success of Illinois, it’s clear that Sufjan is back, in a big way, and he’s about to kick your butt/take over the world.

Too Much

Speaking to As it Happens on CBC, Romeo Dallaire, arguably Canada’s most respected soldier says in regards to Canada’s handling of the Omar Khadr case,

[Canada] has failed beyond description.

The rest of the interesting and compelling interview can be found here (part 2 of the program).

While I’m going to save my full review for when the album is released, I thought it might be fun to share my initial impressions of the new Sufjan Stevens record The Age of Adz.

If you’re a Sufjan fan and haven’t had a chance to take a listen to the new album the entire thing is streaming (until the release date on Oct. 12) over at NPR. That said, I’ve had a listen.

What I guess The Age of Adz amounts to is what happens when a certain personality-type reaches unexpected heights of fame in a very short period of time. With the release of Illinois, back in 2005 Sufjan Stevens, who has always been a bit of a recluse, a big experimenter, and an artist to the core, exploded into popular culture in a way that he certainly did not foresee. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Sufjan was uncomfortable, from the start, with this level of fame. It’s clear he went through a long period of self-doubt, of questioning the integrity and the purpose of his music, of questioning fame, but it’s clear now that he’s come safely out the other side.

The Age of Adz, I think, is that journey.

Departing from acoustic instruments and real live orchestras, Sufjan has instead turned to synthesizers and sounds that Maria has aptly-described as “robots”. Still, The Age of Adz doesn’t stray all that far from Sufjan’s other popular records. There are still those soaring heights, the quiet lows. There’s still plenty of introspection. Sure, it sounds futuristic but forget about what’s making the music and it really isn’t all that different from something you’d expect from an inventive, experimental artist like Sufjan.

On initial impression, I love The Age of Adz. Instead of compromising his integrity as an artist, it seems to me like Sufjan has produced a record that he wanted to produce instead of settling for releasing what all of us wanted to hear. And besides, if you’ve followed Sufjan’s career for anything length of time this really isn’t that much of a departure. Sufjan innovates, he keeps you guessing, and he keeps you coming back for more. He is a well-spring of talent and creative energy, truly, and thank goodness that supply is flowing again.