Why I don't watch TV (much)

1. The Time Machine. (The 2002 version.) In the future, the human race is divided into subterranean Orcs and over-acting Elf-Hobbits. The hero, Guy Pearce, demonstrates effectively why the differing trajectories of his and Russell Crowe's Hollywood careers post-L.A. Confidential are thoroughly deserved. (That's not to say I haven't enjoyed some of Pearce's other films--e.g. Memento--but I don't think he's a good actor. Apparently he redeems himself in The Proposition, which I have yet to see.) As for Jeremy Irons' bad guy: "slimy albino" is an unusual look for a supervillain (but hey!--it worked for Satan in The Passion of the Christ).

Woeful.

2. An ABC doco on C. S. Lewis. I must admit that the Narnia tales sit unread on my bookshelf, and I don't know a lot about C. S. Lewis other than that he is generally considered the Yoda of Christian apologists. Here he is presented as an atheist who converts to Christianity--a cautionary tale familiar to us atheists ("If little Johnny/Lee Strobel/Anthony Flew can believe in God, why can't you?)--though his own account of the conversion reveals him never to have been an atheist in the first place (despite his assertions to the contrary). The actor playing Lewis declares "I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England"--and I turn a deeper shade of unimpressed.