Movie Review: Agora

Very appropriately, I watched this movie on the day of a partial solar eclipse, which made the eclipse oddly emotionally moving.

I knew the movie wouldn't have a happy ending, since Hypatia herself didn't, but I didn't expect it to be so heartbreaking right from the start.( It breaks my heart not to have a center. )

It's not a perfect movie, but it's very good and well worth watching. Just be prepared for two hours of heartbreak.

ETA: For a review with more characters and less geometry, see Abigail Nussbaum's take here. I agree that the movie could have benefited from the length of a miniseries to flesh things out, but I found it a bit better tied together than she did. I was a bit miffed that they didn't even try to age Hypatia up for a 24-year time jump too, though.

Daughter of ETA: For a happier coda, try listening to the Dar Williams song "The Christians and the Pagans" here. So the Christians and the pagans sat together at the table/Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able. (My favorite line is still "Now when Christians sit with pagans, only pumpkin pies are burning.")

They're not even trying

The Mentalist is a unique show in that it's set in Sacramento, which basically never appears on TV - no, it's all about LA and SF, usually. So it's nice to see a show remember which city is the state capital and change it up for once.

There's just one problem. I know what Sacramento looks like.

Take the episode Bloodstream, in which the characters head off to the "Central Bus Station" (at least, that's what it sounded like, though I'm not sure Sacramento has any such thing - all the bus stations I ever heard of have actual street names). My dad, who has a few decades of experience with California city geography, was fortunately (unfortunately?) on hand to confirm my suspicion that the station which appeared onscreen was wrong, wrong, wrong. The conversation went about like this:

ME: Dad, does Sacramento really have a bus station like that? It doesn't look right.
DAD: ...hey, that's Union Station in Los Angeles. And see there, that's the LA OSHPAD office across the street. I've walked right by there. They use Union Station for LA shots on TV all the time.
ME: Then they should know better than to use it when they have prominent "Welcome to Sacramento" signs in our faces!

But hey, it's only like four hundred miles away. Close enough, right?

This is also the show that has the characters regularly pop over to Napa Valley like it's just across the river. You'll be home in time for dinner! And just head right back out there tomorrow instead of charging the department for a hotel room! They don't even mention the traffic.

There isn't any Meyer Forest to my knowledge anywhere close enough for a Sacramento doctor to stop by the driving range on the way home either, unless they mean it to be equivalent to Fair Oaks (which bleeds right into Sacramento). Which, true, has some woodsy areas within city limits, but "forest" is far too grand a term. (Or maybe it's Elk Grove? Seems unlikely - not really on his way. And a grove isn't a forest.) At least there really is a Sacramento Banquet Hall, though I don't know whether it actually looks like the place they filmed. And another episode had an actual location shot at the Tower Bridge.

I don't begrudge them having to film elsewhere except for establishing shots - it isn't their fault the TV studios are in LA - but pretending a well-known LA location is in Sacramento and making up imaginary forest-cities on a valley floodplain surrounded by dry grass and farmland isn't even trying.