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Long before he became the infantile Mr. Bean, Brit funnyman Rowan Atkinson made TV history as Edmund Blackadder, a singularly self-serving and century-jumping member of the English aristocracy who pops up at key moments in his country’s long history to observe, muck about and generally screw things up.
The first “Black Adder ” series, aired in 1983, found the fantastically stupid Edmund fighting in the army of Richard III and accidentally beheading his own king. Subsequent seasons placed him in the court of Elizabeth I, in the midst of the English civil war and as an officer in the trenches of World War I.
There were also “Black Adder” TV specials, including a version of “A Christmas Carol.”
Now the entire “Black Adder” canon has been digitally tweaked and repackaged for “Black Adder Remastered: The Ultimate Edition.” After watching it you realize why many regard it as the best British comedy show ever.
You don’t have to spend much time with this six-disc set to recognize that the series took a dim, practically unpatriotic view of English history. Even members of royalty are depicted as stupid, venal and cruel.
And while you don’t need to know all that much about Brit history to appreciate “Black Adder,” if you have a working knowledge of the Plantagenets and Tudors it will be doubly entertaining.
As for Atkinson’s Blackadder, he undergoes some interesting changes as the series progresses, beyond his ever-changing hair styles. In the medieval episodes he’s a blithering idiot of royal lineage, but over the years the character becomes smarter and more resourceful. Ironically, the smarter he gets, the less real power he exercises — the social standing of the Blackadder clan is on a steady decline.
Meanwhile, Blackadder’s constant manservant Baldrick (contemptuously referred to as a “dogbody”) appears frozen in time. No matter the century in which a story arc unfolds, Baldrick (Tony Robinson) is a complete and utter moron — and curiously, his personal hygiene gets worse the closer he gets to modern plumbing.
The series is practically a who’s who of British comedy acting: Peter Cook (as Richard III), Miranda Richardson (a ditzy Queen Elizabeth), Brian Blessed, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Miriam Margolyes, Robbie Coltrane and Jim Broadbent, for starters.
The production values range from location shoots at castles to entire seasons confined to a soundstage. Even the costumes are often laugh-out-loud hilarious.
The “Black Adder” series has produced several DVD boxes. This latest is important mostly because of its cleaned-up images. The videotape of the ‘80s tended to get smeary and fuzzy, and this version offers crystal-clear viewing.
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‘Adam Resurrected’
It’s “Sophie’s Choice” meets “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in this train wreck of a movie. The latest from Paul Schrader (“Patty Hearst,” “Affliction”) stars Jeff Goldblum as Adam Stein, an inmate in an Israeli mental facility for Holocaust survivors.
In black-and-white flashbacks we learn that Adam was a popular German stage performer — a comic, mentalist and knife-thrower who worked his wife and daughters into the act. But he was Jewish.
Adam runs circles around the asylum’s ineffective director (Derek Jacobi). He has booze bottles stashed everywhere, is having an affair with the head nurse (Ayelet Zurer) and manipulates the other patients like a circus ringmaster.
When a speechless feral child (Tudor Rapiteanu) who behaves like a beaten dog is admitted, Adam begins fixating on his own experiences in a concentration camp, where the commandant (Willem Dafoe) kept him as a human pet, performing tricks for a bone and a warm place to sleep. He was also required to play a violin to calm his fellow Jews on their way to the gas chamber.
With his haunted eyes and German accent, Goldblum is alternately compelling and ludicrous. You may want to laugh at the film’s piling on of miseries, but there’s a core of truth in Goldblum’s performance that can’t be dismissed.
