"High school English teachers, your attention please! I have wonderful and terrible news.

Encore, that glorious waster of weekend afternoons on cable’s desolate seas, has finally decided to show something besides an endless loop of “Dumb and Dumber.” For its first offering, it’s bringing out “Moby Dick,” a lavish, exciting, well-acted and admirably thorough movie adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 classic.

It’s more than three hours long and airs in two parts, Monday and Tuesday night.

That’s what — four, maybe five whole lesson plans? Enough to fill up that entire dead zone after the futile ritual of standardized testing. True, the kiddies might skip the book for the movie, but better they get this “Moby Dick” than no “Moby Dick” at all, right? Set your DVRs and thank me later.

Charlie Cox, a charming British actor, plays a serviceably doe-eyed Ishmael, the young narrator who longs to join a whaling vessel. Arriving in Nantucket (having rescued the young slave Pip from a brutal master), Ishmael winds up on Ahab’s doomed Pequod with his other new friend, Queequeg the Indian, played with revitalized depth by Raoul Trujillo."

Get the Story:
Encore’s lavish new ‘Moby Dick’: There whale be blood (The Washington Post 7/31)