Lost In Translation

Mad Men Coming Soon

One of my favorite shows of last season, Mad Men is about to embark on Season 2 on July 27th, and the Season 1 box set has been on sale since July 1st. The New York Times dedicated a long article to it recently:

So, after working for 18 years, most recently as a writer and executive producer for “The Sopranos” (the episode in which Tony murders his nephew Christopher was his), Weiner, who is 42, has become an overnight success in a very particular, Hollywood way. He is suddenly a “genius,” a meal ticket and the 800-pound gorilla in every room he’s in. It is already show-business legend that he wrote the pilot of “Mad Men” in 1999 while working on the Ted Danson sitcom “Becker.” In 2002, Weiner sent the pilot as a writing sample to David Chase, who created “The Sopranos,” which is how he was hired. That HBO, under its previous leadership, passed on “Mad Men” while Weiner worked on its biggest hit, leaving the field open for the upstart AMC to reap the glory, is one of those stories that give underdogs of all breeds in this town a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Weiner’s achievements with “Mad Men,” which is produced by Lionsgate, are plentiful, starting with the storytelling. Setting it in the early 1960s, on the cusp between the repression and conformity of the cold war and McCarthy-era 1950s and the yet-to-unfold social and cultural upheavals of the 60s, allows Weiner an arc of character growth that is staggering in its possibilities. It also gives him the opportunity to mine the Rat Pack romance of that period, when the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the fog of too many martinis — whether exhilarating or nauseating — and the silhouettes specific to bullet bras only heightened the headiness of the dream that all men might one day become James Bond or, at the very least, key holders to the local Playboy Club.

Deepening the tension between that fantasy and reality, Weiner has put Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency that employs the show’s characters, on the old-school, WASP side of the equation, letting them revel in their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. It was during that period that the creative revolution in advertising was taking off at agencies like Grey and Doyle Dane Bernbach, where Jews and some women held leadership positions. That Sterling Cooper’s creative director, Don Draper, is played by Jon Hamm, a leading man in the Gregory Peck mold who manages to make his sometimes oblique and often heartless character into a sympathetic figure (and won a Golden Globe for best actor), eases the pain.

The New Cult Canon: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

The AV Club has lauded another worthy addition to it's New Cult Canon: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I really enjoyed this Shane black film due to the great dialogue and great execution by Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, etc...besides you can't go wrong with a hardboiled murder mystery:

Arriving after he had disappeared from the scene for nearly a decade, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is pure, unfiltered Shane Black. It's his directorial debut, and it's a minor revelation. I use the word "minor" not to diminish his achievement, exactly, but to say that the film is basically a show-offy writer's exercise, a feature-length riff on hard-boiled crime fiction, formulaic buddy pictures, and the surreal vapidity of Hollywood. It's all throat-clearing and no opera, sputtering forward in fits and starts, winding through the most loveable shaggy-dog plot this side of The Big Lebowski. A cynic might call it Black's monument to his own cleverness; a fan like myself would call it the same thing, but with a sweeter inflection.

Heading a cast loaded with long-in-the-tooth stars from Black's heyday, Robert Downey Jr. makes an ideal conduit for the smug, hyperkinetic dialogue, which doesn't wait around after laugh lines for viewers to catch up. (Hence the film's high rewatch value, and its mushrooming cult status.) He plays the knockabout hero and voiceover narrator, Harry Lockhart, and when the storytelling gets a little bumpy, he breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the audience: "I don't see another narrator, so pipe down." 

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Above all, the film is a celebration of language, often to the point where it indulges in hilariously wonky word-splicing, like when Harry and Perry have a fight about the proper use of an adverb. Fifty years ago, Black would have been right at home penning scripts for post-war noirs and gritty B-pictures, where stylized dialogue was more than just a means to connect one giant action setpiece to another. Until Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his words were effectively buried in the big-budget obscenities of the day; here, he finally got the chance to express himself fully, but Warner Brothers quietly shuffled the film into theaters as if it were an embarrassment. (This in spite of mostly very kind reviews.) There are enough memorable lines to stock the lion's share of blockbusters made during Black's self-imposed hiatus. A few favorites:

"She's been fucked more times than she's had hot meals."

"Go. Sleep badly. If you have any questions, hesitate to call."

"I think you wouldn't know where to feed yourself if you didn't flap your mouth so much."

"Did your dad love you?" "Well, he used to beat me in Morse code, so it's possible, but he never said the words."

And so on. Watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang prompts wishes that Hollywood still had screenwriters talented enough to use explosion-filled trash as a means for personal expression. More improbably, it also prompts nostalgia for the glory days of the buddy comedy, which can really zing when the right actors bounce the right dialogue off each other. Not every project allows writers to examine the clichés they're generating—in that way and others, the film is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Black, and one he's earned—but we're now in an age where the cost of making movies is obscene, yet prominent, highly paid screenwriters with Black's abilities are nonexistent.

John Adams

I recently finished watching the seven part miniseries about John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough, starring Paul Giamatti as the blustery second president of the US. I applaud the high minded content and attention to detail that has come to define HBO productions (see Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, The Wire, Rome, Deadwood, etc.). However, despite the dramatization of some of the nation’s most famous historical moments, it often came across a bit dry. As much as I like Giamatti, his physicality and countenance seems wholly modern to me. Laura Linney, on the other hand, completely sold me on her Abigail Adams, despite the fact that I watched her in The Savages, where she plays a completely modern New York bohemian. David Morse as George Washington, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson and even Tom Wilkerson as Ben Franklin seemed to have been well cast, too.

Sorry, HBO. John Adams Wasn't That Much of a Hero

Here's an interesting article from The Washington Post that argues that John Adams might not be that worthy of a miniseries. That being said I have been watching and enjoying the miniseries, I still haven't seen episode 6, but I'm looking forward to seeing it soon. Here's a bit from the article:

...Was Adams, as his admiring biographer David McCullough would have it, the one leading founder who has never received his due? Or was he his own worst enemy, succumbing to a temper and vanity unique among his contemporaries? HBO is keen to usher him into the canon, but Adams did a great deal to earn the devastating assessment that has trailed him ever since Benjamin Franklin first quipped it in 1783: "He means well for his Country, and is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."

Battlestar Galactica Primer

If you're a late arrival on the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon this primer from Salon will bring you upto date:

When the "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries premiered in 2003, viewers could be forgiven for having low expectations. At the time, the Sci Fi Channel, on which "Battlestar" aired, was a niche cable channel known mostly for "Stargate SG-1" and "Star Trek" reruns, and the show's source material, a cheesy '70s flop for ABC, wasn't exactly "The Sopranos." The series' premise, furthermore, involved enough clichéd science fiction elements -- an evil race of robots, a hotshot fighter pilot and characters with names like "Apollo" -- to make the show's fans wince when explaining it to their friends.

Three seasons later, "Battlestar Galactica" has become one of TV's smartest series. It has won a Peabody Award, made the Sci Fi Channel a semireputable cable outlet and revolutionized science fiction on television. It has proved that the genre, when liberated from the body-hugging Lycra jumpsuits and staid dialogue that have plagued most post-"Trek" science fiction series, can be a vehicle for both scathing political commentary and genuine pathos. The network recently greenlighted a prequel spinoff series called "Caprica," and on Friday, April 4, "Battlestar" returns to Sci Fi after a yearlong hiatus for its fourth and final season.

If you haven't been watching, the show follows a fleet of human survivors from the Twelve Colonies of Kobol -- a group of planets decimated by a surprise attack from the Cylons. The Cylons are a race of partially humanoid robots that were created by humans, and then revolted. Protecting the tiny fleet of survivors is a large aircraft-carrier-like spaceship called the Battlestar Galactica, whose crew is the main focus of the show. In each episode, the humans must evade the Cylons as they slowly make their way to salvation on the mythical planet Earth.

The premise may sound like derivative schlock, but by virtue of its strong writing and naturalistic style, the series manages to be engaging and politically relevant. Its creator, Ronald Moore, uses "Battlestar's" universe as a funhouse mirror for American post-9/11 cultural anxieties. Since the miniseries' initial Cylon attack -- with its parallels to the events of Sept. 11 -- "Battlestar" has broached topical debates about torture, military occupation, abortion, genocide and war crimes. It has managed to do so while avoiding the trap of strained allegory and partisan politics, and has maintained the escapist thrill that makes science fiction, well, science fiction.

Over the past five years, however, the show's universe has also become awfully complicated. At this point, there are good Cylons and bad Cylons and morally ambiguous Cylons and, if the third-season finale is to be believed, Cylons with an inexplicable affinity for Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." With that in mind, we've prepared a "Battlestar Galactica" explainer -- as we've done for "The Wire," "Mulholland Drive," "Donnie Darko and "Southland Tales" -- to prepare you for the upcoming season premiere (which Salon's Heather Havrilesky will review on Friday) and square away any confusion. We'll begin with a summary of the "Battlestar" story line, and briefly outline the characters, before answering some nagging questions.

The Wire Legacy

I'm not sure if anyone besides me and Phatrick have been watching The Wire, but there are soem other good links:

An interview with Michael Williams (Omar Little) at the Onion AV Club.

A list of mp3 interviews with David Simon and cast members was provided by Salon staff member Andy Bowers here.

The House Next Door has a literary companion to The Wire here

The Wire: It's All Over

The final episode of The Wire has been broadcast and I feel the same emptiness that I felt when Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and The Sopranos ended their runs. However, I feel that The Wire’s conclusion was the most fully realized of the four. To be honest I didn’t like the future montage at the end of the last episode of Six Feet Under where you know exactly what happens to every character over the next 40 plus years-too much information, they should have left some of it u to your imagination. Deadwood is incomplete in my mind; they didn’t get a chance to finish the story-they needed another season to tie up the loose ends. I think the Sopranos ending was appropriate and a brave move by it’s creator David Chase, but as a fan I felt cheated I wanted more of a clue as to where these characters would end up in the fictional future. The Wire managed to tie most loose ends while leaving a couple of questions unanswered and added some parallel plot lines that suggested the legacy of its signature characters would continue in a generation of people working for the major institutions of the city. There were a couple of plot lines that I was skeptical about during this final season, but I feel that the writers concluded them adequately in the worst cases and brilliantly in the best cases. Not the best season of The Wire, but certainly one of the best seasons of TV nonetheless. I think one of the reasons that this series was well played out had to do with David Simon’s vision-he said from the start that he had a limited number of stories he wanted to tell about Baltimore, so there was no danger of spinning his wheels like we saw with The Sopranos, which became a victim of its success. The only danger was whether Simon would have enough time to tell his story of the city in decline and the failure of the city’s institutions.

There are a ton of Wire related interviews with David Simon and rehashings of the season, so I’ll link to a few.

A recently discovered site, The House Next Door, had a podcast panel of critics discussing who of the three Davids (David Chase/The Sopranos, David Milch-Deadwood, David Simon/The Wire) has the best creative dramatic vision, here.

Interview with David Simon with Salon TV critic Heather Havrilesky.

Alan Sepinwall has a great interview with Simon at his blog, What's Alan Watching.

Scott Tobias is also interviewed Simon for the Onion AV Club.

The Wire...Sheee-it!

The Wire is winding down and one of my favorite characters in the recent seasons has been Clay Davis played by Isiah Whitlock Jr. and this Slate post discusses the legacy of his famous refrain. Sheeit-it it was first used in a movie!

Special bonus entry today, courtesy of our readers. We're hardly alone in our worship of Isiah Whitlock Jr.'s portrayal of Clay Davis and our delight in his trademark "Sheee-it." Reader Kevin Ray sends us thrilling archival evidence that Whitlock's "Sheee-it" predates The Wire. In Spike Lee's 2002 film The 25th Hour, Whitlock played DEA agent Amos Flood, who arrests hero Monty Brogan (played by Edward Norton). Twice during the movie—when he raids Monty's apartment and when he interrogates him—Whitlock's Flood utters the barnyard epithet with his signature drawl. Watch the arrest scene here and the interrogation scene here.

Friday Night Lights Season 1

I had heard a lot of good things about Friday Night Lights, so I decided to check it out. I think it's a good concept for a TV series-the idea of following a small town Texas football team, which is the hear t and soul of the tiny Dillon, over the course of season. They took the basic framework from reality that inspired the fine film from Peter Berg. They were able to develop characters more fully than in the film and expand on some themes and issues like race, teen sex, steroids, academic cheating, corruption, fidelity, non traditional families, are among these themes and issues addressed. For example the star quarterback is injured in a play in the first game and is paralyzed and we follow his plight to come to terms with his condition as he looks to quad rugby as his salvation. Then we have the coach and his family, his wife (a counselor at the school), and his daughter a student at school. Then there’s the laconic, pretty boy loner fullback Tim Riggins. The naïve and overwhelmed quarterback pressed into duty, Matt Severson, and the loud brash, but talented halfback “Smash” Williams. The there are other characters that are girlfriends/friends/family members to the main core. In particular I can’t remember many shows that had this many non-nuclear families. The soundtrack is impressive without being intrusive. My only complaint is that it sometimes gets too melodramatic, especially where there is some editorializing football commentary over voicing. But I enjoyed Season 1 enough to continue to follow this show, which I have heard is in danger of being canceled due to low ratings. And that would be a shame.

Breaking Bad

A friend recommended the new series from AMC (the people who brought us the smartly written Mad Men) Breaking Bad. It stars Bryan Cranston (of Malcolm In the Middle fame) in a decidedly black comedy. So far I’ve only seen two episodes, but I think I was correct in thinking that it would be difficult to triumph the manic storyline of the first episode, but I think there’s a lot of potential for it so I’ll continue watching to see where it is going. Slate describes it as thus: "IMAGINE THE COEN BROTHERS DIRECTING AN EPISODE OF WEEDS, AND YOU HAVE BREAKING BAD."