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From the Blog

Apr

I have large, moving shapes covered

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Real quick one:

Remember a year and a half ago, when I wrote this?

That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.

Armando Iannucci heard my prayers and delivered. HBO subscribers, tune in every Tuesday to “Veep”:

If you weren’t sure whether or not to watch this show, ask yourself: do I find the Professor’s political cynicism tiresome? If so, avoid. If not, subscribe.

(P.S. You can catch the entire first episode on YouTube, uploaded by HBO themselves! Don’t take my word for it)

Apr

written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth century

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Caught the two-hour premiere of The Borgias, Showtime’s entry into the “Blood, Tits and Scowling” genre that’s all the rage on premium cable. Considering the hard sell that HBO’s putting on Game of Thrones, The Borgias caught me almost completely off guard. Where’s the NYC food truck painted like a sacristy? Whither the “Indulgence” gifts on Facebook? Anyway.

The Borgias: Aside from the usual weaknesses of a pilot episode, an excellent introduction to Vatican politics. Jeremy Irons is suitably restrained, for once, as Rodrigo Borgia, vice chancellor of the College of Cardinals on the eve of being elected Pope Alexander VI. He’s attended by his son, Cesare Borgia (Francois Arnaud), who’s also a priest but ironically seems more ruthless. Cesare seems to hold the role played by Michael Pitt in Boardwalk Empire: the loyal, cold-blooded son, willing to do what the father isn’t. He’s aided in this cause by a conveniently recruited assassin, Micheletto (Sean Harris), and his brother in the papal armies, Juan.

Pope Alexander VI starts the pilot by telling his mistress, Vanossa (Joanne Whalley – remember her? she’s still great), that he can’t be seen with her in public. He ends the episode in a cozy affair with Giulia Farnese (sultry-eyed newcomer Lotte Verbeek), much to the family’s chagrin. But Giulia’s not a lovestruck innocent: she quickly begins consolidating her power by befriending the Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger). Lucrezia and Cesare’s relationship is already uncomfortably close for brother and sister; we’ll see if the Pope’s threats to marry her off put a strain on it.

The pilot suffers from the need to cram a great many plots in a mere two hours. Confrontations and reconciliations that probably took months in real history take seconds on screen. More than once, we see something akin to the following:

Pope Alexander VI: … and I’m making my mailman the Archbishop of Barcelona.
Cardinal Orsini: SIMONY! I denounce you!
Pope: Sounds like someone doesn’t want the awesome papal offices I’m selling.
Orsini: What? Me? Nonsense.
Pope: Good.
Orsini: Speaking of, why don’t you come to a party I’m throwing tomorrow?
Pope: I don’t know; you were just threatening me. Are you sure I won’t be poisoned?
Orsini: Oh, come on. “Poison-free in ’93″, that’s my motto.
Pope: Well, I’m between mistresses at the moment, so I’m free.
Orsini: Excellent! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to swing by the pharmacy to pick up some, er, flavorless blood thinners. Back in a trice!

And so on.

This baldness aside, the series benefits from good cinematography and great performances. When we first see Alexander VI greet the citizens of Rome on the Vatican balcony, blessing the crowd with a dignified wave of his hand, the parallel to the recent coronation of Benedict XVI is striking. Every scene in the Church drips with rich robes, the luster of gold, and the dim lights that would evoke backroom politics in a later century. The Cardinals all look old and corrupt, barely capable of putting up a front for each others’ lies. The younger generation, embodied in the Borgia family, appear young and vibrant. Cesare is most frequently filmed in motion, his clerical robes swirling around his heels as he stalks down one corridor or another.

I still have high hopes for Game of Thrones, but it’s got a strong competitor to live up to.

Dec

songs of innocence and experience

Posted by Perich at 7:37 am

New post on Overthinking It about Season One of Boardwalk Empire. Some minor spoilers for the finale – and substantial spoilers for the season as a whole, of course – so read with care.

By telling a story from your past, you tell the listener: I have been there. Speaking from experience gives your words more weight. This is especially important in an era where media were limited and stratified. Atlantic City has a few newspapers, which were already becoming consolidated in the 20s under the Press of Atlantic City (which is where Walter Edge got the wealth to run for Governor, prior to becoming Senator). There aren’t a lot of radio stations and most of them get their news from the same source. So if you want to tell a story that’s different from the party line, you need an extra boost. Speaking from experience gives you that advantage.

Consider the scene where Margaret tells Lucy that “maybe your cunny isn’t the draw you think it is.” The story she tells has nothing to do with, er, cunny. It’s a rather parochial story about her childhood in rural Ireland. But it lets her deliver a cutting punchline. That makes it more effective than just saying to Lucy, “You’re white trash.”

Nov

we can roll ourselves over ’cause we’re uncomfortable

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Luther: Proof that the British may be more stylish than we, but they aren’t necessarily more sophisticated. Luther may feature talented actors with posh accents and some sharp writing, but it’s your standard cop-on-the-edge drama. Idris Elba (The Wire) plays John Luther, a DCI who doesn’t play by the rules but still gets results. He has a habit of getting into the minds of his suspects. This enables him to do brilliant work, but also makes him a bit of a nutcase, alienating him from his wife and, oh hell, do you even need me to finish this?

Each episode moves along at a swift pace. Plot twists come fast and furious. But the plots are all standard Law & Order fare. A murderer who thinks they’re smarter than the police; a traumatized veteran, back from the wars; a ritual Satanist; etc. The kinds of crimes that only exist in television fiction, in other words. Not the unending tide of knife crime which would cross the desk of a real London detective.

What keeps me watching?

I have a bias: I believe that good writing and captivating acting excuse almost anything. And the writing here is very clever. No point is dwelled on for too long before moving on to the next. The dialogue is harsh and direct. And there’s a large team of talented actors: not just Elba, but Ruth Wilson (of AMC’s “The Prisoner” remake), Saskia Reeves (of Sci-Fi’s “Dune” miniseries) and others you’ll likely recognize.

I’d call it a guilty pleasure but I have no guilt about it. For all my optimism I like watching stories about tormented geniuses. For all the time I spend fuming over police abuses, I like watching hard men who’ll bend the rules to put the bad guys away. I like believing that the world – both the good guys and the bad guys – are smarter than they are. And Luther is a little peek into that world, fictional though it might be.

Nov

american zombies: the walking dead and urban flight

Posted by Perich at 10:45 am

New post on Overthinking It that looks at zombie movies in light of America’s mid-century flight to the suburbs.

Cities, as the centers of densest population, are likely to be the greatest concentration of zombies. They’ll clog the streets with their numbers. Every person they kill will only swell their ranks. In every good zombie movie of the modern era, the refrain is the same: get out of the city. Get to the countryside. That’s where you’ll be safe.

If you consider this for a few moments, though, it doesn’t make any more sense than our earlier theories on zombie transmission. Sure, cities will be full of zombies. They’ll be packed to the fences. What happens in any hunting ground that’s overpopulated with predators? The predators inevitably die off or move on. You can wait up in your concrete fortress for the hordes to dwindle to nothing, then take to the streets.

“But what about food? You can’t grow food in a city.” Maybe not, but this is true of any place in America. Unless you live on one of the country’s remarkably few family farms, you do not have the capability to grow a sustaining diet. You need to get your food the same place everyone else does – the store. And no one imports more food than cities. Your odds of successful scavenging are much higher in an urban center than in the sparse surroundings.

Also: I’ll have more to say on The Walking Dead once the current season comes to an end. But remember when I said I wanted shows to start being good from the pilot episode onward? The Walking Dead is what I meant, only I didn’t know I meant it yet. I had a future vision of post-apocalyptic awesomeness.

Nov

for I’m drunk tonight and I’m rarely sober

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

When last I wrote about Boardwalk Empire, Ferrett cautioned me about expecting too much too soon. “At this point in its development, Mad Men was still relying heavily on “GOTCHA!” moments,” he noted. “It evolved; I’ll give this time too.”

Well, he was right to preach patience. Because now the threads have started to come together.

It hasn’t been perfect. The Jimmy Darmody storyline struggled for footing. If you define drama as two characters in a room, trying to get past each other, Jimmy’s story has been disturbingly absent of that. He takes up with a prostitute, who gets horrifically scarred while he’s out getting a suit. He tends to her while she recovers, but then she kills herself. In both cases, the pivotal developments – the injuries to Rose, either self- or thug-inflicted – happened while Jimmy was literally out of the room. Sure, there was some excellent characterization in the form of Jimmy’s story about the Fourth of July, but otherwise nothing.

Then, of course, the shootout.

Suddenly Jimmy’s making choices. In some cases they’re obvious, violent choices, like shooting Jim Sheridan and his goons in the cloakroom of a fancy club. In other cases they’re subtle, like spending a little social capital to show the mutilated Richard Harrow a good time. But he’s now a participant in his own story. And this is inherently more interesting to watch than baby-faced Michael Pitt moping.

boardwalk-empire-michael-pitt

Margaret Schroeder has started making choices as well. First, she used what leverage she had on Nucky to get him to quit shipping beer to the garage behind her house. Then, when that failed, she sicced Agent van Alden on him. She grappled with the dilemma of whether or not to accept Nucky’s romance – and patronage – and has lived with some of the consequences. She chose to ignore her neighbor Annabel’s advice and allow Nucky to confide in her. And she chose to peer into Nucky’s secrets: his ledger of graft and bootlegging.

Nucky Thompson has grown into his role. I complained in the last post about how Steve Buscemi played Thompson as “history’s most neurotic capo.” That bothered me at the time because, in the first few episodes, he had nothing to be neurotic about. He ran Atlantic City with an iron hand in a suede glove. But now, with the d’Alessio Brothers rifling his collections, the Feds indicting his ward bosses, his paved roads flitting toward Jersey City and Lucky Luciano parked on his stoop, he’s feeling the pinch. Now, his agita is justified by dramatic circumstance. Now he’s a cornered terrier – and I want to see him bite.

boardwalk-empire-steve-buscemi

My continually evolving verdict on the minor characters:

* None of them can do an accent worth a damn. Madame Jeunet’s accent and delivery remind me of some of Hercule Poirot’s worst lines. Margaret Schroeder’s Irish accent has graduated from “appalling” to merely “distracting.” I’d lay into Eddie Kessler’s Hogan’s Heroes German with a little more weight, but he’s clearly comic relief anyway. And while Lucy Danziger’s thick Brooklyn gazpacho is annoying, it’s supposed to be.

* Aleksa Palladino is one of the finer actors on the show. She’s capable of the most genuine facial expressions I’ve seen on anyone in a long time. From the fatigued patience she has with Michael Pitt in bed in the second episode (“you want me to put my mouth down there”), to the disbelief she has at the dream of Greenwich Village, I get no sense that she’s delivering lines. She’s a real person living through these moments. It’s fascinating to watch and I hope she gets lots more work.

* Shea Wigham, as Eli, is similarly unaffected in his performance. It’s a shame that the two best actors are typically confined to bit parts.

* Michael Shannon is also lots of fun. I love the humorlessness with which he commands civilians. I love the weird thing his face does when he tries to smile. But some aspects of his character are a bit too much. The flagellation, for one thing. You can make a character a creepy Protestant without making him whip himself. That said, it was a well-shot scene. The ritual of laying out the towel and the belt; taking off his shirt and folding it. It’s an excellent thematic capstone to an episode where every moment of pleasure – Luciano balling Gillian Darmody; Nucky lazing in a cathouse while Mayor Hague gets his rocks off – is coupled with a moment of awkward shame.

And that, as much as anything, is a reason to keep watching. Theme, style and vision are unified in a way that you typically only see in movies. In the best episodes, like “Nights in Ballygran” and “Family Limitation,” every line and scene points like an arrow into the heart of the story. In other episodes, like “Anastasia” and “Hold Me in Paradise,” the gears rattle a bit. But it’s still TV that eats like a movie. To get that quality every week is a sign we live in a fortunate age.

Oct

I got you, babe

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Man, that Internet sure seems divided on the season finale of Mad Men, eh? First, let’s talk about the season as a whole.

Doesn't that sound like fun?

If the last few seasons have been about shedding the trappings of the past, S4 is about considering who you really are. S3 ended with our heroes taking a stand – breaking out of the old ways of doing business and forming a risky new concern. S4 is about looking around as the dust settles and asking, “Okay. What now?”

With Peggy and Pete, this questioning makes sense. They’re both young; they’re at the stage in their lives when they should be asking these questions. Pete has lost his father (S2) and he still wants to take advantage of the ties that wealth and connection allow him (S3, S4). But he’s defining himself through his work. And not just by having a lucrative job that will provide for his family – note how he turns down that offer from Chaough. He likes being a partner. He takes enough pride in it to call Roger out on being lazy. He also takes enough pride in it to gloat when Ken shows up. So it’s not all admirable, but it’s character.

And to think I wanted to be you ... oh, crap, I still do.

Peggy is already defining herself as a “career woman” as S4 kicks off. Now it’s just a question of living with the consequences of that choice. She’s forced to confront that choice directly, and memorably, in “The Suitcase” – choosing between a birthday dinner with her boyfriend and staying in the office. She also has to choose between a conventional romantic life (courtship, engagement, marriage, kids) and the bohemian life of 60s Greenwich Village hipsters. The process of discovery has been rocky for her, but she’s stayed true to what she wants throughout.

(It’s also a little sad that Peggy Olsen is a more sex-positive female character than most female characters on primetime dramas set in the modern day. She wants sex, she has some, it’s great, la-di-da. Sometimes it’s with the wrong guy, like Duck. Sometimes it doesn’t end well, like with her last boyfriend. But she marches on, unscarred)

The process of uncovering “what now?” has been the most dramatic for Don because Don’s already an adult. At least notionally. And yet he never really had a childhood, not a pleasant one anyway, and what little he had he wants to repress. Free of Betty and his children, he has the opportunity to date around. Women present themselves to him: his secretary Allison, his fetching neighbor, the actress Bethany van Nuys, Dr. Faye, his new secretary Megan. It’s an adolescent fantasy: rich, single, living on your own in the big city. And yet we see how hollow it is. The dingy apartment, the drunken one-night stands, the lost contact with his children.

Don gets a clean break with his past when Anna dies. With her gone, he’s free to be whoever he says he is. And, as the final episode showed us, Don is happy being the man he was before. Don Draper is the type of man (as predicted by Dr. Faye) who marries his secretary. Or the model on his photoshoot. And yet he hasn’t remained completely inert. He’s drinking less. He respects Peggy and Pete more. He’s growing a little more wary of Roger – the man’s a friend, but he’s also a mirror that shows the future. And he’s come to terms (for now) with Betty.

S4 presented Don with an opportunity to change. And, with a few small exceptions, he said, “You know what? I’m good. Thanks, though.”

Retching in terror once every five years is a small price to pay.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, S4 presented Don with a choice between Faye, Bethany and Betty. Faye is smart, warm, supportive and mature. She pushes Don to confront his past. Bethany was young, gorgeous and good at presenting herself. She wanted everything Don had to offer. When Don seemed torn between those two, Megan split the difference. She’s young, gorgeous, warm and supportive. She’s clever but not smart enough to challenge Don. She’s a way for Don to hedge his bets. And that’s something Don’s always excelled at – holding off on signing a contract for as long as possible; bargaining with Pete to keep the DoD off his back. When given a choice between three blondes, Don goes with the brunette and thinks he’s making progress.

More importantly, Megan doesn’t know who Don was before. And that’s crucial. If Don is going to change himself in S4 – or do what he thinks is changing himself – he needs someone who doesn’t know his past. As soon as Don let Faye in on his secret, a world of trouble fell from his shoulders. But she was disqualified from becoming Mrs. Donald Draper.

(That being said, I’m not in love with this development. What sort of plots will it lead to in Seasons 5 and 6? “A visitor from the past forces Megan to confront Don’s true identity”, etc? Shocking)

Of course she's surprised. But she still has the speech rehearsed.

When I recapped the first four episodes of S4, I said that this season would be about dismantling the myth of Don Draper. The season finale puts a capstone on that. Don Draper will not get out of the Sixties intact. When he gets out of one scrape, his first instinct is to retreat to the behavior that got him in trouble in the first place. He’s saved from an FBI background check, and the first thing he does is ogle his secretary (literally, right after she drops the Beatles tickets on his desk). He loses Lucky Strike and he publishes a full-page ad in the Times. We may deplore one and admire the other, but they come from the same place.

“I’m living like there’s no tomorrow,” Draper tells Rachel Mencken in the pilot, “because there isn’t one.” That hasn’t changed in five years. Dick Whitman has been living a borrowed life since his near-death experience in Korea. He doesn’t think about building a future. He thinks about what will get him through today. Just to tide them over; just a little more time; just a little more room. Draper’s idea of planning for the future is to propose to a woman he barely knows with a ring he got three days ago.

Has there been any change? Yes, but not in him.

Note what happens when Draper announces his engagement to the partners. There’s a room of blank faces. The first person to congratulate him is the person in the room who knows him the least: Lane Pryce. And when Megan is invited in and Lane congratulates her too, Pete corrects him. “You don’t say ‘congratulations’ to the bride,” he says, adding an unspoken of Don Draper to the end. “You say ‘best wishes’.” And really, that’s all we can offer this poor girl. Our best wishes in dealing with this mess.

Who the hell's that?

Oct

that old Irish mother of mine

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In the comments section of the AV Club, particularly when discussing Mad Men, there’s an overused turn of phrase: “on the nose.” It’s used when the symbolism in a given episode is a little too obvious.^* Mad Men has earned reams of critical acclaim for the way its dialogue, cinematography and performances are all arranged to hint at a theme without hammering it in. In a given episode, the characters talk about, focus on and move toward everything but what they truly want. It forces the watcher to engage. That’s what makes Mad Men, at the moment, the best thing on television.

HBO’s Boardwalk Empire is on the nose.

boardwalk-empire-steve-buscemi

It started in the pilot, with Atlantic City treasurer Enoch Thompson (Steve Buscemi) crowing with his ward bosses over how corrupt he was. He didn’t quite rub his hands and cackle, but that may have been an acting choice. Buscemi delivers his lines with a stiff formality. I can’t tell whether it’s part of the character – Thompson, at the height of his power, tiring of his facade – or Buscemi’s fatigue with the material. In any case, Buscemi is the least satisfying part of the show for me. He hardly revels in his power the way we want our gangsters to: Michael Corleone ordering the death of his enemies, Joe Pesci threatening to bash someone’s head in. He’s history’s most neurotic capo.

It continued in the second episode, where we learned that Margaret Nicholson (Kelly MacDonald) was the world’s most precocious Irish housewife. Smart enough to quote George Sand from memory but not smart enough to avoid marrying an abusive Kraut, the writers have made her the Voice of the Socially Conscious Woman. Which is a role the show needs, to be sure, but not quite as blunt. We don’t need a character in 1920 judging 1920 with the voice of 2010. That’s the sort of shit I expect from a Heinlein novel. She’s Boardwalk Empire‘s stab at Peggy Olsen, but Peggy at least has boldness if not perfect foresight. MacDonald’s too retiring to cheer for. It doesn’t help that she has the worst Irish accent since Back to the Future III.

And it continued in the fourth episode, with the further exploration of Chalky White (Michael K. Williams). Being one of those legendarily rabid Wire fans, I made a conscious effort not to put too much weight on Williams’s shoulders. “He’s a different character in this show,” I said. “He’s not Time Travelin’ Omar.” But the speech he gave before interrogating the Klansman reeked of cheap melodrama. Other writers on Overthinking It (Fenzel in particular) have decried the recent need to give every protagonist a backstory, and this episode really hammered home why.^**

boardwalk-empire-michael-williams

Williams’s speech ground the pace of the interrogation scene to a halt. It had built to a beautiful thrum of suspense, with the Sheriff hooding the prisoner and walking off. Next scene, Williams enters. We saw how torn up he was over his man getting killed. We know this is an HBO show about gangsters, so we’re expecting some violence. And we get … a speech. A long one, too. Because we wouldn’t believe that a black man in 1920 would be murderously mad at the Klan unless he had some personal involvement with them, like his papa getting lynched.

The scene’s almost saved when Williams quietly unfolds the leather parcel he brought in: a vast array of metal tools. “These my daddy’s tools,” he says.

And then the Klansman asks, “W-what are you going to do with them?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’ve been handcuffed to a chair for twenty-four hours by Atlantic City’s corrupt sheriff. You’re still wearing your Grand Cyclops costume. A scarred black man has just been telling you about the time his father got lynched. And he’s fondling a pair of bolt cutters with a gleam in his eye. The fuck you think is going to happen?

(deep breath)

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. I might have had high expectations going in, since I’d seen all of the above actors in exceptional pieces of art before (Reservoir Dogs; No Country for Old Men; The Wire, etc). Oddly enough, it’s the characters I had no real expectations of who’ve impressed me the most.

boardwalk-empire-michael-shannon

I love Michael Shannon’s unpredictable Prohibition agent. I can still make myself laugh recalling him struggling for breath as he hoists a dying witness into a dentist’s chair. “You got something to boost his system? Give him some pep?” I love Shea Wigham’s understated brutality as Enoch Thompson’s thuggish brother. I’m liking Paz de la Huerta more than I thought I might. She comes off as a vapid sexpot, but it’s a three-dimensional vapid sexpot; she’s not shallow for lack of characterization, if that makes any sense. I like Gretchen Mol, who not only showed some fire in the fourth episode but seemed to mean it, too. And I love the quietly suffering Eddie.

So of course I’ll continue watching it. It’s an HBO series, so it’s allowed to build slow. As a show about the games of power played with an ensemble cast of excellent actors, it’s better than 90% of what’s on TV today. I’m scraping the burned bits off my filet mignon here. It’s good TV; it’s better than I deserve.

But will someone tell the writers to shut up and let the actors do their job? There was a fantastic bit in the fourth episode where Buscemi’s character is getting dressed for the day. “Get my shoes,” he tells Eddie. “Which ones?” Eddie asks. Buscemi stares at his valet in frustrated disbelief and points at the suit he’s wearing. Eddie nods and hustles toward the closet. That wordless exchange said more about their characters than a paragraph of text could – and it was funny, too. More of that, please; less of the other thing.

________________________
^* Formally, “on the nose” means “I’m worried all my friends got it too, and I won’t need to explain it to them.”

^**In a good story, we discover a character through their actions and their words. In a mediocre story, we discover a character through exposition – what they or other people say about them. And backstory is exposition. “You didn’t hear about how his parents were killed in 9/11, by the terrorist he let escape when he was serving in Operation Desert Storm, which he only enlisted in to make his daddy proud?” If you want to show me a conflicted character, then tell the actor to act conflicted. Or, even better, script a conflict! Don’t talk at me.

Sep

now watergate does not bother me

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Like all humans, I rely on certain rituals to anchor my week. My current seudah shlishit: getting a cheddar and swiss hot dog from Spike’s, plus fries and a Diet Pepsi, and eating it at home while watching something on Hulu. I prefer Burn Notice while it’s in season, but will fall back on another action drama (like Magnum P.I.) otherwise. Coasting around the “dial” leads to the occasional bit of weirdness, though, like that episode of Miami Vice starring G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy plays Maynard, an ex-CIA officer who’s aiding a cartel of American businessmen in funding the Nicaraguan Contras. Freelance reporter Ira Stone catches some of Maynard’s mercenaries destroying a Nicaraguan village on tape. He flees to Miami and begs Crockett to keep him safe until he can sell the tape to a major network. Crockett doesn’t believe him at first, since Stone’s a paranoid drug addict. I should note here that Stone was played by Bob Balaban, who has sadly never shaken the “raving junkie” typecasting.

Why is this so bizarre to me? Two reasons.

First, Liddy’s not a bad actor. He’s no worse than anyone else on the show. Miami Vice actors either play wild cartoon characters (e.g., Bruce McGill in “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run”) or stare into the middle distance and mumble. Michael Mann can sure frame a shot, but he had little interest in coaching an engaging performance out of his cast.

Liddy approaches his role as a villainous general with sleazy relish. When one of his cartel asks him for proof that his mercenaries can terrorize the Sandinistas, Liddy tosses a necklace of human ears across the table and grins. He only has one odd line delivery, about two-thirds through the episode. He extorts the tape that Balaban’s character filmed from Balaban. Crockett thinks ahead, makes a copy of the tape, and meets Liddy in a parking lot to deliver it. Liddy waddles up with this giant bag slung over his shoulder, which apparently contains a machine that can magically detect whether a videotape is a copy or an original. “Copy!” he yells at Crockett, a mix of shock and contempt preventing him from using verbs or definite articles.

Second, and I apologize for repeating myself, Liddy plays a former CIA officer who uses illegal means to funnel private contributions toward archconservative political ends. In other words, he’s playing himself. Had he still been working for the government in 1984, instead of having been arrested for his role in the Watergate burglary, this is what Liddy would have been doing: funding the Nicaraguan contras. As it is, someone got Ollie North to do it.

Either Liddy has no sense of irony or a very well-developed one. I can’t tell. And I used to listen to his radio show (… yep).

I’m not sure which I’d prefer. I love irony so much that I’d be equally happy if the joke were on Liddy as if he were in on the joke. Maybe he had no sense of how the episode would look in post production and thought that he might come out looking heroic. The fact that he kidnaps a helpless man and orders a goon to torture him casts some doubt on that, to say nothing of the necklaces of human ears he keeps in his briefcase. Or maybe Liddy grew tired of American intervention abroad after doing a bid for Nixon. Or maybe he just knows how his bread is buttered. Someone offers him the chance to make a hundred thousand dollars by playing a snarling archconservative; who’s he to turn it down?

He sounds like Edward G Robinson, looks like Mr Clean and carries himself like Gary Busey.

(Note this was actually Liddy’s second time appearing on Miami Vice. The first time, in Season 2, his character was smuggling heroin into the country in body bags)

This was hardly Miami Vice‘s weirdest example of stunt casting. Other odd guest stars include Glenn Frey as a bush pilot (“Smuggler’s Blues”), Phil Collins as a con artist (“Phil the Shill”), Frank Zappa as a drug dealer (“Payback”) and Willie Nelson as a Texas Ranger (“El Viejo”). But you don’t watch Miami Vice for the method acting or the gritty naturalism. You watch it for the cool sets, the slick action and the hot soundtrack. “Stone’s War” features songs by Steve Jones, Jackson Browne and an oddly placed Peter Gabriel track. Miami Vice wasn’t the first franchise to substitute attitude for plot, but few can do it better.

Aug

it’s such a feeling that, my love, I can’t hide

Posted by Perich at 10:08 am

Can we talk about how great Mad Men has been this season so far?

I have this secret daydream that Matthew Weiner sat down a year ago, looked at the various issues of Vanity Fair and Esquire and Maxim that proclaimed Don Draper the idol of a generation of unanchored males, and said, “Obviously you weren’t paying attention.” The first third of this season has been devoted to dismantling the myth of Don Draper, super-stud with his finger on the pulse of the now. Consider:

He strikes out with every woman he makes a move on. The sole exception is his secretary, who knows that rebuffing his advances might cost her a job (and suspects that catering to them might earn her a promotion) and consents to sleep with him while he’s blackout drunk. But everyone else – the actress, the perky nurse from across the hall, the consumer psychologist, the twenty-year-old Berkley student – all shoot him down.
Not only that, but it’s clear that Don isn’t looking to claw his way out of his hole. The actress with whom he goes on a date is gorgeous, smart, funny and clearly into him. She explicitly tells Don that (1) she won’t sleep with him that evening and (2) he should call her later so they can go on another date. But the idea of seeing a woman twice in one decade makes Don nervous, so he calls a prostitute to slap him around.
Don’s progressed from “casual drinker” to “habitual drunk.” Notice how he pours Lane’s expensive Scotch into a flask, letting the excess dribble onto the rug. Notice how many times he shows up to a meeting with bags under his eyes (the end of Ep.3, right before Allison quits in Ep.4). Notice how he snaps at his secretary when his bottle’s empty.
And for a man who’s supposed to be shaping the popular consciousness, he doesn’t care as much about moving the Zeitgeist any more. He rattles off a list of Christmas gifts for his secretary to buy for his daughter Sally, and adds “a couple of Beatles LPs” as an afterthought. Which do you think will have a bigger impact on Sally’s childhood – a generic pink dress or A Hard Day’s Night?
Not only is the mystique fading, but everyone seems to notice. Peggy no longer worships Don as a creative genius. Roger and Bert grow tired of Don’s petulant privacy, particularly after he botches an interview in Ep.1. Joan regards Don with impatience, foisting a battleaxe of a secretary on him after Allison leaves in tears. And the new consumer psychologist, Faye, regards Don as “a type.”

Get this straight, American males – Don Draper is not your model for life. And I say this as someone who dressed as him for Halloween.

Other developments?

Peggy and Pete have started to take more of the spotlight, particularly in the last episode. This season should mark Don becoming less relevant and Peggy and Pete moreso. They’re the face of the “youth culture” that’s going to become more important as the Sixties roll on. And, as Ep.04 made explicit, they’re going in opposite directions. Pete aligns himself with old money (the Vick’s cough syrup cartel) and power, while Peggy follows after impulsive hipster culture. Don, Peggy and Pete are going to be the dramatic tripod around which the later seasons develop.

And then there’s poor Joan. The timing’s ironic: the world just discovered how gorgeous Christina Hendricks is at the moment when her fictional character’s good looks became less relevant. The camera still forces us to regard her as a good body in a tight dress. There’s a shot in Ep.02 where she talks to Roger in his office. Roger sits down on the corner of his desk; the camera follows to keep him framed. The result is to cut off Joan’s head, leaving her bust and hips perfectly framed while Roger keeps talking about this red dress she wore once. There’s the male gaze, and then there’s the gaze at the male gaze.

Joan has begun to realize (by Ep.03) that she climbed the wrong ladder. Her husband (in addition to being a rapist) is not a suave, talented surgeon destined for wealth. He’s petulant, manipulative and selfish. But she married him. So what’s her next step? Joan may have made a series of mistakes, but she’s not a weak character. She’s not one to sit idly by and let fate push her into a corner. So the only question is when she’ll push back.

And what’s next for 1965? Martin Luther King’s march on Montgomery, increased troop presence in Vietnam, the Beatles at Shea Stadium and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the Second Vatican Council and the New York World’s Fair. So things might stay busy.