Monday, December 31, 2012

BEST FILMS OF 2012

I did not see nearly enough movies this year for this to be anything resembling comprehensive or objective as a “BEST” list.   In fact, based on reactions I’ve seen from others, I fully expect that half of this list would be knocked off if I redid it after catching up on The Master, Holy Motors, The Raid, The Grey, 21 Jump Street, Amour, Chronicle and Zero Dark Thirty (god damn it Chicago for not getting in on the limited release).

This is just the best times I had in theaters this year.  Make of it what you will.

 10.  SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

psychos

The reason this isn’t higher probably has less to do with how much better the other 9 movies are than it does with how much better In Bruges is.  Which probably isn’t completely fair, but this is my list and I didn’t promise anyone fair.  Martin MacDonough’s latest is not so relentlessly entertaining and definitely not as unexpectedly moving as its predecessor, but it is still frequently hilarious and definitely much bigger and full of ideas.  A lot of those ideas are treading over ground that Adaptation covered ten years ago, but I can see rewatching this a lot more than that one, since McDonough’s characters are constantly fun to spend time with, which does not seem to be a concern of Kaufman’s in his quest to eviscerate himself as thoroughly as possible on screen.  Which is all by way of saying that metafiction is usually not this much fun.

2012 Trend-watching:  Great performance from an aging actor prone to phoning it in (Christopher Walken).  Heavily metafictional.  Good movie that is disappointing as a follow-up to the director’s previous masterwork (In Bruges).  Harry Dean Stanton cameo.  Murder for hire.

Watch it for:  The Quaker Psychopath sequence

9.  SKYFALL

bond

I don’t know how to not make this sound backhanded, but Skyfall impressed me most with how much I liked it spite of it being a James Bond movie.  I’ve never loved Bond, and found Casino Royale to be pretty good rather than the revelation many folks seem to have, but I love Craig’s weathered, more brutish take on the character.  Throw in a supporting cast of ringers like Ralph Fiennes and Naomi Harris, a terrific villain turn from Javier Bardem, some actual meat for Dame Judi Dench to chew on her way out the door, and man-eating komodo dragons and you have an action spectacle that delivers on nearly every front.  The story, due to the focus on Dench’s M, feels weighty in a way that 007’s adventures rarely do, no matter how much peril the world is in.  And holy mother of god, do Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins shoot the living hell out of the exotic locations and beautiful people.  Whatever quibbles I might have about the on-the-nose references or awkwardness of trying to make the movie the capper to the “Bond Begins” trilogy while simultaneously examining how Craig’s incarnation is getting over-the-hill by 00 standards, a summer blockbuster this visually sumptuous is a rare treat.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Lowbrow material tackled with style and intelligence.  Heavily metafictional.  Murder for hire.  No one can make a movie under two hours anymore.

Watch It For:  The jaw-droppingly gorgeous skyscraper fight.

8. LOOPER

loop


Say this for Rian Johnson’s Looper: it’s not like anything else out there.  With it’s high-and-highly-complicated concept, act breaks that seem to begin entirely new movies, and moments of legitimately chilling horror, it seems perversely, almost compulsively non-commercial.  It’s a sci-fi thriller set in/around futuristic Kansas City, for crying out loud.  But it’s also thoughtful and inventive on a level that most sci-fi flicks don’t even aspire to, and even if the time travel mechanics are a bit wonky or the ending works more conceptually than emotionally, there are multiple sequences here that will stick with me for years, like Paul Dano’s character drawing just an incredibly short straw, or the 30 year montage.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Great performance from an aging actor prone to phoning it in (Bruce Willis).  Good movie that is a disappointing follow up to the director’s previous masterwork (Brick). Murder for hire.

Watch It For:  Emily Blunt stealing the show from two bona fide movie stars with half the screentime.

7. LINCOLN

linc

What’s most amazing about Lincoln is not that it’s good, it’s that it’s so frequently fun, without undermining the enormous historical import of the subject matter.  It’s realistic about the compromises and messiness required to pursue even the most lofty political agenda, while still managing to present the ability to compromise as something noble.  And that’s something that is hard to do in movies (our fictional heroes are heroes precisely because they make the principled stances we can’t be bothered to make ourselves), and even more so in politics, where any slight change in position is pounced upon as ideological weakness by opponents and the noisy fringe of one’s own party alike.  It’s not a perfect movie, although it would be close if it weren’t for the tacked-on inclusion of the assassination, but there is so much to love from Day-Lewis and the ridiculously loaded supporting cast that I can’t imagine anyone walking out disappointed.

2012 Trend-watching:  Elaborate period piece.  Slavery.  Great performance from an aging actor prone to phoning it in (Tommy Lee Jones).  No one can make a movie under two hours anymore.

Watch It For:  (arguably) the Greatest Living Director directing (arguably) the Greatest Living Actor in portraying (arguably) the Greatest American, and somehow living up to the challenge

6. ARGO

argo


Ben Affleck is the goods. He’s delivered three polished adult thrillers with no duds in a time when such movies are increasingly endangered by the continual encroachment of superhero and tween romance franchises on their natural studio habitats.  Argo’s Hollywood satire may be rather toothless (if amusing), but as a thriller and a window into an obscure, bizarre corner of American history, it’s taut and immensely effective.  I only saw one movie in 2012 (more on that later) that had the audience as effortlessly in the palm of its hand from the opening on, spending minutes on end in breathless silence before erupting in laughter or gasping in all the right places.  We’ve come to expect so little from brain-dead blockbusters that its refreshing to see one that can manipulate our reactions without insulting our intelligence.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Elaborate period piece. Heavily metafictional.  No one can make a movie under two hours anymore.

Watch It For:  The harrowing opening sequence

 5. MOONRISE KINGDOM

moon

I thought I might be over Wes Anderson after The Darjeeling Limited, which did nothing for me that earlier works didn’t do better.  But Moonrise Kingdom somehow managed to be a refreshing return to form from a guy who has never really changed his form.  Maybe it was the focus on actual children instead of manchildren, maybe it was actually setting it in the 60s instead of a hazy, old-fashioned feeling version of the present, maybe it was bringing in some fresh blood like Ed Norton, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis and Tilda Swinton.  But for whatever reason, Moonrise Kingdom was funny and sweet and entertaining all the way through, and possibly the only movie of the year that I actually felt like ended too soon.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Elaborate period piece.  Great performance from aging actor prone to phoning it in (Bruce Willis, again)

Watch It For:  Incredible young actors Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman inhabiting the mannered Anderson style with as much aplomb and authenticity as any adult ever has.

 4.  DJANGO UNCHAINED

django

Tarantino’s latest massive revenge-of-the-oppressed epic/pastiche lacks some of the quiet, creeping intensity of Inglorious Basterds, but it is even bloodier (Django appears to be firing something closer to RPGs than actual bullets at the slavers), funnier (the Klansman bag scene is a comedic gift that just keeps giving), more gorgeously filmed (the shot of Big Daddy getting blasted off his horse that just follows its galloping legs was a particular standout).  I would rank it pretty low amongst Tarantino’s filmography, in large part because it goes on for too long after shedding its best characters, but then sitting comfortably alongside Reservoir Dogs is none too shabby a place to be.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Elaborate period piece.  Slavery.  Murder for hire. Good movie, but disappointing as a follow up to the director’s previous masterwork (Inglorious Basterds).  Great performance from an aging actor prone to phoning it in (Samuel L. Jackson). Heavily metafictional.  Seriously, no one can make a movie under two hours any more.

Watch It For:  Performances – Sam Jackson playing an actual character, Dicaprio rocketing miles and miles over the top, Jamie Foxx’s childlike rapture when asking Schultz to tell him the story of Siegfreid, but mostly watching Christoph Waltz own the screen like (insert tasteless reference to owning human beings as property here)

3.  THE AVENGERS


ave

The Avengers would’ve been a damn good time if it had gotten even two of its half dozen heroes right.  As it is, it is absolutely the biggest, best crowd-pleaser we’ve gotten in years, with something for any blockbuster, superhero or otherwise, to learn from. If I was doing a list of my favorite moments from movies this year, this movie would dominate it to an embarrassing degree.  Black Widow turning the tables on Loki.  The Galaga joke.  Hawkeye cheating to knock Loki off his sled.  The shawarma bit. Captain America taking charge of the final battle. Every. Single. Thing. The Hulk. Does

The Avengers doesn’t just validate the long game Marvel has been playing with its various lead-in movies, it makes me like all of them a little more in retrospect, which I’m still not sure how that even works.  Is it an “important” movie?  Not really.  But it is a fucking excellent one.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Lowbrow material done with style and intelligence.  Harry Dean Stanton cameo.  Jesus Christ, no one can make a movie under two hours anymore.

Watch It For:  The Other Guy.

2. CABIN IN THE WOODS

cab

The biggest and best surprise of the year (I don’t doubt Whedon or Drew Goddard’s abilities, but the 2 year shelving didn’t inspire confidence), Cabin got billed by some as the “horror film that kills the horror genre”.  I think that’s malarkey, though, as it’s a big, genuine love letter to the genre that flays and removes the pieces for inspection, but in a friendly way.  And it does metafiction the way I prefer, with those elements as allegory/subtext to a story that never betrays its own internal logic (it’s why as much as I liked Seven Psychos, I think Inception is a better “movie about movies”).  And it does have something to say about the genre and it’s cultural importance underneath the simple layers of reference and parody; the allegory here can be read as critical of audiences for being bloodthirsty slaves to convention, but ultimately the point is that we consume horrific entertainment as a way to engage with our darkest, most dangerous impulses without endangering the social contract. Horror saves the world in Cabin’s way of things; I’m not sure I buy that completely, but it’s not something that a movie interested in destroying the entire genre would put forward.

It’s also packed to the gills with terrific gags and payoffs and references for the horror fans in the audience.  The whiteboard alone is worth the price of admission for those folks.  And I didn’t even mention Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins or the speakerphone gag!  Truly this cup runneth over.

2012 Trend-Watching:  Lowbrow material done with style and intelligence.  Heavily metafictional.  Murder for hire.

Watch It For:    The merman.  We should all see one eventually.

 1. BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

beast

How on Earth did a first time director make this movie?  Get this performance from a 5 year-old?  Capture these images, this specific sense of place?  Beasts is a difficult movie to describe, as there’s hardly a plot and the tone is at once dream-like and earthy.  And there are some political undercurrents that some have objected to, but I do not think the world of the Bathtub is depicted as unambiguously good or bad enough to get your partisan hackles up about.  This movie is not unabashedly fun like Cabin or Avengers, or expertly executed as Argo or tackling American historical atrocities head-on like Lincoln and Django, but it was the most unusual and moving time I spent in a theater this year.  More than anything else I saw, this was less of a film and more of an experience.

2012 Trend-WatchingBeasts is such a singular piece of work that it does not have any of the elements I connected with the others.  Here’s hoping that the Aurochs kick off a trend of more movies in 2013 featuring antediluvian beasts.

Watch It For:  The performance of the year by young Quvenzhane Wallis.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

STAR WARS, NOTHING BUT STAAAAR WAAAAAAARS....

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

So, I don’t want to shock anyone, but there’s going to be more Star Wars movies.  And TV shows, and certainly video games and books and comics and all that jazz.  Now, I was as disappointed as anyone by the prequels, but I’m fairly optimistic about the prospects for a decent Star Wars movies.  It can be done.  By the time 2015 rolls around, there’s a good chance that I will have long stopped caring due to the deluge of news and rampant, uninformed speculation, but for now…how about some rampant, uninformed speculation?

Caution: Reading This Piece To The End May (Will) Result
 In  The Inability To Recall The Feel Of A Woman’s Touch

We know very little about the approach that will be taken to reviving this franchise, except that first on the agenda is episodes 7-9 (which is cause for some concern), so it could go any number of ways.  As a Star Wars fan, here’s a rundown of the mindset that I hope Kathleen Kennedy and those perverts at the Magic Kingdom are bringing to this, and the type of announcements that will give me pause in the build up that I’m already getting a bit sick of.

THE PEOPLE

George Lucas: He can be as involved or uninvolved as he wants at this point, and it won’t change my enthusiasm.  I don’t think I would want to be at this point were I in his shoes, after the astronomical amount of shit he took over the prequels.  But he’s not going to direct, so unless word gets out that he’s writing the scripts entirely by himself again, I’m not going to be too worried about the extent of his creative consultancy or whatever it ends up being called.

John Williams:  Dude’s old.  Get him working now.  Tie his granddaughter up and suspend her over a meat grinder if that’s what it takes to keep the guy composing new Star Wars theme music from now until he croaks.  That may sound a tad bit incredibly cruel to children and septuagenarian alike, but this is the only guy who, across all 6 films, never lost sight of what a Star Wars movie should be, and occasionally even made the prequels feel like one.

 
Sorry, Gina, but it’s for a good cause.

Directors:  It feels wrong, being even mildly knowledgeable about the craft of cinema, to downplay the importance of a director’s contribution, but if ever there was a case where a director didn’t matter, it’s this one.

That’s not to say they aren’t important, just that Star Wars, even more than other franchises, has a distinct and fairly rigid visual style that even a true auteur is not going to be able to stray too far outside.  For this reason, I don’t think we should actually hope for a Guillermo Del Toro or Darren Aronofsky or Alfonso Cuaron or even a Rian Johnson to jump on board.  I want to see what those guys produce on their own.  I want Star Wars in the hands of someone who is good with actors and can shoot a competent action scene. If they should have some experience producing or punching up scripts, all the better.

To that end, I love Tim Kelly’s suggestion of Drew Goddard, whose Cabin In The Woods was the best surprise of the year, and showcased an ability to simultaneously homage and deconstruct genre tropes while still being its own story with a consistent internal logic.  Star Wars is essentially a genre unto itself at this point, so a similar approach, lighter on the deconstruction but similarly faithful to the spirit, would be ideal.

Barring that, I’d be fine with Jon Favreau, Neil Blomkamp or even a Martin Campbell or James Mangold.  Hell, if his adaptation of The Stand should fall through, I’d be pretty happy with Ben Affleck taking on an episode, as he gets great performances from his actors, shoots straightforward, muscular action and has a geeky streak evidenced by his courting of various superhero projects and collaborations with Kevin Smith.  It would be a departure from the R-rated thrillers he’s made so far, but I think as a country we should have learned by now that we underestimate Ben Affleck’s ability to stretch himself at our own peril.

 
 "Seriously. Screwing Jennifer Lopez is widely
 regarded  as the low point of my career. 
That means I win."

Writers:  [I learned while putting this together that Toy Story 2 scribe Michael Arndt has been picked to write the first movie.  This stuff mostly applies to any episode or TV show or whatever they end up making]

This is, I feel, and even more important area than the director.  This is where Goddard would double up, as he is a great hand at it and could potentially bring in some of Joss Whedon’s (who would himself be perfect for the job as I just described it if he weren’t busy godfathering the other humongous multimedia sci-fi adventure franchise in its big and small screen forays) Mutant Enemy writing stable to lend their hands.  ME’s defining characteristic, to my mind, is mixing comedy into fantasy/sci-fi without undermining the sense of real stakes.  The original trilogy might not be a laugh riot exactly, but that sensibility is exactly what the franchise needs after the frequently airless prequels.

I’m not worried about this, though, as the geeks are ascendant in the biz right now, and I’m sure every writer in Hollywood is clamoring for a chance to do Star Wars right this time.  My one big worry would be that there will end up being too many cooks, if the producers can’t resist letting everyone who has sold a script in the last 10 years take a crack.  My other would be that it ends up in the hands of Damon Lindelof, who is a worthy successor to George Lucas in that he comes up with great ideas, and created such a seminal property that it is difficult to reconcile such an impressive imagination with such a poor hand at the nuts n’ bolts of storytelling (that last season of Lost fails terribly at a lot more than justifying its own mythology, and then there’s Prometheus…).

"My God, It’s full of on-the-nose thematic dialogue
 and unresolved plot developments…"
The Stars:  For starters, a helpful hint to Disney: for all the new roles, cast unknowns.  People didn’t come back for prequel after disappointing prequel because of Natalie Portman.  The actors are not the draw when it comes to Star Wars; save yourself the budget and don’t pay someone established to be Ben Solo.

The exception to this:  the Villain.  Pay whatever it takes to get the director’s first choice for the new Sith Lord.  By setting Ep. VII close to ROTJ, you’re already in a hole in this regard.  The prior episode saw the death of the most iconic villain in the history of cinema, and the archetypical evil puppetmaster to boot. Those are ridiculous shoes to fill under any circumstances, and if the main evil force is Imperial holdouts, you’ve compounded it.  How big of a threat can the remnants of the Empire be when the heroes toppled it at full strength last time?

Shell out the bucks for the bad guy.  He’s going to be the single most important factor in making this work.

Now, about the alumni…
The first batch of rumors have surrounded the potential involvement of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford.  Of course they’re going to show up in some capacity, but the question is how, and by implication, why.

The obvious answer is that they played these iconic, beloved characters and it would be crazy not to have them show up for nostalgia’s sake.  Here’s my take on that: these movies are going to be largely powered and defined by nostalgia for the originals no matter what, so there’s not much need to actively court it.  To that point, the worst thing they could do is have the original trio be the protagonists of the new trilogy (or even the first entry in it).

I wish this being such a bad idea was completely self-evident, but we live in strange, self-indulgent times where well-off white kids enjoy an extended adolescence well into their twenties (yo!), and well-off white filmmakers defer their mid-life crises until their 60s, then drag the iconic characters of their youth back to the screen to sort them out.  Not that it isn’t possible to make a decent movie about an aged Rocky Balboa, but in execution it seems like these movies go out of their way to show how Rambo or Indiana Jones or John McClane can kick just as much ass at 60 as they did at 30, which always comes off as affected and faintly sad to me.

Of course, The Expendables seems to be gaining steam as a legitimate franchise, and they just got Dolph Lundgren and Van Damme both back for a Universal Soldier reunion two decades after the fact, so maybe it’s me that’s strange for not enjoying old men pretending to kick 20 year-old ass more.  But even if I’m selling the concept short, Star Wars is a young man’s game.  It was a phenomenon because it was a movie that genuinely worked for kids 8 and (all the way) up, and I think it hit a sweet spot there because it mixed in a genuine reverence for the wisdom of age, while still being driven by the youthful energy of the core cast.  Youth and energy being two words that have not appeared in the same sentence as “Harrison Ford” since 1988, I think it would be a mistake to have older versions of those characters be the driving force of this new story.

What about recasting with younger actors?  No.  At that point you’re inviting all the unflattering comparisons to the classic style, but losing the sentimental attachment that is the only reason to stick with these characters.  Just no.  It’s only a slightly worse idea than digitally de-aging them Tron: Legacy style, which will have all the sadness of watching the stars try to recapture their youthful spirit with the added bonus of rubbing the uncanny valley all up in our shit at the same time.

The Characters
All that being said, there is ample precedent for a wise older jedi role in the series for an older actor, and that would be a natural progression of Luke’s character.  Just remember that his role should be that of Obi-Wan in Ep. IV, a revered mentor figure for the actual hero(s), not Obi-wan in Ep. I, an underwritten and fairly inessential side character elevated to quasi-lead because of preexisting familiarity with the fans.

 
 Pictured:  one of the crudely rendered, racist 
caricatures that is more important to The Phantom 
Menace‘s plot than the trilogy’s “hero”

There’s also precedent for an elder maternal political leader, which Leia could fill in some fashion.  But that’s a really ancillary role, and begs the question of whether it’s worth bothering to draw our attention to whether Carrie Fisher remembers how to act after 30 years of public struggles with addiction.  And as for old Han, ugh, no.  That is not a character designed to age gracefully under the best circumstances, much less when the actor has developed as acute a shit-giving deficiency as Ford has these last…well, a whole lot of years.

What I’m getting at here is that there will need to be a new crop of characters to carry a new franchise that will justify its own storyline, rather feeling like a postscript to the existing films.  Because what this trilogy should absolutely not be is a sequel to the OT.  It’s too late for that, and more importantly, they don’t need it in the first place.  Whatever criticisms can be leveled at ROTJ, it is definitively an ending.  I’m pretty sure Disney understands this on some level – I doubt they thought that people were just so desperate to check in on Princess Leia at age 60 that it was worth a billion+ dollars (plus another for each of her lil’ buddies) for the right to tell that story.  For as packed with lame fanservice as it will likely end up, Ep. VII’s primary goal is to kick off a new story that people will want to follow through an entire trilogy, and beyond.

To do that we will need new heroes, although you can have the droids and Chewie around in essentially the same old capacity, since those costumes don’t age like regular folk.  This will probably mean a hatch of fresh-faced Solos and Calrissians, although for reasons I’ve expounded on I think they should distance themselves from the earlier characters.  But the incestuous (in all senses) nature of the Star Wars galaxy is almost an established part of the formula at this point, so it’s probably inevitable.

Still better than Jar-Jar and Watto

Anyway, like I said before, you can cast unknowns here and can even get by without finding a bolt from the blue like Marvel did with Chris Hemsworth.  Because the little secret here is that the characters are not the draw to this series.  Don’t get me wrong, they can’t be bad, and they should be great, but these movies could be massive successes even if they don’t rise past serviceable.
By now you might be shaking your head, wondering what the hell it is that I think makes a movie good if the director and actors and characters don’t matter that much.  I should note that for every other movie these are the most vital components to making something watchable, but Star Wars is its own thing.  And the real appeal of the Star Wars brand is…

The World 

Star Wars has not endured 35 years of shitty novels, comics, video games and eventually an entire new trilogy of high-profile shitty movies on the strength of the characters of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, or even more colorful ones like Han Solo and Darth Vader.  Those were factors, but the bigger one, the one that drives the biggest, most diverse array of Expanded Universe materials of any franchise ever, is that the galaxy far, far away was such an appealing place.  It was more than a world, it was an endless series of worlds, teeming with laserswords and Cloud Cities and evil overlords and magical space samurai and bounty hunters with jetpacks and lovable sasquatch sidekicks and Billy Dee Williamses and 40 varieties of spaceship and Lobot.

 
Motherfuckers love them some Lobot

The thing about the Star Wars universe is that it’s a place where literally anything can happen.  A new Star Wars movie has to have a few things – an opening crawl, Across The Stars, lots of wipes, robot sidekicks, someone having a bad feeling about something.  But the story could be anything.  It could be your standard Campbellian Chosen One epic.  It could be about a mob war between space slugs and yetis.   It could be a Magificent Seven riff on a frontier world, or an Aliens riff on an abandoned space station, or a Die Hard riff on a Star Destroyer, or a heist film a la Ocean’s Eleven where the crooks have literal magic powers instead of just being impossibly cool, or a noir riff with a jetpacked bounty hunter playing the Sam Spade role, or a hard-nosed military drama following Rogue Squadron, or The Bourne Identity where the amnesiac can move things with his mind.  Terminator where John Connor has a squidhead.  The Great Escape on an unstable asteroid prison. Jaws with a giant sandworm.  The Dirty Dozen with cyborgs and green muppets and smugglers and fishmen.  Mutiny On The ExecutorDances With Wookies.  A buddy cop movie where Murtaugh is an android and Riggs has a human butt for a chin.

 
 “Diplomatic Immunity, my faceass!”

Basically, any movie that features gangsters, aliens, wizards, cowboys, samurai, zombies, or robots (so, all the good ones) can be worked into the Star Wars universe.  George Lucas did something back in 1977 that I’m sure would’ve been impossible if he had set out to do it specifically.  He fused sci-fi with fantasy, and through some mysterious alchemy, created a potent hybrid with all the myriad story potential of both that somehow appealed to mainstream audiences that don’t have much taste for either.  It was a world so vibrant, so teeming with life that seemed to extend for parsecs past the edge of every frame, that people didn’t care much that the dialogue could be clunky and the lead was a bit whiny and bland (he did get better as the series progressed!) and kinda wanted to pork his sister. That world is so overflowing with potential that it hardly seemed to matter that the prequels were flat out bad, and didn’t take advantage of it, instead focusing intently on familiar characters and setting up the things we already know all about.  It’s why even though I don’t like a one of them, I can’t write off the possibility that Ep. VII might actually be good.

It’s also why I’m not interested in seeing how Han and Leia are doing in retirement.  Do something else.  Do anything else, because if you can think it up, it can fit in Star Wars.   It’s too bad that Ep. VII has to be, well, Ep. VII, because it suggests that it will be trying to tie things fairly tightly to the prior series, most likely to its detriment.

I may not be able to still care when it comes out in 2015, but for now I’m trying to be guardedly optimistic.  The news that will really perk me up, though, is when it is announced that the next movie/TV show in development will be set far away from the previous ones, like 100 years + past the OT, or way back in the era of the Knights Of The Old Republic games, thousands of years before The Phantom Menace.  Something with that distance would be freer to be its own thing, and function as a homage to the originals, focusing on recreating the spirit and intangibles that made it fun and resonant rather than getting bogged down in hyper-specific references and servicing characters who received perfectly good resolutions in 1983.  To get a story that is new and exciting while having a feel that is familiar and inviting.  That’s the best we can hope for, I think.  The worst…well, the worst is that we get another crappy blockbuster or two and a giant corporation is out a couple billion dollars.  Call me crazy, but I don’t think I hate these odds.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

BREAKING BAD 5.08 - "GLIDING OVER ALL"

This post is a day later coming than the prior seven, and while you might assume that the holiday has something to do with that, the truth of the matter is that the mid-season finale left me supremely conflicted.  I’ve spent the last two days wrestling with this question, and still remain undecided: would a nice wet plop over the executive producer credit have been a perfectly hilarious capper, or the stupidest fucking thing anyone could ever have done, anywhere ever?  Leave a comment below or a post in the message board thread to weigh in.

Our cold open this week focuses on the clean up from Mike’s murder, and despite actually seeing it happen last week, it was somehow more upsetting for me to see the barrel for the old man’s body be laid out.  I don’t know why, as I’m not usually sentimental about mortal remains and have no opinion as to whether my own are buried or burned or reanimated with voodoo to help Andrew McCarthy’s grandson find buried treasure.  It not just me who seemed more taken aback by the aftermath than the actual event (like most fans, I had Mike at the top of the dead pool), though.  Walt looks drained of the exhilaration he felt after he “won” with Gus, and even exhibits what seems to be actual regret.  Which fits with my reading that Walt has been disappointed not to have a Fring to scheme against this year, and found that as much as he tried to push Mike into that antagonistic role, it just wasn’t the same this time around.  Like that other great tragic hero of our age, Charlie Sheen, he’s found that winning all the time is a good way to find yourself fucking up good things just because you want to see what happens.

Speaking of things being too easy to maintain Walt’s interest, the mass murder of the 10 guys goes off without a hitch.  Walt throwing in with neo-nazis to pull it off is, if not a new low per se, certainly a new type of low for the character.  But, after spending about 3 minutes extracting the names from Lydia (who drops a new, ready-to-roll international distribution system in his lap while she’s at it, yawn), planning the deed itself can barely hold his attention.  He seems to put on the figurative Heisenberg hat only briefly at the motel, almost as an afterthought.  The show is obviously operating in a completely different gear these days when you look at how disposing of two bodies was a two episode ordeal back in season one and now a complex web of ten assassinations across three prisons within a two minute window is planned in one scene and carried out in one (stunningly executed, exceedingly brutal) montage.

All of this is leading to Walt’s momentous but again surprisingly easy-to-accomplish decision to quit the business in the last third of the episode.  This fits with the decompression of the show that has been my biggest reservation about this season.  With no dire need for the money or outside influence enforcing a cooking quota, the gang’s adventures have been interesting and darkly funny as per usual, but really, if they needed to spend 3 months planning the train heist, there was nothing stopping them from doing so.  Along with no longer needing to hide anything from Skyler, who was at least technically exhibiting all the symptoms of rigor mortis for the last 5 episodes, this led to a noticeable downshift in intensity for a show that had always distinguished itself as having the tightest screws on television.  Along with the sidelining of important characters like Saul, and especially Jesse, these are the reasons why despite some great stuff in these last couple, this 8 episodes has been the weakest stretch of the series in my opinion.  Not actually weak, mind you, just not quite strong enough to edge out Game Of Thrones as the best thing on TV this year.

But let’s get back to the good stuff.  The most interesting thing about this episode is how it is almost structured as a mock-series finale, in some alternate universe where the show could end with Walt retiring voluntarily and dying in peace.  There are callbacks galore, and in fact, let’s just stop and list some of them:  Walt fixates on a fly again, as well as a familiar painting and a paper towel dispenser he’d previously accosted, he and Jesse reminiscence about their RV, the most extensive meth-cooking montage since “Four Days Out” and all the familiar imagery that comes with that, shots of Walt in the shower and laid out on a medical slab coming out of the EKG or whatever machine that are almost exact recreations of things we’ve seen before, mention of Horace Shapiro, Junkyard Attorney getting rid of another incriminating car, multiple time-lapse shots of suns rising/setting, a signature ricin pump-fake (a move that has come to occupy the same space in BB’s arsenal as the skyhook did in Kareem’s), and of course, Leaves of Grass.  We’ll get back to Leave Of Grass.

For an episode that spans a larger amount of time than most entire seasons and features the biggest power play by our hero yet, this was surprisingly quiet and almost contemplative.  As I mentioned before, the mass murder plays out almost as an afterthought to getting rid of Mike, and Walt is not racked with nerves before or flush with triumph afterward.  He plans and pulls off this operation that the nazi notes is more complicated than offing Bin Laden, mid-episode, and then essentially plays out his ride into the sunset, reuniting his family, making things “right” with Jesse, and extract himself from a massive international criminal operation with tens of millions of dollars and seemingly not a peep from his co-conspirators.  Okay, it seems like his cancer is out of remission, as it must be eventually, but for the most part it’s all coming up Millhouse for Mr. White.  He’s even enjoying  a quiet dinner around the pool with the entire family again, a prospect which seemed completely out of the question just a few episodes ago.

And then Hank takes a dump.

I love this so much.  And not just because watching bald middle-aged men quietly excrete is sort of my “thing”.  I just find it soothing in a completely non-sexual way, and Dr. Schleisser says that as long as they know they’re being filmed no one is getting hurt, so maybe you’re the one who is perverted for thinking it was something dirty, huh Mr. Judgmental?  But I digress. A lot of people, including myself at some points, speculated that (toilet setting aside) this would be exactly how we would enter the mid-season break, but that doesn’t make me any less delighted that they went there with time to actually explore how this changes the basic fabric of the series, and that the thread that unravels the biggest secret on the show goes back to dear, departed Gale Boeticher’s guilelessness.

How will Hank react?  Will he begin his own covert investigation to confirm his suspicions?  Will he confide what he knows to Marie, or Gomez?  Or will he confront Walt more or less immediately?
I’m preparing myself for the first option, as it would maintain something closer to the show’s prior status quo, albeit with Hank now hiding a secret from Walter in their interactions.  But I’m hoping he comes directly to Walt, as I could see him spinning a lie that he cooked one or two batches to try to leave his family some cash, and then paint Fring and Mike as the big villains that forced him to keep up the production with threats to his family.  It could be just plausible enough to make Hank not want to torpedo his career by turning him in, which could lead to his reluctantly helping Walt when the Phoenix/neo-nazi/Madrigal folks come looking to pull him back into the trade.  That would be an entirely new dynamic, and one I would love to see.  And that might be the most impressive feat of these 8 episodes; as much as I found the individual entries less compelling than their predecessors, I never got any less eager to see what comes next.

It’s going to be a long year before we fade back in on Hank sitting on the toilet, that’s for sure.   I don’t have a real clear impression of how many people actually read these things; I have gotten a handful of comments that have been uniformly positive, which is gratifying for sure.  Anyhow, I hope everyone comes back for season 6B, and if not, thanks for reading, hope to see you next year, and may you maintain at least a 96% purity in all of your endeavors.

Estimated Profits: + $62000 + multiple millions from all the deals in the montage.  It looks like Walt has finally got himself securely in the black from all the blue he’s dealing.  And he only had to murder 22 people and indirectly kill about 200 others to do it!

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale Boetticher, Gustavo Fring, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, 14 year-old arachnophile Drew Sharp, Mike Ehrmantraut, Dennis the Laundry Manager, Dan the lawyer, 8 more of Mike’s guys

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.  Mike’s lawyer is arrested, depriving his favorite banker of sweets.  Hank has that last great pleasure of a middle-aged man, a quiet, leisurely excretion, ruined by one of histories greatest monsters.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “It can be done exactly how I want it.  The only question is, are you the man to do it?”

Best Lie – “I used to love camping.”  I don’t know why, but I just feel like Walt has never been an outdoorsman, and this is just the first thing that came to him to fill the silence.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15.  The kid has been absent from several episodes now, to no one I know’s consternation.  People may loathe Skyler, but no one even cares about Flynn.

We Are Done, Professionally –  Jesse actually stays out, even after getting a nostalgic visit from Mr. White.  Good for you, Jesse.  You are going to suffer so damn much in the final 8 episodes, but still.

It’s The Little Things – Son of Fly!  Lydia getting hung up on Walt ordering coffee to make their meet “play better”.  Todd’s quick “Okay!” when Walt says he doesn’t want to talk about Mike’s body.  How the bag Todd drops on the scale at the beginning of the meth montage tumbles off (suggesting just a little bit of ineptitude that might try Walt’s patience working with Not-Jesse but not overplaying it).  Skyler mentioning that her laundering operation has essentially been reduced to spraying a giant pile of bills for silverfish.  The way I can’t shake the feeling that Walt was disappointed not to be able to poison Lydia, not because she is an unacceptable loose end, but because he’s thinking “Jesus, I’m never going to get rid of this stuff!”

Random Retrospective Thoughts On Season 5A:  I never came around on Lydia, so having her be such a big supporting character does not sit great with me, particularly when it comes at such a steep cost to Saul’s screentime.  Jesse and Skyler (outside of her showcase episode) were also really marginalized compared to prior years, although I suppose I appreciate the attempts to make Jesse feel important to the proceedings by having him come up with the ideas for the two big heists.  This tips things in favor of Mike, who needed the added characterization as his story wound to a close, and Walt, who is as focal here as he has been since the first season.

This makes a similar sort of sense, as the show is his story and it is also winding down, and because the issues he’s facing here are not quite as accessible or primally motivating as finding out you have a terminal disease or feeling poor and powerless.  Not to go on an economic tangent here, but most of us feel so far from the top right now that we probably need to be walked through getting there and not feeling particularly interested being there anymore in order to understand it.  But still, to have the character retake the spotlight at a point in his journey where I find him the least interesting and sympathetic does not make for the most gripping of episodes.  Really, what this underscores for me is what a brilliant move that opening flash-forward was, as without it I think I would’ve been much more critical of the show feeling aimless in this stretch, idling around with Walt in triumph, with less to hide and fear than ever before while other established characters languish on the sidelines.  But with that destination in sight, the sight of Heisenberg ascendant takes on a different, more purposeful flavor.  What might have seemed like pandering to the crowd that wanted Walt to be Scarface from season 1, episode 2 is instead recognizable as sowing the seeds for what looks to be a long, ugly fall.

Monday, August 27, 2012

BREAKING BAD 5.07 - "SAY MY NAME"

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

We open this week, not with a stylized tone poem, but with a BB mainstay:  some gangsters meet in the desert to talk business and why they should/shouldn’t murder Walter White.  The outcome of this meeting is not really in question; not only is it beginning of the episode, but we have half a season to go and Declan is too new to the scene to pose a serious threat to any of the regulars.  Which is not to say that 10 episodes from now he won’t have Jesse cooking meth at gunpoint, necessitating the intervention of Walt and a little friend.

At first I felt like we’re supposed to view this as a triumphant exercise of our hero’s power, exactly the kind of scene that those who were frustrated with Walter’s backsliding from the badass Heisenberg persona for the majority of seasons 3 and 4 wanted.  These are the people who hate Skyler for being a wet blanket that prevents Walt from pursuing his kingpin destiny.   The thing that many of the Skyler/Carmela/Rita Morgan haters don’t seem to understand is how boring the kingpin business would get without the tension between it and the more grounded, domestic side of the character.  Heisenberg is ascendant throughout the scene, dominating Declan at each turn and forcing him to kiss the ring before he’s actually delivered anything.  But was it as exciting as any one of the similar meetings with Gus, where Walt had to carefully, gingerly lay out the arguments for keeping him and his partner alive?

Not to me, but I also found it hard to enjoy the scene on a power trip level because I thought Walt did a terrible job of selling himself.  He pumps up himself and his partner and product, which is fine, but he also spends a ton of time running down this crime boss in front of his underlings, which one should always be careful about.  He calls him to a tee-ball team to his Yankees, then launches directly into a second, superfluous metaphor about how the blue meth is classic coke.  “Would you really want to live in a world without Coca-Cola?” is his counter to the obvious question of why this crew shouldn’t leave him in the desert to die.  Fuck Yes I do, if I produce and distribute of RC Cola.

But anyway, this works, as it must, even after Walt makes the pointlessly humiliating demand that Declan name him as the boogieman of the Southwest meth trade.  This is good for the rest of the season, as my primary concern about the season so far is that after the premiere there was no pressing need for the characters to make any of the decisions they’ve been making outside of their own greed and pride.  Now that they have a quota to meet again to avoid the ire of dangerous people, there will be more pressure on them to rob the next proverbial train immediately (whereas if they weren’t ready in “Dead Freight”, they could’ve waited for next week’s train just as easily).  I know to some extent the characters bringing all of these problems on themselves is the point, but those external threats crank up the intensity which was always the most impressive thing about the show to me.

Anyway,  the opening scene is a rare case where I thought to myself “it’s a good thing you’re the protagonist of this TV show, Walt, because a real gangster would feel obligated to react violently to being talked down to so openly in front of his underlings, even if the deal being offered was a great one.” But he is, so we’re off to the episode proper with Mike ready to retire, which seeing as this is a crime story, was the equivalent of putting a black hood on his head. I tried to convince myself that he would make it out of the hour briefly, but then his lawyer had to go ahead and joke about how he was going to need a second deposit box for his granddaughter (you FOOL!!  Don’t you know anything about dramatic irony???), I started saying my goodbyes.

But before we get to that, let’s do a drive-by on the other characters we check in with this week.
Our one scene with Saul (and the writers really need to check with the FDA if they think that meets a growing audience’s daily Saul requirements) is brief but typically delightful.  Calling the other attorney a “clown”, worming his way out of making the bag hand off himself, his drawer full of burners, and of course a quick shot of that majestic inflatable Lady Liberty on his roof.  I cherish our time together, counselor.

Potentially ominous foreshadowing:  when Hank is serving the search warrant on Mike is watching a scene in The Big Heat where characters muse about what happens when a cop shoots himself.  Later, when leaving the faux-distraught Walt in his office, he mimes shooting himself in the head.  Man, I hope I’m reading too much into this.

Todd has really made it now.  He may not be Antoine Lavoisier, but he does get to take part in a stylized meth cooking montage, complete with a time-lapse exterior capper.  Congratulations, guy, that means you have officially made it in Breaking Bad terms.  You can now look forward to short, miserable stint as Mr. White’s lab assistant, most likely followed up by a horrible death at his hands.  Mazel tov?

Walt and Jesse’s argument about the latter leaving the business felt a little rote, but no matter how many times we’ve seen a variation on it the actors are still tearing into the material like the pros they are, and I liked that Walt explicitly appealed to the pride of being the best at something (even if that thing is horrible).  It’s been implicit to his motivation for a long time, and Jesse’s, who Mr. White is correct in pointing out that he doesn’t have much else going on or licit skills to fall back on.  But it’s not clear whether it will be enough to keep him on board this time.  Because his brief, awkward interaction with Skyler at the car wash indicates a growing understanding that their situations are more similar than he would’ve thought.  I’m betting we’ll be seeing those two work together more before the end.  Whether it will be to clean up a mess Walt has made or actively plotting against him remains to be seen.  Maybe the former leading into the latter?

I also like that after all of the largely abstract talk about the kids safety for the last 6 episodes, Skyler quickly points out, with only the vaguest understanding of the context, that Walt’s deal with the Phoenix crew is bringing a real threat closer to their door.  This is another reason I think it might have been better to introduce them and the deal earlier, so that crucial point of contention between them would not have seemed so hypothetical while they were having those arguments.
So…the ending.

First off, beautiful.  Just a gorgeously shot sequence in a wonderful location.  This was Breaking Bad by way of Barry Lyndon, and I would’ve been impressed even if I watched it on mute.  Second, a lot of people seem to have a problem with Mike letting Walt do the handoff, but I’m fine with it.  I think the argument against having Saul do it holds water, and Mike doesn’t want to risk dragging Jesse down with him, but he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if Walt gets himself caught and probably doesn’t mind the last chance to give him a piece of his mind.

Walt doesn’t wear his Heisenberg hat when meeting and shooting Mike, which I think is an important touch.  Because while on one level, this is him getting rid of the biggest thorn in his side in a way that he could easily get away with, but it actually comes across as a crumbling of his badass kingpin persona.  In his meeting with Declan, he is calm, still, purposeful.  When he scurries off screen to grab the gun and shoot Mike, he looks petulant, and mortified after he pulls the trigger.  Heisenberg would never apologize to the man he just shot, but it was actually Walter who pulled the trigger. Because Walter doesn’t like to be compared to Gus Fring, and he really, really hates being told to know his place.  This made me rethink the opening a bit, because if that is supposed to be Heisenberg at his most overweening, and the threads on the porkpie hat are going to be rapidly unraveling, it plays differently.  I still think it cuts off Declan’s credibility as a character at the knees, but at least the stupid aspects of Walt’s speech are knowingly unnecessary.

“I just realized Lydia has the names, I can get them from her.”  What a macabre punchline to the biggest character death the show has done so far (Gus was huge, but he was also squarely an antagonist in a way that rendered his death further within the bounds of convention).  What a strange show whose major character deaths even have punchlines.

RIP, Mike The Cleaner.  I have a feeling things will only get messier without you around. Particularly for your 9 guys and their families.

Estimated Profits: + $62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale Boetticher, Gustavo Fring, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, 14 year-old arachnophile Drew Sharp, Mike Ehrmantraut

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.  Mike’s lawyer is arrested, depriving his favorite banker of sweets.

Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – Walt meets Mike to hand off the bag and demand 9 names, with everything cranked up a notch by the pointed shot of the revolver in the bag that preceded it.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “You’re goddamn right I am.”

Best Lie – Hank promises his boss that he will not have Mike tailed anymore, but says nothing about tailing his lawyer.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15.  The kid has been absent from several episodes now, to no one I have encountered’s consternation.  People may loathe Skyler, but no one even cares about Flynn.

We Are Done, Professionally –  Mike officially retires, even dumping an arsenal that would make Nico Bellic jealous down a well.  Jesse tries to follow him, but we didn’t really think that would happen, did we?
It’s The Little Things – Cufflink Cam!  The giant goofy smile on Gomey’s face when he busts the lawyer.  The smash cut from Skyler walking away from the dinner table to Walt giving an even more historionic performance than before in Hank’s office.  “If you want me to read that, I’m going to need my glasses” – Mike could out-deadpan a slab of frozen beef.

Monday, August 20, 2012

BREAKING BAD 5.06 - "BUY OUT"


(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)


Our cold open this week is a spin on the “body disposal” sequence we’ve seen in many a crime movie/show over the years, including this one.  But rather than a graphic dismembering of the kid’s body, we get a somber, methodical dismantling of his dirtbike.

I’m not sure why exactly the went this unusual route, other than to give it some sort of new twist, but I imagine that part of it was knowing that they couldn’t craft anything as visceral as the gross-out bathtub scene from episodes 2/3 of the first season or the murder and disposal of Victor in “Box Cutter”.  It’s all for the best though, as it’s a beautifully shot, wonderfully moody scene, and while it would undoubtedly have been upsetting to see them handling the body of a dead child, just the sight of Walter setting out a barrel to receive his earthly remains was incredibly chilling, without showing anything that might draw the ire of the censors.  My only small complaint is that I’d rather have had it cut out right there, instead of tacking on the short bit of Jesse decking Todd for trying to be nonchalant about the whole thing.  I like when the cold opens are little conceptual pieces unto themselves, and that part felt  like it could’ve kicked things off after the opening titles.

Todd actually appears very little after the conclusion of last week’s episode seemed to thrust him directly to the center of the story.  But his dialogue is unwittingly pointed as he echoes justifications we’ve heard our guys use on their previous murders.  “It was him or us, and I chose us” was exactly what Walt said about Gale, and of course it was only 2 weeks ago where Skyler was yelling at Walt that murder is not something you shrug off as “shit happens.”  The guys do decide to keep Todd around, just for the sake of keeping a close eye on him, but then the whole operation promptly unravels in a way that makes it sort of moot.

I noticed a lot of people on the boards seem to be jumping to the conclusion that Todd is actually a complete psychopath who got off on killing the kid and kept the tarantula as a sort of trophy.  While we haven’t gotten much of a look at his interior life, I think that judgment is way off.  Because ultimately, this show is not about Todd.  It’s about Walt and Jesse, and having his act be a fundamentally pragmatic one reflects more strongly on them and their chosen business.  I look at the show, for all the depravity it depicts, as  strongly moralistic overall, and I don’t think its been coy about negatively judging Walt’s actions for quite some time.  I expect that to come into even sharper focus as things approach their end, and to have our guys suddenly playing off a serial killer obfuscates their moral culpability and removes some of the onus from them.  If the guys’ mistake was to bring Jeffrey Dahmer on an Ocean’s 11-style heist, isn’t that a rather weak-ass statement on their overall choices compared to saying they created a situation where an impressionable but sane individual would contemplate the viability of murdering a child?

The episode jumps around quite a bit, so much that I’m not sure how I would grade it, if these were that sort of reviews.  This was especially surprising to me as I thought the ending of the last episode was going to crystallize the overall seasonal arc.  But while it did lead in a way to the band breaking up, the whole process was relatively cordial and professional, even when Mike was cuffing Walt to a radiator.  The new head of the Phoenix organization could potentially be the sort of threat that Walt could address with an M-60, but for now all he’s trying to do is pay our guys $15 million.

While the episode jumps around a lot, it’s from strong scene to strong scene, so I liked it a whole lot despite feeling very much like a middle chapter rather than a self-contained story.  We got a little of Skyler and Marie, in a sad but darkly funny exchange that started with Marie obliviously explaining how frazzled taking care of a teenager can make you, followed by the long-delayed reunion between Jesse and Skyler, who I believe have not shared a scene since the second episode of the series.  The reunion is not so much joyous as excruciatingly awkward, with Skyler doing her best Lucille Bluth impression while she pounds wine and flaunts her lack of domestic effort.  It’s great stuff, wrapped around some classic Cranston-monologuing about his history with Grey Matter and how he has nothing left but regrets and vague imperial ambitions for his meth operation.

All of which vocalizes what has been clear for a long time now, which is that Walt is not concerned at all with providing for his family anymore.  Jesse even points out that the current offer on the table, which would allow for Walt to retire and safely bring his children home, is for over 7 times the amount he calculated he “needed” to leave for them before he quit.  But Walt views the $5 million as nothing, as “selling out” (though Jesse notes that protecting the integrity of a meth operation is an inherently silly conceit), because he’s still filled with bitterness over how he gave up on the company he started as a young man.  Those regrets are understandable at their core, but he takes them to ludicrous, delusional levels when he tells Jesse that he’s not in the meth business (which is a lie), or the money business (also known as just “business”), but the empire business (not an actual thing).

Ultimately, Jesse is so frustrated by Walt’s megalomania, and disturbed (in a goofily on-the-nose bit) by his nonchalant whistling while he works ten seconds after lamenting the death of the Sharp boy, that he decides to pull the ripcord even without his partner-in-crime/surrogate father.  This is an encouraging sign, as Jesse has spent the season so far on the sidelines, caught between two increasingly different father figures.  While the show has repeatedly reminded us that for all his kingpin swagger, Walt has failed to put away any meaningful cash reserves for his family, we have seen Mike repeatedly insist on providing for “his guys” in their time of need, to the point that he will hold his nose and partner up with a man he loathes to make sure they get what he has promised them.  Yes, there is a strong element of self-preservation to that decision, but he is eventually willing to pay them all off out of his share of the methylamine profits, and even when angered, he doesn’t present it as a pragmatic necessity, but simply states that “this is what you do.”  A man looks out for his own, rewards loyalty in kind, or at the very least, pays his debts.

Hopefully that’s the sort of man Jesse becomes, anyway, as it will be quietly devastating if after they’re gone we see that he has taken more after Mr. White’s psychological diet of preening and bullshit rationalizations than Mike’s quiet competence and steadfast providing for those in his familial or professional care.  He looked like he was stepping in that direction for most of the episode, but at the end he seems to have backslid to the point that he convinces Mike to once again refrain from firing the gun he’s holding to Walt’s head and listen to his pitch,  even though a few minutes earlier he was saying with complete accuracy and conviction that “the last thing I need to do is listen to you.”

We also get a little bit of Hank and a bit of Saul doing his typical, always fun, sleaze routine to round things out.  I hope Saul and his horrendously clashing salmon-shirt, green-tie, sky-blue Wayfarer ribbon (still rocking it!) ensembles are more involved in the future, as he provides a flavor that none of the other combinations of characters can duplicate.   And I’m optimistic that as Hank and the DEA clamp down harder on Mike, we’ll get just that.  This half-season may be a bit structurally awkward for the show, but I fully expect some fireworks in the last two episodes to leave us breathlessly awaiting the final stretch in 2013.

Estimated Profits: +$62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, 14 year-old arachnophile Drew Sharp

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.

Best Lie – Walt assures Jesse that in a year, year and a half, when they’re done cooking, there will be plenty of time for soul searching.  Of course, only one of them is likely to live longer than that under the best of circumstances.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt Macguyver’s an ersatz soddering iron out of an extension cord…

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – …so he can blowtorch his own arm halfway off and free himself from the radiator.  Watching his skin turn black was stomach-turning.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally –  The whole episode is built around Mike and Jesse attempting to untangle themselves from the Heisenpire.  Of course by the end Mike is holding a gun to Walt’s head, but no one really believes that he’ll use it and apparently we’re going to have another complicated scheme for them to work together on.

It’s The Little Things –  Skyler’s expression when Marie asks how great she must feel after “coming clean” about Ted.  “These are very green beans, Mrs. White.”  I’m pretty sure they gave Aaron Paul a chair with a lowered seat for that dinner scene so that he would look more childlike sitting between between the two big parental figures in the foreground (and yammering on about how the image the packaging on his frozen dinners masks a less appetizing truth, while the couple stares stonily across the table at each other) .  Walt carefully removing the watch he received from Jesse before roasting his wrist with the wires.  The brief, completely dead-eyed glance Mike gives Saul after he describes him as a senior citizen.  “I have never seen someone work so hard to not get 5 million dollars.”

Monday, August 13, 2012

BREAKING BAD 5.05 - "DEAD FREIGHT"

This week’s cold open is short and simple, as we are introduced to a kid taking the dirt bike out tarantula hunting, which is one of those activities that sounds absolutely filthy until you realize it’s literal.  This would be obtuse or confusing on another show, but I’ve been conditioned at this point to expect that all of BB’s seemingly arbitrary openings to pay off in a satisfying way (well, minus that one where the big reveal was that Hank threw Tuco’s grill away).  And since I had been “spoiled” to the extent that the episode would involve a train heist, I was fairly certain as to the context in which the kid would reappear, if not the outcome when he did.

The show proper begins with a miniature heist before we get to the big one, as Walt manipulates his way into Hank’s office to plant bugs.  Oh, and I totally forgot to mention last week that Hank was promoted to a desk job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the ABQ office.  On a plot level, this gives them a little more justification to keep him from being hot on the Heisenberg trail, something the show constantly struggles to do (so as not to shatter the basic set up) without making him just come off as dense.  But it also sets Hank up as another potential contrast for Walt’s new role as the boss, in addition to Mike and the ghost of Gustavo Fring.  I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that in the coming weeks, we’ll see Hank’s managerial technique, while imperfect, demonstrated to be superior to Walt’s.

This is all to set up the moody, noir-ish sequence where the gang kidnaps Lydia and forces her to call Hank at gunpoint.  Or pistol point, as Mike fastidiously corrects, noting that he is “expecting precision here.”  This is the Mike I like best; cold, methodical, dryly funny and implacable without being an invincible paramilitary force unto himself.  It might have more impact if Lydia were a better defined or more sympathetic character, as Laura Fraser’s jittery performance has not done a lot to make us concerned for her fate.  Plus, she explains the concept of Dark Territory to Jesse with nary a mention of Steven Seagal or Eric Bogasian, which…come on, lady.  Anyway, the upshot of all of it is that the guys decide to rob a train, “like Jesse James,” the second time this year the outlaw has been name-dropped, and Walt clearly fancies himself an legend of that variety.

But two things to keep in mind about Jesse James.  One, as much as he may have stolen from the rich and given to the poor (probably none), he also killed people who got in his way or witnessed his crimes.  That obviously came into play sooner rather than later.  But the other thing is that James was shot in the back by a young member of his gang who had previously idolized him (superbly dramatized in 2007’s forgotten masterpiece, which opens with a stunningly gorgeous train robbery sequence of its own).  If the name is mentioned one more time I’m officially putting my bottom dollar on Jesse being the one to pull the trigger on Walt in the end.

The heist itself is simple but clever enough to work, and makes for a fun, exciting sequence.  My one quibble on the practical side of things is why they didn’t have the hoses and compressor set up and just covered in dirt or something before the train arrived, but that’s a minor point.  There’s also Walter’s refusal to pull the guys off early (what is 900 gallons of methylamine really going to do for them that 750 won’t?), but I think that could be justified by needing to make sure the right amount of water gets in so that the scales don’t tip off the chemical company.  He doesn’t say anything about that to Mike though.  So I look at it as an extension of the subtext I’ve been reading all season, that Walt feels insufficiently challenged by the simple process of cooking meth in the post-Gus era, which leads him to antagonize people like Mike and Skyler more overtly, or to manipulate Jesse into breaking up with Andrea as much to see if he can as  because she represents a serious threat to his freedom.  This is just one more example of his pushing things further than necessary to provide himself extra excitement.

Then the kid shows up, and Todd does something great and terrible.  Terrible because, well, he murders a child.  Great because it turns what had been a high-spirited romp of a heist (though I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be getting another of those so soon after the premiere) into something with lasting weight and consequence, and managed to be shocking even though I thought we were heading there from the cold open.  Most importantly, it creates some conflicts for our main characters that have to be addressed immediately, and not just because Walt is bored or doesn’t feel like cooking less or slower.  Jesse doesn’t take kindly to hurting kids, nor, one surmises, does Mike, who is not a fan of Walter to begin with.  We knew this combination was unstable, but the reactions have begun and I can’t wait to see how they play out.

For the next three weeks anyway.  Then…arrgh.

Estimated Profits: +$72000 – at least $10000 in prep costs and compensation for the train job = $~$62000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers,  Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons, a poor kid who went tarantula hunting in the wrong stretch of desert (the felony murder rules of New Mexico and Arizona would hold Walt and Jesse liable for first degree murder, although only Todd could get the death penalty)

Lesser Included Offenses - Grand theft, kidnapping, assault

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.  A young arachnophile is murdered to cover up the train job.

Sequences To Make Hitchcock Proud – The whole heist sequence is terrific, all leading up to that gutpunch at the end.  I expected it after the cold open, but my stomach just dropped out when the kid comes into focus.

Heisenberg Certainty Principle – “Out burying bodies?”  “Robbing a train.”

Best Lie – Walt turning on the waterworks to drive Hank out of his office so he can plant the bugs again contains just enough truth to sell the deeper lie, and also really underscores just how good he’s gotten at deception in the past year.  I also let out an extremely childish giggle at the way it briefly looked like Hank caught him wanking as he hunched over and fiddled with the picture in his lap.

The Erlenmeyer Flask Is Mightier – Walt schools Todd on the relative density of aqueous methylamine and how much they can dilute it without arousing much suspicion.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally – The guys are right on the verge of the murdering Lydia throughout the first 20 minutes, but decide to give her a pass even though she put out “a hit…like the mafia” on Mike.  It’s hard to imagine Walt, Mike, Jesse, and Todd all still working together next week

It’s The Little Things –  The way Lydia hisses “ASSHOLE” at Mike when the wiretap clears her of the GPS thing.  Mike telling Jesse “everyone is Meryl Streep with a gun to their head” in front of the last guy to hoodwink him at gunpoint.  The way the argument in Jesse’s house frames him as increasingly hemmed in by the bickering father figures on each side.  The shot of Heisenberg looking over the train tracks, complete with the proverbial black hat of a western villain.  The waves.

Monday, August 6, 2012

BREAKING BAD 5.04 - "51'

(This piece originally ran on Chud.com)

Adios, Pontiac Aztek.  You were one of television’s great punching bags for the last few years, and you will be missed.  I have to imagine your new owner will treat you kinder than the last one, though.  I’m even starting to suspect he may have been harboring some passive-aggression toward what you represented about the identity he presented to the world and the one that he embraces privately, and this may have led him to treat you more roughly than you deserved.

That guy is having a harder and harder time maintaining the facade identity, not because of any particular demand of the alter ego (which is still facing the occasional speed bump, but no threats of the existential variety), but because he has just lost the taste for it.  His decision to dump the Aztek and buy (sorry, lease) two muscle cars is prompted by the mechanic mentioning that he could put another 200,000 miles on it, leading him to the the obvious conclusion that even if the wagon did, he doesn’t have that many miles left in him.  And he doesn’t want to spend them pretending to be an ineffectual drip when he is clearly the baddest, smartest, swingingest dick west of the Rockies.  He’s even wearing the hat, the lynchpin of his Heisenberg “costume”, in front of Junior.  If he’s careless enough to also put it on in front of Hank, will it spark him to remember the description of Heisenberg as wearing a goatee and porkpie?

A question for another day, as Hank may think Walt’s spending is reckless, but he is distracted at the moment by even more erratic behavior on Skyler’s part. Her unsettling dip in the middle of Walt’s birthday dinner was also the cinematic highlight of director Rian Johnson’s return to the show after season 3’s “Fly”.  You don’t see a lot of feature film directors guest-shoot on TV, as series have a locked-in look and style that is going to constrain even the most visionary of auteurs.  Breaking Bad, though, has always had a lot of flair in its style, allowing for a good deal more technical flourishes than most shows, and also enough cultural/critical cache to attract a “name” like Johnson.  Incidentally, if you haven’t seen his Brick, it’s simply incredible, Brothers Bloom is a fun romp, and you should definitely see his upcoming Looper in theaters.  He’s one of the most interesting young directors working and those guys need all the support we can muster.

Anyway, we’re halfway through this sorta-season, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll be catching up to the flash forward opening before 2013 and the final batch of episodes.   I wasn’t really expecting us to, as Walt’s bearing suggested that even if things go off without a hitch, it’s not the sort of plan that would support 8 episodes worth of story in its aftermath.  But we’re still only halfway from pilot to the diner in story time, and the new big threat to the Heisenpire still has not begun to coalesce.

Well, the type of threat that requires an M-60 to address, anyway, because at the moment, Skyler is shaping up to be Heisenberg’s primary antagonist.  She doesn’t have much of a plan as yet, but I very much doubt that getting the kids out of the house and waiting out the clock is going to work well enough to remain her permanent plan of (in)action.  Walt seems to relish his chance to square off with her, flaunting his superior experience at spinning elaborate lies and rhetorically countering all of her moves as quickly as she can spitball them.  The man’s need to assert himself has so far outpaced all the concern for his family that was his ostensible motivation for starting down this path that if he’s not being sufficiently challenged by the criminals in his life, he’ll threaten to have his wife committed, gladly using the potential trauma to his kids to get one over on her.

The whole scene is as jaw-dropping and ugly as anything the show has produced, and makes this the strongest episode of the year so far.  It’s also a powerhouse for both actors, Gunn in particular. Reminding Walt that he was the one who explained to her that he was the danger, violently rejecting his attempts to make excuses for her role in things, and crowning things off with the devastating declaration that she is just counting the days until he croaks; if she produces another, better Emmy submission episode than this for the final season, she’ll be a mortal lock to win.

It also sets up a fascinating contrast between how the ticking clock affects both characters.  While his imminent demise is spurring Walt to act out in more and more reckless fashion, the same knowledge paralyzes Skyler with the thought that if she simply eschews any of the terrible options laid out in front of her, the Walt problem will eventually take care of itself.

This is not a show where problems take care of themselves, though.  And it is a show where taking control of your fate and becoming more assertive (despite being the requisite growth that 99% of fictional characters “need” to complete in their own dramas) can be a very, very negative thing.  Walt may be happier with his current persona than the milquetoast he was in the pilot, but there’s about 200 people listed in the sections below who would be much better off if he had remained a passive doormat until the cancer ate him away.  I’m almost as afraid of what Skyler will do when her hand is forced as I am to see what Walt does with the gun.

Estimated Profits: + $97000 – ~$25000 (new car leases) = +$72000

Murders – Emilio, Krazy 8, Jane, two of Gus’s dealers, Gale, Gus, Tyrus, Hector “Tio” Salamanca, two other Fring goons

Collateral Damage – One innocent janitor loses his job and goes to jail on a bullshit marijuana charge.  Hank had to kill a guy, even if he was an insane, degenerate piece of filth who deserved to die, giving him fairly severe PTSD.  Combo was killed dealing for Walt.  Jane’s father’s life is utterly ruined.  167 passengers on two planes are dead.  Skyler is forced to become an accessory after the fact (or take down her son, sister and brother-in-law with Walt).  3 broken Pontiac Aztek windshields.  Jesse’s RV is destroyed. On their mission to kill Heisenberg, the Cousins kill 9 illegal immigrants and their coyote, an old woman with a handicap-accessible van, a grocery-shopping bystander, an Indian woman and the Reservation sheriff that investigates.  Also they shoot Hank multiple times, forcing him through a long, painful physical therapy process.  Andrea’s kid brother is murdered by Gus’s dealers due to trouble Jesse and Walt stirred up.  Jesse murders Gale, crushing him with guilt and destroying his hard-fought sobriety.  Gus murders Victor to send a message to Walt and Jesse.  Three Honduran workers get deported (or maybe worse).  Walt purposefully wrecks a car, straining an already-injured Hank’s neck in an unspecified fashion.  Ted Beneke breaks his neck fleeing from Heisenpire goons.  Brock is poisoned and nearly dies.  Tio blows himself up, but no one’s weeping for that vicious old fucker.  The staff of an industrial laundry is out of their jobs.  Dozens (hundreds?) of criminal prosecutions are compromised when the guys wreck the APD evidence locker.  Hank’s boss gets pushed out of his job for his failure to apprehend Fring or Heisenberg.  Herr Schuler, Chau and a low rent hitman get offed as Lydia scrambles to cover up Madrigal’s connection to Fring’s drug empire in the wake of his death.  Walt manipulates Jesse into breaking up with Andrea.

Official Walter Jr. Breakfast Count: 15

We Are Done, Professionally – Mike is already trying to go back on his decision not to murder Lydia two episodes ago.  It appears that Walt came up with some idea for dealing with her that won’t cut off their methylamine supply, but we won’t see how that plays out til next week.

It’s The Little Things –  All of the big and small indicators that the current status quo cannot hold; Lydia’s mismatched shoes, the unraveling thread on the porkpie, the ticking clock on the watch (recalling the time bomb Mike characterized Walt as), the blood from the head shaving, the way the White house seems to get darker and darker in each successive scene.   The look on Hank’s face in the background when Marie wonders “You don’t hand-mash?”  The way the pool is lit up to look like a batch of the blue meth that Skyler is literally drowning in.  How Walt’s entry to the pool is obscured by her billowing dress, so his grabbing her is like the sudden appearance of a movie monster.