Category Archives: Reviews

I’M The One Who Fava Beans

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAROLINE!

May be an image of 2 people and beard

Anthony Hopkins’s letter to Bryan Cranston after watching Breaking Bad:

“Dear Mister Cranston.

I wanted to write you this email – so I am contacting you through Jeremy Barber – I take it we are both represented by UTA . Great agency.

I’ve just finished a marathon of watching “BREAKING BAD” – from episode one of the First Season — to the last eight episodes of the Sixth Season. [Editor’s note: There are in fact five seasons of Breaking Bad; this might have been wishful thinking.] (I downloaded the last season on AMAZON) A total of two weeks (addictive) viewing.

I have never watched anything like it. Brilliant!

Your performance as Walter White was the best acting I have seen – ever.

I know there is so much smoke blowing and sickening bullshit in this business, and I’ve sort of lost belief in anything really.

But this work of yours is spectacular — absolutely stunning. What is extraordinary, is the sheer power of everyone in the entire production. What was it? Five or six years in the making? How the producers (yourself being one of them), the writers, directors, cinematographers…. every department — casting etc. managed to keep the discipline and control from beginning to the end is (that over used word) awesome.

From what started as a black comedy, descended into a labyrinth of blood, destruction and hell. It was like a great Jacobean, Shakespearian or Greek Tragedy.

If you ever get a chance to – would you pass on my admiration to everyone — Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Aaron Paul, Betsy Brandt, R.J. Mitte, Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Steven Michael Quezada — everyone — everyone gave master classes of performance … The list is endless.

Thank you. That kind of work/artistry is rare, and when, once in a while, it occurs, as in this epic work, it restores confidence.

You and all the cast are the best actors I’ve ever seen.

That may sound like a good lung full of smoke blowing. But it is not. It’s almost midnight out here in Malibu, and I felt compelled to write this email.

Congratulations and my deepest respect. You are truly a great, great actor.

Best regards

Tony Hopkins.”

Deja Viewed: Mad Men


Ask Google ”What are the greatest television shows of all time?”, and she’ll promptly display a horizontal bank of names, with corresponding photos. There’s no number to designate rank, but if one were to read left to right, the first ten would look as follows:

The Sopranos; The Wire; Breaking Bad; Fargo; Oz; Mad Men; The Shield; Deadwood; True Detective; and Better Call Saul.

Two things stand out on the list. One, Vince Gilligan created two of them, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Two, they all have crime and death at the core of their story lines.

Except Mad Men.

If anything, the story line of Mad Men should barely constitute a daytime soap opera, let alone a prime-time drama: A New York advertising executive in the 1960’s struggles with alcohol, womanizing and a spiraling All-American family life, in that order.

The show, which turns 15 this year, would offer no murder plot, no gang syndicate, no crime, really, to speak of besides the white collar variety. The only significant death happened before the show’s first episode. These Mad Men were racist, sexist, and as poetically merciless as The Sopranos or The Wire in their worldview of America as fading corporate sellout.

That Mad Men managed the transcendent feat bloodlessly makes the show arguably the highest TV achievement ever.

Embodying that malaise is adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a creative arts director who doesn’t buy the American Dream because he sells it on TV and magazines. Well.

If Tony Soprano is the Washington on the Rushmore of Hollywood’s iconic TV anti-heroes, Don Draper is its Lincoln. Creator Matthew Weiner, who served as a producer on Sopranos, created his greatest anti-hero since, well, Tony Soprano. Instead of a Mafia don, we get a Madison Don.

But make no mistake: a sharp suit does not soften the ugly edges of the character draped in it. This anti-hero is as much anti as hero, maybe more. Tony and Don both depart the series smiling, but at least you knew Tony was smiling at the image of his family. The frustrating beauty of Mad Men is you can never really tell if a character is being honest — or selling an image they honestly want to be.

One way to measure a show’s IQ is to count how many times a character has a facial reaction NOT seen by the other characters in the scene, particularly dramas. Mad Men specialized in the unshared epiphany.

What may ultimately set Mad Men apart among TV historians is its sense of history. Set from 1959 to 1970, Mad Men feigns being a show about the 60’s. But it really chronicles the birth — and death — of the Baby Boomer generation. We watch with Don & Partners as events such as the Kennedy and King assassinations and the Civil Rights movement leave our heroes crippled and dog paddling in a rising corporate tide. But like Breaking Bad, it’s all black comedy, many times laugh out loud. Even the final scene is so droll you won’t know if you’ve been won over or flim-flammed.

Which is Mad Men’s ultimate point. Are you loved and happy, or playing someone who is? Is there a difference?

Seasons 1, 5 and 7 are the show’s best, in that order. The First for its novelty; Fifth for its Conradian Hero’s Arc, and the Seventh for Hero’s Return. Lady Lazarus, the 8th episode of season 5, may be Mad Men’s best episode, period. Written by Weiner, Lazarus is the show at its narrative and artistic zenith — with a stunning final two minutes that rival any two final minutes. Period.

Combine the show’s needle drops (from the Beatles to the Stones to Frank and Nancy Sinatra) with its meticulous attention to historical detail, and you have, essentially, Ken Burns with dramatic flair.

Sold.

Deja Viewed: The Wire


It took two decades, but The Wire has finally reached its proper literary altitude. Feel free to unfasten your seat belt, recline your tray table and roam about about the cabin.

You see, this cabin is one of the few to showcase a television show that has entered the realm of high art. Elite club membership includes Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos and The Simpsons — stratospheric television achievements that elevated the medium that hoisted and foisted them as a newborns.

Maybe the epochal delay (the show is celebrating it’s 20-year anniversary this year) came from its unique DNA. The Wire may be America’s the first and only (intentional) five-sided television show. The police drama about life in the streets of Baltimore was divvied into five chapters of working America: crime; labor; politics; education; and journalism.That HBO even greenlit such a corporately-suspicious show is worth noting — along with the cold reality that no network, including HBO, would greenlight it today.

Which makes The Wire less a history lesson than an archeological find, a glimmer in a gold pan.

And one need look no further than Episode Two to find the treasure. Michael K. Williams played Omar Little, a scarred, poor gay gangbanger who served as a modern-day Robin Hood. Or Robbin’ ’Hood. Omar steals from gangs to feed his own, which is still victimized, but far less vicious. When Omar’s lover is ensnared, tortured and killed within “the game,” we become something more than spectators.

Consider the road The Wire could have taken, but did not. Any TV show could take that spark and stare at the candescent glow of a clever police procedural until disinterest reduced it to ember.

But creator David Simon, a former police reporter with the Baltimore Sun and author of Homicide, had no interest in flame — or navel — gazing. His octagonal intention was to examine the crumbling foundations beneath the feet of the city dwellers in Baltimore.

And thus America.

Colleges now teach The Wire and its themes as a course. President Obama called it the greatest television show of all-time. That it was nominated for only two Emmys — and won neither — effectively eliminating the venerated award as legitimate metric of quality.

Seasons One and Four are the show at its apex. Ironically, Simon’s look at journalism is the weakest chapter, largely because he views through the lens of a newspaper. Papers were already on life support by 2007, and the final season feels more like eulogy than observation.

And there’s no getting around the heavy lifting required to fully digest the show. I’ve watched the series four times now just to unpack its dense, tracer bullet dialogue. Simon filmed in Baltimore and used locals (some with felony records) to infuse scripts with current street and police slang. The language is so casually raw and the violence so blithely graphic, The Wire may have earned an NC-17 rating were it a film.

Fortunately, it’s not. Instead, it is a game-changer. The Wire may boast the longest list of anti-heroes ever committed to teleplay. From Omar to the alcoholic Detective McNulty to the psychopathic drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, it’s often hard to tell who is antagonist and who is protagonist, which is Simon’s larger point.

And this may be The Wire’s: “The game” is an octagon, at least. And no one leaves uncut.