Category Archives: Reviews

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.

Open Letter to Stan Lee(‘s Ghost)


Dear Stan,

You are not here and wouldn’t remember me if you were. I’ve interviewed you a few times, and was even in one of your cameos: Iron Man cameo (where Tony Stark mistakes you for Hugh Hefner). Did all of them take that long?

Anyhoo, that’s not my question, and this is not another interview request, though that would be quite a scoop. It’s a superhero pitch. And no need to summon your lawyers, who have probably cryogenically frozen your brain somewhere. It’s not a ripoff of Ant-Man or X-Men. Well, it kinda is.

The pitch is a superhero that can harness and all powers of the human brain. And not like Batman, who was never a regular human, no matter what the dweebs say. Who can afford an electric cave?

Consider, then, Quantum, the first superhero to have utter control of the brain, its billions of neurons, its trillions of synapses, and its infinite combination connections. Quantum is androgynous, raceless, and ideologically poseable to fit your retail needs. Quantum can:

  • Turn off neural pathways that deliver pain. Imagine, Stan, a scene when Quantum is captured and placed in a torture device. No matter what the pain brings, no matter the anguish, it all brings a chilling laugh from Quantum, who can laugh at her own amputation. How NC-17 is that?
  • Wa Engage photographic memory at will. Scientists studied one man with a photographic mind and who memorized the PI calculation to roughly the 30,000th digit. Q can double that at least, leaving Batman’s detective looking like the Encyclopedia Brown on meth.
  • Commandeer dreams. This is perhaps the most exciting power, because it unleashes the subconscious. Imagine: Quantum CANNOT put a crime piece together, for whatever dastardly reason. So he/she decides to dream on the case, to approach it from the brain’s dreamscape perspective during sleep. Dreamscapes are like multiverses: You can apply any narrative you wish. Except we know dreamscapes are real.


Because Quantum works at the subatomic level, the battles can occur within someone’s brain, carried in by nothing more than an asymptomatic cough. Stories can be built around epic battles, all occurring within one skull (or lung, heart, kidney, etc.) All panels, scientifically sound (which should shut up the adults who still believe them infantile rubbish).

The villains rip themselves from the social media headlines. Q vs. Covid. Q vs. Facebook A.I. Q vs. Lone Gunman Syndrome. Q vs. Q. Conspiracy theorists alone provide a built-in diehard circulation base.

It’s even got a tagline. Quantum: His/Her Only Limitation Is Your Imagination.

Anyway, that’s the pitch. Feel free to give me a dream sometime, or accidentally irradiate me, or do whatever lingering spirits do. Because Hollywood needs something resembling originality.

How’s my dad, by the way? Portly guy, salt and pepper hair, has probably punched at least one afterlifer in the face and threatened two with the same.

Now HE’S gonna want an interview.

A Brave New Cosmos

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a flash bang of a film. One might even call it a big bang.

You’re sitting in your dark, cool theater seat — the first you’ve taken since the pandemic — and Bang! The movie explodes in action and exposition, and doesn’t give a damn if you can keep up with the cosmology and quantum physics and action and raw emotion that ripples through the most original and profound film in more than a decade.

Think The Matrix meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as directed by Christopher Nolan.

But even those comparisons are unfair, because Everything acknowledges and bows openly to its cinematic origins. Then it bows to the universe’s origins, which it embraces like Stephen Hawking on crack.

From the multiverse to quantum entanglement, Everything packs a silly kung fu movie into a story that may be as scientifically sound as the Hubble telescope. And still focuses the story into a narrative singularity — accessible, yet still awe inspiring.

The plot is a trifling, disposable matter: Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, an aging laundromat owner trying to juggle tiny receipts, big customer complaints and a family that includes a judgmental father and rebellious daughter. After an unintended peek into another dimension, Evelyn learns she must face down an existential intergalactic threat.

It’s pablum. But as Everything points out, insignificant moments are the only things that DON’T exist in reality — particularly in the multiverses we build for ourselves in a world sinking into a black hole of digital chatter. Everything reveals itself as a poignant drama about finding your place in the world only after nearly dazzling us too much with dazzling concepts and computer effects. At 2 hours 19 minutes, the frenzy numbs a bit before it pierces.

Everything looks much bigger than it is. The film, which cost about $25 million, underscores what Hollywood used to be: audacious, loud and opinionated — and hustling a shoestring budget. Maybe that’s why it drew Oscar-caliber talent including Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, unrecognizable under makeup as an oppressive tax auditor.

It is karate with a pinkie, kung fu with a pocket pup, pyrotechnics with polygons. And it nearly sets the screen ablaze with its brashness.

So as Hollywood crows over the box office haul of a colossus like Top Gun: Maverick, Everything will control its own delightful corner of the universe.

Now THAT’S a reason to have hope for moviemaking. Everywhere, all at once.