Archive for September 11, 2016

9.11.16

September 11, 2016

As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Fall TV Preview: Hip-Hop, Harlem Superheroes and ‘The Walking Dead’

September 9, 2016

‘Luke Cage’

Netflix, September 30
Ooh baby, we like it raaaaw. With trailer music and episode titles alike nodding to classic New York hip-hop, the latest of Netflix’s street-level Marvel superhero shows (it follows Daredevil and Jessica Jones and precedes Iron Fist and team-up series The Defenders) looks like it will make good on the promise of its lead character, the pioneering African American superhero-for-hire created in the 1970s. Actor Mike Colter’s cameos on Jessica Jones were among the show’s high points; let’s see if his solo turn is as bulletproof as his skin. STC

I wrote about a whole bunch of upcoming or just-debuted shows for Rolling Stone’s big Fall TV Preview feature, along with a whole bunch of talented writers. Enjoy!

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Six: “Los Pepes”

September 9, 2016

What follows is a gruesome shootout in full view of Pablo’s beloved family. Shot in a pair of long takes in order to emphasize the chaos, it’s a deliberate contrast with the similar long take that highlighted Pablo’s relative security at the beginning of the previous episode. It’s a smart choice in that it keeps the focus not on the Boss but on his terrified family, outgunned employees, and invading enemies. As a viewer, you get to see and feel what life is like in Pablo’s orbit — you’re an expendable bit player in the drama centered on him.

The result is, at times, genuinely moving. There’s a moment when Tata, her daughter in her arms, rushes through the kitchen where Pablo’s exchanging gunfire with Los Pepes; he’s just a blur with an absurd “Golf Masters” sweatshirt and a machine gun, frantically waving his arms and shouting “Get out! Get out! Get out!” between rounds as his family flees for their lives.

And when the family reaches safety — sans Carlos, who’s dead, and with Pablo’s mom humbled and his wife devastated — his daughter asks a brutally naive question: “Daddy, how will Santa still know how to find us?” Kudos to Wagner Moura for making Pablo’s reaction not a controlled emotional implosion, but a weird, awkward, trembling hiccup. That feels much more true to the unbearable experience of having to account for your failure to a child you love.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider. The show is doing very smart things with mirrored shot set-ups, as hopefully this review and the last one taken in tandem indicate.

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Five: “The Enemies of My Enemy”

September 9, 2016

By now it’s no secret that Narcos doesn’t do flashy. So far this season I’ve seen this mostly leveled at the show as an insult — it’s trying to do for Scorsese what Stranger Things did for Spielberg and company, with a similarly shaky grasp of everything that makes the filmmaker in question not just Fun but Great. For me, it’s what separates this show from Stranger Things. If Narcos were simply trying to ape Marty, Francis, et al, it’d have all the surface-level razzle-dazzle but none of the black-hearted soul.

So it’s worth pointing out when the show genuinely does do something Scorsese-esque. In episode five of its second season, “The Enemies of My Enemy” (these titles are getting really cheesy, incidentally), we’re treated to a long tracking shot that would make Henry Hill on his way into the Copacabana proud. With Col. Carrillo in the ground, Pablo is living, well, the life of Pablo — giving his adorable kids diving and swimming instructions, joking around with his jolly sicarios, cheering on his favorite football team, goosing his lovely wife’s bum. (Tata Escobar’s posterior is as much of a costar this season as Joan Holloway’s décolletage was in Mad Men.)

The intent of this multi-minute shot is to show that for Pablo, everything is in its right place, at least for the moment. You don’t need to be flashy if your rare instance of ostentatious camerawork is as communicative as this.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“Fear the Walking Dead” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “Do Not Disturb”

September 7, 2016

The worst part, by far, is Elena, the mad fascist…hotel manager. Yes, this winner of a character willingly sentenced an entire wedding party to death when one of their number turned zombie. Why? “I had the hotel to think about. We were at capacity.” Oh, well, alright then! “I contained the situation,” Elena explains. You know who else “contained the situation,” Fear the Walking Dead? You might say that Elena found the final solution to the guest question in her hotel.

It’s not inconceivable that Elena might react to a sudden zombie outbreak in her hotel’s ballroom by locking everyone at the party in with the dead. Had she been shown to be panicked, preoccupied, or even just a little nervous about reports of “the sickness,” that kind of snap decision would make sense. On the contrary, she blows off the mother and father of the bride’s concerns about the dawning apocalypse mere seconds before the dad drops dead. (A tidy bit of plot-hammering right there!) In that light, her reaction to the infection of a paying customer, and his sudden decision to chew the face off his child in the middle of their father-daughter dance, looks either insanely sociopathic or insanely poorly written. But hey, this is Fear the Walking Dead — why choose?

I reviewed this week’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. This show is fascist, right down to the philosophical incoherence.

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Four: “The Good, The Bad, and The Dead”

September 7, 2016

SPOILER ALERT

It’s long been my contention that the single greatest act of cinematic revenge belongs to Robert De Niro’s bank-robber character in Michael Mann’s crime epic Heat. (Spoilers ahead, though really this is just a signal that you should go watch Heat immediately.) Discovering the location of an associate who betrayed him, he risks everything to infiltrate the hotel where the man is being kept under guard, distract his protective detail, break into his hotel room, and kill him. But does he just shoot him in the back of the head, like so many mobsters from The Godfather to GoodFellas have been content to do? Hell no. “Look at me,” he demands, then shoots the guy in the gut, then in the head. If the point were simply to kill him, none of this would be necessary. But the point is to make sure he knows he’s about to be killed — knows he’s in the process of dying, in fact — and knows why. Otherwise, what’s the point?

This is a lesson Pablo Escobar has clearly internalized. In “The Good, The Bad, and The Dead,” the cornily titled fourth episode of Narcos’ second season, Pablo quite shockingly gets the drop on Colonel Horacio Carrillo, the ruthless Colombian police officer who’s been his nemesis from the jump. Though he and his men are peppered with bullets, Pablo insists on delivering the killing blow himself. “Look at me,” he says. “Look at me,” he says again, repeating himself just as De Niro’s character did. He then fires the bullet Carrillo sent to him as a warning into the man’s leg before finally delivering the coup de grace to his head. Pablo understands that there’s no point in simply defeating your enemy. He has to know he’s being defeated, he has to know he has no hope of not being defeated, and he has to know who has defeated him. Death isn’t enough. Agony is paramount.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Ten: “eps2.8_h1dden-pr0cess.axx”

September 7, 2016

there’s more to television than plot, or plot twists; there’s more to character than dialogue; there’s more to acting than line readings; there’s more to narrative fiction than figuring out what comes next. A sequence like the one that juxtaposed Dom’s confrontation with her suspects and their assassins with Elliot and Angela’s kiss shows how sight and sound, score and cinematography, body language and silence can produce an emotional effect far beyond the sum of its parts, and irreducible to sound bytes about “How ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 2 Lost Its Way.” On a show this good, getting lost — alone in the dark, the roar of the approaching monsters growing louder by the second — is the way.

I reviewed tonight’s magnificent Mr. Robot for the New York Times, with a focus on the gorgeously constructed final sequence.

“Halt and Catch Fire” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Four: “Rules of Honorable Play”

September 6, 2016

And when people go under, they sink like stones. Brought to an everybody-who’s-anybody party for Silicon Valley movers and shakers by Diane, Boz appears to be in his element — cracking jokes, telling tales, and generally cranking up the Texas charm. Indeed, from calling an audible during the Swapmeet buyout and driving down its price by a small fortune to bantering with Donna and the boys in the office, it’s this ability to command a room that attracted Diane to him in the first place. But in an ugly exchange that perfectly reproduces the brittle civility of enemies pretending to make nice, Joe MacMillan takes Boz’s number, calling his affable-backslapper routine a “performance.” Just last week Joe referred to himself as the product he’s concerned with selling; apparently he recognizes some of this in the old Dallas salesman, too.

By the time Boz makes his way back to Diane, Joe’s words have clearly dug in deep, reinforcing doubts he’d already had about his role at Mutiny and his place in their world at large. Unfortunately for Diane, she unwittingly echoes Joe’s veiled insults in a failed attempt to praise her date. She compliments him for the way he naturally steals the show at the party, but what he hears is further evidence that he’s some kind of dancing monkey, trotted out there for everyone’s amusement. As Diane flirts, it at first seems like Boz is oblivious, but before long it’s clear he knows exactly what she’s up to and is simply rejecting it. “Somewhere along the line I lost my taste for tobacco,” he says when she offers him a smoke, then adds “And champagne. Parties.” His tone grows more pointed with every word, his bonhomie curdles visibly on his face, and the overall effect is like biting on tinfoil. Thus a potential romance storyline that seemed like such a delightful sure thing when it was first hinted at just last week is swept off the board, because, well, that’s how things happen sometimes. Cold as this is, there’s still something warm about watching the baffling rhythms of legit emotional reality play out on a TV show.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Halt and Catch Fire for the New York Observer. The command this show and these actors have over human behavior is gobsmacking at times.

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Three: “Our Man in Madrid”

September 6, 2016

I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that “Our Man in Madrid,” the third episode of Narcos’ second season, has this running theme of ersatz arts criticism, though there’s no reason to believe it’s anything more than a fun visual leitmotif to return to throughout the hour. However, there’s a deeper resonance to this device than what’s visible at first glance. As I’ve been saying throughout these reviews, the beauty of Narcos is that it doesn’t try to have a Moral Of The Story. How can it? What is the story, after all, but “A crook made billions of dollars and went berserk, so a pair of governments went even more berserk until they finally murdered him”? This is not True Detective Season One–style paean to the bad men who “keep the other bad men from the door,” either. Escobar and his associates are loathsome. The Cali cartel members who play both sides are loathsome. The various military, law-enforcement, and intelligence agencies involved in the hunt for Pablo are loathsome, though at least at times guys like Murphy and Peña are capable of recognizing their own loathsomeness and not bothering justifying it. In a world like this, the self-glorifying self-portraits or image-burnishing fine art you attempt to immortalize yourself with is a bad joke. You’re spiritually pissing on it even when you’re not literally pissing on it.

I reviewed the third episode of Narcos’ increasingly ruthless second season for Decider.

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode Two: “Cambalache”

September 4, 2016

It’s one of the most famous sequences in cinema history, and probably the single most influential sequence in the gangster genre bar none: the baptism/massacre montage in The Godfather. (Or as Christopher Moltisanti from The Sopranos would more familiarly put it, “in One.”) You know the deal: While Michael Corleone renounces Satan at the christening of his godson, his hitmen take down every rival mob boss from New York to Las Vegas in various elegantly choreographed ways — a bullet through the eyeglasses, a tommy-gun volley through a jammed revolving door, a shot in the back and a fall down a massive flight of steps, and so on.

This episode of Narcos, “Cambalache,” gave us the show’s own version, and it’s telling how much less grandiose the whole shebang is. Forget the Catholic symbolism, folks: Pablo Escobar is too busy slow-dancing with his lovely wife Tata in one of her endless succession of flow-y flattering dresses to recite prayers in Latin. And there’s nothing elegant about how his goons slaughter Medellín’s cops, unless you consider drive-bys, hand grenades, and a few point-blank executions elegant. As the premiere already proved, Narcos just isn’t the kind of show to play to its characters’ delusions of grandeur, or play up delusions of its own. It sees Pablo’s story as too straightforwardly sordid, too pointlessly wasteful, for all that. It plays things straight, and is a much more enjoyable, if less spectacular, viewing experience for it.

I reviewed the second episode of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“Narcos” thoughts, Season Two, Episode One: “Free at Last”

September 3, 2016

“Okay,” groans DEA agent Steve Murphy as the second season of Narcos begins. “Here we go again.” Friends, that is the sound of a show that took Socrates’s advice to Know Thyself. Stepping into the prestige-gangster void left behind by the departures of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk EmpireNarcos has never taken the stylistic risks of those shows (bilingual scripting aside). It’s not as flashy as either its larger-than-life subject matter, the multibillionaire druglords of cocaine-era Columbia, or its Scorsese-indebted, voiceover-narrated, tapestry-of-criminality format would lead you to believe.

Rather, it takes its cues from its central performance: Wagner Moura as the lethal, laconic legend of the drug trade, Pablo Escobar. Portly, poorly rested, perpetually stoned, yet the most dangerous international criminal (non-government-official edition) this side of Osama Bin Laden, his reign of terror over his country rarely requires him to ruffle his own feathers. He simply stares into the distance, his dark brown eyes glowing beneath thick black eyebrows, then issues an order in a deadpan baritone and gets on with his day. His exploits may be unbelievable, but he takes it all in stride. So does Narcos, the most low-key series about a gigantic manhunt for a mass murderer you’re ever likely to see.

I reviewed the season premiere of Narcos for Decider, where I’ll be covering the Season 2 daily. Woo!