A striking brunette with porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, and a body that’s been a meme since True Detective Season One, Alexandria Daddario is the perfect lead for Mayfair Witches. Sure, she can act, which is also true of the rest of the show’s core cast: Annabeth Gish, Beth Grant, Harry Hamlin, Tongyi Chirisa, and Jack Huston. But, and I stress, she’s also one of the most attractive women on god’s grey earth, and that counts for a lot in the endemically horny world of Anne Rice’s witches.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

Alexandra Daddario impresses here, too. True to her filmography she’s playing Rowan Fielding as a sort of White Lotus character, a brilliant and accomplished woman who chafes to the point of physical tics at being condescended to — by anyone for any reason, but especially men — but who’s been given the supernatural ability to make people’s brains explode instead of just sleeping with their husbands or ruining their vacations or whatever. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

Until things get down and dirty — not just sensual or half-naked but genuinely perverse — Mayfair Witches is doomed to feel like one of those sexy supernatural CW shows. Interview worked right out of the gate; Mayfair has a lot of work left to do.

I’ve decided to cover Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon, starting with my review of the series premiere.

…is now available for your perusal on my Patreon! Go subscribe and see what the hell I’m on about!

I wrote about the series finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Cheekily titled after the series from which it is a spinoff, Better Call Saul‘s most recent episode deftly if unspectacularly stitches together scenes from the past and present of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman/Gene Takavic’s life. It will thus likely be remembered for the cameos not just of BCS regulars Tina Parker as Jimmy/Saul’s secretary Francesca (with whom it appears he devised a method to keep in touch) and Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut (seen in a flashback reporting on the real identity of Saul’s potential new client “Heisenberg”), but also and especially Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, whom we rejoin during their half-assed kidnapping of Saul the night they first hired him. The present-day material, in which Gene re-recruits the man he ran the department-store scam with for a far more ambitious series of home invasions and identity thefts, adds a certain pathos to all this; at this point, the former Jimmy McGill is just another middle-aged man with a dated mustache, turning to a life of crime more out of boredom than Walt’s desperation.

But none of that is what I’ll really remember from this episode.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I walked around my apartment, holding a beer and singing the opening riff to “Plainsong” by the Cure to myself. I wasn’t sure what else to do. 

In the very first installment of my series of posts entitled My Favorite Music, I wrote about the Cure’s Disintegration, calling it an album about a sadness so huge you could land a spacecraft on it. It’s about outsized emotions, extravagant emotions, emotions in excess, emotions too big to be talked about, to be hashed out, to be discussed in logical terms.

In tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill snaps. Instantly, as far as the magic of TV time is concerned. One moment, he’s being dumped by his wife Kim Wexler, who is so aghast at the horrors their conduct together has wrought that she gives up her life as a lawyer as well as his wife. The next moment, Jimmy awakens to a Journey song, next to a prostitute, in a ghastly and gaudy new apartment. He then makes the transition to his awful strip-mall office, with its inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof and the ridiculous text of the Constitution written on its high-columned walls.

It happens that fast. He’s Jimmy for most of the episode, and then he’s Saul, forever and ever, amen.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

But there are times when appearances tell us more than what’s going on beneath the surface does. At nearly every step of this story, Rhea Seehorn, directing herself, places her character Kim in front of bar-like vertical blinds, walls of glass bricks, a window grid. Slowly but surely, as she’s been doing since the series started, she’s sealing herself into a Saul Goodman–shaped trap, like a vacant office in a strip mall furnished solely with a toilet.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Weirdness is where art lives.

I wrote about the season finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

This episode of Better Call Saul focuses on Jimmy’s trauma after witnessing his first murder, an important and necessary thing for the show to do. But because of the skill of actor Rhea Seehorn, the story of the episode can be told almost entirely by a series of looks on her face.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Five for my Patreon.

“I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of! I’m so far beyond you! I’m like a god in human clothing! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!”

Jimmy McGill is right about all of this in at least two respects I can think of. For one thing, he’s probably right: Howard Hamlin would not believe what Jimmy McGill is capable of—helping a murdering cartel boss walk free, for example. To borrow a phrase from Lloyd Henreid in The Stand, “small-time shit” is the extent of the trouble Howard can likely imagine Jimmy getting into. Little does he know.

I wrote about last week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Somewhere along the line, the Kimmy Wexler who refused to get in that car became the Kim Wexler who, despite being kept in the dark (literally, thanks to director Michael Morris and cinematographer Marshall Adams’s obscurely low lighting) by Jimmy McGill, decides to get in his car anyway. And we know where Jimmy’s headed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Caul Saul for my Patreon.

Once again there’s a cycle of shittiness; once again there’s a person who thinks they have both the right and the power to decide exactly where the wheel stops.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

On Better Call Saul, the devil is in the details. This has been true if not from the start then at least from the early going, when it became clear that co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan were out to depict the show’s thriller sequences, whether of the legal or action variety, as matters of tradecraft. It has this in common with The Americans, which though it faltered slightly with its too-generous ending always rooted the espionage antics of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in utter tedium. If Mike Ehrmantraut took a brake from painstakingly studding a garden hose with nails long enough to watch the Jennings dig a hole to exhume a dead colleague practically in real time, he’d certainly relate.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Like its predecessor, the third episode of Better Call Saul‘s fifth season begins and ends with images of waste. At the start, we witness the fate of the ice cream cone Saul was forced to discard on the sidewalk at the end of the previous episode, as ants shot in extreme closeup approach, detect, swarm, and devour it. This isn’t the first time the extended Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe has utilized insect imagery to make a point about its characters; cf. the fly in the meth lab with which Walt becomes obsessed in the famous Breaking Bad bottle episode “Bug,” or Walt’s stint using an exterminator company as a front for his cooking operation in the show’s last seasons. Connoting both insectoid coldness and verminous corruption and filth, the utility of this imagery in regards to narratives of men slowly succumbing to crime and cruelty is obvious.

I wrote about episode three of Better Call Saul season five for my Patreon.

If you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, every week you’ll get a new piece on one of my favorite movies. Here’s what I’ve tackled so far:

• All That Jazz
• L’Avventura
• Barry Lyndon
• Casino
• Darkon
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Heavenly Creatures
• Hellraiser
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II
• The Lord of the Rings
• Lost Highway
• Manhunter
• The Master
• Natural Born Killers
• Nightbreed
• Star Wars
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• To Live and Die in L.A.
• Velvet Goldmine

Subscribe, read, enjoy!

There’s a wrestler in AEW by the name of Adam “Hangman” Page, who works a cowboy gimmick by way of Red Dead Redemption iconography. (One of his finishing moves is called the Dead Eye, presumably after RDR‘s targeting system.) During one of his promos a few months back now, he promised one of his enemies that in their upcoming match he’d see Page do some real “cowboy shit.” Ever since, fans have chanted “COWBOY SHIT! COWBOY SHIT!” when Page takes the ring or uncorks a successful offensive maneuver. It’s charming.

It’s less charming when I think about “cowboy shit” as the animating force and raison d’être of Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

It occurred to me that despite writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for years, I never wrote anything about the BB sequel movie El Camino. Well, over at my Patreon, now I have.

Tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul begins and ends with images of waste.

I wrote about the second episode of Better Call Saul Season 5 for my Patreon.

“Gene Takovic” lives in a gray world, black and white and rich, grainy gray. He is the future self of Saul Goodman, who was the future self of Jimmy McGill, who was the future self of “Slippin’ Jimmy.” All roads lead to Omaha, Nebraska, where “Gene” toils as the manager of a Cinnabon and hopes he will not be exposed as the accessory to mass murder that he is. The world he inhabits, as shot by director Bronwen Hughes and longtime director of photography Marshall Adams, is a lot like the way imagine the world to look when you put on the One Ring. It’s a world of murk and shadow, with light that adheres rather than illuminates. It’s a dead world.

I will be covering this season of Better Call Saul at my Patreon, starting with my thoughts on the season premiere.