It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.

On twitter this morning I saw one of the cleverest trolls I’ve seen in a while: a normal (i.e. non–New Atheist bigot) atheist admirer of atheist Stephen Hawking, speaking like a Christian, telling Christians welcoming atheist Stephen Hawking into Heaven that he won’t get in because he was a sinner who didn’t believe. Fighting passive aggression disguised as Christian charity with fire.

There’s something truly disgusting to me about the smugness with which dead atheists are subjected to ideas they spent their lives thinking about and had good reasons for rejecting now that they’re dead and can’t answer back. It’s incredibly disrespectful, especially since it comes from people who theoretically respect them.

I personally have never liked saying “rest in peace” or “rest in power.” Dead is dead, and no one’s “resting” after they die, any more than the parrot in the Dead Parrot Sketch was resting. But it would be insane to get in people’s face about this when they’re grieving. Drawing cartoons in which Saint Peter installs a handicapped parking spot in front of the pearly gates so that Stephen Hawking, a dead man who didn’t believe in Saint Peter and the pearly gates, will feel welcomed – do these people not see that’s like crashing a funeral?

To its credit, “The Alienist” always treats the deaths of the children upon whom its serial killer preys as a series of tragedies. It is equally respectful, and properly outraged, about the grotesque class inequities that help enable the murderer to operate with impunity, or even under outright protection. The conditions to which the mentally ill are subjected by the institutional options of the day, the routine dismissal and degradation of women by men, the barbarity of white America’s genocidal war on the indigenous population, the cycle of sexual abuse that turns victims into victimizers ad infinitum: This episode alone exhibits fist-on-the-table fury about all of it. The PG-13 “Perils of Pauline” routine can only cloud this moral clarity.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It can be hard to make a crime show about how murder is tragic when the threat of murder is also supposed to be exciting.

Today new interviews came out with both Julian Casablancas (ex The Strokes) and Jack White (ex The White Stripes) in which they said a variety of dopey things. Because of this, half of my twitter timeline took victory laps about how they never liked the Strokes and the White Stripes, that the Strokes and the White Stripes were never good, and so on. It’s a low-grade version of how people fall all over themselves to announce that they always hated the work of the latest man to be exposed as a sexual predator, and it’s just as goofy here as it is there.

I understand the compulsion to seize any available opportunity to advertise your distaste for a passionately disliked artist. Couple that with the catharsis of dunking on people who’ve revealed themselves as fools or creeps under any circumstances and it’s like you’re playing socio-critical tee-ball. But in every case, this unspoken logic behind these comments is that only fools and creeps can make shitty art, and you had the perspicacity to see through the act from the start. It’s a totem wielded against the nerve-wracking uncertainty involved in investing your time and energy and emotions in art, a field in which being a smart person, being a good person, and being a good artist often have little to do with one another.

I’ve disliked a lot of art made by people who turned out to be pretty awful; Louis CK is the most obvious example here. But I also love, and continue to love, a lot of art made by such people as well, though I don’t love the people themselves. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to learn that other artists I love are awful people in the future. And god knows that any number of artists I both love and hate are doofuses. (One of the “I never liked them anyway!” comments I saw about the Strokes and the White Stripes unfavorably compared them to Britney Spears; I like a lot of her music too, but is the implication here supposed to be that she’s never done or said anything unfortunate or asinine?) I’m hard pressed to think of a single case in which my feelings about their work and the truth about them as people had a connection I sussed out years in advance, and therefore now deserve to crow about publicly. Critics, of all people, should know better.

Despite earning the respect of his bosses for his correct call against making the attacks, and lining up much-needed help cracking the CIA’s vault of secrecy from the Justice Department, John O’Neill’s a fuckin’ mess, man. Belying his on-top-of-the-world swagger, his lavish lifestyle of fine dining and $400 shoes (in 1998 money!) combined with the need to travel between three different romantic partners has buried him in debt. His credit cards get declined. He’s out of town for so long all the time that his wife and children barely tolerate him when he returns. Catholic cardinals fail to give him a reprieve to divorce his religiously devout missus and marry his equally devout (and deceived) girlfriend Liz, no matter how many Cohibas he smokes with them. Just to top it all off, his other other woman is planning a move to New York to be near him. He’s, uh, not thrilled.

And even when he’s right in this installment, he’s right about stuff that makes him seem prurient, rather than prophetic. In place of his many killer one-liners about how bin Laden wants us to go to war, maaaan, he’s pontificating about the “72 virgins” issue with his star agent Ali Soufan, who tells him it’s all bullshit. “Blow yourself up and win the pussy sweepstakes—it’s like consumer fraud,” O’Neill concludes. “And ironically, so fuckin’ American.” He’d know!

This is how Jeff Daniels can work: as a guy who seems to have all the advantages a wealthy white straight cis Christian man who’s got a high-ranking job in a law-enforcement agency in America’s cultural and political capitals can get, yet seems incapable of not pissing those privileges away. People keep trying to cast him as Wyatt Earp or Walter Cronkite, while his potential to portray a reasonably popular governor forced to leave office after getting caught using the state education fund to pay his mistress’s son’s orthodontist bill was right there all along.

Hey gang—I figured out Jeff Daniels’s strengths as a dramatic actor and wrote about them in my review of this week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider! What do you think of that, Jeff?

The third episode of The Looming Tower was struck by two coordinated explosions. No, not the al-Qaeda-orchestrated embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, nor the CIA-orchestrated tough-guy retaliatory strikes on an AQ training camp in Afghanistan and its, ahem, “chemical weapons facility” in Sudan. As if invoking the “two-for-two” principle that led American intelligence and defense officials to launch the latter attacks, writer Bash Doran and director John Dahl teamed with their actors to set off a double detonation of their own: the interrogation-room outburst of FBI investigator Robert Chesney, played by Bill Camp; and the furious freakout over being kept out of the loop on the airstrikes, potentially lethally, by his boss John O’Neill, played by Jeff Daniels. The first of these hit its target. The second was a dud. The difference between them says a lot about what these two actors, each likeable in his own way, have to offer.

[…]

I don’t blame Daniels for failing to deliver the dynamite that Camp cooks up in his similar scene, not entirely anyway. But it’s certainly true that Daniels is a far broader performer than Camp, even when the latter is screaming at the top of his lungs. His recent career has seen him repeatedly cast as ostensibly convincing figures of authority, be they good (his blustery Real News anchorman from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, whose name I can’t remember but whom I now always think of as “Jeff Newsroom” thanks to a vocal anti-Sorkin contingent on Twitter) or evil (his extravagantly bearded one-armed mass murderer in Netflix‘s Western series Godless, which feels like the part of a Broadway show’s run where a new actor takes over for the lead who originated the role, in this case most likely Jeff Bridges).

Yet these authority figures never actually convince. Again, the writing is often to blame, but either way it’s impossible to imagine a ham like his Newsroom character saving the moral heart of the journalism industry, or his pretentious, bible-quoting gunman becoming the most feared figure in the West in a show where Michelle Dockery and Merritt Wever both displayed more, ahem, true grit. His O’Neill commands respect insofar as we know he was right and his enemies were wrong, but Daniels is just the guy whose job it is to inhabit that suit of rectitude. He doesn’t wear it particularly well. (His secondary characteristic — an irresistible ladies’ man whose ruddy middle-aged machismo is irresistible to half a dozen different women half his age — is an even worse fit.)

I did a satisfyingly close read of the performances of Jeff Daniels and Bill Camp in my review of The Looming Tower’s third episode for Decider. Camp is the most underrated actor on television.

“We’re at war.”
“Only if we want to be.”

Welp, there you have it. That’s the game right there. That’s the whole megillah. “Losing My Religion”, Episode 2 of The Looming Tower, may have a too-cute-by-half title. (It’s a reference to our lapsed Catholic and observant Muslim FBI heroes dealing with his own sins in the former case and those of his correligionists in the other — relatively minor issues in the scheme of things). But that nine-word exchange between the CIA’s Strangelovean, bearded boffin Martin Schmidt and the FBI’s hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’, law’n’order straight-shooter John O’Neill encapsulates the great debate that would shape the next 20 years of American history because of who winds up winning.

[…]

I’m a bit perplexed by complaints that the show is a sentimental look back at 9/11 with little to tell us about what happened afterwards. In the pilot, all the sniping and name-calling and backstabbing between agencies made me think it possible, even likely, that by showing us FBI, CIA, and DoD morons staging a pissing contest while people die, The Looming Tower would be more useful to us today than a deep dive into Islamist extremism would be. Now I see that while that element continues, so too does a blunt, bare-essentials critique of the War on Terror. Put it all together, and you’ve got a portrayal of an intelligence community that’s overworked, underinformed, and lacking in basic human empathy, helping to usher in America’s dying-empire phase. Again, look at today’s headlines and tell me this isn’t a valuable perspective.

I reviewed episode two of The Looming Tower for Decider. It’s a very straightforward show, but it certainly isn’t hidebound.

When it comes to horror movies I’m the opposite of Morrissey’s “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful.” I enjoyed Get Out, though I’d have enjoyed it more (and, in a directly related phenomenon, paid less attention to its plot holes) had the whole goddamn story and vibe and theme and specific bits not been spoiled for me prior to seeing it. I’ve never enjoyed a Guillermo del Toro film before so I don’t anticipate enjoying, or frankly even watching, The Shape of Water. But I love horror, I’m a horror person, del Toro and Jordan Peele are horror people (also Mexican and Black respectively, and not doing corporate franchise work to boot), and the fucked-up movies they made won Best Screenplay and Best Director and Best Picture. Normie World doesn’t matter, but my favorite genre just stole some awards from Normie World, and I’m delighted.

John Rambo spent the 1980s knifing, booby-trapping, and exploding his way into the American consciousness. But to resurrect this killer of a character for the 2000s, Sylvester Stallone dug deep into the heart of his hero… and dear God, that heart was dark.

Released in early 2008 to solid box-office success and minimal critical favor, Rambo promised a back-to-basics approach to Stallone’s hit action franchise, just as 2006’s acclaimed, heartwarming Rocky Balboa had done for The Italian Stallion. Stallone even planned to title the movie John Rambo to make the comparison even more direct, and wound up using that title for the film’s longer, more character-driven extended cut. But while the fourth and final film in the Rambo franchise gave Sly’s troubled Vietnam veteran a happy ending at last — its closing shot shows the 60-year-old killing machine returning to his family farm in Arizona for the first time in decades — it also gives us a character to fear, not root for. This evolution of Rambo as a character and mainstream action franchise, in turn, reveals uncomfortable, disturbing truths about the United States, and after a recent revisit, suggests that our own violent history should be treated with far more nuance than unquestioned cheerleading.

Set in the killing fields of Burma, Rambo is a brutal and bracing revisionist take on a hero whose name is synonymous with mindless action-movie excess, from the man who helped craft that excess in the first place. Yet it’s precisely because of its unprecedented savagery that the film feels truer to John Rambo’s roots than either of the sequels that preceded it: the movie, this time directed by Stallone, takes the philosophical tensions and fear of warfare present in the franchise since its politically fraught initial installment, loads them into a machine gun, and fires them directly at our collective face. Using all the tools at an old Hollywood hand’s disposal, it reflects the national mood by depicting its angry American as both suffering and inflicting trauma, in as traumatizing a manner as big-budget action movies have ever attempted.

Three thousand words on Rambo for Thrillist? Don’t mind as I do. I’m proud of this piece on one of the most viscerally disturbing and structurally odd mainstream action movies ever made.

“He’s a house. He’s a home. He’s a yard and a family and picking kids up from school…he’s a future.”

“They say this man…this man has nothing left to give. And a man with nothing to give is a nothing man….This world has wasted me.”

Ominously directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton and featuring absolutely stunning dialogue from series writer Tom Rob Smith, “Descent,” the sixth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, is the first and only episode so far to steer entirely clear of murder and its aftermath. Yet somewhere between those two statements above — the first is a description of his beloved David Madsen to his friend Lizzie, the second a description of himself to a meth-induced nightmare vision of Gianni Versace — Andrew Cunanan dies. The old Andrew, anyway, the Andrew capable of warmth and charm and moments of honesty amid the lies. It’s not hard to identify the specific spark of vitality that gets snuffed out to make his dark rebirth into the new, lethal Andrew happen, either. When his hope dies, the old Andrew dies with it.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Minneapolis to be born? I reviewed this week’s stunning episode of ACS Versace for Decider.

Best: “Streets of Philadelphia” (‘Philadelphia,’ 1993)

Like “Shaft” shaking up the saccharine sounds of the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen’s sad, sparse contribution to the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme’s AIDS-crisis drama Philadelphia is a bracing break from the Best Song norm of its era. The lyrics are one the Boss’s most haunting portrayals of loneliness and abandonment (“I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt / I was unrecognizable to myself”); he recorded the song alone in his home studio with a synthesizer and a drum machine, and you can hear the isolation in every note. (The only down side to the song’s victory: Neil Young’s even more devastating contribution to Demme’s movie, titled “Philadelphia,” had to lose.)

Worst: “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (‘The Lion King,’ 1994)

It didn’t have to be this way. When Disney’s big animated comeback The Little Mermaid upended the Eighties’ string of Top 40 Best Song winners in 1989, it did so not with a ballad (although “Part of Your World” is one of the studio’s best) but with the calypso jam “Under the Sea.” Beginning with 1991’s Oscar for “Beauty and the Beast,” though, the category became a cartoon-ballad free-for-all, with live-action winners mostly following suit. The result is one of the dreariest, schmaltziest runs in the award’s history, and they don’t come much goopier than Elton John and Tim Rice’s love song for lions. Pro tip: “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” is twice as long but about 40 times as awesome.

I had a grand old time writing about the best and worst Best Song Oscar winners of all time for Rolling Stone. These kinds of pieces are a blast to write, since you get to cover so much territory and study how values change over time.

The Towers really do loom over The Looming Tower. They stand in the distance as John O’Neill, the FBI’s chief counterterrorism agent, complains to a colleague that the Bureau’s director slept through a nationally broadcast interview with Osama bin Laden, a sure sign that “we’re running out of time.” They show up again as he rides the train into Manhattan the night al Qaeda simultaneously blew up the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, as he calls his best Arabic-speaking agent Ali Soufan to tell him “now it begins.” The presence of the Twin Towers is a commonplace in pre-9/11 period pieces, and of course they appear in countless films made before the attacks with little or no fanfare, a simple marker that the characters have woken up in the city that never sleeps — hell, I watched The Money Pit the other night and there they were in the opening credits, a recognizable Manhattan landmark meant to establish contrast with the bucolic, disintegrating suburban mansion Tom Hanks and Shelley Long were about to fall down in a lot. But their presence takes on extra heft in The Looming Tower. Only here do they loom over a man who dedicated his career to thwarting terrorist attacks, quit when bureaucratic infighting made his job impossible, then died mere weeks into his private-sector career as a security consultant when the World Trade Center collapsed on top of him. He was right, and it killed him.

I’m covering The Looming Tower for Decider, beginning with my review of the series premiere. It’s a pretty straightforward show as far as this one hour of it is concerned, but that’s probably the best way to play this. While I’ve read reviews saying the moment for this treatment of this material has passed, since it focuses on the American intelligence community exclusively rather than treating al Qaeda’s leaders and forerunners as co-protagonists the way the book did, I’m curious to see if it can transform itself into something that does speak to the present moment after all. A show about FBI, CIA, and DoD morons having a pissing contest while people die is probably more useful to us at this point than one about Islamist extremism anyway.

Books vs. Show

They said it would never be done! Your illustrious cohosts do the one thing they never do and spend an entire episode comparing and contrasting A Song of Ice and Fire with its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones. The casting, the writing, the plot, the effects, the sense of scale, the themes, the changes: We’re going all in, baby, and we’re unlikely to do this kind of thing again for a long long time, so enjoy!

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Indeed, from top to bottom, characters are coming into their own. In their off-duty moments, the chemistry sparks and sizzles between Moore and Sara, on the one hand, and between Kreizler and his mute maid, Mary, on the other. When Mary cuts her finger while preparing the doctor’s dinner, Kreizler notices the injury and slowly unwraps the bandage; the eroticism of the act is unmistakable even before he licks his own finger and applies his saliva to her wound as a “natural coagulant.”

Speaking of fingers, Sara’s later riff on why John would be a lousy typist is one big digit-based double entendre. “I think you lack dexterity — in your fingers, that is,” says. “All men do. That’s why they’ll never be any good at it.” I’m sorry, what were we talking about again?

Sex! Now that I have your attention, I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It was the best episode so far, by far.

Just when it seemed they’d cracked the case, it turns out the investigators on “The Alienist” don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Frankly, neither do I. Ain’t it grand?

With this week’s episode, “The Alienist” has reached the halfway mark of the season. It has also arrived at that most deliciously frustrating stage in any murder mystery: the point at which the detectives, fully armed with information and deductions, make their move, only to discover that they’re still several steps behind their quarry. For heroes and villains alike, this has the potential to be the most engaging and revealing moment in any such story. It can show us how the heroes deal with adversity and the villains with unexpected good fortune (if not so good for his hunters and victims). Lucky for us viewers, “The Alienist” is emerging from this stage of the race firing on all cylinders.

I reviewed this week’s fun episode of The Alienist for the New York Times.

It’s 2018 and Fischerspooner have returned after a nine-year absence as an in-studio supergroup. Sure, why not? The group began as the performance-art project of frontman Casey Spooner and co-writer/producer Warren Fischer before finding surprising success as electroclash’s signature act. That genre’s celebration of artifice, coupled with the suspicion that it was all an art-school lark, created a mountain of critical skepticism that Fischerspooner have had a hard time surmounting ever since. Yet of their three previous albums, two displayed tremendous proficiency in the booth: #1, from 2002, remains a sexy, sleazy snapshot of its time and place, while 2005’s Odyssey convincingly refashioned their sound into muscular electro-rock. They really only blew it with the rickety dance pop of 2009’s Entertainment, and as another great prefab star once sang, two out of three ain’t bad.

For their comeback, Spooner and Fischer have joined forces with (among others) Chairlift vocalist Caroline Polachek, Beyoncé and Run the Jewels collaborator Boots, Saddle Creek Records’ in-house sound wizard Andy LeMaster, pop superstardom’s go-to engineer and mixer Stuart White, and freaking Michael Stipe. Speaking of comebacks, Stipe’s writing and production on the record constitute his first major musical outing since the dissolution of R.E.M.following 2011’s Collapse Into Now. As if in homage to the formation of this alt/indie/R&B Justice League, Spooner sculpted himself into a superhero’s physique, though with his long hair and soup-strainer mustache he looks less Marvel Studios and more like a human mash-up of the Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott characters from Road House. But the transformation has more to do with Spooner’s mid-life embrace of his own sexuality, which he addresses throughout the record with more candor and unapologetic lust than ever before. In fact, Stipe turns out to have been Spooner’s first boyfriend, way back in 1988, providing Sir with a juicy backstory to match all its attention-getting musical collaborations and stylistic shifts.

Where does all this behind-the-scenes stuff get us? You can find out in my review of Fischerspooner’s new album Sir for Pitchfork. I’ve loved Fischerspooner since (before?) their first album came out, so writing a number-graded review of their new work was a difficult task for me. I’m still not sure how I feel about doing that.

Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew doestake his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.

I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. This is a great show.