Famous last words, Aureliano.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

“You wanna go to war?!?” Well, kinda. The sixth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 may be called “It’s War,” because that’s the desired outcome of nearly everyone involved: Adelaide Anacleti’s Sinti Roma faction, who want to take Ostia by force; her son Spadino, his wife Angelica, and his friend Aureliano Adami, who want to team up to ambush Adelaide’s men, thus protecting Aureliano’s turf and handing control of the “Gypsys” to Spadino; Amedeo Cinaglia and Sara Monaschi, who want the chaos to scare the Roman people into voting for the Right, a politically advantageous development for them both. Alone among the major characters, only the itinerant mob boss Samurai wants to stop the bloodshed, to facilitate his own political alliances. But when the shooting starts, everyone gets both far more and far less than they bargained for.

I reviewed episode six of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Two for Decider.

Some lines punch above their weight class. You know what I mean? You can feel them searing their way into your brain and then lodging there, as close to permanently as anything can in a world that feels like a blow to the head every day, despite them not being important or funny or even good. One of those quote-tweet audience-response twitter threads went around recently to this effect, asking what obscure movie lines have become a part of your everyday vocabulary or thought patterns. My personal choice, besides the obvious, is a woman at a dinner party in Hellraiser squawking “Doctors!” in this over-the-top, probably dubbed-to-replace-an-English-accent what a world way, and her husband responding with a “That’s right, honey” so patronizing it makes your eyes water.

I can currently feel this happening with poor Jack, that’s him on the right above, trying and failing to prevent his fellow bouncer Horny Steve from allowing two young women below the legal drinking age from entering the Double Deuce with IDs so woefully inadequate to the task of age verification that they aren’t even fake. “This is a Sears credit card” he tells Steve, who’s in the middle of greeting his lady friends Beverly and Agnes and could not possibly care less. I feel it searing, and I swear there was no pun intended. I feel it becoming the way I react to any frustratingly bogus situation or nonsensical explanation, like the pet-shop clerk who tells Parker Posey “This is least like a bee of the ones that we have here” when she’s desperately searching for a replacement Busy Bee for her dog in Best in Show, or Kramer and company shouting “These pretzels are making me thirsty!” in Seinfeld. Car says it’s out of gas even though it previously said there were forty miles left in the tank? This is a Sears credit card! Laptop won’t remember a password I’ve entered in a million times? This is a Sears credit card! Politics??? This is a Sears credit card! I will never see the softer side of Sears again. I accept this.

“This is the new Double Deuce,” says Frank Tilghman. We are at the start of an all-hands staff meeting, and Tilghman is pointing to the concept art for the bar’s redesign. But standing nearby is his latest hire, Dalton. It is through Dalton, with Dalton, in Dalton that the new Double Deuce will be achieved. Dalton embodies the new Double Deuce. He is its future.

When Dalton takes over as cooler he becomes more than just the chief bouncer. His role is not to handle a series of discrete incidents, but to institute sweeping reforms that will eliminate such incidents forever. “It’s going to change,” he states—not a threat, not a promise, a fact. His bouncers, too, must change for this to take place. As below, so above.

Bouncing on the Dalton Path is a matter of following “three simple rules.”

This, again, is the third.

3. Be nice. (continued)

When first we assayed the Third Rule, I said the following:

It is the shortest rule, and it requires the most explanation. It is the least practically minded rule, and it is illustrated with the most practical applications. It is a rule about being kind to others, on the surface at least, and it is the rule greeted—and at times delivered—with the most open incredulity, even hostility.

When Dalton tells the assembled staff of the Double Deuce to be nice, it is Jack the bouncer who, whether in spite or because of being Dalton’s best student, opens the door for doubt. “Come on,” he says, gently but with unmistakable disbelief. He’s trying to ask his new sensei “Are you out of your mind?” in the politest possible way.

Now comes the yin-yang instructional configuration that should be familiar to us as central to the Giving of the Rules. Dalton leans forward and tells Jack “If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice.” Jack responds with a skeptical “Ohkayy”—and, though he knows it not, passes the test Dalton has just given him in so doing. Dalton got in his face and called him a cocksucker, and he was nice. It takes the doing of the thing to see that it can be done and learn how to do it. If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.

(to be continued)

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s Suburra!

When you kiss but feel bad cuz you just killed her dad, that’s Suburra!

When you free / several refugees / just so there can be / unrest in the streets, that’s Suburra!

When you roast dudes like ribs then go shopping for cribs, that’s Suburra!

Yes, romance, parenthood, racism, and the smell of burning flesh are all in the air in this episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome. Named “The Crib” after the hilariously gaudy baby furniture Spadino and Aureliano buy for the former’s forthcoming bundle of joy—at the end of a long night during which Aureliano burned the abusive cousins of his new right-hand woman Nadia to death and then dumped the corpses in front of the heads of all the Ostia crime families as a warning never to do business with “gypsies” again—this one is jam packed with everything that makes this show so goddamn good to watch.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s Suburra!

When you kiss but feel bad cuz you just killed her dad, that’s Suburra!

When you free / several refugees / just so there can be / unrest in the streets, that’s Suburra!

When you roast dudes like ribs then go shopping for cribs, that’s Suburra!

I had a little fun reviewing episode five of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

Here’s a singularly unpleasant chain of events. Wrapping up his latest white-blues scorcher, Cody, the lead singer of the Jeff Healey Band, announces he and the band will be taking a brief break because, quoting here, “gotta drain the main vein.” I go back and forth on this. Not on whether it’s an awful thing to say, because it is; even a film this aggressively stupid that line lands on first-timers like punch in the nose. But in a way I think it’s gutsy to introduce a character by having him use a grotesque euphemism for using his penis to urinate in his first spoken lines of dialogue. And at least it rhymes, unlike “I heard you got balls big enough to come in a dump truck” or “Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick” or “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick” and probably a few other phallocentric howlers I’m forgetting. That’s no doubt one of his proficiencies as a bard.

Then this man—you remember this man, he’s Heckler, played by Charles Hawke, and he’s a non-voting observer nation in The Agreement—then this man says something less unpleasant to read but vastly worse to hear. “Hey, you’re paid to play—play!” he screech-slurs in a hideous Noo Yawk accent that’s practically Piscopovian in its cartoonishness. Rendered phonetically s it’s more like “HAY YA PAID TA PLAY PLAY!“, its dulcet outer-borough tones more than a bit anomalous in a film whose language is listed as “Yokel” on the cassette box.

With that he throws a bottle of beer, still half-full, at the chickenwire fencing surrounding the Double Deuce’s stage. The guy’s got a real cannon of a right hand apparently, because it shatters into a million pieces with a sound you might associate with dinner scenes in which a guest says something so shocking that the hostess drops her plate.

The reaction of Jeff Healey Band frontman Cody is inscrutable. Judging from the way he reaches his hand to his bottom lip and growls “Fuck!” I think we’re to take it that a piece of glass made it through the mesh and cut him on the face, but two data points would seem to dispute this. First, he’s not visibly injured in his ensuing conversation with Dalton, and Road House is pretty fastidious about making sure people bleed properly. Second and more puzzling is his reaction in the moment: He simultaneously snaps his head back and flops forward, as if completely poleaxed. Again, the bottle hit the chickenwire, not him.

The logical explanation is that Cody is a sort of “earth spirit” or personification of the Double Deuce, serving a function similar to that of Tom Bombadil vis a vis Middle-earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, though with the additional characteristic of suffering when the place through which his existence is defined suffers. As an elemental of this sort he can be expected to react strongly to damage he senses through his metaneural network.  However, at no other point does Cody display this type of symbiosis with the Double Deuce, not even in the cataclysmic brawl that takes place just a few minutes later, so this theory too needs reexamination.

So we turn back to the other participant in this pas de deux, Heckler. Heckler, who lurks on the margins of The Agreement, the dissolution of which nearly destroys the bar. Heckler, who throws a bottle with sufficient force to break it to pieces on a fence. Heckler, who can wound this troubadour with pure mental animus. It seems safe to conclude that he is a black magician, or even a demonic entity himself, warping the world around him with his corrosively evil presence. Witnessing the Coming of Dalton, he wisely chooses to depart rather than test his strength against a servant of the Secret Fire, leaving more ambitious or more foolhardy members of his infernal cohort to fight in his stead. Who knows how many such creatures Dalton has banished by his mere presence.

eo

The dream of the ’90s is alive in Suburra. That’s one of the many, many, many things I find endearing about this show, I realize now. Sexy, cool-looking dirtbags cruising around in a late-night city to late-night electronic music, like if The Sopranos starred the cast of Trainspotting. It’s beautiful, man, just beautiful. If I could ensure I wouldn’t get shot, or wouldn’t have to sit someplace crying because someone I love got shot, I’d move there in a heartbeat.

Speaking of the ’90s, a decade during which I did a lot of crying, men cry a lot on Suburra, too. Maybe more than in any other show I’ve watched, when you factor in the small number of episodes to date and the short running time of each? That’s another attractive element. Again, I always call this show “emotional,” and this is why.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

The dream of the ’90s is alive in Suburra. That’s one of the many, many, many things I find endearing about this show, I realize now. Sexy, cool-looking dirtbags cruising around in a late-night city to late-night electronic music, like if The Sopranosstarred the cast of Trainspotting. It’s beautiful, man, just beautiful. If I could ensure I wouldn’t get shot, or wouldn’t have to sit someplace crying because someone I love got shot, I’d move there in a heartbeat.

Speaking of the ’90s, a decade during which I did a lot of crying, men cry a lot on Suburra, too. Maybe more than in any other show I’ve watched, when you factor in the small number of episodes to date and the short running time of each? That’s another attractive element. Again, I always call this show “emotional,” and this is why.

I reviewed episode four of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider.

When I wrote about Wade Garrett yesterday, I remembered something about his black t-shirt: He’s not the only cooler in the movie to wear one. The other of course is Dalton—but it’s not like he wears it all the time. The movie shows us he’s molded in Wade’s by deploying black in his wardrobe on three key occasions.

Attentive readers of Pain Don’t Hurt will have guessed the first by now: The Giving of the Rules. This takes place prior to Wade’s introduction, directly linking the older man’s debut to the establishment of his acolyte’s doctrine.

The second is the fight that takes place the night he and Doc have their first date, which is also the first time we see him on the job after we meet Wade. This reinforces the sense of succession while also tying Dalton’s romantic flourishing to the older man’s tutelage.

The third is his impromptu breakfast summit with Brad Wesley, during which Wesley brings up his checkered past and offers to hire him away from the Double Deuce. It’s not a t-shirt here but a collared shirt, as befits this more formal occasion. But the dialogue makes direct reference to an event in Dalton’s past that Wade will also bring up (while wearing a collared black shirt himself) later in the movie, and shows Dalton standing up to an asshole in a way that would do his mentor proud—even if he’d likely suggest getting out of Dodge afterwards.

Clothes make the man. Clothes mate the men.

How confident in its storytelling is Suburra: Blood on Rome at this point? Confident enough to introduce purple as a signature color for Livia Adami during the episode in which she dies, then paint the whole world with it as her brother Aurelio gives her a burial at sea.

Confident enough to reunite its three main characters early in its second season’s run for the express purpose of doing something long overdue: teaming up to kill Samurai, the taciturn Roman crimelord who’s been screwing with all their lives like a capricious deity from the start. Not just planning to do it, either—deciding to do it, tonight.

And confident enough that even though it seems unlikely that our three amigos would succeed in taking out the show’s number-one villain in episode three of Season Two, the death of Livia in the previous episode (at Samurai’s hands, no less) is enough to make us in the audience believe that anything could happen. In other words, it’s exactly as confident as it deserves to be.

I reviewed the third episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

How confident in its storytelling is Suburra: Blood on Rome at this point?…Exactly as confident as it deserves to be.

I reviewed episode three of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Two for Decider.

The shadow lies upon Wade Garrett when first we see him. He stands ramrod straight, stiff lipped, chin up, eyes alert. He rocks back and forth from the intensity of the vigilance thrumming in every sinew and synapse. To his right is a sign of prohibition. To his left, a box controlling the generative energy of the bar itself. Behind him, a doorway, barred by his very body. His hair is grey with the knowledge and peril of the long years, and his raiment is black. Wade Garrett knows the gate. Wade Garrett is the gate. Wade Garrett is the key and guardian of the gate.

At that very moment, here’s what he’s looking at.

Not without professional cause, mind you. Within seconds, a horned-up Marine yells “CHARGE!” and rushes the stage, and Wade must rush into action. He sits the jarhead’s ass back down and defuses the situation with a quip about Rambo and saving the world from the Commies that shows Dalton is not the only cooler for whom Be Nice is a cardinal rule. But his protégé, strong though his game may be, could never match the sly grin Wade flashes at the dancer he rescued, who smiles and winks appreciatively in return. Condoms have been lab-tested with less.

What can we learn of the Way of Wade Garrett from this sequence? Most obviously, the integrity of the Wet T-Shirt G-String CONTEST every NITE! would rightfully be called into question but for his presence. We see that humor, even irony, feature prominently in his bouncing arsenal. We see him through the eyes of a dozen drunk, erection-toting members of the United States Marine Corps, who view him as likeable enough, formidable enough, or most likely both to allow him to lay hands on one of their number and walk away unscathed (and bowlegged). He is himself horny, and hairy, but not handsy. He’s quick to action, but not eager for it; not for him is Dalton’s remonstrance to Morgan about not having “the right temperament for the trade.”

And from that first look at him, standing silent sentry in the half light, we see that he harbors within him a darkness—one that does not belie the revelry with which he surrounds himself and the merry manner in which he polices it, but which informs and complements it. He is only at ease because he knows all there is in the world to worry about. Those things have worried at him, and he has held them at bay. For now, anyway. For now.

One of Suburra‘s many strengths, and the one most responsible for making it such a strangely endearing show regarding its dirtbag characters —other than the fact that they’re all played by incredibly beautiful actors I mean— is how emotional it is. I think I’ve used that word every time I’ve discussed the show at any length, but it’s the only one that fits. There are so many shots of so many people quietly crying about losing other people while that lush, mournful theme hits in the background that you can’t help but feel something like what they’re feeling, you know? It’s the contrast between everyone’s affected tough-guy personas and their tendency to melt into sobbing puddles when they’re rejected or bereaved that makes you care.

“Consequences” (Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2, Episode 2) counts on this. It drills right down into one of the series’ closest and most volatile relationships, and then ends it.

I reviewed the second episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

One of Suburra‘s many strengths, and the one most responsible for making it such a strangely endearing show regarding its dirtbag characters —other than the fact that they’re all played by incredibly beautiful actors I mean— is how emotional it is. I think I’ve used that word every time I’ve discussed the show at any length, but it’s the only one that fits. There are so many shots of so many people quietly crying about losing other people while that lush, mournful theme hits in the background that you can’t help but feel something like what they’re feeling, you know? It’s the contrast between everyone’s affected tough-guy personas and their tendency to melt into sobbing puddles when they’re rejected or bereaved that makes you care.

“Consequences” (Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2, Episode 2) counts on this. It drills right down into one of the series’ closest and most volatile relationships, and then ends it.

I reviewed the second episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome‘s second season for Decider.

Dalton, during the prologue of The Giving of the Rules: “It’s my way or the highway.”

The highway:

Show me the lie.

Whether by accident or design—who can say? alright I can say, it’s by accident—there is no aphorism, no catchphrase, no idiomatic expression, no imbecilic threat or come-on or dick joke in the entirety of this film that does not bear close, even literal, reading. This is what I want to impress upon you more than anything else. This is what inspired this project: the sense that in the 15 years I’ve been watching this movie I haven’t touched bottom any more than you might during a swim in the middle of the ocean. Road House is a journey of discovery, a highway if you will, and the higher you fly the deeper you go the deeper you go the higher you fly so come on come on come on it’s such a joy.

Several martial-arts disciplines utilize the gi, a simple uniform developed over time with the physical and strategic demands of each particular discipline (judo, karate, whatever) in mind. Dalton, who in another life would have made a hell of a mixed martial arts fighter, likes to wear his out on the town sometimes. It’s the only outfit we see him in not once but twice: first on the day he takes a trip to the auto parts store and discovers that Red Webster is getting shaken down by Brad Wesley and his goons, and second on the day of his final mad battle against the Wesleyans. Dalton is wearing a gi when Red springs the original colloquialism “Does a hobbyhorse have a wooden dick?” on him in lieu of the traditional “Is the Pope Catholic?”, and again when he approaches his niece Dr. Elizabeth Clay in the middle of examining the x-ray results for her latest trauma patient and/or colonoscopy recipient to beg her to skip town with him so they can avoid the wrath of her insane Fotomat-owning ex-husband. But I assure you that in neither case did he slip this clean white garment on in anticipation of seeing action. It’s simply the film’s way of communicating that the Dalton Path stretches from East to West. In many ways it’s an equivalent signifier to stretching with a lit cigarette in his mouth, or waking up hung over from a late-night binge-read, or receiving a philosophy degree from NYU for studying “man’s search for faith, that sorta shit” prior to becoming a professional ass-kicker, or asking for a king’s ransom as a salary but living in a place that costs $100 a month and driving a car chosen specifically because it’ll function basically the same if it gets half-destroyed by angry drunks whose noses he’s broken, or doing tai chi by the water in between tours of every greasy spoon and dive bar in town. He is a human mixed martial art. Might as well dress the part.

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I reviewed the premiere of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

(NOTE: These review summaries will remain brief while I play catch-up with links. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I’m covering Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. I love this show.

(Note: I’m playing catch-up so these review descriptions will be brief. You’ll just have to read the reviews, I suppose!)

After a long night of breaking tables with people’s faces, firing bouncers for fucking teenagers in the storeroom, making Frank Tilghman fire Brad Wesley’s nephew (and I think it’s safe to say his own lover) Pat McGurn, and reading Jim Harrison novels while Wesley and his goons have a topless pool party across the water, Dalton likes to get out of bed hungover without drinking a drop the night before and fully nude in front of his co-worker Carrie Ann, light a cigarette before he finishes buttoning the fly of his jeans, and do some light stretches without even taking the lit cig out of his mouth as she presents him with coffee and a jelly donut or a danish or something. That’s just who he is. That’s just how he (jelly)rolls. The whole little morning ritual we see when Carrie Ann pays him her erotically charged visit is a delight precisely because of the incoherent portrait it paints of this man. He’s constantly smoking even when he’s exercising but he turns up his nose at junk food. His entire method of bouncing depends upon everyone reading everyone else for the slightest cues and clues but he walks around bareassed in front of a woman over whom he has hiring and firing authority, who’s there delivering him food out of the goodness of her own heart. He’s a huge nerd who was up all night reading a book, to the point where he frowns upon some relatively wholesome sex-comedy shenanigans over at Wesley’s place, but when he wakes up it’s like he’s coming off a three-day bender. If you sat and tried to depict the contradictory demands of ideal masculinity—stoic yet vulnerable, wise yet monosyllabic, sexy yet oblivious to his own sexiness, abusing the body he treats as a temple—I don’t know if you could come up with a better illustration than a shirtless Dalton doing his morning stretches while smoking like Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters while wearing pants he hasn’t quite finished putting on.