“His Dark Materials” thoughts, Season One, Episode One: “Lyra’s Jordan”

November 5th, 2019

Question: What does your daemon look like? Is it a ferret, a fox, a monkey, a regal snow leopard? In the world of His Dark Materials, the joint BBC-HBO adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s hugely acclaimed young-adult fantasy series, everybody’s got a literal spirit animal — magical creatures called “daemons” that function like having an external animal-shaped soul you can run around with and talk to. As a way to engage the audience, daemons rank right up there with Harry Potter’s Gryffindor-to-Hufflepuff sorting matrix, or Game of Thrones’ great houses, only even more personalized. And if HBO pulls off yet another swing-for-the-fences fantasy adaptation properly, you’ll want one of your own.

I’m back at Rolling Stone to cover His Dark Materials this season, starting with my review of the series premiere.

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309. A body in motion, a body at rest

November 5th, 2019

It’s really all over for Jimmy once Dalton snaps his leg against that tree trunk. Punches, kicks, everything Dalton can dish out Jimmy takes right in the mush. He’s practically dead on his feet by the time he stumbles to the ground a few feet away from Dalton. That’s when Dalton enters wait-and-see mode: Does this guy have anything left in the tank, or does he still have a trick up his sleeve (or his pant leg)?

It is at this time that Dalton’s body starts moving up and down to the pace of his breathing. Right arm raised to strike, lower arm thrust forward for balance, he almost cycles or rotates into his breathing. Inhale and his torso moves up and back. Exhale and his torso thrusts forward and down. It happens two or three times that we can see. And it reminds me of nothing so much as the way characters in an RPG video game will cycle through a similar set of waiting-to-strike movements as they await their turn. It’s some Final Fantasy shit, really. To which I can only say add Dalton to Kingdom Hearts and Super Smash Bros.

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308. Tree of woe

November 4th, 2019

Jimmy uses his leg to break a tree; Dalton uses that tree to break his leg. How often can you describe the turning point of a fight in terms so symmetrical they could pass for aphorism? That’s the beauty of this extraordinary fight. It uses its environment, and spacial relationships between the combatants within that environment. To see and hear him, Jimmy looks and sounds like he’s closing in for the hill when he delivers the kick that misses Dalton and separates a branch from the tree between them instead. He seems momentarily surprised, and that moment is just long enough for Dalton to grab Jimmy by the ankle and use the tree trunk as a fulcrum to pulp Jimmy’s lower leg. One could make a point about Dalton being in touch with nature here were one so inclined.

After that the fight is all downhill from Jimmy, until he finally abandons the whole Marquess of Queensbury thing and pulls out a gun. At that point, too, the result will be the opposite of what he’d intended. Some people you can’t stop from signing their own death warrant.

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“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Eleven

November 4th, 2019

The final episode of “The Affair” begins and ends with different versions of the same song. In its opening minutes, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Irish folk-rock band the Waterboys blares forth while Noah Solloway drills friends and family in a dance routine for his daughter Whitney’s wedding. As sung by the vocalist Mike Scott, the lyrics regard a loved one with awe that borders on pagan devotion: “I saw the crescent,” he joyfully yelps. “You saw the whole of the moon.”

By the time the episode ends, Noah is an old man, alone with his memories on the shores of Montauk. This time, Fiona Apple, who provided the show’s opening theme, performs the song. In her ragged voice, the lyrics sound less like praise and more like accusations: When she sings “I sighed, but you swooned,” the words catch and drag in her throat like a curse.

Yet the sense that Apple is in love, deeply, with the person to whom she is singing is no less palpable here than it is in Scott’s original. Rather, her performance reflects the way the people we love can confound, even infuriate us while at their best as well as at their worst. Sometimes, loving someone who feels bigger and better than we are can be an enormous burden. Sometimes we want to see only a sliver of the sky rather than the whole thing, and to hell with those who would force us out of ourselves to do otherwise.

If you’ve watched all five seasons of “The Affair,” you can see where this is going. To Helen Solloway, her ex-husband, Noah, is maddeningly impulsive and self-pitying but also patient and sweet. To Noah, his ex-wife Helen is infuriatingly Type A and judgmental but also caring and almost impossibly together. Sometimes their virtues are nearly as difficult to tolerate as their vices. But that’s love, isn’t it?

I reviewed the series finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been one of the great rewards of my career to watch and write about this show.

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“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Five: “405 Method Not Allowed”

November 4th, 2019

“It’s cool, dude. We don’t have to talk.” From Darlene Alderson’s lips to the creator, writer and director Sam Esmail’s ears: The fifth installment of the final season of “Mr. Robot” is almost entirely dialogue free.

It’s an attention-getting feat from the filmmaker, who is no stranger to such stunts. Recall that high-rise thriller episode that looked like it was filmed as one long take, for example, or the series’s perfect simulacra of 1990s sitcoms and 1980s slasher films.

This episode primarily tracks Darlene and her brother, Elliot, as they finagle their way into a secure server farm in order to hack the bank account used by their nemesis, Whiterose, and her Dark Army. One side plots tracks the outgoing E Corp chief executive, Phillip Price, and the compromised F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro as they follow the Dark Army’s instructions. Another tracks Elliot’s therapist, Krista, who doesn’t realize she is being followed by the minions of Elliot’s old drug-dealing enemy, Vera, until it’s too late.

It all makes for a rather miserable Christmas Day for all concerned; indeed, the contrast between the characters’ stressful states and the compulsory joy of all the Christmas music they encounter is the episode’s best running gag.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mr. Robot‘s final season for the New York Times.

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“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode Three: “She Was Killed by Space Junk”

November 4th, 2019

Even at this relatively early stage in Watchmen‘s game, summarizing the events of an episode, much less watching one, can be a dizzying prospect. Phone calls to Mars, exploding coffins, racism detectors, homemade spacesuits, dead buffalos, pet owls, Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” cars falling from the sky, massive blue dildos—it makes you sound like a crazy person, or at the very least the police chief from The Naked Gun.

But that’s the charm, isn’t it? Alright, I’m not asking, I’m telling: That’s the charm. Even though “She Was Killed by Space Junk,” Watchmen Episode 3, is so far the only one to make a big deal of its ties to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s epochal comic book, it is every bit as weird in its content and jarring in its rhythm as its predecessors. You thought introducing the Silk Spectre was going to slow things down? Think again.

I reviewed the third episode of Watchmen for Decider.

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307. Faces of Death

November 3rd, 2019

Take a moment, won’t you, to appreciate the faces pulled by Marshall Teague as Jimmy dances his last lethal dance. He’s marvelously expressive, isn’t he? His face contorts like a noh demon mask when he’s preparing to strike, and his eyes twinkle with malice and delight when in repose.

And this elasticity, this reactivity, tells us something about the face’s bearer. This is a man who loves what he does, and that love is written all over his face. The professional is personal with Jimmy as a rule, whereas for Dalton this kind of fury and passion is the exception. Perhaps you need to form murderous intent in advance to channel this kind of rubber-faced self-expression. Perhaps malice aforethought has a transformative effect on the jaw and the flesh. Viewed through this lens, what Dalton does to Jimmy can almost be seen as simply pulling the plug and turning this beautiful and terrible face off.

At any rate we were robbed of a Marshall Teague/Bruce Campbell fight when both men were in their prime, and someone should go to jail for it.

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306. More repartée

November 2nd, 2019

JIMMY: Damn, boy—I thought you were good!

DALTON: Go fuck yourself.

Ah, the rapier wit of Mr. James Dalton. Once again, he responds to a fairly specific taunt from his enemy with whatever generic oath he finds lying around in his battered mind, nearly to the point of non sequitur. He doesn’t defend his martial prowess, he doesn’t malign Jimmy’s in turn—he simply picks a more colorful version of “Go jump in a lake.” (Which indeed Jimmy will soon do, sort of, and fatally at that. Be that as it may.)

But the thing is, why would Dalton keep a complement of insults ready to hand? Recall the Giving of the Rules: Insults are just two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response. What’s he gonna do, call Jimmy a cocksucker? Call his mama a whore? A seasoned fighter would know better than to respond to such meaningless verbiage, so there’s no reason to accumulate it. You are such an asshole, go fuck yourself—these are the comebacks of a man whose mind is taken up with more important matters, both physical and philosophical. Because Jimmy is wrong—Dalton is good, as Jimmy is about to learn to his great misfortune.

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305. tfw you’re standing on the veranda of your mansion watching the ranch house across the water that you ordered blown up by your chief goon who is also quite possibly your bastard son though there’s no canonical evidence to support this burn to the ground as your nemesis and his girlfriend who’s your ex-wife and his landlord who’s a crusty old geezer whose horses you like to harass by buzzing their corral with your helicopter flee for their lives and not even the fact that all three of them survive can quite put a damper on the pleasure of watching it all go up in smoke as must all things that stand in the way of you and the JC Penney

November 1st, 2019

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304. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”

October 31st, 2019

“So, it’s come at last. At last, it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come, at last.”

—“A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Bye Bye Birdie

The most infamous line in Road House was not in the script. That much we can agree on. Marshall Teague, the actor who says it, claims it was improvised and given the seal of approval by on-set super-producer Joel Silver. Rowdy Herrington, the director, says it was Silver’s invention. Whoever the author, their work is not present in the basic-cable cut of the film, for obvious reasons. Few pleasures have I known greater than watching Road House in the company of men who considered themselves Road House superfans but who had never seen the uncut R-rated original article, only to arrive at this line. It’s a moment the phrases “Holy shit!” and “What the fuck?” were made for.

Why is that? Because it’s the moment when the band-aid gets ripped off, the pustule is pierced and drained, and the sexualized violence toward and involving Dalton is finally made manifest. No more talk about taking Dalton, no more innuendo about how we thought he’d be bigger, no more homosocial power-dynamic establishment with words like “son” or “boy” or “mijo“—this is just Dalton’s would-be nemesis stating outright that in other circumstances, fights like this ended with him raping the bested combatant.

Yet despite its awful—I was gonna say implications, but it’s not implying anything, is it? It’s coming right out and saying the awful thing. Yet despite that, the line does not short-circuit our enjoyment of the film, or even of just this fight scene, the way you might expect it to. In part that’s because our society does not take prison rape seriously and never has. In part it’s because Jimmy is about to get his in a way that’s even more spectacular and gruesome than the line itself. And in part it’s because Road House is a cavalcade of outrageousness from the start. Every yokel and goon who gets punched in the face, every gratuitous ass and boob shot, every ridiculous line reading by some weird old crank, every arrhythmic scene in which Brad Wesley does twelve contradictory things, every explosion, every monster truck, every mention of the concept of famous bouncers—all of it prepares us to weather virtually any storm to come our way. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” Okay, sure. What else ya got?

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303. Drift away

October 30th, 2019

Midway through their fight on the beach, Jimmy wallops Dalton in the side with a hunk of…I want to say driftwood? It could be a fallen branch from one of the nearby trees, too. Either way I commend his astute use of innate environmental advantages in his fight. That’s the root of all good fight scenes, as I’ve said for many years now—they distinguish themselves from one another by making use of the physical space around them and the objects that inhabit that space. It’s a bit disappointing that at no point does anyone throw sand in the other person’s eyes to momentarily blind them, but be that as it may. It’s also unclear how Jimmy can muster enough force to break an item hard enough to injure Dalton’s ribs a less than one-foot swing, but we’ll ignore that as well. Jimmy’s presence of mind is what’s on display here. And when Jimmy gets his leg tangled up in a tree, Dalton will pay him back in kind, reversing the fortunes of the fight and leading to his overall victory. Watch the wood.

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302. Wipe that smile off your face

October 29th, 2019

Relatively early on in the proceedings, Dalton flashes a grin at Jimmy while they square up after a flurry of blows and counters. Is he…enjoying this? Yes, at the moment anyway, and for several reasons. First, he’s just told Doc that he’s only good at one thing: He never loses. Of course he’s glad to be doing the one thing he’s good at.

Second, consider Jimmy’s rhetoric. He opens their battle banter with “Prepare to die.” Dalton knows he’s in a life-or-death struggle, for himself anyway—I don’t believe he has any plans to kill Jimmy at this stage—and with that in mind Dalton is pleased to have weathered Jimmy’s initial murderous assault with roughly the same alacrity as he’s fended off countless others. He’s doing well, and he knows it.

Third, and again springboarding off Jimmy’s declared intent to kill, Dalton knows that being as good as he is is pissing Jimmy off. He can read the frustration all over Jimmy’s face, and thanks to Marshall Teague’s enormously expressive mug, so can we. There’s some delight to be taken there, as any number of the smug smiles he’s shot at the Tinkers of the world indicate.

But we have another face to look at here, don’t we. Jimmy is not just annoyed, or even pissed—he’s furious. He decided to kill Dalton the moment Dalton knocked him off his motorbike, and he’s doubling down on that decision.

When Dalton realizes this, when Dalton decides it’s really kill or be killed, Dalton will smile no longer.

 

 

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“Mr. Robot” thoughts, Season Four, Episode Four: “404 Not Found”

October 28th, 2019

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“The Affair” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Ten

October 28th, 2019

A snakebite at the end of a climactic, no-holds-barred heart-to-heart is a perfect visual synecdoche for the entire series, which has always pitted human desire and emotion against the caprice of the universe — hurricanes, cancer diagnoses, fires, drownings, accidents of birth. What a pleasure to watch a show move toward its final hour with so firm a grasp on what has given it life.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

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“Watchmen” thoughts, Season One, Episode Two: “Martial Feats of Comanche Horsemanship”

October 28th, 2019

There’s a going on here, and it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that seems so full of conflicting ideas it might burst at the seams. It’s a good feeling.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Watchmen for Decider.

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301. Another leap

October 28th, 2019

We’re several exchanges of kicks, strikes, and wrestling holds deep into Dalton and Jimmy’s vicious fight at a small beach on the shore of the mysterious body of water separating Emmett’s ranch from Wesley’s mansion when Dalton takes to the skies once again. He winds up delivering a knee to Jimmy’s midsection, which takes his opponent down. This gives Dalton his first chance to really lay a beating on the guy, albeit briefly as they’re very evenly matched.

But in a film with approximately half a hundred fight scenes, what we’re watching Dalton do stands out. Balletic leaps through the air were not part of his arsenal at any point inside or outside the Double Deuce, which is where all of his fights had been contained until now. So in part we’re seeing him respond to the environment, which has no walls or ceiling or furniture for him to navigate—just the branches of the trees. Small wonder Dalton’s offense becomes a more soaring thing, a thing of beauty.

But one other point worth considering is his motive for the fight. Dalton is off the clock right now, after all. And he’s not defending liquor shipments, or simply performing his routine job of keeping riffraff out of the bar where he works. He’s just seen his friend Emmett nearly get blown to bits by a cackling ghoul in head-to-toe denim. He wants revenge.

Seen in that light, this dance-like formation is how Dalton expresses his rage, his bloodlust, his thirst for retribution. Could there be anything more Dalton than giving voice to his basest instincts in the most beautiful way possible? Dig deeper and deeper into Dalton’s psychophysicality and you’ll find the place where the heavens meet the earth.

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300. The quips begin

October 27th, 2019

JIMMY: Prepare to die!

DALTON: You are such an asshole.

Noël Coward it isn’t. Peter Parker it isn’t. Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man it isn’t. Jimmy makes an explicit threat, and Dalton dodges the threat component completely—no “not today,” no “prepare to think again,” nothing directly tied to Jimmy’s words. Just, “You are such an asshole,” a statement he could have accurately made about Jimmy at any point during their relationship, not predicated on being informed he should prepare to die at Jimmy’s hands.

Not for the last time in the two-minute fight that follows, Dalton’s mid-battle quip is essentially a non sequitur. He hasn’t come to banter—bantering just gets on his nerves. He won’t reply to the banter, but he’ll assert his feelings about the banterer, merely using the banter as a logical starting point. It’s a fascinating series of choices for someone engaged in a life-or-death struggle, like if Luke Skywalker had responded to the Emperor’s taunts by saying “You are one ugly motherfucker.”

“Prepare to die!” “You are such an asshole.” Say it loud and there’s music playing, say it soft and it’s almost like praying.

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299. The Leap

October 26th, 2019

Decking a man off the back of a moving motorbike is no mean feat. You have to run full-tilt, first of all, as close to motorbike speed as the human body allows, just to get in the door as it were. You need to properly angle your body and the leap it makes so that you’re aimed in the right direction rather than just jumping blindly. You have to lead the bike so that you’re not jumping at air where the bike once was. You have to not lead the bike too much so that you’re not gonna land on the dirt a few feet in front as the bike runs you over. You have to count on your quarry being so preoccupied by his own glee over the wanton destruction he’s wrought that he doesn’t notice the man in sweatpants barreling towards him. It helps to be shirtless and glistening with sweat, too. (I mean, I assume. Aerodynamics and all that.) You need your arms and legs at full extension, buying you time in midflight to readjust and aim appropriately, to say nothing of the asethetics. And you have to be animated with a blinding thirst for vengeance against a man who dressed up in head-to-toe denim in order to blow up the house of the weird old man who rents you an extravagant loft apartment for a hundred bucks a month, a nominal fee intended to keep the local Presbyterians at bay. You put it all together and you have Dalton, running at breakneck speed, then soaring through the air in order to crash into a man on a moving motor vehicle and then, after the crash, to kick his ass and tear his throat out. Poetry in motion. No, wait: Philosophy in motion.

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298. The Laugh

October 25th, 2019

Like a 1950s nun kicking the little girl under her desk.

Like a billionaire ejaculating on a $40,000 watch.

Like tyrant hearing a sycophant’s joke during the purge.

Like a budding killer dousing a cat with kerosene.

Like a border patrol agent who’s learned just enough Spanish to be cruel with it.

Like a wildfire taking a sudden turn toward inhabited areas.

Like the commander of the trebuchet that launches severed heads over the battlements.

Like an incumbent senator the night of his eighth reelection.

Like a man in wraparound sunglasses swerving his SUV toward a rabbit.

Like student loan officials at an all-expenses-paid luau.

Like a shitposter reading about the latest mass shooting.

Like a child’s nightmare of a cartoon villain as he slowly makes his way down the hall to the bedroom door.

Like a piano with only black keys, played by unseen hands.

Like a flash flood, like a rabid dog, like cut brakes, like hate speech, like black ice, like a sudden sharp pain in the left arm, like knives, like cuts, like blood.

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297. On top of things

October 24th, 2019

Dalton’s compassion is cloaked at this stage in the film by his rage, but it’s still there, animating his actions. To a fault, perhaps. After he pulls Emmett from his burning house, which then explodes a second time, Emmet tells him “I’d be fine if you’d get off of me.” And what does Dalton do immediately? Rest his head on the old man’s chest. He does this not out of spite or a desire to increase the man’s suffering, of course—he’s just overcome with relief that his friend is well enough to crack wise. Dalton even smiles for a second, despite it all.

When you write about Road House you have to take all of it on board or it doesn’t work. You have to treat every weird filigree of the film like a deliberate choice. You have to treat the characters as the gestalt of their actions. This is why Dalton engenders such love: About two minutes before he rips a man’s throat out in anger, he presses his forehead against the chest of his landlord, just to be closer to a man he’s glad is alive. He makes time to be nice, and bless him for that.

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