Breaking the Line

Mad Men's Styles of the Times: How the Show's Shifts Mirror the Characters' Uncertainties and a Turbulent Era

While I watch a lot of TV, I don't often get a chance to write about it; weekly recaps are a bit of a  thankless grind, and they've largely taken the place of more reflective, occasional essays. (Some people, like my colleagues Matt Zoller Seitz and Noel Murray, manage to do both at once, damn them.) Plus, Jesus are there a lot of people writing smart stuff about Mad Men on an almost minute-by-minute basis. Thanks, at any rate, to my Indiewire editor Alison Willmore for letting me chime in on the Mad Men finale and the season as a whole, focusing (I hope) on some of the broader issues that sometimes get lost in the weekly wash of plot developments, especially when it comes to keep tabs on the show's style. Enjoy.

Shirley Maclaine: Downton Abbey, Hitchcock Slang and Peter Sellers' Aura

And speaking of Bernie, it gave me an excuse, I mean opportunity, to talk to Shirley Maclaine, who plays a wealthy, mean-spirited widow opposite Jack Black's guileless mortician. Even better, the A.V. Club's "Random Roles" format let me quiz her on her past triumphs, including the beyond-brilliant Some Came Running, as well as her experiences with Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis. Did I ask about her role on the upcoming third season of Downton Abbey? I sure did.

Paradise Regained: Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky and the Saga of the West Memphis Three

And speaking of long-simmering interests, I've been following the saga of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley, Jr., who eventually became known as the West Memphis Three, since the initial release of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. It was almost surreal to sit in a screening room nearly 20 years later with the WM3, only recently freed from prison, and the filmmakers who'd played an instrumental role in getting them out. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which is now airing on HBO, is more a capstone to a collective masterwork than a great film in its own right, but that it exists is a tribute to Berlinger and Sinofsky's extraordinary dedication, which I was more than happy to talk up for the Los Angeles Times. 

Bonus! My 2004 interview with Berlinger and Sinofsky on their excellent documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and with Berlinger on the subject of his less-excellent foray into feature filmmaking: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. 

Let Me Down Easy's Anna Deavere Smith on Healthcare, Nurse Jackie and the Future of Acting

Like a lot of people I've been interviewing of late, I've been following Anna Deavere Smith's career for night on two decades (or, to be more precise, since my college girlfriend, a theatre major, hipped me to Smith's work). Furthering the sense of personal connection, her latest play, Let Me Down Easy, began with interviews at Yale New Haven Hospital, where a family member of mine was successfully treated for cancer around the same time I was learning about Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles. So it was a special thrill to get a chance to interview her for the A.V. Club, even if some of the Philistine comments are making my blood boil just a bit at the moment. (To the writer who regales us with the story of how Smith's character impersonations were ridiculed at the recent Television Critics Association meeting by audience members who compared her rigorous embodiment of her interview subjects' speech and gestures to a character on SCTV, I'm sorely tempted to respond, "That's why they write about fucking TV." But I didn't, because I'm a diplomat.) Anyway, you can see a filmed version of Let Me Down Easy on PBS beginning this evening, so judge for yourself.

Bonus! A review of the filmed version of Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles from (gulp!) 2001.

Boardwalk Empire: Guns Blazing (aka Recapping the Recaps)

If you haven't been watching Boardwalk Empire, or you bailed due to the sluggish pace of the first few episodes, you've been missing out on a what's become a very enjoyable and occasionally great show, one that's heading towards what's sure to be a gangbusters season finale on Dec. 5. Of course, I haven't been helping you keep up, what with not posting links to my Salon recaps for weeks, so let's fix that now. Beginning with this week, in reverse chronological order:

"The Emerald City"

"Belle Femme" 

"Hold Me in Paradise"

"Home"

"Family Limitation"

"Nights in Ballygran"

"Anastasia"

"Broadway Limited"

"The Ivory Tower"

"Pilot"

 

Boardwalk Empire, 'Nights in Ballygran': When Irish Eyes are Blearing

 

More catchup: My Salon review of Sunday's Boardwalk Empire, in which the widow Schroeder and Agent Van Alden debate the merits of Prohibition and St. Patrick's Day is dreaded by Nucky Thompson. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: If you've been put off by the show's slow pace, now is the time to catch up, as the voluminous setup is starting to pay off big-time.

Boardwalk Empire, 'Anastasia': Time to Play Catch-Up

It's been obvious since the beginning that Terence Winter and the writers of Boardwalk Empire have been playing the long game, front-loading the series with sometimes clunky exposition and character introductions in order to get their epic story into motion. With the fourth episode, "Anastasia," those preparations start to pay off, as I detail in my Salon recap. If you haven't been watching, now would be a good time to start, in preparation for the show's feature-length sixth episode. As per my recapping protocol, I'm not watching ahead, but the fact that HBO is willing to cede an extra half-hour of airtime for the season's midpoint more or less guarantees big things are afoot.

Boardwalk Empire, 'Broadway Limited': Meet Chalky White

I've got plans tonight that have nothing to do with television, so this'll be as short as can be. My recap of Boardwalk Empire episode three, "Broadway Limited," is now up at Salon, in which the piper comes calling for Jimmy Darmody and we get our long-awaited introduction to dapper bootlegger Chalky White (Michael Kenneth Williams). Enjoy.

Boardwalk Empire, "Ivory Tower": Cooking With Gas, on a Low Flame

My week two recap of Boardwalk Empire is now up at Salon. (At least for the next several weeks, they'll be up immediately after the first east coast airing, whether or not I get around to linking to them then.) The show is a little steadier on its feet post-pilot, with Terence Winter's old Sopranos colleague Tim Van Patten taking the monocle and jodhpurs from Martin Scorsese. That means fewer flash-freezes and temporal leaps, but also a lot more solid characterization. The show still feels pedantic in its period detail, tacking signifiers like a Ku Klux Klan recruit handing out flyers on the boardwalk onto the beginning and the end of scenes, but then that was a fault of Mad Men's early episodes as well. (Look! Sally's playing with a dry-cleaning bag! They don't clean up after picnics! Oh tempora, o mores!) But the show still feels like it hasn't found its focus. I let HBO's screener DVD play halfway into next week's episode while I was doing some chores, and found that a character I'd assumed to be mere window dressing was the subject of his own scene, which is part of the problem: There are so many characters to maneuver into place that it still feels like we're engaged in an act of faith, with the consequences for not paying it off growing steeper each week. A lot of the substance is engaging on its own — although sweet Jesus did they rip off The Remains of the Day this week — but a better sense of where we're going would make the journey seem a whole lot shorter.

Boardwalk Empire, "Pilot": Welcome to Nucky's

The first of my weekly Boardwalk Empire recaps is up at Salon, where I take a gander at the pilot episode of HBO's costly and heavily promoted new series, directed by a scrappy young tyke named Marty Scorsese. Even on the low-quality DVDs sent out in advance (grrr), the scope of the production is stunning; $5 million was spent on the recreation of the Atlantic City boardwalk, circa 1920, alone. But still and all, it's a pilot, which means that there are lots of scenes that essentially consist of characters introducing themselves to one another and explaining things only the audience needs explained. (My friend Noel Murray nailed it with this only slightly exaggerated dialogue snippet: “Gentleman, thanks to prohibition we’ll be able to charge more for illegal booze and we’ll all get rich! By the way, I’m the city treasurer, you’re the mayor, and that guy over there’s my brother.") Scorsese deploys an arsenal of iris-ins, freeze-frames, temporal jumps and cross-cut action sequences  — if it were any other director, the similarities to Goodfellas would constitute an inexcusable ripoff — but in essence, the point of the pilot is still to get people to tune in for the second episode. Go back some day and watch the first episode of any show you've grown to love, and you'll be surprised at how off it seems. No matter how experienced the talent (and Boardwalk creator Terence Winter is a veteran of The Sopranos), it always feels like they're just getting their feet wet. The mechanics can certainly be handled more gracefully — the Breaking Bad pilot is an object lesson in how to structure exposition that doesn't feel like exposition — but there's plenty in Boardwalk's opening salvo to merit a follow-up visit.