AMC's The Prisoner: Better Than You Might Think

AMC hit it out of the park with its first two dramas—Mad Men and Breaking Bad, respectively—so that fact alone warranted checking out The Prisoner, a 3-part, 6-hour mini-series it aired a week after the third season finale of Mad Men. But the reviews weren’t good and too many people were too attached to the original show—a 1967 British drama considered one of the greatest TV shows of all time—to let any of its flaw slide. Still, I tuned in. My thoughts? Yes, it’s just as dull as the reviewers said, completely lacking in charm and a sense of humor (I love surrealism... but I think it works better with a sense of fun). And yet... it’s actually about something – and for that reason alone I can’t entirely dismiss it.

Initially I just watched the first hour and gave up out of boredom. Despite how great Ian McKellan was and how good the series looked, with its expensive productive design and stylish editing and cinematography, it wasn't enough to make me want to invest another 5 hours into. I’ve thought Jim Caveizel affective in some of his movie work, but here he just wasn’t bringing anything to the table. He was the boring, exasperated leading man, made oddly all the worse by how... generically good-looking he is. And I didn’t plan on going back to watch the other 5 hours, but then I caught a good article about it Thursday morning. With the series over, HitFix’s Daniel Feinberg gave his spoiler-heavy thoughts on the finale. He called the series “very intriguing, if not wholly successful in its execution.”

Feinberg talks about the big reveal in the mini-series' final hour. He observes that the series’ mysterious setting—called The Village—was “a psych experiment which, we're told, left people feeling better.” The Village was “the ultimate placebo, but it's reflective of a society in which people prefer to handle their pain and emotional troubles in any way other than actually feeling that pain and facing those troubles.” Feinberg continues: “The Village is Second Life. The Village is World of Warcraft. The Village is Facebook or Twitter.” This intrigued me enough to give the show a second chance.

And while I ultimately don’t feel it was completely effective, it was much better than I originally thought. Yes, it still needs a sense of fun injected into it, but like I said, it’s actually about something and it’s completely original and completely relevant to our crazy, fast-paced, information-heavy world. I love the revelation that the New York scenes, which I guess we’re initially led to believe are flashbacks that pre-date the scenes that take place in The Village, are actually happening simultaneously with each other! That everyone in The Village is actually living their lives out in the real world, but just on another level of consciousness (how fucked up is that?). I love that The Village is inside real-world Ian McKellan’s wife’s head and that she lives in a constant rattled, sleep-like state. And I love the ending, with Caviezel’s dumbass decision and damaging sense of idealism. He takes over for #2 thinking that he’ll make The Village work, that he’ll do it better. But we know different. Feinberg talks about the final scene’s use of The Beach Boy’s “I Know There’s An Answer.” But this ending made me think of another song: The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

So for that I give the series a pass and declare it fully worth watching. Whether I'll ever go back to it, however, is another thing altogether. I don't know if my love for the series' final hour of crazyness makes up for the dull (though otherwise fine) first 5 hours.

Oh yeah, and I’m finally going to check out the original series. I’ve put it off for way too long...

Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats

George Clooney has a life-time pass in my books. Even if he starts making sub-par films and working with low-rent directors in his later years, I’ll still be there. And this is because in my first years as a serious film fan, starting in 1998 and well into the early-aughts, Clooney was in at least one interesting, intelligent movie a year. Since then his track record speaks for itself: good movie after good movie, with even the clunkers being interesting and worth a look (see Intolerable Cruelty and The Good German). Sadly, The Men Who Stare At Goats is one of these clunkers – interesting and worth a look, funny and completely original, but ultimately a movie I wanted to like more than I did.

My biggest problem with the movie is probably its tone. I think it’s too goofy and too broad, and especially to the point where, when it tries for real drama, for some significance, it completely fails. There’s a quiet moment mid-way through the movie where Clooney apologizes to a kind Iraqi man for the American arrogance and ignorance of two US security companies whose rivalry resulted in a street fight in an Iraqi market square. I didn’t catch the sincerity of this moment until it had completely passed. Similarly, I don’t think the emotional climax of the film, where Clooney finds a kind of closure-cum-redemption for his having once killed a goat with his mind, works as effectively as I think the filmmakers—and the heavy-handed music—intended. I think this film would have been better suited as a comedic drama then a dramatic comedy. A more serious look at goofy, new-agey military programs, with a subtler comedic approach, would have made for a more balanced, more significant movie.

But problems aside, it’s still a good movie. It has quite a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments, and Clooney and McGregor are incredibly likable in their respective roles. In fact, everyone is good here, including the always reliable Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. And the film is a complete original; there aren’t many movies that cover this same territory. All of which only accentuates for me just how much of a shame it is that the film doesn’t come together more than it actually does. And anyway, I've still got two more Clooney films to look forward to in the coming weeks, with The Fantastic Mr. Fox out this week and Up In The Air in theaters in December...

Rediscovering A Great Film: Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear

So I very randomly watched Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear this week, and fell in love with it in a way I hadn’t before. Previously I dismissed it as good, competent work-man-Scorsese; a good, solid mainstream film that didn’t reach the peaks of the powerhouse director’s more prominent artistic works, like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. And it still is that—a solid, mainstream work-man picture—but I’m no longer as dismissive. It’s got a complexity and an intensity to it that most mainstream thrillers could only hope for, with Robert DeNiro at the center of everything great about it.

What ever happened to this DeNiro? The current DeNiro, even when he's not working on middling mainstream comedies, hasn't had this kind of intensity in a long time. This is probably his last great great performance. I have profound respect for his work in Heat and Casino, which both came out a few years later, but even those performances pale next to this one. DeNiro is scary in this movie. He’s unstoppable in the same way that Terminator and the T-1000 are in the Terminator, only more intense because he's actually a believable, real-life human being. No obstacle gets in the way of the revenge he wants; neither physical pain nor the law. And he’s just as scary intellectually as he is physically.  Once an illiterate redneck, he now has conversations with Nolte's daughter about classic works of literature and "roman a clefs."

And Nick Nolte is good too, as the man DeNiro seeks revenge against. It would have been easy to cast someone weaker and less intense in this role, like a Tom Hanks (bad example, I know) -- someone who could have cowered more in the face of such a menacing threat. It also would have been easy to write the family all as complete innocents having to face off against DeNiro’s pure evil. But as this is a Scorsese picture, he takes none of those easy routes. Nolte’s character is slightly morally corrupt – he was neglectful as a professional while working as DeNiro’s court-appointed attorney, and he’s cheating on his wife as the film opens. What this allows the DeNiro character to do is something even more menacing than simply stalking and threatening the family – he manipulates and attacks them by subtly exposing and contributing to the family's already-existent fault lines.

It also has one of my favourite movie posters of all time. This image says so much about the movie: the lightning cracking eerily over the houseboat and seascape, DeNiro’s hateful eyes looking over the family photo that’s symbolically ripping apart... It's a powerful image. I remember seeing this poster every day in middle school, hung up on the wall of the drama classroom.

So, my conclusion? This is an amazing piece of work from one of the masters, and the last great collaboration from one of the greatest director/actor-relationships in film history.

Sons Of Anarchy: The In-Progress 2nd Second

Sons of Anarchy on F/X was a real surprise last season. I never would have expected to fall head over heels for a show about a biker gang, something that on first glance may have seemed more about kewl violence and blue-collar machismo. But it definitely won me over, and especially with the series’ eighth episode, “The Pull”, with the shocking sequence of events that followed FBI Agent/stalker Josh Kohn attacking Tara in her home. From there on I was in love. I loved the somber closing montage at the end of “Hell Followed,” set to a sad, instrumental version of CCR’s “Prodigal Son.” And the finale! The first season finale, “The Revelator,” was one of my favourite hours of television all season, perfectly setting up a second season I wanted to start watching immediately after the episode ended. It set lead character Jax Teller in a direction he’d been heading towards all season, angry and driven and on a mission to reform the Sons biker club onto a straighter, more righteous path.

And the second season, which premiered in early September, hasn't disappointed in the least. If anything the series has become more intense and more focused.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The series is about the Sons of Anarchy, or SAMCRO, a California biker gang in the small town of Charming. It’s loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with Jax (Charlie Hunnam), the young, reflective club VP, in the Prince Hamlet role, and his step-father, Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), the current bull-headed President of the gang, in the King Claudius role. The series began with Jax finding a manuscript written by his diseased father—a co-founder of SAMCRO—called "The Life and Death of Sam Crow: How the Sons of Anarchy Lost Their Way." As a result of reading this script Jax began questioning the direction of the club and butting heads more and more with acting-President Clay.

The second season introduced two new storylines: Jax finding the club a new, legitimate business venture (porn), and the introduction of a new villain in Ethan Zobelle (Adam Arkin), the head of the League of American Nationalists, a white separatist gang who attempt to force SAMCRO out of Charming. The first episode of the season started off with a bang with the introduction of this new threat, and it hasn't let up since. One problem this has led to, however, is that the new (and admittedly awesome) frenetic pace has taken away from the more day-to-day inside-a-real-a-biker-gang type stories we saw more of last season.

Another criticism I have: I often wonder if Jax is too smart. It's surprising how someone of his young age and limited experience can know so much (“Up in hospitals, bounty hunters will pay admins to call in names of nefarious types”) or deduce the complex machinations of the show's different players (as in the scene in "Gilead" between him and ATF Agent Stahl). Occasionally it stretches credibility. Can it really just be explained by calling him a genius? However, its a minor complaint, as the series is good at also having Jax make the big mistakes or be completely wrong about something (like this week’s episode with him accusing Clay of burning down the porn warehouse.)

But minor criticisms aside, this has been a stellar season for the show, the highlight of which, for me, was “Gilead,” the episode where the gang was put behind bars and where Clay and Jax finally came to physical blows. This episode was dense, with a lot of plot for just one hour of television: the gang behind bars and in danger, trying to arrange for protection, Opie and Gemma on the outside, each trying to do their parts to help them, the ATF's attempts to work the crew; and that dirty, bloody fight between Clay and Jax, something so completely necessary that the other club members decided not to break it up (Bobby to the others: "They need this!"). And that bitter-sweet ending, with frustrated Jax walking the solo route, ignoring the oblivious Gemma and Tara. This episode was a minor epic for the series, and up there with "The Revelator" for me.

I can’t wait to see how the season’s remaining 3 episodes play out. My prediction: Clay and Jax will find out about what Zobelle did to Gemma and put aside their differences to take him down for good.

Auteur Rian Johnson: THE BROTHERS BLOOM and BRICK

I finally was able to watch Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom, and, wow, file it under cinematic-failures-only-genius-filmmakers-could-make (along with War Inc., Southland Tales, and Youth Without Youth). It's a whimsical story about two con artist brothers, Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), who writes and casts all their cons as if they were works of Russian literature, and Bloom (Adrien Brody), who has grown weary of the con artist game... of living "a fictional life."

The premise is fun, the cast is great, and the European locations are cool. I even liked a lot of the gags and found the relationship between the two brothers moving at points. Mark Ruffalo is charming; it's a fun performance where you never know if you can trust anything he says. But none of it is enough to get the movie off the ground. It all just feels like watered-down Wes Anderson. The tone and style and whimsy feel unoriginal and over-cooked. And the movie's constant "Is-everything-you're-watching-a-con?" flirtation with the audience grows tiring by movie's end. I never felt I could trust anything that was happening (I was even distrustful of the most sincere character in the movie, the puppy-dog-like Adrien Brody), which had the cumulative effect of wearing me down. By the final scenes I stopped caring.

But the movie was interesting enough to get me to finally check out Johnson's previous movie, Brick. The movie got considerable buzz and acclaim in 2005, which normally is all I need to give a movie a chance, but the premise of transplanting film noir dialogue and conventions into a high school setting kind of scared me at the time. It just seemed... potentially lame. It's hard enough for me to take teenagers seriously as is, let alone teenagers who talk like Humphrey Bogart. But throwing my reservations aside finally, I jumped in... and I was blown away. The buzz and the acclaim were completely justified -- this movie is cool!



Promising young actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays high school loner Brendan, who finds his ex-girlfriend dead and decides to investigate the case himself. As he explains to his friend and partner-in-crime, The Brain, "The bulls would gum it up" ("The bulls" being a colloquial-noir term for "the police"). "They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes, probably find some yeg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes. If we're doing this, I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit." Sharp dialogue. And the movie is littered with it. Great Hammett-esque lines and exchanges. And the filmmaking and the acting sell it. You don't care that these are kids, you just get caught up in the style and the intensity of it all.

And it is intense. The stylish low-budget filmmaking, the way the camera moves, the intensity of Gordon-Levitt's performance... and those fights! Levitt's character takes and gives a lot of beatings through-out the movie, all of which are brutal and thrilling to watch.

In the end, I couldn't tell you exactly what happened, plot-wise. Labyrinthine plots are a signature of noir films, which are always more about atmosphere, style, and coolness anyway. Three things this movie has in spades.

One final note I have to say about Brick is that watching it made The Brothers Bloom all the more disappointing. I immediately wanted to see more of this writer/director's work. Something with a similar kind of intensity and originality -- but all I had was Bloom (It's odd how a director who won an "Originality of Vision" award for his first film could make such a flaccid, unoriginal-feeling second film like Bloom). I just hope Johnson's future work (IMDB says his next film is called Looper) is more in line with Brick than Bloom. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

My Thoughts On: The Alcoholic, by Jonathan Ames

A couple weeks ago I checked out Jonathan Ames’ graphic novel from last year, The Alcoholic. Ames is the creator of HBO’s Bored To Death, my favourite new show of the 2009/2010 season. I was always curious about the book, what with it landing on so many best-books-of-2008 lists, and its connections to the HBO series only amped up my curiosity even more.

Just like in the show, Ames named the lead character "Jonathan Ames," after himself (which is so odd and cool at the same time. Why does he keep doing this?). But the book feels much more autobiographical than the TV series. A quote inside the book by Neil Gaimen puts it best when describing it as “painfully-honest-even-if-we-don’t-know-where-all-the-fictional-joins-are memoir-cum-fiction.” Similar to the real Ames, he’s a balding Brooklyn writer. However the Alcoholic-Ames is a writer of pulpy detective novels, while the real-life Ames writes comedy novels; the Alcoholic-Ames' parents died while he was a teenager, while the real-life Ames' parents are still very much alive; and on and on. Regardless of what’s real and what’s not, everything in the book feels real, with the kind of painful and awkward experiences that could only come from someone who has lived some version of them (Example: The teenage, heterosexual Ames’ awkward homosexual experiences with his best friend).

So what are my thoughts on the book? Well, I’m not as enamoured with it as I am with Bored To Death, I guess because BTD is aided by glossy filmmaking and the charisma and talent of the three lead actors. The story is made up of a series of vignettes in the life of an apparent alcoholic: his experiences with friends and family and his career from his teenage years to his mid-life years a little after 9/11 as a balding, Brooklynite writer. The series seems kind of formless, with, basically, one thing happening after another until it just kind of ends. The introduction of 9/11 into the story comes out of nowhere–which I guess shouldn’t be a criticism because the real life incident actually came out of nowhere–but I wish it had more of a thematic or literary connection to the events than it did in the story. But I have to say, the book was never boring, and the characters’ experiences and feelings felt just genuine and interesting and personal enough to be keep me engaged from beginning to end. It’s a pretty fluid read; never a dull moment.

It’s also just plain interesting if you're a fan of Bored To Death. The Alcoholic-Ames character, for example, writes the kind of pulpy books that inspire the Bored-To-Death Ames to take up his double life. Or there's the presence of a comic artist in Bored-To-Death Ames’ life, clearly inspired by real-life Ames' association with The Alcoholic artist Dean Haspiel (I’ll give Haspiel the benefit of the doubt that the Zach Galifinakis character is in no way based on him). Haspiel is the real artist of the odd, hilarious artwork that Galifinakis draws every week on the show. And at least one scene in the show reminded me of a scene in the comic: when Bored-To-Death Ames outruns the Russian mobsters in the series’ 5th episode, he lies down underneath the Brighton Beach docks and begins frantically burying himself in the sand. In the comic, Ames narrates part of the story while on-the-run and buried from-neck-to-toe in the sand under the docks.

Overall: a good book, a good, interesting supplementary read for fans of Bored To Death... but nothing especially great.

Bored To Death: Favourite New Show

Last Sunday's episode of HBO's Bored To Death--the series' 6th episode--solidified it for me: it's my favorite new show in a long time. The series is about a bored, loser-ish writer, Jonathan Ames (not-so-coincidentally named after the creator of the series, novelist Jonathan Ames), who, after breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to advertise his services as a unlicensed private detective on Craig's List. "I've been reading so many of these detective novels that I know what to do," he reasons. The series mixes his misadventures as a low-rent PI with his life as a Brooklynite writer.

I didn't think the series started off very strong, with a weak first couple of episodes, but the strengths of the three lead actors--Jason Swartzmann as Ames, Zach Galifinakis as Ames' comic book artist friend, and Ted Danson as Ames' rich, eccentric, magazine-owner boss--kept me on board. The third episode, "The Case of the Missing Screenplay," was the first hint for me of something greater, with Ames having to retrieve a screenplay from the office of the father of an under-aged girl he almost slept with. Especially great was the scene at the end of the episode with the father, a psychiatrist, hilariously deconstructing the psychology of Ames' character in a rapid-fire fashion. "Next issue," he'd bluntly intone after completely solving the last one.

But it was the last two episodes, “The Case Of The Lonely White Dove” and “The Case Of The Beautiful Blackmailer,” that completely sold me on the show. Ames’ puppy-dog-like pride over having given the blackmailer two orgasms, Galifanakis’ lackadaisical role as Ames' sidekick, the pot-fueled conversations between Galifinakis and Danson while Ames' life is in danger ("I'm on marijuana minutes")... this show is hilarious and fun. But on top of that, it's also occasionally enlightening and moving, as in the closing scene with the Russian lothario in the 5th episode: "Goodbye my new friend. I don't know if I'll ever see you again. But I hope your heart is broken many times because it means you will have loved many times."

The 6th episode also ended with a new story development, Danson becoming aware of Ames' double-life and wanting Ames and Galifinakis' character to do a comic about it in his magazine.

It’s sad to think that there are only 4 more episodes left in the season! Thankfully Jonathan Ames--the real Ames, the creator--just made a cool announcement on Twitter:

RT @jonathanames okay, going off twitter for a while. have to work on the new season of #boredtodeath.