As protests continue to rage over the death of George Floyd, Black social justice leaders as well as scholars urge people wanting to make a change to educate themselves on systemic racism through books, conversations, movies, and documentaries, according to ABC. Doctor Creshema Murray, founding fellow at The Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, published her first book in 2018, Leadership Through The Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power. “Television and film is a way for us to disconnect from what’s happening in the real world, but it’s also a tool for us to understand,” says Doctor Murray.
Tag: television
James Gandolfini wanted “The Sopranos” to be a movie before passing away in 2013
Vincent Pastore, who played Salvatore Bonpensiero on HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007), told The Sunday Times series star James Gandolfini wanted to adapt the show to film before he died of a heart attack at fifty-one years old on vacation in Italy, according to Metro. Pastore says showrunner David Chase ended the series ambiguously on purpose so as to open The Sopranos up for a movie. Chase describes the “genius” actor as one of the greatest of all time, Gandolfini having won three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as a Golden Globe for his performance as conflicted mob boss Tony Soprano.
Michael Biehn cast in the second season of Disney+’s “The Mandalorian” (2019-)
Michael Biehn has been cast in the second season of Disney+’s The Mandalorian (2019-) as a bounty hunter from the titular Din Djarin’s (Pedro Pascal) past, according to /Film. A James Camron alumnus, Biehn has starred in The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), as well as The Abyss (1989), in addition to action movie classics such as George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993). Giancarlo Esposito is expected to reprise his role, Rosario Dawson will play fan-favorite Ahsoka Tano, and Bill Burr, Carl Weathers, and Gina Carano are all set to return; Baby Yoda (officially called “The Child”) is back also.
Updates released on second “Simpsons” film
Al Jean, showrunner for 20th Century’s The Simpsons (1989-) as well as a producer behind David Silverman’s The Simpsons Movie (2007), says the talks for another potential spinoff film are “in the very, very early stages,” according to New Music Express. Series creator Matt Groening said at D23 that he thinks the movie will happen, and Jean added that the Simpsons team “would love to do one for Disney, but it’s not like it’s happening next week or next year.” In a new statement, Jean made clear that any new film would be a standalone work, rather than a sequel.
Amazon Prime review: HBO’s “Sharp Objects” (2018)
The 2012 novel Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn should have won the Pulitzer Prize, or, at the very least, a National Book Award, for its postmodern black comedy of manners on marriage and relationships.
David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of the same title, from a script by Flynn herself, was likewise snubbed at that year’s Academy Awards.
Flynn, a hybrid between Stephen King and Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Missouri’s answer to King’s Maine, debuted in 2006 with Sharp Objects, and mainstream literature as well as popular genre fiction have found a lovechild in her, too.
If you don’t know what to watch next, HBO’s Sharp Objects (2018) is available on Amazon Prime.
Marti Nixon’s psychological thriller miniseries was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series of Movie for Amy Adams, Outstanding Supporting Actress for Patricia Clarkson, and Outstanding Limited Series.
Flynn herself executive produced.
Recently released out of a Chicago hospital for self-mutilation, alcoholic crime journalist Camille Preaker (Adams) is assigned to cover multiple child murders in her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri.
The visit forces her to reunite with her estranged mother, Adora Crellin (Clarkson), a small-town socialite.
As the mystery unfolds, the troubled Camille finds herself losing the battle with the demons from her past.
Camille is one of the great antiheroes in the Golden Age of Television, as desperately needed a woman for this archetype as Norma Bates.
Across a pseudo-feminist landscape of problematic superwomen who do not so much empower women with humanization as pander to their pocketbooks for corporate fat cats who run Hollywood from the other side of the glass ceiling, Adams’s turn is a breath of fresh air.
She is as flawed as any noir protagonist, but not at the expense of an ethical characterization.
What makes her a sympathetic leading lady are her faults, for she is as much a victim of Wind Gap’s violent misogyny (which is symptomatic of the slave state’s Confederate history) as the girls whose murders she’s compromising her own mental health to help investigate.
A contemporary Southern Gothic murder mystery in the same vein as William Faulkner and Daphne du Maurier, the quasi-Italian neorealistic setting calls to mind the juxtaposition of ancient Roman artifacts against postwar modernization in the aestheticism of Federico Fellini.
The production constructs a morose tone through the overexposed lighting of the cinematography and the suffocating diegesis of the soundtrack, provoking the same numbing mood as the traumatized main character between her broken interactions and dark flashbacks.
The Crellin family is the most dysfunctional this side of Tennessee Williams, even though they’re just as picture perfect. Anchoring this dichotomous image is Clarkson.
Adora recalls Blanche DuBois in the tradition of Scarlett O’Hara herself, Vivien Leigh, the aging Southern belle in a changing world, using her fading beauty to dress up the ugliness of Southern American culture in moth-eaten clothes.
Clarkson is an icy Hitchcock blonde where Adams is a psychologically tortured noir antihero.
But a filmic adaptation of Flynn’s book might have been stronger.
The episodic format of the miniseries pads some scenes for runtime until they’re filler, with subplots from secondary characters who pale in comparison to Camille’s character study and the murder mystery as a framing device.
Granted, at two and a half hours, Gone Girl still makes a meal of its source material, but not one frame of the final product belongs on the cutting room floor; the same can’t be said about Sharp Objects.
But if Sharp Objects is guilty of any sin, it’s being too much of a good thing.
Some would call it and its writer misogynistic, and the case could be made against the “false accusation” narrative in Gone Girl (though one could argue it’s a critique of “white woman gone missing” feminism), but Sharp Objects is not unsympathetic toward Camille, or even Adora.
To the critical viewer, it is more an indictment of its setting than its cast (like many Great American Writers, Gillian Flynn trained in the unsentimental, lowest-common-denominator mass appeal of commercial journalistic storytelling).
She is possessed of a Hitchcockian pragmatism for dolling up such universal themes of the human condition as sex and death with timeless craftsmanship and mastery, casting all her Tarantinoesque pulp fiction through the same literary lens as her masterpiece.
Netflix review: AMC’s “Better Call Saul” (2015-)
To spin off AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013) is to ask lightning to strike twice.
Vince Gilligan captured that lightning in a bottle with his masterpiece, and he corked it at its zenith, when the business of television characteristically pressures showrunners to push series past their expiration dates until every possible penny can be squeezed out of them.
It is only fitting for the network to ask Gilligan to open the bottle back up again and release some more of the lightning that lit up the sky on AMC, but even a genius of Gilligan’s caliber would be hard-pressed to cast a new spell with the same magic as he did the first time.
If you don’t know what to watch to watch next, AMC’s Better Call Saul (2015-) is available to stream on Netflix.
It has been nominated for twenty-three Primetime Emmy Awards over the course of its run, and the series premiere set the record for highest-rated scripted premiere in basic cable. Creators Gilligan and Peter Gould also executive produce the crime drama.
Set in Albuquerque, 2002, Bob Odenkirk reprises his role as Jimmy McGill, a con artist struggling to legitimize himself as an attorney under the shadow of his successful older brother, Chuck McGill (Michael McKean), with the support of love interest Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn).
Meanwhile, retired police officer Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) first involves himself in the Salamanca cartel via drug lord Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).
All of this culminates toward Jimmy’s transformation into Saul Goodman, with a framing device of flash-forwards to his life after Breaking Bad as a Cinnabon manager in Omaha named Gene.
If Breaking Bad is a tragedy with comedic undertones, then Better Call Saul is a comedy with tragic undertones. This complementariness is the shaft through which Better Call Saul mines from the mythos of its parent show while at the same time standing on its own two feet.
It justifies its existence in its own right, without any opportunistic, exploitative excess.
For that reason, fans of Breaking Bad may not necessarily be fans of Better Call Saul.
The respective compositions may reach the same production value – cinematographer Arthur Albert shoots TV’s two most cinematic programs on location in a sweepingly photogenic New Mexico – but they sing with two different (yet harmonistic) voices.
Better Call Saul is much slower-paced than the addictive, bingeworthy Breaking Bad, with less explosive payoffs.
Lovingly cut montages of mundane moments abound, none of which are filler, but all of which may be hard to swallow for someone expecting more of the same from Breaking Bad.
In a similar vein, Jimmy McGill’s descent into Saul Goodman is as sociopathic as Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) into Heisenberg, if not as violent, and that is where the text’s brilliance flickers.
Jimmy is such an adept conman, he could scam the uncritical thinker into sympathizing with him.
He ruins reputations, careers, and lives over his deception and manipulation, no matter how zippy his one-liners are, and there ought to be no straightening his crooked path in our minds, because Jimmy’s own rationalization further evinces his antisocial personality.
Warts and all, Better Call Saul is a character study of an antihero as great as any other in the Golden Age of TV. In fact, it’s in a class all its own because of its dark humor.
We may have yet to see how it ends, but, in Gilligan’s hands, who engineered the most perfect series finale of all time for Breaking Bad, it only does what every worthwhile spinoff should and gives you more to look forward to.
“Cahiers du Cinéma” lists David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017) as greatest film of the decade
Cahiers du Cinéma, the oldest French-language film magazine in the world as well as one of the most prestigious movie publications in any tongue, has named David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) as the greatest film of the 2010s, according to IndieWire. Lynch is the only American filmmaker to appear on their end-of-the-decade top-ten list, but it has ignited a debate over whether Twin Peaks: The Return, which was written as a single feature script, should be counted as film or television, since it aired on Showtime over eighteen episodes. André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca founded Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951, and writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut would go on to mold the French New Wave, with Éric Rohmer serving as editor in 1957.
Philip Pullman defends Chris Weitz’s “The Golden Compass” (2007)
Philip Pullman, the author behind the His Dark Materials young adult fantasy series, took to Twitter this morning to speak up for Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass (2007), an adaptation of his 1995 novel of the same name, according to The Independent. Only forty-two percent of reviews aggregated through Rotten Tomatoes for the Nicole Kidman vehicle are positive, and its underperformance scrapped the two planned sequels, but Pullman, praising the cast (and singling out star Dakota Blue Johnson), says they had not enough time. The televised interpretation, BBC One’s His Dark Materials (2019-), is a critical as well as popular success.
Amazon Prime review: HBO’s “Chernobyl” (2019)
Between AMC’s Mad Men (2007-2015) and HBO’s Chernobyl (2019), Jared Harris specializes in playing characters who meet a very specific fate.
If you don’t know what to watch next, Chernobyl is available on Amazon Prime. Showrunner Craig Mazin also wrote the historical drama, with Johan Renck directing. Both of them won Primetime Emmy Awards for their efforts, as well as Outstanding Limited Series.
The crux of the miniseries is the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Pripyat, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The characters encompass the bureaucrats behind the scenes of the meltdown in addition to its aftermath on the ground.
First responders, volunteers, and miners digging a tunnel under the compromised reactor are all spoken for here.
This USSR fable is altogether Hollywood in its presentation, not only for its production value, but also its characterization.
It is a post-September 11 American imagery to cast the firefighters on the scene, their health forever tainted from their own self-sacrifice, failed by the very government they serve.
Moreover, such dramatic democratization calls to mind Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958) as popularized through George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), with commoners leading us across this epic narrative of institutional corruption and environmental apocalypse.
The aestheticism hums with an intoxicating foreboding as punishing as the decay which both literally and figurative eats away at the characters.
This verisimilitude bridges the temporal and geographic gulf between the Soviet Union and the contemporary United States, and, with the political and natural degradation facing us today, the themes of the show are allegorical in their implications.
Bearing witness to the ruination of these historical figures may make the audience wish to turn away, but its import to our own cultural trajectory is impossible to ignore.
It has always struck this critic as silly, though, when English-speaking actors play non-English-speaking roles (especially when it’s accented). In our shrinking world, the network had the resources to cast Eastern European players.
Modern viewers are media-savvy enough to read subtitles.
But it can be read as a textualization of the rhyme this team is conducting between East and West, between past and present, a way to set the tragedy in a world which more closely resembles our own.
Hulu review: ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” (2004-2012)
When the First Lady of the United States references your series for a White House Correspondents’ Dinner joke, you know you’ve got an instant classic on your hands.
If you don’t know what to watch next, ABC’s Desperate Housewives (2004-2012) is available to stream on Hulu. Marc Cherry’s mystery comedy-drama was a ratings juggernaut over the course of its run. It is the longest-running hourlong television show with all-female leads.
Set on Wisteria Lane, the primetime soap opera is narrated by Mary Alice Young (Brenda Strong) after she commits suicide.
The ensemble cast are Mary Alice’s friends and neighbors: the recently divorced girl next door, Susan Mayer (Teri Hatcher); the overwhelmed mother, Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman); the WASP-y Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross); and the adulterous Gabrielle Solis (Eva Longoria).
Each season turns along a central mystery at its axis (the inaugural season being the circumstances which led up to Mary Alice’s death) as these four titular housewives come to grips with love, motherhood, and friendship.
Like Showtime’s Dexter (2006-2013) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019), Desperate Housewives should’ve ended after its fifth season, but went on for eight instead. The first five mysteries are the most bingeworthy.
After the infamous time jump between the fourth and fifth seasons, it holds itself to be self-evident that Cherry could only develop these characters so much.
Visiting them five years into their future is a gimmick which sticks the landing for a staff of writers whose reputation precedes them for setpieces and cliffhangers, but it’s one that cannot be outdone.
Susan, Lynette, Bree, and Gaby become not who we know them to be when we initially befriend them, which is organic to their dramatic trajectories, but they begin to feel like strangers in the final three seasons.
These last seasons fail not because they’re bad, but because they’re forgettable, which a soap never should be. The sixth-season “witness protection program” twist is yawningly predictable, and this reviewer can’t recall what even happens in the seventh and eighth seasons.
Not every program can be AMC’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013), quitting while they’re still ahead, and Desperate Housewives is in the business of generating viewership, not crafting high art, which it does well, even if it’s what’s keeping it on life support past its expiration date.
If true genius in entertainment is to be found in knowing one’s limitations, then a visit to the campy, twisty, addictive fun of Wisteria Lane won’t overstay its welcome as long as you don’t plan on moving in there.
Life After Death 