Category Archives: Television

True Detective and The Good Wife

Americana, Television

Sugar Cane Refinery

Sugar Cane Refinery by Richard Misrach

 Last Sunday was the finale of True Detective and the first Good Wife in several weeks. Good Wife showing times being so erratic, made watching True Detective on HBO much easier. Not that it wasn’t easy to start with, True Detective was on HBO – the adult channel – and that screams Serious television. It turned out, though, that the easy decision was the wrong decision. The last episode of True Detective has left me dissatisfied. The total was less than the sum of True Detective’s parts. I should probably say Spoiler Alert here although I don’t particularly want to talk about any plot points.

True Detective has lots to like: the photography was great, giving me a genuine sense of place; the music was superb and haunting; and the acting, by two actors I like alot, was outstanding. However, it was all to almost no avail. Michele said that True Detective was a story about telling stories, but the stories were like somebody who keeps telling us that this story is going to be great and then it turns out to be about a crushed ping pong ball à la Auntie Mame. I loved the way the scenes took place at three different, distinct times, mid nineties, early oughts, and now, but – in the end – the different times did not really add anything. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s mixing up of the times was a big factor. If the time were linear, one of the last scenes, would be when Vincent Vega got killed by Butch Coolidge. But True Detective seems to be, in the end, a buddy movie, and if the scenes were presented in a chronological order, I don’t think much would have changed.

I am not a big fan of conspiracy movies – you know, the kind where the little paperboy is killed because he saw the President kill his mistress – but I found myself hoping for it in True Detective. Nevertheless, in the end, True Detective was just about some crazy loon. Not that that couldn’t have made a good story, but everything about True Detective hinted at something bigger.

On the other hand, The Good Wife, is almost always about something bigger idea. As an aside, the producer of The Good Wife, is Ridley Scott who is one of Hollywood’d most ardent feminists – think Thelma and Louise, Ripley in Alien, or Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus – and the main character, Alicia Florrick, is the wife of the guy who is cheating (unlike True Detective in which the cheated-upon wife, played by the underused Michelle Monaghan, is just a plot device).  End aside. In Perry Mason style, every week is centered around a different court case and the cases are usually fascinating in their own right.

Often the case will turn on some cutting-edge legal or technological question. Last week, it was illegal wiretaps which turned out to be collateral damage from NSA wiretaps. There have been cases on  online currency  and the Treasury Department, a software manufacturer accused of helping the Syrian government spy on protesters, a test case to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, and an athletic doping case. All this against the backdrop of Alicia’s relationship with her husband and with her two kids and their relationship with their father. It is all fascinating stuff.

The next day, The Good Wife is still fascinating and True Detective has disappeared, like a phantasma.

Scarlett Johansson, Oxfam, and SodaStream

Sports, Television

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We have a DVR – which we often, mistakenly, call a Tivo – and we watch almost nothing live, guiltingly skipping past the commercials, so it was especially interesting to see the Super Bowl Commercials at Peter and Ophelia’s. I think I saw more commercials in three plus hours than I have seen all year, and I loved it. All the little stories done with such care. As an aside. I know that Ridley Scott and Spike Jonze got their starts doing commercials and I think Ingmar Bergman did also. End aside.

My favorite commercial was the Maserati ad with Quvenzhané Wallis. There were just so many things that I liked about it, the rift  on Beasts of the Southern Wild, the parody of – homagé to? – the GlobalHue agency’s, Imported from Detroit, Chrysler ads, and then the shock that it was a Maserati ad. The New Yorker had it as one of the worst ads while Forbes said it was the best (proof of one of my mother’s sayings, de gustibus non est disputandum). One of the commercials that I didn’t particularly like was the SodaStream ad with Scarlett Johansson.

Scarlett Johansson has a quirky acting style, often she seems to be not quite there, sort of daffily stoned but very appealing; it worked perfectly in her. Among other things, I didn’t like Scarlett telling us how hot she is and that the ad would go viral because she was sucking on a straw (not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable in a prurient way). I didn’t believe that and didn’t really believe that the resulting soda would be any good, but, then, I don’t drink soda.

Later, as I started to read about the controversy over the ad, I began to think that the ad may have actually hurt SodaStream. The SodaStream machinery is made in a factory in the West bank, built on land reclaimed by Israel after it was confiscated from Palestinians, but I didn’t know that. I only know it now because of the controversy over the ad and  Johansson. Johansson had been a Global Ambassador for Oxfam and Oxfam is very strongly against Israel’s West Bank policies. They asked her to leave Oxfam or SodaStream and she left Oxfam.

I have no insight as to why Scarlett Johansson left Oxfam, why she decided the way she did, but the dilemma itself is interesting . As an aside, she does have a Jewish mother and self identifies as being Jewish, she was probably not paid by Oxfam and paid handsomely by SodaStream, and Oxfam is the one who pressed the issue – my theory is that if someone says It’s either me or them, I’ll always go with them – so it might have been some combination of those three. End aside. Acting as  a Global Ambassador for Oxfam works both ways; Oxfam gets more publicity when Scarlett Johansson visits Dadaab, Kenya – the largest refugee camp in the world – than they would if an unknown, non-celebrity, visited and Scarlett Johansson is shown as somebody who cares.

Much of  Bono’s reputation is based on his work with organizations like Amnesty International and it is hard to believe that he would give that up to maintain his commercial relationship with Vuitton – for whom he and his wife have done ads – but Johansson gave up that part of her reputation. It was a very public decision and, in my imagination at least, she did not make it lightly. In the end, I find that a little sad.

 

Justified

Television

justified_rayboydWe watched the second episode of Season 5 of Justified last night. It is, by far, my favorite drama on TV. I’m not sure drama is the right word but comedy doesn’t fit either. The program is partially written by and based on a book – and, more importantly, characters – by Elmore Leonard who wrote movie sources like Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, and 3:10 to Yuma.

Leonard had a stroke in July of last year and died a month later so I am not sure how that will reflect on the coming season of Justified, hopefully everybody will energize their inner Elmore and it will continue to be good. Graham Yost – Speed with Sandra Bullock in her first major role, Broken Arrow, and Boontown, a short-lived L.A. cop program that Michele and I wished had lived longer – is now the writer and producer.

What I like about Justified are the great characters, the language, and the plot twists that we didn’t see coming but look obvious in retrospect. The hero is  Raylan Givens, a US Marshall that is not very good at relationships including that of his estranged wife who has left town with his daughter. The bad guy is Boyd Crowder who does have a good relationship with his wife and is easily the smartest, most morally ambiguous and, interestingly bad guy on TV. The third main character is Harlan County, Kentucky, a way-past-its-peak coal mining area that plays similar to Winter’s Bone with Jennifer Lawrence.

Check it out on FX.

Mad Men and Packard

Television

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First you write for yourself, then you write for others, then you write for money. Somebody famous.

Michele and I watched the last episode of Mad Men -Season 6 – again last night. I like watching movies twice; somehow, I am not as caught up in the moment and it is easier to follow. On TV programs – that sounds so archaic – I have watched parts of Justified more than once but never Mad Men. My loss.

As a car guy, the last scene in the last episode of the season, really struck me. It didn’t jump out so strongly that I saw it the first time around but it did jump out on the second viewing. Don is looking down at his daughter and behind her is an old, seemingly faded, circa 1958, Packard.  It is just perfect. A touch that most people will never notice, a touch that the writer must have written in for himself.

Everything in a movie or a TV Drama is done by somebody for some reason. Everything everybody is saying, everything somebody is wearing, every background, has been planned to say something; about the character, about the situation. In the movies – and I’m including TV here – nobody just pulls a sweater out of the closet in the dark and wears it in a scene, even if the scene is somebody pulling a sweater out of the closet in the dark and putting it on. No director ever said Oh, who cares? Just stand by that wall and I’ll take the shot. So, almost by definition – I guess – everything on the screen has meaning. Including a 1958 Packard. Especially a 1958 Packard.

Packards were great cars – they may have been better than Cadillacs during the early 30’s – but the company went through a slow decline and stopped making cars in 1956 or so. Studebaker, also in decline, bought Packard – or their name – and, for a couple of years, produced a Packard that was just a tarted up Studebaker President with the Packard name pasted on the hood.

That poor, sorry, car behind Don’s daughter, was an almost departed Studebaker, all dressed up and pretending to be a Packard. It makes me want to go back and watch the whole season over again.

Skyfall, Hashima Island, and how do they know?

Film, Television

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In the movie, Skyfall, James Bond ends up – I guess he doesn’t actually end up there because it is in the middle of the movie – on an abandoned island off the coast of Macau. The island, at first, does not seem like it can be real but as the scene(s?) go on, it just looks too good to be fake. As it turns out, the island is real. It is an abandoned island off the coast of Japan named Hashima Island. It was originally built – bought and colonized – by Mitsubishi, in 1890, to house workers working on nearby underwater coal mines (and I don’t want to even imagine how that must have worked). Later, as Japan moved away from coal, Mitsubishi abandoned its island leaving me to wonder how the James Bond people ever found it.

Maybe they had a scene on an abandoned island and went searching for one, or, maybe, the local Chamber of Commerce is peddling the island as a great place to shoot a picture. I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge knowledge of the world but it shocks me to find out that an island like  Hashima exists and I have never even heard of it. I had no idea that it existed or that the Japanese mined coal – underwater! – near Nagasaki.

One of the best people to find great locations like this was George Lucas and Star Wars was filled with real locations, from Golden Canyon in Death Valley to Ksar Hadada in Tunisia to Temple IV at Tikal in Guatemala.

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I have been to Death Valley – duh!  I have probably bee more times than I have been anywhere else away from home – and I have been to Tikal twice but, in 1977 I had never heard of Tikal and I hadn’t heard of Ksar Hadada until about an hour ago (although, at sometime in the distant past, I did know that some scenes were shot in Tunisia which is how I found Ksar Hadada).

On the otherhand, faking the use of exotic places is probably more usual than actually using them. Southern California is an incredibly varied place, both in terrine and culture. As an aside, the California Title 24 building standards which set building standards to cut back on energy consumption is based on 16 climate zones found around the state. All 16 zones are found in Los Angeles County, from Coastal to Above Timber line. End aside.

Justified, one of Michele and my favorite programs, which realistically takes place in Harlan County Tennessee, is filmed in its entirety in and around Los Angeles County (except for the opening credits). The story line is culturally Harlan County but the terrine is SoCal.

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