Posts Tagged ‘spoiler alert’
Gerry-Built Monday Links
* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.
* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.
* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.
* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.
* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.
* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”
* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.
* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.
And Old Lace
It looks like NASA has discovered [SPOILER], which is pretty big news, even if it doesn’t quite live up to more eager speculation.
‘Tomorrowland’
Spoilers!
As I was hashing out on Twitter this afternoon (1, 2, 3, 4) I feel as though last night’s Mad Men was a fine ending to a truly superb season that challenged the best seasons of The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire. I think I may be bucking the Internet consensus on this; here’s a representative negative take from Amanda Marcotte:
The main problem with the episode is that it, frankly, sucked. Besides the abortion cop-out,* it wasn’t even really the plot or the ideas or the character development. At the end of the day, it was the pacing and the scripting, which were lazy and anvilicious. Matthew Weiner admits they just finished the episode on Wednesday, and I think that’s all you need to know about why it didn’t work. The editing was all off—the fact that they got home from California and were in his apartment in a quick cut was confusing, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how long they’d been back in New York. I realize they were trying to speed things up to capture the idea of a whirlwind courtship, but they failed. It’s not like the team behind “Mad Men” can’t do a swift and dirty episode. The end of last season was amazing. But this was just confusing.
Putting “the abortion cop-out” aside—which honestly didn’t bother me in the slightest—it seems to me that the actual point of the episode was precisely to capture the idea of a whirlwind courtship, as opposed to the actual thing. Don and Megan are plainly not a good match; she’s too young for him and he knows almost nothing about her except that (unlike poor Dr. Faye) she won’t ever challenge him to be more than he currently is. She’s pretty and good with the children, and he really is a person who likes “the beginnings of things,” so he went and proposed on a whim. (“The writing I most enjoy, is the writing where I can see myself in the man who is, with good reason, wrecking his life.” For the wrong take on this, see Ezra Klein.)
It’s obvious that Don’s fooling himself, and we’ve already seen from Roger how this story ends. But it’s next season that we see this self-delusion come undone; the point of this episode was to show the falseness of all this, how easy we can backslide and how hard it is to genuinely change, and how seductive lies can be when we want to believe them.
So I find it’s not a sloppy episode, or lazy, or anvilicious; it’s just that its narrative presentation is very closely linked to Don’s selfish, self-deluded perspective. But the writers leave more than enough (in Henry’s rant, in the Peggy and Joan scene, in the very idea of Roger Sterling, in the final shot) to puncture that balloon. Heather Havrilesky at Salon writes:
At the start of the episode, Don asks Faye, “Will you at least put me out of my misery before you go?” Don would choose death, or an absence of feeling, over the excruciating pain of seeing himself clearly, over the constant struggle of “trying to be a person like the rest of us.” Since Faye won’t allow him to shut off from his life, to power down and drift through the world like a handsome ghost, he chooses Megan instead. At the end, Don has found his new winning story, his new heroic role, his new, patently false proclamation of victory. The central identity parable of “Mad Men,” which seemed like a simple act of deception in the first few seasons, has deepened into something richer and more ominous. Don Draper reflects the American compulsion to sidestep the hard work of living a flawed but authentic life for the empty illusion of perfection, as shiny and skin-deep as an advertisement that promises the impossible.
I realized earlier this evening that the episode puts this together quite nicely using a visual metaphor of sleep. At the beginning of the episode—in its very first shot—Don claims to have a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach but he is able, quite literally, to sleep at night.
When Faye awakens him, he is self-effacing and charming, and they have an adult conversation, face-to-face as equals, about how he might do the tough work of making peace with his past so he can have a future.
At the end of the episode, he has Megan asleep on his chest. No conversation of equals is possible here—and for the second time in the episode, we find Don can no longer sleep.
As the “Theme from Groundhog Day” begins to play, a tracking shot towards the window makes it clear: bathed in darkness, he’s already turning away from Megan, already looking for the door.
‘Inception’
Very quickly, and with spoilers: I’ve been informed that my quick take on Inception’s dream-infiltration as an allegory for film creation—both dreams and films starting in medias res and employing cuts to obscure origins and transitions, both building small but deceptively complex conceptual mazes into which the viewer can pour her secret desires and emotional investments, both organized fundamentally around willed suspension of disbelief and slight-of-hand—has already been taken up by io9 and CHUD. This is what I get for going on vacation!
Most of the other Internet criticism I’ve been reading has been preoccupied with the problem of the ending, particularly whether it “means” the one thing or the other—which of course is about as useful as trying to “prove” it was the lady and not the tiger. The audacious-but-predictable refusal to show the final orientation of the spinning top, which in my theater as in most was greeted with gasps, groans, and happy nervous laughter, isn’t some puzzle to be solved: it’s just the exclamation point for the allegory. The same goes for any of the rest of the film’s many plot holes, inconsistencies, and mild surrealities. Of course none of it makes any sense; it was just a film, it was just a dream.
The stronger criticism, I think, has to do with the utterly mundane nature of the dreamworlds themselves; why, in an age of almost limitless directorial power, do Nolan’s characters dream solely in action-film clichés? In another director’s hands—perhaps in the hands of the young Ridley Scott, for whom the premise seems to call out—Inception might have been a masterpiece; here, it’s merely a very enjoyable spectacle, maybe even the best film of a not-great year for film, but far too impressed with its own limited gimmicks and possessing a startlingly small vision for what either films or dreams might achieve.
David Simon Is Your President Now
Don’t miss this long David Simon interview with Vice about The Wire and his new New Orleans-centered series, Tremé. (Warning: Big, terrible spoilers if you still haven’t finished The Wire yet.) Nothing escapes his ire, not even our beloved Joe Lieberman:
Why does reform seem so impossible?
We live in an oligarchy. The mother’s milk of American politics is money, and the reason they can’t reform financing, the reason that we can’t have public funding of elections rather than private donations, the reason that K Street is K Street in Washington, is to make sure that no popular sentiment survives. You’re witnessing it now with health care, with the marginalization of any effort to rationally incorporate all Americans under a national banner that says, “We’re in this together.”But then the critics of a system like that immediately cry socialism.
And of course it’s socialism. These ignorant motherfuckers. What do they think group insurance is, other than socialism? Just the idea of buying group insurance! If socialism is a taint that you cannot abide by, then, goddamn it, you shouldn’t be in any group insurance policy. You should just go out and pay the fucking doctors because when you get 100,000 people together as part of anything, from a union to the AARP, and you say, “Because we have this group actuarially, more of us are going to be healthier than not and therefore we’ll be able to carry forward the idea of group insurance and everybody will have an affordable plan…” That’s fuckin’ socialism. That’s nothing but socialism.It is, literally.
So the whole idea of group insurance, which of course everyone believes in, like that fellow on YouTube, “Don’t let the government take away my Medicare…” You look at that and you think there’s only one thing that can make people this stupid, and that’s money. When you pay people to change their votes on the basis of money, the wrong shit gets voted for. That’s American democracy at this point. And you get to the Senate and you’re looking at 100 votes, which don’t represent anything in terms of popular representation. When 40 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the votes in the higher house of a bicameral legislature, it’s an oligarchy.I’m getting depressed.
Now you’re listening to Joe Lieberman say that he will filibuster anything with a public option. Let me understand this: One guy from a small state in New England is going to decide on a singular basis what’s good for the health care of 300 million people? That’s our form of government, and I don’t get it.It’s not good.
Well, it is what it is and it has been for years, and it’s why we’re able to marginalize larger and larger percentages of our population. Fuck ’em where they stand. Five percent, 10 percent, 15 percent. How many people are you going to keep out of the gated community? How many guards are you going hire?The guards will be the only working-class people in the gated communities, I guess.
Right. You’re going to hire people to guard your shit, but you’re not going to give them health care.
So much more at the link. Via /Film.
Name That Movie
Via MetaFilter, Paul Roger’s Name that Movie is a pretty good time.
USA! USA!
Soccer: Click the [+/-] to catch the fever.
USA up 1-0 over Spain at halftime in the semifinals of the Confederations Cup.
UPDATE: Spain looking pretty tough in the opening minutes of the second half. Shoot; miss; get the ball back five seconds later; repeat.
Also, sorry for the lack of spoiler alert…
UPDATE: Dempsey! I love that man. I always pick him in my fantasy league and he never lets me down. Great goal.
UPDATE: USA! USA!
Dollhouse 2.0
io9 has details on that final episode of Dollhouse we may never actually get to see. Sounds fairly promising, actually…
"150,000 Years Later"
Has there ever been a show that misunderstood itself as badly as Battlestar Galactica? As regrettable as the last few seasons have been, I confess I was completely unprepared for the sheer awfulness of this finale. I think I pissed off a few people on Twitter with my up-to-the-minute spoiler-laden despair, so I don’t want to repeat that mistake here—but suffice it to say I can’t think of a television finale less successful than this one.
I wrote not that long ago that
All that said, I think it’s too early to turn Battlestar into Star Wars; the reputation of the series will live or die in what happens in these next few episodes and it could still go either way. Melodrama aside—and yes there was a lot of it last night—I think there are reasons to believe.
Well, now we know. Frak it all.
Put its utter randomness, offensively easy a-wizard-did-it mysticism, and excess sentimentality aside. Battlestar Galactica in its final moments actually seems to view itself as some sort of prophetic warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Delivered by angels. It’s actually that bad.
What a colossal disappointment. Bad, bad, bad.
