The Wire, Mad Men, The Kids Are All Right & Restrepo
I'm on a roll?
Recent film/television:
1. The Wire, season one. I loved it, and it absolutely lived up to all the enthusiastic raves both from fellow flisters and elsewhere. Brilliant writing, directing, and acting. I love so many characters - Stringer, Daniels, Kima, Freamon, Omar, D'Angelo, Wallace, Bubbles...I love that every character is flawed (some more than others), even "good police" like Kima. I wished the season didn't have to end, even though I know there are still four more to go. Watching the episodes, listening to some of the commentary, I really appreciate the kind of storytelling, the kind of layering and detail they're going for with The Wire. It's my kind of tv.
I'm up to 2.7 right now. Good stuff! I adore seeing how the docks work, just the machinery shots make me happy. In 2.7, in fact, there was some presentation about the robotics being used at the Rotterdam seaport - which I saw in 2007 when I did a harbor tour with some friends and I was utterly awed by the sheer magnitude of it - the colorful mountains of shipping containers that stretched away from the water, the massive lifts that brought the containers up off the ships and onto the docks. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that, on such a scale (I've only seen the Baltimore docks from a distance, and in Norfolk I've seen mostly naval ships and container ships at sea, not the dock works). It was truly impressive. I think I have a fascination with the trappings of heavy industry - it's both repellent and magnificent at the same time - perhaps one reason why I'm so entranced by many of Ed Burtynsky's photographs.
In terms of the storyline, I think season two is in some ways more difficult, more convoluted than the first. They're building on top of the fallout from the first season and have introduced more moral quandaries and more intrigue and a brand new underbelly culture. One of the things that stood out for me in a recent episode: in trying to get a court order for a wiretap, the investigators are surprised to learn that while drugs trafficking would get them the wiretap, trafficking in prostitution (even the forced illegal alien kind) won't. That's not fucked up at all. >.<
2. Mad Men, I've been watching this every Sunday and loving it as much as I both love and loathe many of the characters. I'm enjoying this season just as much as the last three, if not more for all the ways that our characters are negotiating the concept of change. Don is not doing well at all - dingy apartment, miserable love life, shit with his kids, not to mention screwing around with his secretary. I'm glad that he's sticking with Joan's punishment because it's the very least that he deserves. I do find it curious that we've seen so few ad campaigns in recent episodes - they've talked around them, but not much on the actual concept or presentation side. Reading online comments this week left me rather disheartened - between excuses for Roger's racism (Bert Cooper's racism is rarely even mentioned anymore) and attacks on Betty's continuing inclusion in the drama and suspicions of Grandpa Gene abuse of Sally to explain her masturbation incident, I felt rather deflated. I thought it was terrific & thought-provoking on so many levels - the psychology issue is brought up again, the need to talk things out which was seen not just with Henry convincing Betty to have Sally see a psychiatrist, but also in the way that Don confessed some of his problems to Dr. Miller in the kitchen. The idea of confronting change is (again) all over the episode, but one of the most masterful scenes was really Joan & Roger in his office - the filming and editing were just as superb as the dialogue exchanged.
I think the Weiner & Co. are doing a bang-up job with the season so far, slow episodes (3, anyone?) notwithstanding. The last two have been fantastic.
3. The Kids Are All Right, I saw this last Thursday night and I really enjoyed it. Annette Benning and Julianne Moore star as lesbian mothers raising two teenagers, aged 18 & 15. When their kids dig up their sperm donor father (Mark Ruffalo), his presence generates some dramatic changes in their family dynamic during their daughter's last summer at home. All the actors are terrific, including the kids, and the whole film felt very down-to-earth and real, and if anything, emphasized the universality of family and relationship issues.
4. Restrepo - this is a documentary filmed by Sebastian Junger (journalist who wrote The Perfect Storm) and British photographer Tim Hetherington who were embedded with troops who were on a 15-month tour assigned to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan during 2007-2008. The Korengal Valley was then considered one of the most dangerous postings in Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips each (together and separately) between 2007 & 2008, Junger & Hetherington generated 150 hours of film while living with the soldiers of Battle Company, depending on them for their security and their sustenance, enduring the same besieged conditions as the soliders, hiking the same treacherous mountainous terrain when soldiers went out on missions or patrols, and ducking and trying to film when the soldiers (rather regularly) took fire. It doesn't have a political angle, but it shows you how these soldiers lived during that time, and what they faced. The film alternates between tight close-ups of Battle Company soldiers describing what happened and how they felt and hand-held camera footage shot by Junger & Hetherington. It was unnerving, actually, to see the kinds of emotion these guys, kids really, gave off, the fear and adrenaline and despair.
Sebastian Junger recently published War, a book that describes more of his time with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley, and in January 2008, he published this Vanity Fair article: Into The Valley of Death, describing what he'd seen up until that time.
Perhaps the greatest things I took away from this film are how these incredibly young men (most under 25, I believe, with a 27 year old commander) survived (or didn't) impossible conditions, took fire nearly ever day, often multiple times in a day, and how they will survive in the civilian world. I'm paraphrasing, but one of the soldiers interviewed said something early on in the film that stayed with me - he said something like "they don't know what to do with us." He meant that the government doesn't really know how to deal with these soldiers coming out of these intense combat tours, some of them enduring three, four combat tours, racking up combat months to rival World War II numbers, and often ending up with PTSD even if they manage to emerge physically unscathed. (see here for some statistics)