Meme, The Wire, Mad Men, The Hunger Games and War
A meme: List all of the television shows you have on DVD, no matter how obscure or embarrassing. Even if you only own one season, list it. Let's see who has what! I included miniseries as well because I can, and unless otherwise stated, I have all seasons. Yes, some are still in plastic, unwatched or partially watched!
24, S1
30 Rock
Angel
Arrested Development
Battlestar Galactica (new), miniseries & S1
Blackpool
Bleak House
Blue Planet
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
Cambridge Spies
Children of Dune
Cranford
Creature Comforts
Da Ali G Show, s1
Doctor Who (new)
Farscape, UK & US DVDs
Firefly
Friday Night Lights
Generation Kill
Grey's Anatomy, s1
Harsh Realm
He Knew He Was Right
Heroes, s1
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Horatio Hornblower
Life on Mars (UK)
Lost, s1
Mad Men
Monarch of the Glen, s1&2
The National Parks
Nicholas Nickleby
North and South (BBC, Gaskell novel)
The Office (UK)
The Office (US), s1
Our Mutual Friend
Planet Earth
Poldark
Pride & Prejudice (BBC, Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle)
Profit
Pushing Daisies
Rome
Seachange (Australia)
Second Sight, S1
Sherlock Holmes TV Classics (1 DVD) (Crawford & Howard)
The Simpsons, s1
Spooks/MI5, s1
State of Play
Supernatural
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Torchwood
True Blood
Ultraviolet
Underbelly (Australia)
Veronica Mars
The Way We Live Now
The West Wing, s1
The Wire
Wives & Daughters
Recent media:
1. I finished S2 of The Wire last weekend, and as usual, I'm late posting my thoughts. Season two was amazing.
The Sobotkas
Frankly, most of the time I wanted to kill Ziggy who was played brilliantly by James Ransone - I see now why the actor was chosen to portray Cpl. Josh "Ray" Person in Generation Kill. Ziggy had this amazing desperate, frenetic energy, a grand sense of entitlement and a need to be taken seriously, to be respected, but he wanted everything to just happen, to land at his feet, perfectly and effortlessly. Such a doomed character. I'm so surprised he survived until the end of the season.
I pitied Frank as he struggled so hard to hold on to what he had with the union and to try to get back what was lost, the jobs and honest labor, the meaningfulness of good, necessary work - something else that was really doomed from the start. He'd convinced himself that his corruption was worth it to accomplish something important and necessary for the union, for the workers of the future, but if this season told us anything, it's that Baltimore is transforming and that blue collar workers like the stevedores will likely see their livelihoods vanish with that transformation. If it's not politics and developers, it's robotics that will put them out of work.
And I was just disgusted with Nick for sinking into drug dealing on top of the smuggling even while I admired him for being a much better businessman than his cousin (ok, that isn't saying much...).
The Detail
Just about all of the cops began the season either facing a dead end or stuck in a rut of some kind. I loved poor Prez talking up the work they did on the Barksdale wiretap detail, and it was awesome that eventually something actually registered with his father-in-law boss, although Valchek's vendetta against Sobotka was utterly maddening. There was this thing with seniority that was mentioned again and again among the union workers, in terms of who worked and how many hours, and I felt like seniority was also shown to be problematic among the cops when someone like Valchek can run amok with departmental resources to pursue a personal vendetta. He was one of the most unpleasant characters to show up on The Wire thus far. (I thought Rawls & Burrell were awful in S1 but Valchek puts even them to shame).
In general I felt like the end result for the detail was largely a failure, though (it felt like they uncovered the tip of the iceberg, didn't it?). They cleared the murders and collected a lot of valuable new information, but (very realistically) the responsible guys ultimately got away. The best part is simply that the detail will be a proper dedicated unit.
Barksdale Gang
The shine really began to come off Stringer Bell this season - what with his inferior product woes and trying to get Avon to look after his nephew in prison - and moving in on the mother of D's kid. Not to mention ordering's D'Angelo's murder, and THEN, when you think it can't get worse: lying to and manipulating Omar into a vengeance-hit on Brother Mouzone to eliminate Avon's attempt to stop the Barksdale/Bell-Prop Joe alliance. WHAT? Stringer! What's gotten into you? No doubt it's all going to come back to bite him - D'Angelo's murder looks like a suicide, but what if it comes out later that it isn't? And Stringer has now earned the wrath of BOTH Omar and Brother Mouzone. So I have a feeling that things are looking dire for Stringer next season. I honestly can't see him not paying for these things.
I also really enjoyed seeing Bodie & Poot "growing up" in the organization - particularly Bodie, who's learning to be a better businessman. His faith in Stringer is touching. I'm still tickled by Bodie listening to "The Prarie Home companion!"
Vondas, "The Greek" (who isn't even Greek) and their international criminal crew
In short - they scared the crap out of me. I swear, throughout the entire season, I kept flashing onto The Greek telling Sergei to make sure the guy from the Atlantic Light (who was responsible for killing all those poor girls) had no face and no hands. And later when Sergei's infamous line was replayed over and over: "Did he have hands? Did he have a face? Yes? Then it wasn't us." CHILLING. (incidentally, in confirming this quote with "sergei hands face" in my google searchbox, Sergei Malatov is the #2 hit)
But beyond how scary these guys were, they also introduced us to a much wider world of crime - giving us the impression of some vast faceless multi-headed entity way beyond Baltimore, beyond the United States, that can maneuver seemingly effortlessly - they take casualities, shrug and walk away, and they have friends in the right places. By positioning these guys in bed with the dock workers Simon & co. showed us just how easy it is to smuggle everything from electronics to drugs to women (and much, much worse, no doubt) - and also how easily these bad guys can strike back at whomever they like. Or how they can do a favor for one guy while teaching someone else a painful lesson, which happened with the Colombian drug seizure for their FBI guy.
The Baltimore PD management
Ugh. What can I can say about these guys aside from how disgusted I was with all the in-fighting, and with how little the guys in charge seem to be interested in actually doing good (or even in doing their jobs)? It made me so angry to see these bosses relegate smart, motivated cops to scut work out of malice instead of putting their brains to some use. Also, intriguing bit with Bunny in the Western district toward the end. And clearly we're going to be seeing a lot more politics next season.
If season one introduced us to the game, it was a tight, fairly claustrophobic scene - Barksdale's crew, the wiretap detail, the Baltimore PD. In season two, the game got a whole lot bigger. It's not just a drug war that's being fought, it's a much larger crime war. Different gangs, shadowy conspiracies, corruption all around. There's so much disillusionment in season two, sacrificed ideals and broken promises, lies and frustration. It's not just about a city in ruin, but about the direction that city is taking to rebuild - which might look bright and shiny but is built on lost jobs and lost opportunities. It's easy to feel sympathy for Frank Sobotka who just wants to give his men and his profession a fighting chance for their future, but he's in over his head, and he's doomed from the beginning. There's no hope for him or his profession, whether he's straight or dirty. So ultimately the lesson is about change and compromise - those who can shift and redefine or reinvent themselves can survive. Sobotka and his ilk can't - he can compromise his morals but not his work, so he's doomed, and the docks are doomed. Stringer sees the writing on the wall and knows his operation has to adjust in order to stay in business - hooking up with Prop Joe is just the beginning, I imagine. And the Greek and his people easily melt away when pursued because they can sidestep seemingly anything - they can afford to abandon valuable cargo if necessary and change their tactics, seek out new opportunities or make them for themselves. Because they aren't tied down, their flexibility guarantees their freedom.
I'm now up to 3.5! So good.
2. Mad Men - Don iS REALLY losing it. He's been losing it all season but now he's introducing himself to waitresses as Dick and behaving erratically and weirdly - it looks like his carefully constructed Don Draper persona is shattering and overlapping with Dick Whitman - which makes me think he might be in for another unmasking this season. The scene where he started throwing out slogans to the Life people (while drunk and high on winning the award for the Glo-Coat ad) was awful and painful and alarming. I nearly had to look away.
I love the revelation that Roger didn't even find Don - that Don basically conned himself into a job for Sterling Cooper.
And I'm tickled to see that Danny Siegel (aka Danny Strong aka Jonathan from Buffy) conned himself into a job for SCDP. It's fitting that all these ad men who are con artists should get conned.
And Peggy was rather awesome in this episode!
3. The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins. When I saw so many people talking about this, I bought all three books for my Kindle and I finished the trilogy last weekend. I couldn't help comparing it to Battle Royale, Takami Koushun's 1999 novel, but I loved Collins' world-building a lot more. More importantly, her characters were far more loveable and charismatic, and I loved a lot of secondary characters, too.
4. War by Sebastian Junger - to follow up on my Restrepo comments from last week, I finished reading the book this week and I loved it. Like the film Restrepo, Junger's book is far more about how these soldiers who fought in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan in 2007-2008 were affected by their war-time experience than it is about the actual events. While reading and after finishing the book, I couldn't stop thinking about the plight of many of these soldiers who are emerging from multiple combat tours and how they will cope in civilian life - especially when some of them are young enough to have gone from their parents' homes into war, so war is all they've known as adults. I also couldn't help relating it to fandom in terms of Supernatural's Sam & Dean Winchester - one of my big fascinations both in real life and in fiction is with how people cope with life after traumatic experiences. I always want to know what happens next. Junger's book doesn't tell you what happens next for any of the guys he writes about in War, but he gives you a pretty good idea of how hard their civilian transition will be. Which of course then led me to considering how the Winchesters (particularly Dean) might cope with life after hunting (it's a rather persistent avenue of thought for me actually in my SPN musings). There are plenty of fic writers who have tackled this but not many who delve into the PTSD side.
I'm looking forward to Tim Hetherington's book which should be coming out next month I think - Hetherington is the British photographer who also spent months with the men of Battle Company in Afghanistan and filmed the documentary Restrepo with Junger.
On a related note, Geoff Dyer's June article in the Guardian about war reporting is an excellent read - he discusses a variety of non-fiction war books, some of which I've read, but he also talks about film and television like Generation Kill, The Hurt Locker and Restrepo (all of which I love).
5. Regarding any rumors of Supernatural creator Eric Kripke having anything to do with a possible Sandman television series - I do not approve! Basically, if Neil Gaiman's Sandman series can't get the HBO treatment as GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire is currently receiving, I do not want to see Sandman on the small screen. *shudders*
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Have a wonderful weekend (some of us even get 3 days!), everyone! I'm off to make ricotta gnocchi and I hope to get some writing done this weekend as well. Maybe I'll even get around to writing a long overdue RL update.