Author Archives: ulyssesworkman

by | May 23, 2013 · 5:04 pm

Review: Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

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In 30 years, they’ll still be discussing the marketing campaign for Random Access Memories. I’m just not sure if they’ll be talking about the album. Buoyed by one of the most exciting buildups of all time, it was inevitable that the reality of Daft Punk’s fourth studio album wouldn’t be able to match the possibility suggested by the heavily Instagrammed billboard on Sixth Street or the SNL ad that forcibly shoved “Get Lucky” down our ear canals. It is unfair to judge Random Access Memories by the gap between it and the imaginary RAM that has lived on blogs and in my mind for the last three or four months, but even setting that aside, I’m not quite sure that the record matches up.

Take “Giorgio by Moroder,” a tribute to Girogio Moroder (with an interview with the man himself) that simultaneously feels like a thesis statement for the record and a remake of “Losing My Edge” without any of the self-awareness or humor. The line between “making a record with the sounds of the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and the future” and “you kids need to turn down that racket and respect your elders” is a thin one and often, it feels like RAM slips and starts making sure you knew it was there (it was theeeeeeerrrrrre). Blown out to near double-LP length, the band seems content to wander through a field of influences and old loves. This can lead to an amazing sense of discovery, as on “Touch” where emotive parts melt into a ragtime dance and then back to ballad, but it also seems like the band gets lost, as on the tedious “The Game of Love.” For me, the album briefly catches fire as “Touch” builds and builds to Paul Williams’ emotive vocals and then melts into the glorious, extended version of “Get Lucky” (when the one-minute snippet was first released, it was so catchy that I wondered just how much of that song I could listen to without getting sick of it. Apparently the answer is “at least more than 6:05”). But once “Beyond” kicks in, I find my attention fading again. Its a little too easy for me to zone out and find that I’ve missed a couple songs.

A lot of attention has been paid to Daft Punk’s decision to forgo sampling but the album is actually still sample-heavy in spirit; its just that they skip over the actual sampling part by bringing in the musicians to record new music that sounds like the kind of thing they used to do. They could have placed Pharrell’s vocals on top of Nile Rodgers’ disco guitar loops and added some Daft Punk vocoder action, but the decision to unwrap this process and actually record the parts live and in collaboration with the artists in question leads to a vitality and energy. However, at the same time, they’re so intent to play “curators” that the songs rarely rise above mash-up. Random Access Memories is its own remix.

Critics have taken this move largely as a response to EDM, the genre that Daft Punk accidentally launched and now, in interviews, seems eager to disavow. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it seems to lead the band to embrace their worst impulse, which is their need to say Something. Whenever Daft Punk goes too far off the reservation and attempts to add deeper meaning to their musings about technology you end up getting something like this. Or songs called “Give Life Back to Music.” Listening to the record, it feels like both Daft Punk and the larger critical community that is so eager to declare this a Great Record are looking for some kind of large statement on a record that doesn’t have one (which is fine) and peddles in largely shallow generalization (which is not). That said, the band’s selection and recreation of old sounds actually touches on a very modern notion.

In their own way, Daft Punk have managed to an album-length recreation of the modern Internet and media atmosphere, where “curation” and dressing up other people’s content in a new outfit is more profitable and more widespread than actual new stuff. More to the point, I don’t see any practical difference between what Daft Punk is doing on this album and what, say, Maria Popova does on Twitter or the staff of Buzzfeed does on their site. At the end of the day, Random Access Memories feels more like a work of aggregation and SEO than an album. “24 Great Songs From the 1970s That You Have to Hear Now.”

The other half of the new media equation is sharing, which brings me back to where we started. Capitalizing on our need to share things and plant flags in culture we approve of, every element of the Daft Punk build-up was meant to get us talking and sharing, but also to get us to take ownership of the album. There may have only been a few billboards and, to my knowledge, the commercial only ran at Coachella and on SNL, but it made the rounds on the Internet and, as it spread, it turned the people spreading it into tastemakers while also having them, conveniently, do a lot of the street team level work building awareness. We rented space on our Facebook and Twitter pages out to Daft Punk’s label, allowing them to use it publicize their album, in exchange for some cultural capital that comes with being the first to spread the word about a particularly cool album. Its a weird relationship, one that I dealt with a lot when I was working as a film blogger, but the end result is a tangible investment in the album being good (and, on the other side, a thirst to push back and be contrarian by declaring the album “bad”).

In a way, this is the extra-textual element that the album backs up the best. It is a record that is meant to be passed around and explored collectively. It is probably best listened to in a big room with lots of sweaty people around you, where the exquisite production and propulsion can cover for a lot of what is otherwise a little tedious. All of Daft Punk’s albums are lumpy, but this one is lumpy and seems to think it has more to say than it actually does. Of course, the only reason it feels like it has grander aspirations than getting you to shake your butt is because the amount and execution of hype primed the pump for an album that did more. Perhaps the album’s biggest crime is that it did too good of a job of capturing culture in 2013. Random Access Memories is imprisoned by the very cycle of aggregation and sharing that it mimics, capturing the exuberance, but also the disposability, of whatever viral hit is plastered all over your Facebook wall this week.

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by | May 6, 2013 · 2:39 pm

Why Are the Commercials On Mad Men So Irritating?

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There are two major complaints cropping up about this season of Mad Men: the characters are too unlikeable and the commercial breaks are too abrupt. I’m waiting to see how the season plays out to say much about the first complaint (although I will note that I’ve found Don Draper pretty irredeemable for two or three seasons now, but my fascination has never wavered) but the second is in some ways more interesting. The abruptness of the cuts to commercial break on Mad Men is nothing new, but as more television critics stopped getting pre-air screeners from AMC and were forced to watch the episodes live, the complaints have become more and more vocal. However, there’s a possibility that I think is worth exploring: the commercial breaks are supposed to be jarring.

A couple of quick notes. First of all, it is important to establish that the jarring commercial breaks are a matter of authorial intent and not AMC’s fault. Mad Men is a hypnotic, languorous show, more so than almost anything else on TV, and snapping out of its trance is not easy. But, more to the point, there’s a specific structural quirk at play. For those who might not know, most commercial television scripts are structured to accommodate commercials by breaking them up into several acts. Each act corresponds to a segment and ends with an act break, some kind of moment that’s meant to push viewers into the commercial while making sure they’ll want to stick around to see what happens next. Matt Weiner and his writing staff intentionally write episodes of Mad Men without act breaks. They aren’t the only people who do this, but pretty much everyone else who does writes for premium channels like HBO, which are commercial free. This is how Weiner would have written scripts for The Sopranos and how screenwriters have been doing it for decades.

The writers aren’t stupid; they know they’re writing a show with commercials and could choose to accommodate the ads if they wanted. So why don’t they? It could be because this is simply how Weiner wrote on The Sopranos. But he’s not the only writer of the show and The Sopranos isn’t the only show he wrote for (he was also on the staff of Andy Richter Controls the Universe, which aired on FOX). It also could be so the show plays better on DVD and Netflix. But whatever the reason, the result is that it strengthens the show’s critique of American capitalism and, especially, the ways that advertising propagate ideology.

If you are already on-board with the concept that at least part of what Mad Men is doing is critiquing of American capitalism in general and advertising’s role within that system specifically, feel free to move along to the next paragraph, but I would like to show my work a little. Mad Men does more than just peel back the curtain on the process and people behind advertising; it looks like an advertisement. The gorgeous, meticulously arranged mise-en-scene wouldn’t look out of place in a Sterling-Cooper design, but an ad by the agency (or anyone else) would be using those images to suggest that the same perfection and happiness is within your reach through consumption of a given product. On Mad Men, the point is the opposite. These are the people living in those ads, consuming and consuming, and all they’re left with is emptiness and displeasure. Think of “The Wheel,” where Don turns family photos into a literal advertisement for Kodak, convinces himself that domestic perfection is within reach, and then returns to find an empty house.

So Mad Men is a show critiquing advertising’s role in society, but this is a difficult argument to coherently communicate when you have to stop the show down every ten minutes to air commercials. I would argue this is one of the reasons why scholars have been so quick to look down on TV for so much of its history: how incisive and critical can a series be when its main reason for existing is to provide a hospitable atmosphere for advertising. Mad Men side-steps this by creating as inhospitable an atmosphere as possible. The cuts are abrupt and jarring, the show makes no effort to incorporate breaks into its overall structure. The ads don’t fit because the show doesn’t think they should fit.

As a result, the commercials exist as the breaking of a trance, an imperfect, loud, and classless intrusion on the perfect structure of the show. They don’t fit and, as a result, draw attention to themselves. You think critically about them. You notice how irritating and fake they are. You are angry about their very presence. It is a small leap to move from feeling like the presence of the ads is artificial to feeling like the substance of the ads is artificial. Mad Men takes a simple fact of its form, commercial breaks, and contorts them until they fit its larger critique of American society.

Of course, the obvious retort to all of this is the fact that Mad Men has relied on product integration for much of its run. However, as the show has had more autonomy, it has reduced the amount of paid product placement and also made the real brands that appear in the show pay a steep price for that exposure. Most obviously, Jaguar, which was shown as structurally corrupt in “The Other Woman” and utterly unreliable in “Commissions and Fees.” Heinz is shown as immature and high schoolish, with an executive who is a unpleasant, petty mess and the Chevy car that Don and Teddy pitched for last night turns out to be a historic lemon. Those appearances may not have been paid for, but one that was, by Heineken, was used as a backdrop to Don’s humiliating manipulation of Betty.

If I had to guess, I would say the main reason Mad Men ignores the commercial breaks is simply because they can. However, the result is that it deepens one of the show’s most important, and yet easy to miss, themes. These people have been lied to all their lives by the very industry they work for and tricked into believing that the right car and the right suit and the right job and the right wife would make them happy. Why would the show help keep up that illusion when it can subvert it instead?

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by | July 18, 2012 · 1:32 pm

New Music Roundup – “The Safety’s Off”

This week’s roundup of new music features records that I was really looking forward to but that, for one reason or another, haven’t really been doing it for me. Let’s take a look:

I lived in Austin for a couple of years and, really, it was a tremendous place. However, if there was one thing I couldn’t stand about it, it was all the people acting like they were special and unique for enjoying nature’s beauty. It was a one-dimensional, touristy idea of nature based on easy-going vibes and an unquestioning belief in the awesomeness of getting drunk next to a tree.

I thought a lot about that dichotomy while listening to Oshin, the debut LP by Beach Fossils affiliates and spelling bee champions DIIV. The music is pleasant enough to listen to and certainly taps into the kind of hazy joy that Beach Fossils and Real Estate got big trafficking. But there’s a hollowness to the whole record that leaves it empty and unsatisfying.

This big picture problem wouldn’t be as much of a problem were it not for the fact that the album had so little else to offer. The reverb drenched vocals, Neil Young-inspired noodling guitars, and beachy harmonies have become to 2012 what syncopated drum beats and post-punk guitars were to 2002 and samples of atrocious yacht-rock songs were to 2010. The result is an album that goes in one ear and out the other.

In Ian Cohen’s BNM review of the record for Pitchfork, he talks about how DIIV has tapped into something elemental and natural, but have they? The record is closer to the equivalent of a shirtless bro, beer in hand, floating the river on an intertube and talking about how close he feels to nature. The elements that symbolize “nature” are present on the record, but the music is too generic and formed to really back that up. It is a bloodless vision of nature, one drained of any sort of tension or reality so that DIIV could set up a shack and sell guided tours at $20 a ticket.

I don’t really know what else is left to be said about POP ETC, the moment where whatever term you want to use for “R&B music that gets posted to blogs” (I prefer PBR&B) began eating itself. There’s a reason why people don’t look back on Discovery with fondness.

POP ETC seems a little more sincere than that effort, which is almost more of a problem. There’s so little distance between singer Chris Chu and lyrics like “she said why did we bother/I said I’m not your father” that, frankly, its a little embarrassing. With Katy Perry synths and a lot of autotune, the record sounds like it wandered in from 2008, still drunk an unashamed.

I liked The Morning Benders fine, especially their Grizzly Bear-by-way-of-The-Shins second album, and I respect them for following their muse. And some tracks, like “Keep It For Your Own,” show a kind of focus and energy that seemed to be missing from their earlier work. But its clearly an awkward fit that the band is still kind of trying to negotiate.

I’ll admit that its probably a little premature to put the Dirty Projectors on here and I remain open to being convinced otherwise. There are moments that I really love, the spacey harmonies that open “Offsprings Are Blank” and the propulsive immediacy of “Gun Has No Trigger,” but the record as a whole suffers from a little bit of sequelitis. There are no moments as surprising and attention-grabbing as the heights of Bitte Orca (which basically were the entire album from start to finish).

Bitte Orca was one surprise after another, here’s a Beyonce-level R&B song, now here’s a Nico rewrite, now here’s the whatever the hell “Useful Chamber” is. Swing Lo Magellan is more focused and tighter. You could even call it the most distinctly Dirty Projectors record yet, but that’s the problem. The record leans perhaps too heavily on the band’s trademarks, whether its the soaring harmonies or the now-ubiquitous African rhythms.

Furthermore the new wrinkles that they did do nothing but detract from the album. The folky touches, cribbed from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, make the album sound, at times, empty. Songs like the title track trade away too much complexity in favor of a stripped-down amiability that veers dangerously close to generic. With Woody Guthrie folk music must come politicized lyrics and, once again, the band kind of falls on its face. Dave Longstreth is not quite an effective enough storyteller to pull off the company man tragedy of “Just From Chevron” while “Gun Has No Trigger” is laughably simplistic.

It’s not like Dirty Projectors forgot how to make music and, even listening to the record while writing this, I can feel myself softening. It’s not that Swing Lo Magellan is bad, its just a frustratingly sideways move from a band that has spent the better part of a decade swirling and rushing forward in thrilling ways.

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by | February 27, 2012 · 8:30 am

New Music Mondays – Since We Parted Ways

In lieu of Official Album Reviews like we usually do around here, I thought it might be fun to present, instead, wholly unformed thoughts on some things that I happen to be listening to each week. So this week, here’s a few records that I’m slightly ashamed to admit I’m into because of how middle-of-the-road they are.

The Craig Finn thing is kind of easy to understand given that for much of my college career, no band was as important to me as The Hold Steady. However, their graph has been trending downward, unmistakably so in light of the uneven and bloated Heaven is Whenever, and a Finn solo record held the potential of a palate cleanser or perhaps a bold new step. But Finn isn’t one for boldness and Clear Heart Full Eyes sounds like The Hold Steady drained of its scope. It is an intimate album and its best songs, specifically “Jackson,” sound more personal than Finn has sounded in years. But they also sound like acoustic performances of Hold Steady songs, Finn’s storytelling remains idiosyncratic but a touch underealized and that sin was easier to ignore when it was covered up by the band’s boozy festival field scope. Clear Hearts Full Eyes has none of the Springsteen scope or Replacements rambunctiousness of Finn’s best work, its subdued, singer-songwriter vibe may be more mature but is far less satisfying.

Listeners looking for some of that old Hold Steady swagger, but with more than a touch of Clear Heart’s lilting Southern drawl would do well to turn to the newest record from Heartless Bastards. On Arrow, Heartless Bastards do little to change their heady, classic rock direction nor do they need to. This is the genre of music that Erika Wennerstrom’s voice was basically created to sing and she doesn’t let it down. Arrow cuts between heavy riffs and introspective slow cuts with ease and while the album struggles to match the highs of “Parted Ways,” that song is more than enough to fuel your Dazed and Confused reminiscing.

Tennis is probably the most embarrassing of these three records, after all it is the follow-up to a breeze-pop record about buying a sailboat and sailing along the Atlantic coast. It is indie at its Vampire Weekend bougiest and, to top it all off, this album is produced by one of the Black Keys guys and man do I fucking hate the Black Keys. And yet I can’t stop listening to Young and Old, even when I should be giving my attention to the perhaps too thought-out new Sleigh Bells album or the more complex Grimes record. Part of that is Young and Old simply makes itself so easy to listen to. I’m not even sure which song is the single because they’re all so brisk and joyous. The band added a light folk touch to their first record’s traditionalist pop bent and the result is a kind of generic brand Grizzly Bear (albeit lacking in the dense, exacting production, lush instrumentation, or intricate songwriting that we’d need for such a comparison to make any sense at all) that would fit almost as snuggly in the 1930s as it does on Spotify.

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by | February 8, 2012 · 11:30 am

How Much Time Do You Give A New Show to “Get Good”

Over at Gawker, Brian Moylan has had enough of waiting for TV shows to become good:

That’s the problem with these slow burn shows, especially ones with fancy pedigrees backed by highbrow channels like HBO or AMC. We can’t imagine how they could not be good, so we keep watching, episode after boring episode, all the while waiting for some amazing payoff. And sometimes, like a skilled horse coming from behind, it pays off. But remember: For every The Wire there is a Treme, and for every Mad Men there is a The Killing

…

Sometimes slow isn’t good. Sometimes slow is just drab.

This is an interesting point and one I’ve thought about from time to time. Are you getting tired of “prestige” shows that promise payoff down the line but ask you to invest a lot upfront?

However, for me, I’m not sure that Moylan is looking for the same things out of TV that I am. Is all TV inherently about some sort of “payoff?” To put it another way, I think its damaging to look at TV shows in terms of a cost-benefit analysis and assume that the time you’re putting in should be rewarded down the line.

That is not to say that shows shouldn’t continue to get better the deeper and more intricate they become. TV has the luxury of time, a luxury that no other visual medium really has, and that allows it to set up more intricate ideas and play with different modes of storytelling. Take Treme, which, according to Moylan, is an utter failure because it did not adequately reward his time. But Treme is not a show about plotting and payoff, it is more of a low-key, character based drama about people living their lives. The stakes are much lower and the payoffs will be much smaller than on The Wire.

But Treme never pretended like that wasn’t the case. From the first episode, it was clear that we weren’t dealing with the life-or-death, all-in-the-game world of The Wire. Treme has gotten deeper and more involving, its characters more complex, but it is the same show that it was in the first episode. On the other hand, The Killing isn’t a bad show because it never told us who killed Rosie Larsen; it is a bad show because it took a bunch of hollow, uninteresting characters and drowned them in a sea of red herrings without ever giving us a reason to care. It didn’t take 13 episodes to realize that show wasn’t going to be good.

Of course, shows change and improve over time and there are programs that you have to invest some time in at first to be truly rewarded by them. But they also have moments, even early on, that make you want to invest in them. The Wire was puzzling at first, but it still had the chess scene and the “fuck” scene in the first four hours. Mad Men was gripping from its first moments. Shows may be paced slowly, but that doesn’t mean they’re uninvolving. Moylan brings up Boardwalk Empire as an example of this problem but BE just finished its season with about as big of a payoff as it could have possibly done.

It is important that the shows that are usually held up as an example of this form, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, are shows that people usually caught up on after they aired. If an episode was disappointing or somewhat unsatisfying, you didn’t have a week to stew about it and increase the pressure on the next week. All of which is to say that if you are watching a show because you need it to vindicate itself for making you watch it, then it is probably time to cut the cord. Whether that takes two episodes or two hundred, it is up to you. But it isn’t a TV show’s job to turn itself into what you want it to be so that you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted your time.

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by | February 6, 2012 · 11:03 am

Person Seeks Publicity Through Controversy

Somehow, we have reached a point where M.I.A. can play the Super Bowl Halftime show, where she made an appearance along side Madonna, LMFAO, and Cee-Lo. Somewhere, in 2005, 18-year-old me just had his head explode. Anyway, M.I.A., as she is wont to do, gave us all the finger, predictable people responded predictably, and it turns out that anyone who would be inclined to listen to M.I.A. probably didn’t care too much about this whole thing to begin with. Now let’s watch the hilarious, hilarious Bradshaw touchdown and never speak of this again.

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by | February 2, 2012 · 12:15 pm

Some Thoughts on Homeland

Like everyone else, my favorite new show of the season has been Showtime’s Homeland. Homeland is kind of like 24 for adults, a counter-terrorism thriller with strong characters and more of an emphasis on realism. The show is about Carrie (Claire Danes), a CIA analyst who believes that a POW (Damien Lewis) who was recently recovered in Iraq is actually a double agent. Here’s a few thoughts/ideas I had about the show, while mainlining its first season a few weeks ago (spoiler alert for the whole season, so maybe don’t read this until after you’ve watched the show?)

Terrorism:

For a show about terrorists and the people who fight them, Homeland is actually at its least interesting when engaged with issues of national security. While I don’t agree with Pamela Aucoin, whose article suggesting that Homeland validates and slyly supports the excesses and abuses of the War on Terror, I do sense an ambivalence towards the War on Terror in the show. It balances between different notions of how to fight terrorists before, in the end, pretty clearly endorsing the empathic mode used by Mandy Patankin’s Saul and, eventually, Carrie. Saul gets important information, not through torture or illegal surveillance, but by just spending time getting to know the suspect and understand her reasons. Similarly, Carrie saves the day in the season finale because she knows Brody and his family well enough to know how to reach out to him.

But this all can’t help but feel a little tired. In the ten years that we’ve had the war on terror, there’s been plenty of entertainment raising questions about the exchange of liberty for security. Homeland doesn’t have much to add to the conversation, but it also doesn’t seem too interested in that, either. I appreciate the matter -of-fact way that it deals with all of the tactics its characters use to fight terrorists, whether its Carrie’s illegal wiretap or the illegal airstrike that ignites much of the plot. It presents these as things that happen and generally trusts the audience to make its own decisions about whether it is right or not.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a clinical term that refers to when a person tries to manipulate another person into thinking they are crazy, like in the film Gas Light where a husband tries to gain possession of his wife’s jewelry by convincing her that she is crazy and having her committed. As depicted in this essay, gaslighting is something that happens to women a lot, and this same problem forms the spine of Homeland.

Carrie’s illness is not imaginary; she is bipolar and, towards the end of the season, has a manic episode that gets her fired. However, despite her illness, she is the only person who recognizes that Brody is a terrorist from the beginning. She figures out a large part of the case and even saves the day in the end. But as a reward, she is fired from her job at the CIA, everyone dismisses her as crazy, and she ends up having electroshock therapy to try and fix her illness.

Carrie is the only woman we really see involved in the CIA but her voice is marginalized and dismissed as crazy. This seems important. Would she have to go to such great lengths to hide her disease if she were male? Would her colleagues dismiss her as much? Homeland’s approach to Carrie’s gender is interesting and makes the show much deeper.

Television

In the end, however, I wonder if Homeland’s primary concern isn’t the medium of television itself and the relationship between it and its viewers. After all, Carrie spends most of the first four episodes watching TV: her surveillance footage of Brody and his family. She wears her pajamas and sits on the couch and eats snacks, just like a lot of the audience watching Homeland is doing, I imagine. However, as the season goes on, the walls between Carrie and her TV go down. She meets Brody in the real world and they end up hooking up. Carrie, in many ways, is living out the dreams of every television viewer: she gets to become a part of the action.

Several studies have shown that watching television has the same affect on the brain as forming friendships. Homeland, in some ways, is about the peculiar mix of voyeurism and loneliness that seems to cause that effect. It implicates its audience by making Carrie’s surveillance, so similar to our own, illegal and intrusive. It also questions what we’re getting out of it; Carrie isn’t able to stop the terror attack until she steps out of her living room and actually gets to know Brody as a person. And it shows the psychological cost of this surveillance, by ending with Carrie getting electroshock treatment. In the end, Homeland asks some interesting questions about television as a medium and what viewers get out of it.

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by | · 11:06 am

Kanye West Is Making a Movie in the Middle East Because Of Course He Is

Musician, mogul, throne-watcher, and Donda CEO Kanye West is finally returning to his roots as a filmmaker. According to the New York Observer, Ye is in the Middle East to shoot a follow-up short to “Runaway,” which, of course, was so good that it cured world hunger. This time, Yeezy has his sights set even higher, according to his reps:

“His reps seemed genuinely enthusiastic about creating a piece which highlights the culture accurately,” our source explained. “There’s a lot of preconceived notions and stereotypes about Emiratis and Qataris, which Westerners often play up. They discussed how Kanye is looking to bridge the cultural divide and break misconceptions.”

Yup, the film will indeed finally create peace between the West and the Middle East, so we have that to look forward to, along with Ye’s eventual Nobel Peace Prize (and subsequently shoving Philip Roth off the stage to demand the Nobel Prize for Literature should go to Haruki Murakami instead). Of course, its always possible that this is just a ruse to cover up the fact that Kanye is finally beginning work on The Jetsons movie, so more on this story as it develops.

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by | January 24, 2012 · 9:21 am

Oscar Nominations are Here

Yes, after 9,000 months of campaigning and preliminary awards, today the Academy separated the contenders from the pretenders and announced who was up for Oscars. There were plenty of surprises, both pleasant and otherwise. Support for Terrance Malick’s masterpiece The Tree of Life was stronger than a lot of people expected, as the film garnered Best Picture and Director nods. Best Actor contained two surprises, as Gary Oldman’s soft spoken spy from Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and Demian Bashir’s illegal immigrant from A Better Life edged out expected frontrunners Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Fassbender. Melissa McCarthy got a well-deserved nomination for Bridesmaids, but unfortunately Albert Brooks got ignored for his work in Drive. Oh and you guys will love this, 9/11 exploitation-fest Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close somehow got nominated for Best Picture. Predictions and analysis to come, but let’s all remember one thing: the Dean from Community is now an Oscar nominee.

Best Picture
The Artist
War Horse
Moneyball
The Descendants
Tree of Life
Midnight in Paris
The Help
Hugo
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Actress
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Viola Davis, The Help
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Best Actor
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy
George Clooney, The Descendants
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Demian Bichir, A Better Life

Best Supporting Actress:
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs

Best Supporting Actor:
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Director
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick, Tree of Life

Best Original Screenplay:
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids
J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Asgar Farhadi, A Separation

Best Adapted Sceenplay
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, The Descendants
John Logan, Hugo
Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, Moneyball
George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon, Ides of March
Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Foreign Language Film
Bullhead
Footnote
Monsieur Lazhar
A Separation
In Darkness

Best Animated Feature
Rango
A Cat in Paris
Puss in Boots
Kung Fu Panda 2
Chico and Rita

The complete list of nominees is up at Vulture.

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by | August 28, 2011 · 10:48 pm

Breaking Bad – “Problem Dog”

One of Breaking Bad’s finest aspects is its tendancy to play fair with the audience. It doesn’t put off plot movement out of the need to fill time, it doesn’t cheat its characters out of their next logical move, and it doesn’t underestimate its audience. We’re smart enough to know where Jesse stands with Walt and Gus, that Hank wouldn’t march into the DEA headquarters without something concrete, and that Gus wouldn’t be cowering in fear of the cartel if there wasn’t something very serious going on. It is so good about this that when it does take a little narrative indulgence, as it did tonight, it has more than earned the right to do so.

This week’s episode largely belonged to Jesse and Hank, connected as they are. The former remains haunted by his demons (as we learned in this week’s bang-up opening, complete with a camera attached to the end of Jesse’s light gun) while the latter is exorcising them. Gus and Walt’s maneuvering has landed Jesse square in the middle of this conflict, after Walt learns from Saul about Jesse’s encounter with Gus last week. Walt tries to talk Jesse into killing Gus but it doesn’t matter because Jesse seems ready to do it anyway.

Walt, for his part, is more on the fringes of this week’s episode, but he remains driven to ridiculous extremes by his powerlessness. Rather than returning Junior’s car, he sets it on fire (incurring $52,000 in fees). He finds Skyler growing increasingly distant (see the awkward peck on the cheek) and he even offers her an out when he seems surprised about the amount of money he had (I have to admit I found this part a little bit of a stretch. Did this really never come up? Especially given Walt’s warped sense of pride)

So, anyway, Walt gets to work on a Breaking Bad standard, the odorless, flavorless poison (long term viewers will remember him trying to give the same thing to Tuco in Season 2). He gives it to Jesse, who hides it in a cigarette but is not sure when he may see Gus again. It turns out that he would see him the next day, as Mike takes Jesse to serve as muscle for Gus’ big meet with the Cartel. Jesse has a chance to poison Gus right then and there, and then again could just shoot him in the head, but both times he doesn’t do it. It seems like Jesse might be thinking seriously about Mike’s suggestion that his loyalty is to the wrong person.

Or it could just be Jesse’s deep and powerful self-loathing. The latter drives him back to NA where he runs into one of the lifers from last time (who we last saw harassing Raylan Givens on Justified). Jesse flirts with confession, telling the people that he killed a dog but when a woman in the group turns on him, Jesse turns back on himself, lashing out at the group and admitting that he started there to sell them drugs. The episode leaves Jesse even worse off than before. He’s slouching more and generally seeming disconnected from the world around him.

On the other hand, Hank finds himself taking control of his life and the episode reflects that in his physical improvement. Not only is he walking around without help, but he goes from a walker to a cane in the course of the episode. In his first scene he slyly takes Junior to Los Pollos Hermanos, getting some face time with Gus Fring and even a free refill hand delivered by the man himself (and look at how smooth Gus is in this scene. Not only does he laud Hank but he offers Junior a part-time job, which would also happen to give him more leverage with Walter, without ever once dropping his “upstanding businessman” act. The guy is cold-blooded.)

Gus is very good, but Hank is even better, and he shows the lengths he has been going to when he finally sits down with his former colleagues in the DEA. He backtracked a serial number in Gale’s apartment to a company that sells the kind of tanks that would be useful to someone looking to make a massive meth lab. Then he connects the company to Pollos. All of this is circumstantial, and the DEA guys dismiss it as much, until Hank drops his bombshell. He found Gus’ fingerprints at Gale’s house.

For an episode that was mostly about table-setting, this week’s Breaking Bad was still superb. The parallels between Hank and Jesse were brilliantly drawn, as was the tension (this show sure does poison really well). The tension has gotten so hard to bear that a lesser show would have brought everything to a boil weeks ago. Here, however, things just keep getting worse and worse, and the ways out keep getting narrower and narrower.

Jonah’s Score: 89
TUiW Grade: A

Other Notes:

-I didn’t touch on the bit of narrative indulgence I alluded to earlier, when we found out that the Cartel is after something very specific from Gus. I’m not sure if I was the only one who was assuming that the Cartel was simply mad a Gus for his direct actions against him, but that took me by surprise. Any guesses about what they’re after? The obvious guess would be Heisenberg, but the Cartel seemed happy to let the Cousins kill him last season. Maybe they want Hank dead? Either way, frustrating as it was, I’m sure there’s a good reason why we didn’t learn that piece of information this week.

-Really great work by Aaron Paul this week, especially in his big scene at the NA meeting. In fact, between him, Dean Norris, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jonathan Banks, there are enough good performances this year to totally overwhelm the Best Supporting Actor category at the Emmys.

-I would like to see more of how Hank’s newfound sense of purpose has changed life at home for Marie. She certainly seems happier. Am I the only one who wants to see a scene with just the two of them to confirm it?

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