INDELIBLE FRECKLES

With The Good Wife ending its first season just like it started (but OMG oh-so-different), the inhabitants of Fortress Mamea have been bracing themselves for the fact that this week is chocker with season finales of Nurse Jackie, Glee and (I’m on my own with this one) Justified. Winter 2010 threatens to be a bleak affair.

As if.

The second season of Fringe fell by the wayside earlier in the late last year but we can catch up with Dunham and co at our leisure now. Unless we’re already belatedly catching up with Dexter (about to start season three) and Burn Notice (couple of eps from the second season finale). Or (re)watching the first seasons of Scrubs and Green Wing.

It should only be for June and a bit of July: the fifth season of The Closer and the fourth season of Mad Men open next month.

Meantime The Goddess has Radar’s Patch to chuckle over while I have Treme all to myself.

We’ll get by.

The Goddess likes Urbis and Beekeeper Journal while I like Empire and mourn the limited availability of Guns & Ammo. She listens to Greg Johnson and Jacqueline du Pre while I like to crank up some Wu or Nina Simone. She has a soft spot for Miss Marple while I’ll re-up with McNulty and friends any time.

There is some common ground. Queen, Maisey Rika and Phoenix Foundation. Better Off Ted, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife and Mad Men. (Yes, these last coupla years have been big box-watching years.)

She likes relationship stories while I like kill-my-dog-and-I-shall-lay-waste-upon-the-land-until-vengeance-is-mine stories. Her viewing threshold is a lot lower than mine – q.v. The Cult – but my excuse is that all viewing is a learning experience.

So we like different things. So what.

Were it not for Her, I would not have had the pleasure of Grand Designs, the River Cottage series, Pieces of April, and King of Kong. And were it not for me, She would not have had the pleasure of Mad Men, The Good Wife, Lars and the Real Girl, and In Bruges.

I suppose it evens out in the end. And because I do like to quote the good doctor,

  It is important to always try new things.

After twenty seasons, Law & Order has been canned.

I readily confess to not having watched the last eight seasons as fanatically religiously as the preceding twelve, local broadcaster scheduling notwithstanding. It has been comforting to know that it continued to chug along as I took up with the likes of Miss Marple, Wallander, Orange Roughies, Dexter, The Closer, The Shield, and The Wire. A nice warm glow was almost always guaranteed when chancing on a L&O episode whilst channel-surfing.

Alas – until we start rerunning the show down here – no more.

Its been an institution. Its time has come.

Time for more of the same – but different.

I finished James Ellroy‘s The Big Nowhere a while back. I’ve read it a few times now. Don’t know if it’s my favourite of his “L.A. Quartet” but I do relish its quicksand plot, bastard cops, and Ellroy’s unremitting style. The end is so black that when I reach it, I immediately want to start over as maybe things will work out better for my favoured characters the next time around.

The same goes for whenever I rewatch films like The Constant Gardener or television shows like The Shield where the endings are not happy.

Why do I subject myself to this torture?

It’s the execution. It’s the characters. It’s being taken by the hand for a half-hour or hour or ninety-plus minutes or days and returning to the real world short of breath, my heart thundering in my chest and a lump in my throat.

This is not a new discovery. Romeo and Juliet will never grow old. Rick will always have Paris. Rachel and Deckard will never have certainty.

And I think to myself:

  Someone wrote that shit.

  I lapped that shit up and begged for more.

  I want to write like that.

That word has been bouncing ’round my head lately. Part of it has been Steve Hickey‘s posts about sticky ideas. Another part has been discussions I’ve had recently about film, television and theatre that have left enduring memories regardless of the passage of time. And there’s been a smidgen of shop talk about making the familiar fresh.

There are doubtless innumerable posts in the ether about what makes a piece of art resonate.

For me, it’s a singular interpretation, execution and vision that transports the viewer.

I have no idea where David Simon and Eric Overmyer are going with Treme but I am so there, man, because I’m hooked. Same goes for the recently concluded 100 Bullets from Messieurs Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso – each trade paperback left me floundering as a reader but I’d still make enough connections between the many, many plotlines and goddamn if it wasn’t a hot little page-turner. And then there’s The West Wing and The Walking Dead. And The Good Wife and Ex Machina. And Mad Men. … I could go on.

With the exception of Treme, all of the above are easily categorized genre pieces.

Each title resonates not just because they’re so different from everything else out there that they’re essential reading/watching – they’re the creators talking directly to us the audience at an individual level. They’re connecting.

That’s resonating.

Burble.

• Screenwriter J D Shapiro apologises for Battlefield Earth.

  (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

• This. Is. SHATNER!

  (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)

• Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire scribe and producer, David Mills died suddenly last week. I didn’t know – I should’ve, really, but I didn’t know – that he was the one who penned the Homicide “Bop Gun” ep (the one with Robin Williams and a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal). This forty-plus minutes of free-to-air television truly opened my eyes to just how much more you could put into a police procedural.

  His and David Simon‘s latest television series Treme opens in a few days. I can’t wait to introduce The Goddess to teevee a la Simon et al.

Peace out.

This five-ep series about Brit plods trying to deal with space-time-continuum anomalies, fate v destiny, the possible existence of wormholes, and… oh god I can’t fake any more objectivity: it’s shows like this where cliches come to… make more cliches.

It’s largely negative critical reception in the UK may sum up the show best but will never explain why I persisted with these five hours of ‘entertainment’.

The Unit creator David Mamet apparently wrote a memo to the writers of the show of things to keep in mind, including things like:

Nothing a self-respecting screenwriter won’t already know but nonetheless a recommended and refreshing Mametian reminder.

(Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

Been saving these up, oh yes I have.

• The last swords-and-sandals epic I saw was Gladiator. Since then, Troy, Alexander, Rome and 300 have come and gone with nary a flicker of interest on my part. But The Incomparable‘s review of Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi‘s Spartacus has sparked a guilty, pulpy, what-the-heck kind of interest:
  …Spartacus won’t win any awards for the originality of its premise. Hunktacular warrior dude loves his superhot wife, but is reluctantly called away to battle for the good of his people. Hunktacular warrior dude is betrayed by sleaze-weasel Roman general and branded a deserter. Hunktacular warrior dude escapes and is reunited with his superhot wife just in time for them to be captured (notably, while in the altogether) by sleaze-weasel Roman general. Sleaze-weasel Roman general sells hunktacular warrior dude into the employ of agreeably amoral gladiator owner. Hunktacular warrior dude must wage a muscly, well-oiled, tiny-pantsed struggle up the ranks of the gladiator circuit to find his beloved wife and gain his whoa that guy just took a giant axe to the face!
• The always excellent xkcd webcomic has this heads-up for those writers out there putting the final touches on their denouement:

  

• And go here – now – for the rest of this brilliant bat-take on Memento: