It seems Homeland star Mandy Patinkin missed the memo about Stephen Colbert being a satirist:
[hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/434812]Category Archives: Film/TV
Our long national nightmare is (almost) over
The New York Times reports on the impending conclusion of MTV’s notorious TV series Jersey Shore on December 20:
Incredibly it was only three years ago that MTV ran its first episode of “Jersey Shore,” its documentary-style account of four muscle-bound guys and four impossibly orange women partying down and hooking up in Seaside Heights, N.J.
Over six rapid-fire seasons, including excursions to Miami and Florence, Italy, “Jersey Shore” became one of MTV’s biggest hits ever, drawing nearly nine million viewers an episode at its peak and introducing terms like “smooshing” and the gym-tanning-laundry shortcut “G.T.L.” (among less savory acronyms) to the American lexicon.
The series has also elevated its distinctively monikered cast members like Michael Sorrentino (a k a the Situation), Jenni Farley (JWoww) and Paul DelVecchio (Pauly D), making them the envy of unemployed milliennials, the scorn of Italian-American advocacy groups and unlikely ambassadors of their hurricane-devastated coastal escape.
But now these improbable celebrities are bracing themselves for a different kind of reality, when the parties and press tours — and the cornerstone TV show that supported them — go away, leaving viewers to take stock of why they tuned in, and its subjects to wonder if their fame could fade as rapidly as it arrived.
“We were regular people a couple years ago,” said Vinny Guadagnino, a “Jersey Shore” star. “I don’t want it to stop.”
I do.
“In Memoriam” to a once-stellar series? Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 11 of Homeland
Jay Pinho: OK, so here goes…
I have to be honest: this was probably my least favorite episode of Homeland this season. There are way too many flaws to remember off the top of my head, but here are a few of my initial complaints:
1) If there’s one scene that embodies all the problems raised by this episode, it’s the one where Carrie finds the secret passageway in the tunnels and her companion improbably moves in alone without even bothering to inform his colleagues right away, never mind wait for backup. That moment was so single-handedly ridiculous I couldn’t believe it was actually happening while I was watching it — it played off every horror movie cliche, and the fact that he was killed was just about the most predictable TV death in recent history. Not a good look for Homeland. On the bright side, it did lead to my favorite online comment of the year (which can be seen below Alan Sepinwall’s typically spot-on review):
I was totally with it until Carrie did the job of like a hundred SWAT teams and then out-muscled Abu Nazir immediately after he’d slit the throat of a large man. Might I add that Carrie weighs like 90 pounds, hadn’t slept in two days and has a diet that consists of Chinese takeout, her father’s sandwiches and vegetarian lasagna. Oh, and she’d been in a car wreck less than two days ago. That was really the best they could think of? I hope the writers do some serious soul-searching before season 3 starts.
2) Again, Saul’s naiveté is quickly morphing into “unbelievably stupid” territory. If he really does believe that Estes and Quinn are plotting Brody’s assassination — as we know is the case — then would he really bring all this up publicly, again and again, revealing how much he knows and thereby endangering himself? That scene with the polygraph test — while showing off, once again, Mandy Patinkin’s incredible acting — was just not credible: what does Saul get out of openly accusing Estes of running an off-the-books black ops plan to kill Brody? Saul’s a veteran spy; in no universe does his insistence on getting himself into deeper trouble make any sense.
One last note re Saul: I really did like the way he completely disappeared from the storyline for the remainder of the episode after his scene with Estes. It was a good matching of form to content, as in: what would the show look like without Saul? Obviously, he’s not actually going to disappear — at least, not like that — but it was interesting to see that the CIA accomplished the single greatest goal Saul and Carrie had been working toward (getting Abu Nazir), and yet Saul was portrayed as a complete sideshow to it by the end of the episode. It was as if Estes’ plan to isolate him were already being enacted. If Estes and Saul somehow both survive the season finale next week, I really hope the show never finagles some twisted way to get them back in each other’s good graces again. In my opinion, the Saul-Estes relationship has passed a point of no return: there’s just too much mutual suspicion for them to ever go back to the way they were, so I hope the show never tries that. Continue reading “In Memoriam” to a once-stellar series? Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 11 of Homeland
Going crazy over Homeland
New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who’s come up with an elaborate theory about the latest episode of the Showtime series Homeland (warning: spoilers below), worries that she’s turning into Carrie Mathison:
Yet I couldn’t help getting drawn in, because after some consideration, I found that I’d stumbled upon a solution—which is to say I developed a completely insane theory that explains everything. I am also prepared to defend my crazy theory at all costs, because this show is turning me into Carrie Mathison. Enough preamble. The theory is this: Nicholas Brody is faking it. He plotted with Abu Nazir to have Carrie kidnapped, so that Brody could “save” her, thus ensuring her loyalty and manipulating her into concealing their crimes (which she did, after all: she didn’t tell her bosses about the scheme to kill the Vice-President.) All that face-acting Damian Lewis was doing, with the yelling and the screaming into Skype—a notable departure from the subtlety of Lewis’s earlier performance? He knew Carrie was listening. It was an act.
Carrie Mathison is clearly in love with Brody. Brody has feelings for her, too, but he’s still capable of manipulating her (which is the same thing she’s doing to him, after all, in the name of the C.I.A.—calming him down with sex, holding his hand to reassure him.) When Nazir kidnapped Brody, during that mysterious prayer confab a few weeks back, the two came up with a plan. I’m not sure what that plan is, beyond killing the Vice-President, but it seems to involve messing with Carrie’s head—even more than she’s already been messed with.
When you think about it, my theory explains much that felt strange about “Broken Hearts.” It explains why Brody was going so over-the-top bonkers. It explains why Nazir didn’t walk away with his cell phone, to explain the pacemaker plan out of earshot of the C.I.A. operative he’d kidnapped. My theory also explains why Nazir was so willing to let Carrie go, even before Brody had given him the code: they’d scripted that element, to make it clear that Brody was motivated by love. The twist would match up perfectly with the show’s thematic fascination with behavior as performance, which goes back to Season One, when Carrie watched Brody strip and suffer on her monitors as if he were some especially juicy episode of Real World: The Patriot Act.
“Broken Hearts” on Homeland: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 10
Last night’s episode of Homeland was crazier than ever, in both good ways and bad. As fellow obsessives of the Showtime series, First Casualty contributor Sam Lim and I usually follow up each weekly episode with a series of frantic emails back and forth to digest what just happened in the preceding hour. This time, I decided (with Sam’s permission) to put (a slightly edited version of) them up on the blog, which we’ll be doing for the last two episodes of Season 2 as well. Without further comment…
Sam Lim: Where to start with this week’s episode…did NOT see Carrie getting abducted by Abu Nazir. Smashing a car in public and then dragging away a woman seems like it’d garner a lot more attention than it did, no? And where the heck did Abu Nazir have time to find an abandoned mill on his own?
Jay Pinho: Damn! Wow…another veryyy twisty episode. Here are a couple random thoughts:
1) Homeland keeps surprising me. Every time I think I’ve figured out where it’s going to go next, it seems to anticipate what that is and goes in another direction instead. Case in point: Carrie getting captured. Like you said, that was completely out of the blue. I expected the rest of the season to have a storyline involving Carrie finding out about the plan to assassinate Brody, and trying to warn him. Actually, that might still happen, but if so, the show is taking a really interesting/circuitous route to get there. Continue reading “Broken Hearts” on Homeland: Sam Lim and I discuss Episode 10
The problems with Skyfall
Eric Alterman was nonplussed about the latest James Bond film, Skyfall:
Things that are too stupid about “Skyfall” to accept, though it does not make it impossible to enjoy the movie:
1) It is based on a total absurdity: No intelligence would ever (or even could) compile such a list.
2) There is never any explanation given for the existence of said list.
3) When Bond “dies” in the beginning and then ends up on that beach, well, what? How did that happen? Again, no explanation.
I don’t mind absurdities within the movies. I do mind a) the plot being based on one and b) them not bothering to try to explain them.
Things that are silly but okay, because this is Bond: Everybody in the movie has hundreds of chances to kill everybody else. They prefer to describe how they are about to kill them instead. That’s standard fare in all bad guy movies.
Stephen Colbert on Homeland
You’ll never guess why he finds the Showtime series so unrealistic:
You knew this had to happen
The inevitable David Petraeus/Mean Girls analogies:
Mean Girls, that true classic of modern cinema, introduced America to a catty social undermining technique known as the “three-way calling attack”: A teen girl phones a friend to engage in some gossip, neglecting to mention that a third friend is listening silently on another line. It’s casual entrapment, a surefire way to gin up controversy in a small, closed social circle. But there are usually unforeseen consequences.
One week in, with more backstabbing details emerging every day, the Pentagon affair scandal has begun to seem like a giant three-way (or five-way) calling attack staged by a D.C.-military-elite version of the Plastics. The split-screen mayhem looks like this: General David Petraeus has a long-simmering affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, who gets jealous of Petraeus’s acquaintance Jill Kelley and sends her threatening, anonymous e-mails. Broadwell also dials in General John Allen, another acquaintance, sending him e-mails that describe Kelley “as a ‘seductress’ and warn[ing] the general about being entangled in a relationship with her,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Then Kelley gets an anonymous FBI agent on the line, intending that he only hear Broadwell’s attacks. But while he’s eavesdropping on that interaction, he overhears dirt that Kelley didn’t mean to expose — namely, that she was exchanging her own sexy e-mails with Allen. Oh, and that anonymous FBI agent was hot for Kelley and had sent her shirtless pics of himself. As the Plastics would say, “OMG.”
Oh, and it continues.
Brief thoughts on last night’s Homeland
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZjPzWPdoqw]
Warning: Homeland spoilers below.
I seem to be in some weird alternate universe in which I disagree progressively more strongly with the critical consensus on Homeland episodes. Yesterday’s episode, “The Clearing,” is a case in point: many reviews I read took a decidedly “meh” tone about the story, while I thought it may have been Homeland‘s strongest week of the entire series (or at the very least, in the top three or so).
The one thing almost everyone agreed upon was the pool scene, in which a solitary Nick Brody was momentarily able to escape his increasingly complicated life by taking a brief swim in the dark. The combination of the music, the deliberately slow pacing (which contrasts heavily with the general feel of Homeland), and the solitude rendered this one of the single best moments in the entirety of the show. Just a beautifully executed scene.
In all other aspects of the episode, reviews were mixed. But I thought all the storylines were actually well-constructed and helped to contribute to a pervasive sense of betrayal and abandonment. Jess feels betrayed by Brody (for not telling her about killing Tom Walker), by Dana (for running someone over and not confessing earlier), and — to a lesser extent — by Cynthia Walden (for immediately seeking the coverup instead of acting ethically). Brody, in turn, feels betrayed by Carrie for using him in the eponymous clearing of the title, and then for her humiliation of him in front of Dana at the end of the episode. Saul feels betrayed by Aileen, with whom he’d believed to have established a rapport. And Dana feels betrayed by a compromised father whom she once idolized, and by Finn for his coldness after she forced their confession.
Also, can we please see more of Mandy Patinkin? That guy’s the best actor on the entire show. As Alan Sepinwall alluded to in his review, Patinkin’s scene with Aileen — especially after he realized what she had done — should single-handedly win the man an Emmy. What a performance.
The SNL streak continues with Homeland
They’re on a roll over there:
[hulu http://www.hulu.com/watch/423747]