 The third season finale of Better Call Saul was the kind of episode where you know what could happen, and whom it could happen to, yet somehow, you’re still shocked.
Clunk, clunk, clunk went the noise of Chuck McGill (Michael McKean) kicking the table until a lantern fell and caught his house on fire; the episode cut to black on a shot of the house as flames filled the windows. We may have recalled the time that Chuck’s brother, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), warned him that, between all the books and legal papers and the gas and oil lamps he used to the light the place, death by fire was a real possibility. We might also have been reminded of the clever but not all that subtle signals strewn throughout the episode that registered subliminally on their own, but that added up to, “Chuck will commit suicide by fire tonight.” Read More
0 Comments
 Spoilers ahead for the season finale of Better Call Saul.
The following is an edited, combined transcript of two conversations about the character of Chuck McGill on AMC’s Better Call Saul. One was conducted June 4, 2017, at Split Screens TV festival, the festival I programmed at IFC Center; actor Michael McKean and series creator and executive producer Peter Gould were my guests. (You can view unedited video of the conversation here.) The second conversation occurred today. If you’ve watched the season-three finale of Better Call Saul, you know why I’m being coy about describing the circumstance of the second interview. Read More  Netflix’s new wrestling comedy GLOW is about women making opportunities where none existed. The key to success, it tells us, is pretending that you don’t know that the patriarchy’s rules exist, the better to ignore them. The pilot starts with its heroine, Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie), at an audition, pretending she doesn’t know she’s reading the man’s part in a scene because the woman’s part is a demeaning waste of time that consists of telling a powerful man his wife is on line two.
Read More  The last half-hour of the season-one finale of Bryan Fuller’s latest series American Gods, about old and new deities fighting for humanity’s allegiance, is so delightful that it made me unreservedly love it, rather than finding it, to quote Ian McShane’s Mr. Wednesday, “confused but intrigued,” which was my default landing place throughout much of its run. (No, I haven’t read Neil Gaiman’s source novel, and I have no plans to; adaptations have to stand on their own.) It’s not that this Starz blockbuster lacks for moments of terror, beauty, and wit. Its long, self-contained, theatrically shaped scenes are a welcome antidote to the exposition-packed trailers-for-themselves that dominate a lot of TV drama, and the show is so visually, sonically, and musically self-indulgent that its excesses are often funny and sometimes inspired.
Read More  Starting tonight and continuing through Thursday, June 15, Showtime will air The Putin Interviews, a series of conversations between filmmaker Oliver Stone and Russian president Vladimir Putin. The project has been in the works for several years, but the most recent conversations occurred in February of 2017.
Last year, I published a book about Stone’s life and career titled The Oliver Stone Experience. One unifying thread was the controversy that has followed him throughout his career, from Midnight Express through Snowden. The tradition continues with the release of this new series, which has already been attacked in some quarters for being too favorable toward its subject. I asked Stone about the documentary and its detractors last Thursday, on the same day that former FBI director James Comey went before Congress to accuse President Donald Trump of trying to suppress an investigation into his administration’s alleged ties to Russia. An edited, condensed version of our conversation follows. Read More  From the moment it debuted on April 15, 2012, Lena Dunham’s coming-of-age comedy-drama Girls became a crucial fuel source for the internet’s think-piece-industrial complex, and it kept that machine chugging along for six seasons. As the date of Girls’ finale drew nigh, after an arc that saw Dunham’s heroine, writer Hannah Horvath, getting pregnant and deciding to have the baby, a wary consensus settled in: Whether they love-watched or hate-watched Girls, anyone who’d so much as sampled it wanted to see how it would end. Right after the finale, in which Hannah had maturity foisted upon her, the recaps and cultural thumb-suckers began to appear. Everyone had their say. And then: crickets.
Read More  Orange Is the New Black seemed to dig itself into a narrative hole at the end of season four with the brutal death of one of its most beloved characters, Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), in a jailhouse dustup that echoed subjects of Black Lives Matter protests (the choking death of Eric Garner in particular). It was an event so harrowing that it pulverized the show’s delicate balance of social criticism, inspirational empowerment subplots, and R-rated sitcom tomfoolery. Where could Orange possibly go after such an emotional catastrophe?
Read More  HBO’s The Leftovers has always been a story of faith and doubt, filled with coincidences that might really be the result of fate’s wheels turning. Sunday’s finale was the culmination of everything that series co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta and their collaborators have done to put that notion and others across during the show’s three seasons, but always with an element of what we might call “plausible deniability.” No matter what uncanny events occur, the viewer can credibly interpret events as breaking one way or the other, secure (or insecure) in the knowledge that the show will remain officially agnostic about what happened and what we’re supposed to take away from it.
Read More  “It adds up,” says Frank Langella’s weary KGB handler Gabriel, not long before leaving the spy game and heading back home to Russia near the end of season five of The Americans. There’s been too much lying, too much killing, too much pretending that it’s all normal and that it takes no toll on his psyche. He’s done. He talks a bit about the tendency to rationalize evil, when he admits committing atrocities after the war: “I believed I was working in service of a higher purpose, but I was just scared.” The whole season is about the damage done, and what you decide to do (or not do) after you’ve assessed it. Gabriel got out. He proved to be an old canary in this coal mine. By the end of the season, we’d see several major characters expressing a wish to get out of their respective Cold War jobs, on both sides of the KGB-FBI divide and on both sides of the Atlantic. As goes Gabriel, so goes The Americans.
Read More  The Carmichael Show, Jerrod Carmichael’s refreshingly old-school NBC sitcom, returns for a third season tonight, and what a pleasure it is to see the cast and crew settling into such a confident groove. The series is a hot-button comedy strongly modeled on the collected works of Norman Lear (All in the Family, Good Times, Maude, The Jeffersons). Carmichael is too young to have watched any of these programs during their original airings; he discovered them in repeats and became fascinated with them because, during his own childhood in the ’90s, network sitcoms had largely moved away from the sort of topic-driven, let’s-fight-it-out material that Lear and his collaborators specialized in.
Read More |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories
All
|
RSS Feed