Season Two is definitely an improvement for the HBO series The Newsroom.  It doesn’t rate quite so highly as liberal porn anymore, but the diminished speechifying and improved story structure more than make up for that…

Have I mentioned yet how much I’m starting to miss my Showtime?  I don’t think so, but I am now two episodes behind on Ray Donovan.  That’s not too bad, but if this isn’t resolved before Homeland premieres next month, there’s a big problem brewing.

I believe Lovelace, a biopic about the star of Deep Throat, is interesting in several ways but not great because of some limitations in the characterization of Linda Lovelace.

Maybe I’m more traditional than I like to think because I always have trouble with films in two parts (from Full Metal Jacket to Life Is Beautiful) and am searching for a third part to make it feel whole unless the narrative structure of a given film is more experimental, in which case I jettison such expectations.

Lovelace is not particularly experimental, however.  The cast is terrific (more on that later) and the story is solid so far as it goes, but I want to know a little more about Linda Boreman / Linda Lovelace / Linda Marchiano.

Mostly, I want to know more about Linda Marchiano to get a deeper understanding of the person she becomes.  The text at the end of the film is insufficient for me to feel a deep enough understanding of her various transitions to feel fully satisfied with the film; I have the feeling she was a much more complex person than the one I see on the screen.

Still, there is a lot to recommend it.  The cast is strong.  Amanda Seyfried has been a favorite of mine from the first time I saw her in a film, and I sometimes go to movies I wouldn’t otherwise see because she is in them.  Once again, she is mesmerizing in the title role.

Peter Sarsgaard is another actor I greatly admire.  It’s a rare talent to be able to play a predator with enough charm and skill (An Education as well as this film) that viewers can understand the attraction his target feels at the same time his character’s smarminess, selfishness, and ill-intent are skin-crawingly evident (to us) from the beginning.  The duality he conveys raises the stakes from the outset.

Sharon Stone is unrecognizable as Linda’s mother, Dorothy, and her anger and disappointment are palpable.  Robert Patrick is good in the small role of Linda’s father.

But, it is Chris Noth, Bobby Cannavale, and Hank Azaria who make the porn industry seem like such fun, probably because they are having so much fun recreating the scenes depicting the production of Deep Throat.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making films together since 1987, mostly documentaries – like Common Threads:  Stories From the Quilt and The Celluloid Closet – but also the narrative feature Howl.  Before then, Epstein also directed an historically significant doc I’m quite fond of, The Times of Harvey Milk.  Andy Bellin wrote Lovelace.

I’ll spend a moment on Howl because James Franco, who stars as poet Allen Ginsberg in this unusual biopic, also has a small but important role in Lovelace as Hugh Hefner.

Howl works a little better for me than Loveless.  It has more latitude in terms of expectation because this biopic is more experimental and takes an unusual approach to the subject.

The film focuses on the time Ginsberg wrote his long poem “Howl” and, subsequently, when his publisher defended it in court over an obscenity suit.

Franco gives a powerful performance as the beat poet, and the strong supporting cast includes Jon Hamm as the defense attorney for Ginsberg’s publisher, David Straithairn as the prosecutor, and Jeff Daniels as a literary critic testifying for the prosecution.

I admire they way Epstein and Friedman – again co-directors but here also co-writers – have crafted the film from court transcripts, interviews, and the Ginsberg’s poems.  I’m more ambivalent about Eric Drooker’s animation for the poems, not the use of animation, which seems fitting, but the look of these sequences.

Howl evokes a time and place with authentic feeling and with a sense of the iconography of the key players, Ginsberg and his friends Jack Keroac and Neal Cassady.  Some people may find the treatment more cerebral than engaging as the film celebrates the writer’s craft, but this is not a problem for me as a viewer.  Poetry is elusive, so why should a film about it be any different?

It seems ironic that the more experimental film coheres better thematically than Lovelace, but that is the effect of the two films on me.  Lovelace is certainly worth seeing for the performances, the production design (oh! The 70s!), and the subject, but I need a bit more to think of it a great film rather than a good one.

This week, it’s Brian Stelter.  I love The New York Times – and I like his content better than some other contenders – but can’t help but notice that the pattern continues of white guys behind the desk.

By the way, my assessment is that Frank Sesno is the best of those who have taken a turn hosting so far in terms of style because he’s the most experienced in front of a camera while some others have been (understandably) nervous to a degree that interferes with the flow of the show.

Still, I’m still hoping for some diversity before the game of musical host chairs comes to an end.

 

 

I am sad Nate Silver is leaving NYTimes for ESPN…leaving my world and going to another. The Stats Stud has been the most important part of my political life through two campaign cycles.  Sigh.

As I was waking up this morning, before I opened my eyes, an image crossed my mind, a hairy, hideous beast crying tears that turned into diamonds.

When I was in middle school, which we called junior high school back then, my family went to Florida over the holiday break, which we called the Christmas break, and I spent most of my time sitting around the house reading The Fountainhead.

Don’t laugh.  I must have been 14 or so because I didn’t quite understand yet how ridiculous that novel is.

One morning I was resting my eyes for a moment and caught a flash of something intriguing on the television.  “Go back,” I said.  It was mid-morning, and I had just seen something beautiful, sublime even, in luscious black and white on the small screen.

The subtitles were French.  I wonder if this singular experience led me to take French later on in high school?  Perhaps.

The book forgotten, I saw a film that would stick with me and maybe transform me.  I was a rapt viewer, an adjective I notice shares a root with rapture.  Really, that’s what watching this movie was for me, a rapture.

Until 11 a.m. rolled around that is, and, at that moment, my Granny didn’t care what was on the local PBS station because it was time to go to lunch.  Really.

I begged and begged to stay behind to watch this movie.  I had no idea what it was but knew it was remarkable and that I may never have another chance to see it.  After all, those were the days before VHS, and access to films was limited.

I was afraid that I may never even be able to figure out what the film was, and I cried a few silent tears just like the Beast, though mine did not turn into diamonds.

Happily, that random encounter with the mastery of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La belle et la bête is one of the handful of formative experiences with films that helped lead me down my professional path.

I was sad that morning to leave the dazzling images for the buffet line but thrilled years later to see the film again and know that I was right as a teenager to appreciate things about it that were beyond my ability to articulate.

 

 

I have Regina Spektor’s catchy theme song for Orange is the New Black on heavy rotation inside my head.  “You’ve Got Time” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAyFRgdjKU8) is popping into my consciousness all the time, which means at least two things.

I like the song.

I want to see more episodes of the series.

Unfortunately, in the way that it is sad to finish the last few pages of a wonderful novel, I have binged my way through the series.  It’s done now. Sigh.

The story centers on Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling – liked her in the short-lived series Mercy, too), a middle class, college-educated woman in her 30s who has to leave her fiancé to spend a year in prison as part of a plea bargain for an old drug charge.

It’s a good premise, and the women Chapman encounters in prison have compelling stories of their own.

Orange is the New Black is adapted from a memoir by Piper Kerman, which I have not read, but the writing on the series is sharp, one of the strongest elements of a riveting series.

If you have Netflix streaming, give it a shot.  I liked the first episode enough to keep watching and really warmed up to the series as it unfolded and more and more backstories of inmates were included in the larger narrative.

There are too many good performances to cite them all here from faces new and familiar, and the production values are very high, too.

All around, this is one of my new favorite series.  Personally, I like it better than Weeds, also created by Kenji Kohan.  See what you think.

Here it goes again!

“The animals, the animals

Trapped, trapped, trapped ’till the cage is full

The cage is full”

Leap ahead to…

“Think of all the roads

Think of all their crossings

Taking steps is easy

Standing still is hard

Remember all their faces

Remember all their voices

Everything is different

The second time around“

Maybe I should just buy the song and play it over and over while I’m driving or walking or whatever to exorcize it from my head?

“You’ve got time

You’ve got time”

The song is good, but the reason it’s trapped inside my head is because it’s inextricably linked to the series.

Just watch the show.

 

So, I watched the rest of the episode hosted by Politico’s Patrick Gavin, and the second half seemed a lot like an entertainment “news” show.  There was more diversity among guests on the “lite” stories, but perhaps that doubles the insult.  I have limited interest in whether or not The Newsroom seems like real newsrooms panelists have worked in and which news outlets are adding yoga rooms and beer taps adjacent to their own newsrooms.

 

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a regular viewer of Reliable Sources, the weekly CNN show critiquing the media.  I was out of town on Sunday and am just now settling in to watch this past week’s episode as part of my scheduled DVR maintenance.

What?  Is there yet another white guy rotating as host and presumably competing for the gig since Howard (Howie to his friends) Kurtz left CNN for FOX?  Why no diversity in the mix?  Why did the first segment on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have a panel of white guys analyzing the deals that may or may not go down for two other white guys?

Bored with the lineup, I turned to the computer to find out if anyone else is feeling frustrated about the show.  Turned this up right away:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/08/01/dear-cnn-find-a-female-media-critic/

Yes, Erik Wemple, I’d like to turn on the TV and see Karen Tumulty hosting Reliable Sources next week and see the panels staffed with some of the other names you mention.

There is a great need for serious reporting on the media and analysis of the media culture.  Make this show work and let it reflect the world the rest of us live in…

The Way Way Back marks a nice directorial debut for Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.  Imagine a young teen’s terrible summer vacation at a beach where he’s too young for the older kids, too old for the younger kids, and generally ignored except for a community he finds at a water park nearby.

Both Faxon and Rash have supporting roles in the film as water park employees and longer resumes as actors than as writers, though writing is what has landed them the success that likely made this film possible.  Before co-writing The Way Way Back, they co-wrote The Descendents with Alexander Payne and took home an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

But, back to The Way Way Back, which refers literally to the back of a classic station wagon where Duncan sits far away from his mom’s boyfriend Trent, (Steve Carrell), his mom, Pam (Toni Collette), and Trent’s daughter, Steph (Zoe Levin).

There are some good performances (who knew Steve Carrell could be so mean?) and nice movie moments, but Liam James really carries the picture as Duncan, a 14-year-old boy who feels beaten down by his mom’s boyfriend, abandoned to some degree by his mother, and as uncomfortable in his own skin as I imagine all boys his age must feel.

In addition to James, Carrell, and Collette, I particularly Allison Janney, as an out of control neighbor, and Sam Rockwell as Owen, the water park employee who takes Duncan under his wing.

There’s a line in the film about the beach in summer functioning as spring break for adults, and the whole experience reveals to Duncan that not only do adults not have everything figured out but they can behave as badly as the worst of the high school mean girls and middle school bullies.

There are some searing moments.  It makes me cringe to think about the cruel remarks – intentional and incidental – that parents and other adults toss off at their children in this film.  But unlike another film that traffics in this type of emotional hurt, The Squid and the Whale, there isn’t quite enough character development in The Way Way Back to make all of the relationships clear and meaningful.

Notably, Trent’s daughter, Steph, is completely underwritten.  It would not have taken much screen time to have given the audience some sense of her relationship with her father, which, in turn, would have relevance to the way he treats Duncan and the way she and Duncan interact in their few scenes together.

I’m not talking about interactions and characterizations that are too obvious or contrived.  Faxon and Rash handle subtlety well, as with the water park romance between Owen and Caitlin (Maya Rudolph).  Nuance is good, but make sure there is enough “there” there.

The Way Way Back is worth seeing, but I wish the film had been better than the trailer instead a little less promising than the promotional piece.