This is scarier than an army of White Walkers.
Enjoy…
And you thought seeing Cersei on the Iron Throne was scary
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Category Archives: Television
Right! What’s all this, then…? What are you on about?
Our regular contributor Jeff Mobley raised this question today on Twitter:
@BradWarthen, need an expert’s verdict: Is this really the theme from “The West Wing”? https://t.co/5EDE1HU0YY
— Jeff Mobley (@JeffMfromSC) July 12, 2016
What followed was a clip showing the end of David Cameron’s presser when he announced he’d be leaving as P.M. After which he walks into the house humming to himself.
I could only answer that I wasn’t sure, but what I truly loved was that perfectly British, clipped “Right!” at the very end… Like that’s that, then! Stiff upper lip, what? Stay calm and carry on…
Game of Thrones recap: Finally, the Khaleesi gets off her duff
ALERT: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT!
Actually, there were a lot of “finally” moments in the finale, which is fitting:
- Arya finally gets to employ her new skills in obtaining what she wants — revenge. That is to say, she had her “My name is Inigo Montoya” moment.
- As a result, we don’t have to look at Walder Frey’s ugly, nasty, antisocial puss any more.
- Jon Snow, the bastard who was never treated as a true Stark and who ended last season suffering the ultimate insult-to-injury treatment, finally comes into his own, winning the esteem and devotion of the entire north (if you don’t count Littlefinger, which I don’t).
- Everyone acknowledges that, as chief Westerosi meteorologist Ned Stark told them so emphatically long ago, Winter is indeed Coming.
- Tyrion Lannister, whose drinking problem arose largely from his never getting any respect back home, finally gets a promotion — and not a grudging, degrading one like he got that time he was the Hand of the King.
- All that futzing around with the High Sparrow is at a cataclysmic end, and we know who’s in charge in King’s Landing. True, it’s the wrong Lannister — if the Iron Throne had to be occupied by one of that incestuous pair, we’d all be better off with Jaime (as was noted in commentary after the episode, now that all her children are dead, Cersei has no redeeming qualities at all) — but at least all that uncertainty is over.
- Samwell Tarly, who has so wanted to become a maester, has that glorious moment beholding the ultimate dream library, which is his to dive into.
And as I said in the headline, the Mother of Dragons finally, finally stops with the big talk and the hemming and the hawing and the messing around with local politics over across the Narrow Sea, and heads toward what she has told us with unrelieved monotony for years is her destiny. Sheesh! About time. At last, the girl will put up or shut up.
Anyway, I found it all fairly satisfying, and now I can happily drop my HBO Now subscription, and not think about it any more until next year. Since, you know, Amazon Prime give me everything else HBO has to offer…
Below, you see Jon being acknowdged as King in the North. Yay. But it reminds me I’d like to see one more “finally” moment. I’d like to see someone finally pay the light bill in Westeros. Why does everything have to be so dark that I can’t tell what’s happening if I try to watch on my iPad in a room with any lights on at all?
Cranston, others are AMAZING in ‘All the Way’
I intend to drop my subscription to HBO Now, as an economizing measure, after the last episode of “Game of Thrones” this weekend. (I’m not giving up much; my Amazon Prime account gives me access to pretty much everything I value about HBO.)
Before doing that, I made a point last night to watch the new HBO movie, “All the Way,” starring Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson.
I was blown away. Wow. I did not know Cranston could act like that. Sure, a lot of it was a brilliant makeup job, but that was just the start. And it wasn’t just the voice impersonation; plenty of people could do that. It was his physicality — the way he positioned and moved his body, the subtleties of his facial expressions, that made him seem to inhabit LBJ.
The constant Grimace of Anxiety
Just watching his mouth shape the words was hypnotic. As much as I liked “Breaking Bad,” it persuaded me that he had a limited set of expressions. In the early seasons, I got really tired of that grimace of extreme anxiety that he wore constantly — although, in retrospect, I suppose that was masterful, too, as it so effectively communicated his stress to me, which was part of what I didn’t like about it.
But to watch that jaw and lips and teeth become those of LBJ was astounding.
But the quality of this production extends far beyond Cranston. You’ll also be impressed by Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey, and Melissa Leo as Lady Bird. Frank Langella as Sen. Richard Russell and Steven Root as J. Edgar Hoover are both wonderful as well, but then those guys always are.
There are less impressive parts, of course. The actor who plays Strom Thurmond only has a line or two, but I still fault him for doing too little with it.
But the greatest letdown is Anthony Mackie as Martin Luther King. For one thing, he doesn’t seem old enough. Yeah, I know — MLK was only 35 at the time and Mackie is precisely that age. But King had a bearing that made him seem older than he was.
Perhaps I expect too much, but it seems that in everything I see — the disappointing “Selma” comes to mind — the actors portraying King fall far short of capturing him. Mr. Mackle simply lacks the gravitas — in the shape of his face, his voice, his manner. King had a presence that impressed. Why is there not an actor out there who can communicate it, or at least approximate it?
But let’s not linger on the shortcomings. “All the Way” is excellent, and if you have access, you should take the time to see it.
Recap: Game of Thrones decides to throw us a bone
Having a bad day, Jon? Well, it’s the consequence of your own poor decisions…
Yeah, I know how other sites give you the Game of Thrones recaps the same night the episodes are first released, but that is SO-o-o-o- 20th Century. I watch them in the modern way — when I feel like it.
So here’s my recap of Episode 9 of Season 6, “The Battle of the Bastards.”
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER — BASICALLY, NOTHING BUT SPOILERS FROM HERE ON.
Let’s cut to the chase and deal with the battle itself. Bottom line, the good guys win, which in and of itself is remarkable. For once the writers throw us a bone.
But here’s the thing — they don’t deserve to win. Not tactically speaking. In fact, they do everything they can to throw the battle into Ramsay Bolton’s nasty lap.
What was the one thing that came out of the Council of War the night before? Make Ramsay come to us. He has the numbers; he has the cavalry. Choose your ground, hold it, shape it with trenches and other things that will prevent the enemy from enveloping you, and you have a chance.
Um, remember how the plan was NOT to get enveloped?
So what happens? Ramsay does something entirely predictable — as Sansa said, there’s no way Rickon is walking out of this episode — and Jon et al. do exactly what he wants them to do, what even a split second of thought would tell them he wants them to do. And they do it anyway, without hesitation.
This seems particularly egregious to us as viewers — or me, anyway — because who is Rickon to us? Yeah, in the abstract we know that Jon watched the kid grow up, but we have not been made to feel that. To us, Rickon is just this guy, you know? Has he ever spoken a word of dialogue? Maybe so, but not that I recall. Yeah, he’s the last legit male Stark heir who hasn’t gone north of the Wall and become a hallucinating oracle, but were any of us pinning our hopes on him to save the family fortunes? I don’t think so. The poor boy was a born victim. I didn’t seen any of Ned in him. In fact, I didn’t see any of anybody in him, because we never got to know him.
So we see Ramsay do Rickon in in a cruel manner, but not a particularly cruel manner by Bolton standards. Which we expected him to do. Which, since we don’t know Rickon really from Adam’s off ox, makes it seem especially egregious when Jon reacts by doing everything he can to throw the battle away.
And in fact, he succeeds in that. The battle, as far as the forces Jon went in with, is entirely lost when Littlefinger comes to the rescue — a deliverance we had no reason to expect, making it the plot equivalent of dealing with a nightmare situation by writing, “And then the boy woke up.”
Yeah, it’s satisfying to see Ramsay come to an ignominious, gruesome end. He brought out the cruel beast in us all.
But the good guys had this one handed to them. They didn’t earn it.
Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, the Khaleesi is in a fix and her dragons deliver her from it, yadda-yadda. Personally, this girl isn’t going to impress me any more until she finally makes an appearance in Westeros and delivers on all her big talk.
But what did y’all think?
Meanwhile, Daenerys and her dragons, yadda-yadda…
Game of Thrones: A girl tells a man where he can get off
A girl sees that a man failed to pay the light bill again. A girl is out of here…
Lots of websites, including some run by respectable newspapers (how respectable? in one case, so respectable that Donald Trump has banned it from his campaign), drive traffic by posting weekly recaps of “Game of Thrones.”
Any interest in that here? After all, I stayed up too late a couple of nights ago to catch up on it, and I hate for that lost sleep to count for naught.
SPOILER ALERT
I was glad to see that Arya woke up and decided that, after all, she does have a name. Jaqen H’ghar had been one of my favorite characters, based mostly on his idiosyncratic speech habits. But at some point, damn, girl — it’s time to realize you’ve had enough, head home and use some of your new assassin skills on Ramsay Bolton, or someone else who richly deserves it.
OK, so the Khaleesi’s back home. But is anyone besides me tired of waiting for her to actually get it together and head for Westeros? Enough stilted, grandiose talk! Get with the program or put your dragons out to pasture!
As to the scene with the fugitive Ironborn heirs in the brothel (poor Theon!)… Anybody besides me wonder how they cast a scene like that? Do they place an ad asking for “beautiful young women with shapely boobs; no skills required?” Hollywood is a ever-weirder place as we descend further into cultural decadence.
Take a good look at Jon Snow, with his perpetual petulant, worried, put-upon expression. He looks like a boy-band member who didn’t get his bowlful of red M&Ms. Would you follow this guy to almost-certain doom? Neither would most of the noble houses of the North. When Sansa, habitual victim, comes across as the stronger sibling, House Stark is in trouble.
Finally, is Winter ever going to come? There’s a whole army of zombies up there north of the Wall, and did we get to see any this week? No.
Personally, unlike all those fanboys out there, I’d like to see all this get wrapped up….
Seriously, does this face inspire confidence? Do you want to follow it into battle?
Sometimes ‘realism’ is taken to unreal lengths
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- The 1950s Hickok.
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- The ‘Deadwood’ Hickok
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- The real-life Hickok
With all the talk about guns in the wake of the Orlando massacre, we got to talking on an earlier thread about the role of firearms in American history, which started me (as a child of the ’50s, who felt naked without a toy six-gun on my hip) to start riffing on that peculiarly American art form, the Western, and how it has evolved.
So I thought I’d expand on the subject in a separate post…
I, and others my age, grew up on unrealistic westerns in which every man went around with a gun in a holster, except for wusses such as shopkeepers or bankers. I’m pretty sure that is an exaggeration, and I suspect that people who went obviously armed were probably looked at askance by the townspeople, although it may have seemed marginally less bizarre than it would today on Gervais Street.
Just as gunfights were nothing like the ritualized affairs we know from movies, with two men approaching down the dusty street, pausing with their hands hovering over their holsters, scrupulously waiting for the other guy to go for his gun before drawing.
Gunfights such as the one at the OK Corral were wild, confused affairs more akin to what happened at that video game storethe other day…
Modern westerns, of course, go for realism.
SPOILER ALERT!
I’m belatedly watching “Deadwood.” I’m not binge-watching because, as one whose ancestors stuck to Civilization — by which I mean the East Coast — I can only take so much profanity, filth, crudeness, naked avarice and utter disregard for common decency at a time. (As much as it would scandalize my 6-year-old self, I have come to suspect as an adult that had I lived back then, I likely would have been a “dude.” Which wasn’t as cool back then as it sounds today.) Thirty seconds with the “Deadwood” character Al Swearengen (based on a real guy) can make you want to write off the human race as beyond redemption. At the very least, it should persuade a discriminating person to give the Wild West a wide berth.
I would not want to live in the same territory as this guy.
Anyway, I’m in the first season, and in the last episode the death of Wild Bill Hickok was depicted — VERY realistically, with him being shot in the back without warning while playing poker.
Such realism is preferable, I suppose. And the clean-cut, 1950s-style western was ridiculous (compare above the guy who played Hickok on TV when I was a little kid and it was my favorite show, the version from Deadwood and the real guy).
Although enough of “Deadwood” and you can start to long, at least a little, for the Disneyland version, with the good guys in spotless white hats.
Or at least for characters you give a damn doggone about. So far the only relatively likeable person on this series is Calamity Jane, and you don’t want your kids in the room when she’s talking.
Bottom line, I’m sure something like everything you see on “Deadwood” actually happened at one time or other in the Old West. But not distilled to this extent, not as unrelenting with the soul-wearing nastiness. Just like, unlike on cop shows, real cops can easily go their whole careers without discharging a firearm in the line of duty.
Surely they had to let up and give it a rest sometime — go through a day with a killing, or maybe speak two sentences in a row without an F-bomb, just to give their profanity mills a rest.
Or else it seems that after a couple of days, they’d get exhausted with it all and skeddadle back East. I know I would have.
Quick: Whose catchphrase was, “Hey, Wild Bill! Wait for me!” The answer is below…
The Great Reality TV Divide: It explains so much
This felt like quite an epiphany when I thought of it several days ago — scale falling from my eyes and all that — but then I immediately realized it was perfectly obvious, and not in the least profound, so I didn’t post it.
But I did put it on Twitter yesterday, and received a little reinforcement there and on Facebook, so I’ll go ahead and share it:
I finally realized why Trump has been winning, and why I didn’t foresee it: There are a lot of Americans who, unlike me, LIKE reality TV…
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) May 26, 2016
I kept wondering why the problems with Trump — the fact that he must not ever be considered for even a split second to hold the highest office in the land — are not painfully obvious to everyone. What’s the cognitive barrier?
That question, and my puzzlement, had a certain flavor, and suddenly I recognized it. It’s the same confusion I have when I wonder why on Earth anyone can tolerate Reality TV.
I hated it from the first moment or two (and that’s all I could bear) I saw of MTV’s “The Real World.” All that false drama concocted and acted out with all seriousness by excruciatingly uninteresting, self-involved people. It seemed deliberately devised to make us all want to hurl.
And yet people watched it. And I still don’t get that, either…
The difference between Pope Francis and the High Sparrow
I mean; aside from the fact that one is fictional.
Anyway, someone brought the above to my attention this morning.
OK, yeah, there’s a superficial resemblance… and as my interlocutor (my son-in-law) said, “The high sparrow takes his vow of poverty seriously, displaying a humility that makes me wonder if the actor actually IS portraying Pope Francis…”
But here’s the difference: The High Sparrow is WAY more interested in directly exercising worldly power.
The High Sparrow is more like a medieval pope in that respect. And in Westeros, that’s an innovation; things are moving in that direction — in our world, they tend the other way.
When the Pope holds a head of state (or anyone else) prisoner, or forces another to atone for his or her sins by walking naked through a city, get back to me…
Candidates as Game of Thrones characters? Fail.
Tyrion Lannister is far more like Graham than Cruz…
I think Chris Cillizza does a great job at The Fix, and I enjoy reading his stuff.
But his effort over the weekend, “If the 2016 presidential candidates were ‘Game of Thrones’ characters,” was sort of lame.
He should leave the silly pop-culture analogies to someone else, such as, I don’t know… me. I’ll stack my “Candidates as stock characters in WWII movies” against this any day.
OK, the “Hillary Clinton as Cersei Lannister” isn’t bad, although I don’t picture Cersei making the same clothing choices. But these comparisons are terrible:
Donald Trump: Robert Baratheon
There was a succession plan in place for how you picked kings. Then, Robert decided to ignore all of those rules and take the kingdom by force. Sort of like Trump just did with the Republican Party. Also, they are two men who have big appetites for everything in life — and don’t feel the need to apologize for it….
Bernie Sanders: Ellaria Sand
She’s down there in Dorne. People — including Oberyn’s brother, Doran (RIP) — don’t take her seriously. But she is a true believer and has more of a following than anyone initially thought. And you sort of suspect that she’s going to have a biggish role to play in the main plot by the end — but you can’t figure out how yet.
Ted Cruz: Tyrion Lannister
Neither one comes out of central casting. Perennially underrated. But without question, the guy who honestly diagnoses his own strengths and weaknesses best, and who not only sees the whole playing field better than anyone else but also puts in place a plan that is three steps ahead. Also: Someone most people don’t like in his world — and who doesn’t care….
All right, I can almost see Trump as Robert Baratheon — both are ill-suited to governing and take little interest in matters of policy. But Robert was a semi-sympathetic character, scoundrel that he was, and he had the wisdom to appoint Ned Stark as Hand. Trump would never do that. In fact, Trump would go on at length about how he doesn’t need a Hand, because his own hands are perfectly adequate no matter what you’ve heard, in fact they’re terrific…
Bernie as Ellaria Sand? How absurd. Bernie as a really hot woman who is pure, murderous evil, who seems to have no human feeling at all? No, if anything, Bernie is old Grand Maester Pycelle, the crotchety guy at court who makes out like he’s more decrepit than he is.
But the worst is Ted Cruz — the least likable member of the U.S. Senate as Tyrion, possibly the most sympathetic character in Westeros? I’d see Lindsey Graham as Tyrion — neither is of imposing stature, they’re both given to wisecracks about the other characters, and they both think everybody should drink more. (Cillizza cast Lindsey as Ser Davos, which is OK, but I think Tyrion is more on the money.)
There are characters on the show who would be a closer match for Cruz, but for reasons I find inadequate, Cillizza decided to leave out Ramsay Bolton and Joffrey Baratheon. He didn’t want to be that mean to any of the candidates — even if they deserved it…
The calming influence of Daryl Dixon
I liked this fun news item:
An Atlanta TV station shared photos from witnesses at a May 12, 2016, accident scene in Peachtree City, Ga., that show two stars from the hit show “The Walking Dead” helping out.
The report from CBS46 quoted witness Mikail Turan, who said Norman Reedus and Steven Yeun looked like they had stopped their motorcycles near the scene in the town southwest of Atlanta to “kind of calm everybody.” Turan said he took photos for a few moments and left when the police arrived….
Yeah, that makes sense, because if I were shaken up after an accident (no one was hurt, reports say), the one thing that would calm me down and restore a sense of normalcy would be seeing Daryl Dixon ride up on his motorcycle. Oh, great! First I wreck my car, now the Zombie Apocalypse!
Just kidding, Daryl! In truth, when said apocalypse arrives, I want Daryl and his crossbow to have my back. He’s the best there is in a zombie fight in any fictional universe, bar none (and apparently the only one to figure out that gunshots draw more walkers). And Glenn Rhee in charge of scrounging supplies, of course.
“Everybody OK? Can we help?”
ICYMI: C.J. Cregg returns to the briefing room
All of y’all probably saw this already, but I would have missed it if Kathryn Fenner had not brought it to my attention via Facebook over the weekend.
Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I had to go hunting elsewhere to find an embed code. (I couldn’t even find it at the White House, which is where Kathryn had gotten it — apparently, they only posted it on FB — unless I’m just looking in all the wrong places on the website.)
It was great to see her back in the saddle. And seeing her as press secretary instead of chief of staff takes us to those wonderful days when Leo was still alive. Sigh…
I was a bit disappointed in her when she ducked the one question she got from the actual reporters assembled: “Who is President Bartlet supporting in the Democratic primary?”
But she ducked it with typical C.J. aplomb…
Allison Janney fields an actual question from an actual reporter in the actual West Wing.
‘… You can lose your mind, when cousins are two of a kind!’
Her obit, of course, leads with her Oscar for “The Miracle Worker.”
But her name will always be associated with one of the silliest high-concept TV sitcoms ever, “The Patty Duke Show,” in which he played “identical cousins.” I think the idea must have come up when somebody was smoking something exotic while watching “The Parent Trap.”
That was one of many shows of questionable value that I consumed so voraciously when I came back from two-and-a-half years in Ecuador without television. I didn’t care how awful it was, I thoroughly enjoyed it all.
She will always be the identical cousins in my mind, just as Anne Bancroft will always be Mrs. Robinson. Coo-coo-ca-choo.
Coolest bit of trivia about Ms. Duke? She was once married to John Astin, the original Gomez Addams (Sean Astin, Samwise Gamgee, is her son, but not the biological son of John — it’s complicated). Now there was an awesome show. But at age 11, my tastes were sufficiently unformed that I preferred the Munsters…
What was Scorsese thinking with ‘Vinyl?’
I posted this at 10:18 last night:
Just finished making myself watch the “Vinyl” pilot after four attempts over a couple of weeks. Really, REALLY disappointing…
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 21, 2016
Have you tried to watch it? If so, you have my sympathy.
And my hopes had been high. This was a joint effort by Martin Scorcese and Mick Jagger, about the music business in the early ’70s. Martin Scorcese, in case you haven’t noticed, is the director with the greatest sense of rock ‘n’ roll in the history of Hollywood. Think about it: from “Mean Streets” to “The Departed” who used rock better? Let’s be more specific: From the moment Harvey Keitel’s head falls back onto the pillow and kicks off “Be My Baby” to that magnificent Roy Buchanan instrumental cover of the Patsy Cline classic “Sweet Dreams” as the camera pans from the last bloody body to the golden dome of the Massachusetts state capitol… wow.
He has been particularly good at finding perfect ways to use the Rolling Stones — it’s like the songs were recorded specifically for those scenes in those films. So, having Jagger along should make it even better, right?
Nope. It was just awful.
As I said this morning to Robert Rikard when he said he’d had the same unpleasant experience trying to watch the show, the show’s pilot was just a bunch of really unpleasant people being really unpleasant — kind of like a Trump rally, with cocaine.
Even Ray Romano was utterly without any redeeming qualities. Who knew he could be so unlikable? So much for Everybody Loves Raymond. I know actors like to break type, but here’s a tip, Ray — find a new character that audiences can stand to watch…
And the pilot was the episode guaranteed to be good, directed by Scorcese himself!
It is possible to make an engaging movie about the music business in 1973. I point you to “Almost Famous.” Yeah, that was schmaltzy and sweet, but it very successfully captured at least some aspects of why we loved the music. I expected this to be a much, much harder-edged version of that.
Instead, it made me think, “How could I possibly have ever spent a moment of my life listening to anything produced by these people?”
You want to hang out with these guys? Neither do I…
Which would you prefer as president: Trump or Underwood?
Robert Ariail has proposed it in a cartoon, as a joke.
But as an alternative to, say, Donald Trump, would you accept the devious scoundrel Frank Underwood as president?
Robert also posed the question with regard to Hillary Clinton, and go ahead and address that if you choose.
But I’m more interested with the conundrum on the GOP side, where the dynamic is entirely different. Whatever you think of her, Hillary is pretty middle-of-the-road among Democrats — members of that party won’t have an identity crisis if she is their nominee. “Anybody but Hillary” isn’t really a thing on that side.
It’s over on the Republican side that we see serious people considering deals with the devil.
We’ve already seen Lindsey Graham, who like everyone else in the Senate utterly despises Ted Cruz, say that it might be necessary to embrace the Texan in a last-ditch effort to stop the disaster of Trump. Even though he has described Cruz, accurately, as “toxic.”
So why not Underwood? Think about it: Does he advocate any horrible policies? Not so I can recall (although y’all might remind me of some dealbreakers.) Basically, he’s a thoroughly rotten, ruthless individual when it comes to seizing and keeping power. But as long as the policies were relatively benign, would that not make him preferable to someone who is both personally and in policy terms unthinkable?
Saying that runs against my own inclinations. Over the years I’ve increasingly come to care less about people’s specific policy proposals and more about their character. That’s because no one can predict what will really arise once the person’s in office — the candidate’s promises may become impractical, or ill-advised, based on unforeseen circumstances. I look for someone who I trust to make good decisions in the face of the unanticipated.
And it occurs to me that maybe, maybe we could expect ol’ F.U. — who is a pretty smart guy, aside from all his character defects — to act wisely and responsibly, if only because he does love power so much, and therefore would not want to screw up and lose political support.
Whereas we know that Donald Trump doesn’t know wise policy from a hole in the ground. Even if he were trying to do the right thing just to look good, he wouldn’t know how.
Thoughts?
Weekend’s best video: GOP intro and ‘Bern Your Enthusiasm’
Some of you may think the best thing on TV was a football game, but I beg to differ.
The above and the below beat that by a mile.
As wonderful as good satire (below) can be, in this year it’s hard for deliberate comedy to match real life (above) on the campaign trail…
Hey, Hollywood could use more imagination, period
Even when Morgan Freeman played God, it fit into one of the type categories…
The Guardian ran a piece earlier this week that I enjoyed. It addressed the phenomenon of Hollywood not writing good roles for nonwhite actors, which it portrayed as a problem that goes far beyond this year’s all-white Oscars.
But wait! you say. There are lots of great roles for minorities in the movies! Well, yes and no. The part of the piece I enjoyed was its list of Top 10 current stereotypes for “people of colour” (leave it to the Brits to take an already stilted-sounding phrase and make it more that way by adding a “U” to it).
Whether you think opportunities for minority actors are limited or not, you’ll have to smile in recognition at some of the categories, such as No. 1, the “Magical Negro:”
One of the most popular cliches for black characters, a wise, folksy black character with some connection to magical forces or spiritual insight. They only exist to enable a white character to grow as a person and/or reach their goal. Examples include Will Smith in Bagger Vance, Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile, Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, and most of the roles that Morgan Freeman has ever played.
Or No. 5, “Awkward desexualised Asian:”
A man who is unlucky in love, though often played by extraordinarily good-looking actors. The character can never get a girlfriend, and if they do, it’s down to the intervention of the white protagonist. Generally nerds for good measure. Examples: Kal Penn in Van Wilder, Steve Park in Fargo, and special mention to Jet Li in Romeo Must Die who is in no way awkward but still can’t get a kiss from Aaliyah.
They forgot to mention Raj on “Big Bang Theory.” He exemplifies that type perfectly. (Maybe they were deliberately avoiding TV.)
And let’s not leave out one of my personal faves, No. “7. Jaded older police officer:”
Acts as a counterpoint to a younger, more energetic white police officer. Provides advice based on his own wealth of experience but is often ignored in favour of the white police officer’s instincts. Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, Reginald VelJohnson in Die Hard, Morgan Freeman in Se7en.
Or Wendell Pierce, Lance Reddick or Clarke Peters in “The Wire.” Especially Clarke Peters, shown here with the requisite younger, brasher white officer. But Danny Glover is definitely the much-lampooned archetype of the category. Now in a way, I’m thinking that role may originally have been conceived by writers as a way of going contrary to type — with the black character representing the Establishment for a change. But yeah, it’s become a type of its own.
So there’s reason to believe this stereotyping thing is real, right?
But you know, in the spirit of “All Lives Matter,” we must acknowledge that Hollywood could stand to have more imagination when it comes to creating characters of all pigments and nationalities.
Here are a couple of types we can see out there for white men:
Idiot father and husband: The opposite of “Father Knows Best,” this guy is always wrong, and thank God he’s got a wife and kids to keep him straight. Think Archie Bunker in “All in the Family,” Doug Heffernan in “The King of Queens” (see the video below for the perfect example of the type), Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin in “The Family Guy,” Ed O’Neill as a dad in almost anything.
Feckless man-child — This guy is lost in time, lost in the culture, lives in a confused fog and has only the vaguest notion of himself as a man — either according to traditional or modern standards. Jesse Pinkman in “Breaking Bad,” Edward Norton’s character before he and Tyler Durden started the “Fight Club,” almost any character portrayed by Breckin Meyer (I’m thinking particularly of “Clueless” and “Kate and Leopold”), Seth Rogen in almost anything (but especially “Knocked Up”), Wayne and Garth of “Wayne’s World,” Bill and Ted of “Excellent Adventure” fame.
But of course, the roles for white guys don’t always belittle them, not by a long shot. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have:
Secular Messiah — Ordinary young man discovers, to his wonder and often his delight, that he is not ordinary at all, but The One — a completely unique and necessary hero with special, mystical qualities who is destined to deliver his people from evil. This is an old role dating back in our literature quite a ways, but the movies have enthusiastically embraced it. Think: Arthur in every story from Le Morte d’Arthur to Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone,” Paul Atreides in “Dune,” Neo in “The Matrix,” Harry Potter in all the books and films of that universe, Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.”
The One doesn’t have to be a white guy, you understand, but somehow, in the movies, he always is.
Of course, Morgan Freeman got to play God… but that’s covered in the “Magical Negro” category…
Yes, if ‘Downton Abbey’ were set in the US, it would be in SC
Soon after I moved back to S.C., I was struck by how much my home state was like the England of a couple of generations back — or at least, how its ruling class was like that of the older England. I’d read in books how when one member of the public school set met another, they could usually find a personal connection in one of three ways — family, school or military unit.
On one of my first visits to the State House, I either participated in or overheard conversations in which connections were made in each of those three ways. The Citadel or Wofford may not be Oxford, but the interpersonal dynamics were the same.
(Before I came home to SC, I had never in my work life — in Tennessee and Kansas — met strangers who could make personal connections to me, which gave me a comforting sense of professional distance from sources that I took for granted. Then, one of the first people I met at the State House — Joe Wilson, as it happened — heard my name and said, “Yes, I’ve met your father; he’s doing a great job.” It was bit of a shock. My father at the time was running the junior ROTC program at Brookland-Cayce High School after retiring from the Navy.)
All that was brought back to mind when I was reading a feature in The Washington Post this morning about the origins of the surnames of presidential candidates, and I got to this:
Graham
Possible national origins: Scottish or English
Meaning: Have you ever seen the show “Downton Abbey”? It’s a good show (or, at least, has had its good moments). It centers on an expansive British estate at which there are strict social norms and a reliance on maintaining the boundaries of proper manners. If it were in America, it would be set in South Carolina.“Graham,” as it turns out, is a name identifying residents of Grantham in Lincolnshire. And Lord Grantham is the main character in “Downton Abbey.”
As for “Grantham,” it’s apparently a combination of “homestead” — -ham — and either the Old English word for gravel — grand — or a reference to the name “Granta,” which means “snarler.” Making Lindsey Graham actually Lindsey Guy-who-lives-near-a-gravelly-home-or-near-where-the-snarler-lives….
Yes. An American Downton would likely be in South Carolina. In the Lowcountry, I would expect. Think Hobcaw Barony or something like that…
Bennettsville boy makes good
And no, I’m not talking about Hugh McColl, or even yours truly, who was considered to have done fairly well in the wider world until I got laid off. (You doubt my celebrity in the place of my birth? Consider that I was once invited to address the Rotary at Bennettsville’s now-defunct Farron’s Restaurant — which was not defunct at the time. Of course, the invitation did come from my uncle.)
No, I’m talking about Aziz Ansari, whose celebrity now exceeds Hugh’s, and even mine.
The above moment in the pilot of “Parks and Recreation” was a sort of milestone for our hometown. It was, I believe, the first time a recurring character on a prime-time network show said to the world, “I am from Bennettsville, South Carolina.” The fact that he followed it up with “I am what you might call a redneck” hardly takes away from that proud declaration. We Marlboro Countians have a great appreciation for irony.
The irony goes deeper, however, than the assertion that the Indian-American is from Bennettsville and not, as Amy Poehler’s character had guessed, a Libyan.
The fact is that Aziz — since he’s a homeboy, I feel free to call him “Aziz” — has greater claim to Bennettsville than I do. Sure, I was born there (while he was born in faraway Columbia), but only because my mother went home to have me while my father, a newly minted Naval officer, was attending a school in San Diego. I grew up thinking of it as home because it was the place I returned to each summer to visit my uncle and grandparents between new postings to places where I would live for a year or so and never return to.
The one time I lived in Bennettsville almost year-round was the 1967-68 school year, when I was in the 9th grade at (also now defunct) Bennettsville High School. So if you walk down Main Street, you may not be able to find anyone who knows me, although you may run into an older person who will remember me as the boy who yelled right out at the preacher in church, completely cracking up the congregation, in the middle of an otherwise stultifyingly boring sermon in 1957. No, I’m not making this up. I have it on good authority that when my name comes up in B’ville, if it does come up, the conversation inevitably moves to the yelling-in-church incident. I’m quite the local legend for that. It probably surprised no one that I became a writer of opinion; I am after all The Boy Who Didn’t Know When to Shut Up.
But Aziz actually grew up there, and attended Marlboro Academy, which (irony again) is where most of the white kids went after BHS was finally completely integrated at the start of the 1970s. (When I was there I had black classmates in homeroom and P.E., but we were then under the “Freedom of Choice” system in which everyone declared which school they wanted to go to each year, and only the very bravest African-Americans dared to say that they wanted to go to the “white” school — something I didn’t really appreciate at the time; I actually thought the school was integrated.)
So his Bennettsville credentials may be more solid than mine, but at least I can say I was a Green Gremlin (possibly the quirkiest, coolest school mascot ever), and he was not.
So there.
Anyway, have any of y’all seen his new show on Netflix, “Master of None?” It’s pretty funny. Not something you want to turn on until after the kids have gone to bed, but funny. Check it out and we’ll discuss it here…
Funniest SNL skit ever… to me… at least on paper…
I say “to me” because it was inside humor; it could not possibly have been as funny to someone who has not sat through thousands of news meetings just like the one portrayed, and suffered just the way Phil Hartman’s character suffers in the skit. (I’d love to know who wrote it. It had to be a fellow sufferer, because only someone who has been there and listened to such nonsense could possibly have come up with some of the touches in the dialogue.)
And I say “at least on paper” because, to my disappointment in going back and watching it again, I see that the actors were a bit off. There were stumbles by Rob Schneider, and even Phil Hartman, who otherwise is brilliant as the one sane man in the room. I wish in retrospect that they’d shot it as a short film in advance, as SNL sometimes does, to iron out those little problems with timing. I find myself wondering whether the actors just lacked energy because, having never been newspaper editors, they just did not understand how hilarious this was.
Unfortunately, the live audience hardly laughed at all, which probably persuaded Lorne Michaels that insider newspaper humor doesn’t sell.
Anyway, I’m sharing this because of a Twitter exchange I had Saturday night:
@BradWarthen 9/11?
— Dave M. (@dmech06) November 15, 2015
Perhaps so. I forget what the show did right after 9/11. But that reminded me that, ironically, one of the funniest things SNL ever did was about Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, the skit ran 50 years to the day after the attacks, and that amount of time having passed gave the show license to make fun.
And it was just so, so real. How many times have I been in such meetings, trying to sell something important as the lede story, while my fellow editors oohed and aahed over minor crime news, or the fact that “the lady bulldogs have a chance of going to the state finals this year.” And as one who has always had little patience with other editors’ overreaction to the weather (my general guiding principle on that is that if I want to know what the weather is, I’ll step outside) this is a battle cry that resonates in my heart:
“I’ll tell you what’s happenin’ in the weather: IT’S RAININ’ BOMBS IN HAWAII; that’s what’s happening…”
There’s just one brilliant line after another, such as “Do we have one Japanese person in Turrell?” and “Now Bill, that is something that affects our readers — they’re going to have to pay for those typewriters!” Someone had to have been taking notes during real newsroom budget meetings to come up with dialogue such as that.
But the very best touch of all is when you see the paper roll off the press, and the Pearl Harbor story is played at the bottom of page 7, under the news that Phil Hartman’s character has, understandably, shot himself. It appears under this savagely brilliant, one-column headline:
Asians
Attack
“Base”
… because, you know, you can’t be too careful. Do we KNOW that they were Japanese? And we’d better put “base” in quotes rather than step out on a limb…