Treme - Season 2

Treme's second season expands on the scope of the show a bit while staying true to its roots, trying to show a complete picture of post-Katrina New Orleans and its many colorful inhabitants. The whole cast is back except for the ones who obviously wouldn't be, a couple characters get meatier roles (including David Morse as the cop friend of Melissa Leo's Toni, who deals most directly with the show's increased focus on crime), and Jon Seda from The Pacific shows up to kickstart a new plotline involving the city's attempt to rebuild and the seedy things that go into it.

If you didn't like the first season, you won't like the show now. It has the same natural feel, where characters go through their lives and something dramatic isn't really guaranteed to happen. There are a couple shocking moments beyond anything from the first season in keeping with the theme of crime returning to the city as it recovers, but they're rare and not what the show is about. There's also the same amount of extended scenes with live music, and if you don't like the kind of songs they play... well, it can be a hard show to watch. I do think there's enough variety of style that there's usually at least a couple songs I like per episode, though I occasionally wish they got less screen time, so the show would go by a bit quicker.

Being the second season, the show does branch out just a bit and have a few characters spend time away from the city. Del continues to hop back and forth between NO and New York, but this time his father comes along, and Janette is also in the city, with a story about being a cook there that feels mostly separate from the rest of the show but is still pretty interesting, even if you don't watch the Food Network. The writers also managed to miraculously save Sonny, having him clean his act up by working a fishing boat. I like the way the show avoids typical dramatic story beats with its characters, having developments that would usually go one way turn out another, more realistic and somehow more satisfying way. I won't go through every single character, but the show did a great job of continuing to intertwine all their lives, and the series is getting to the point where watching a new episode is like spending time with old friends and family. Treme will never be the amazing, game changing drama that The Wire was, but as a portrait of an interesting place tinged with political ideas without being overwhelmed by them, it is a very good show on its own. I look forward to season three.

The Green Mile

The Green Mile is a good movie trying very hard to be a great one. It's Frank Darabont's second film from the 90s, and like The Shawshank Redemption, it is a period drama set mostly in a prison in early 20th century America, featuring a bond that forms between a white man and a black man, and based on a story by Stephen King. It also features a strong cast, and is undeniably well made even if you don't like the story. The film has an extremely stately pace and feel, almost to excess, and tugs very hard on your emotions, although it's not quite the same as Shawshank. One of the biggest reasons is that the plot actually has a supernatural element, one that would actually qualify the film as a kind of fantasy story, and one that I imagine would greatly surprise anyone who came into watching it blind, especially since this element doesn't actually surface until a full hour into the film. A lot of things are like that though, since it's three hours long when the story seems like it could have been told in two. I wouldn't say it was too long exactly, or that it ever really got boring, I just don't see what the benefit was to giving every single bit of story as much time as the producers would physically allow to develop.

So Tom Hanks is in charge of death row at a prison. Most of the prisoners are decent guys who did wrong, but the two that get brought in after the movie begins are different. Michael Clarke Duncan is a saintly giant, the ultimate version of the magical negro. Sam Rockwell is a deranged, freakish bastard. Hanks is the boss of several recognizable faces as the other guards, who are mostly good men like he is, except for Doug Hutchison's character, a privileged piece of shit with family connections who wants to watch a couple crooks fry before transferring to a better paying job. Sam Cromwell plays the warden, and Patricia Clarkson is his wife dying of a brain tumor. Those are pretty much all the pieces that will be shuffled around, as the guards learn more about Duncan's abilities and realize why he ended up getting sentenced to death for the rape and murder of two young girls. The acting is good all around, especially the two leads, with Hanks' weariness over what his job is doing to him and Duncan's otherworldly innocence, despite the stereotypical nature of the character. It really is a well produced film, and I liked the mixture of fantasy bits with an old fashioned southern drama. But it seems like the kind of thing I'd struggle mightily to ever watch again, and the whole movie is quite possibly just a bit up its own ass. Still, I liked it.

The Rock

You know, I've repeatedly seen The Rock referred to as one of if not the only good movie Michael Bay has made. But... I really don't see it. It's not as bad as some of his other work. I didn't hate it. But as far as big action movies go, I've seen a hell of a lot better and smarter. It's clear that some people, including developers of popular video games, took quite a liking to what it did. But while I wasn't bored or annoyed by what was happening on screen, I wasn't terribly entertained either. It was the kind of movie you just watch while rarely caring about what you're seeing.

There were a few elements I liked. I'll get into the oddness of the plot in a bit, but I liked Ed Harris as the main antagonist. There was a righteousness and power to his performance that I didn't quite expect, and it lent some gravitas to some of the more dramatic scenes he was involved with. That stuff tended to work okay. Sean Connery is likable as good guy one, and while he's already in self-parody mode as early as 1996 here, Nicolas Cage is a tolerable good guy two. I didn't care that he was worrying about his pregnant girlfriend because she was a prop instead of a character, but he wasn't bad. And some of the shootouts and fights were okay. I'm really not a huge fan of the way Michael Bay films action; it's often too cluttered and jumpy to really understand and thus enjoy what's going on. Especially car chases, the one here was pretty much a mess of choppy editing and irritating wacky reactions from bystanders (that kind of stuff: basically never funny). But some of the stuff on the prison island itself was mildly enjoyable.

And the way they handled the main plot was just odd. The primary antagonist was more sympathetic than the guys the heroes were working for. Simply put, a decorated general is mad at his country for neglecting to honor and provide support to some of its soldiers, even that which they were lawfully obligated to. So instead of doing something productive about it, he recruits some men under his command, they steal a dangerous chemical weapon, and threaten to launch it on San Francisco from Alcatraz, where they've taken hostages, unless their monetary demands are met. But rather than even pay for the legally required monetary support to the families of fallen soldiers, let alone the further demands, the government decides to send in a SWAT team led by Cage's chemical weapons expert FBI agent and Connery's grizzled former spy who knows the prison from having escaped there. And by the way, Connery hates the government because they held him without trial for over thirty years. Also, after the evil plot falls apart, things still aren't over because the cavalry still doesn't know what's going on in a fairly ludicrous sequence. So basically, the bad guys in this movie are the military and the government. Great. This edge to the plot is handled with no subtlety and distracts from what's already a mediocre action movie. The government doesn't even try to justify itself in any way, we're just expected to be on their side because the citizens of San Francisco are at risk. It's pretty weak stuff. And that describes the movie in general. Again, I wasn't actively bothered by the movie. It was just incredibly dumb and did little to make up for it.

The Hurt Locker

I managed to catch a couple more Best Picture nominees before the Oscars last night. Although The Hurt Locker wasn't my favorite (and isn't even on my 2009 list because of its late 2008 release in Italy), it was the most likely candidate to keep Avatar from the top prize, so I was definitely rooting for it as the night went on. It's not that I dislike Avatar, because I enjoyed it, it's that the only reason it seemed that it was getting any sort of award attention over any of the other pretty yet uninspired huge budget action movies over the years is that James Cameron made it and it earned an absurd amount of money. The only way I can see one justifying its critical success is by valuing the difficulty and uniqueness of the process over the actual quality of the result, and in my mind The Hurt Locker is in every way that's important a superior film.

Not that it isn't without its flaws, which I guess I'll get out of the way. Despite being the sort of film that you'd figure is built on details, it makes some strange errors. It takes place in 2004, yet features soldiers playing an Xbox 360 and referring to Youtube, things that didn't come around until a year later. The only thing that I can compare in terms of portraying the war is Generation Kill, and Kill certainly seemed to capture the actual experience a lot closer. There's a difference in goal, as Kill is all about trying to show the soldiers' experience, while Hurt Locker is trying to be an exciting thriller. But while they have a similar veneer of gritty realism, there are things that happen in Locker that just seem and are ridiculous. While Kill follows an entire battalion through the early invasion period, Locker focuses on a single bomb disposal unit that apparently acts autonomously and basically does what they want, which seems wrong and accounts of real soldiers back me up. Jeremy Renner plays a leader who follows his own rules and ignores standard procedure a lot. It's a good, interesting performance, and it avoids being a cliche in the story because of how things turn out. But the simple fact is a sergeant who actually acted like that would never last close to that long in the field.

Also it's funny that one of the quotes on the movie poster compares Jeremy Renner to a young Russell Crowe. Crowe is less than seven years older than Renner.

Anyway. It was a good movie. Mostly on the strength of its sound and visuals. I complained on twitter about writer Mark Boal possibly beating Quentin Tarantino for Best Original Screenplay before it happened, and I stand by that. The script does some interesting things, but for the most part it shuffles between action setpiece and soldier downtime for two hours before its solid denouement. The movie works because those setpieces are filmed so damn well. The super slow motion, the overhead shot as Renner discovers how many buried IEDs he's actually dealing with, the entire amazing desert sniper sequence, the uncompromising nature of dealing with the body bomb... it's just filled with astounding imagery that all the technical wizardry of Avatar wishes it could match the thrill of. And the sound helps every bit as much, with every explosion and gunshot having the perfect punch. The score is really good too, suiting a war movie that doesn't really act like your normal war movie.

I already discussed Renner, who did a great job in his role, and probably deserved the nomination. His two costars Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty are solid as the rest of his squad, and together they form a believable tension between camaraderie and hostility that help the movie survive its lack of authenticity elsewhere. Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes both do well in roles that are sort of funny in the way they go away so quickly, leaving the movie in the hands of the unknowns for the most part. And Kate from Lost shows up as Renner's wife which is kind of weird but doesn't really hurt the film. I've seen some debate about whether Kathryn Bigelow would have won Best Director over her ex-husband if she wouldn't have been the first woman to receive the honor, but for me it goes back to the same question as the two movies overall, and while Cameron may have poured more of his life into his movie and invented more technologies and created more out of his own imagination, what actually showed up on screen in the two films has me leaning towards Bigelow in that department. It's a film that for me totally survived off the strength of her vision, and I'm interested in exploring a bit more of her work, although some of what I've heard about it has me less sure. Still, a good film and an acceptable Best Picture.

12 Monkeys

Another time travel movie. I've never seen any of Terry Gilliam's non-Monty Python work before, but it's really not too different in feel. The plot is an interesting, violent science fiction story, but there's a fair amount of silliness in certain scenes. There's something odd about the way he films things. I don't know if it's a lens or what, but just like his short before Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, it feels flat and contained or something, not exactly low budget, just a little antiquated in the apparent scope of the image. It doesn't make the film worse, it just seems unusual. The performances are odd, too. Bruce Willis is totally not his in his standard mode for serious movies, and Brad Pitt's character is completely nuts. A couple of his quirks seemed forced to me, but otherwise it was an extremely entertaining job.

Basically Willis lives in a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by a deadly virus, and he's sent back in time to gather information about what happened. I like how the plan isn't to change the past, just to help make the future better. Of course, things in time can become distorted and everything's not quite what they assumed, as the plot gets more and more convoluted. What I found interesting was how the main characters became more mentally disturbed and confused as they went on. In movies like this the characters always take things more in stride than we might realistically expect, but here they begin to seriously question whether they're imagining everything or not. It all leads to the inevitable circular ending. Really enjoyable film.