"That guy could read from a phone book and make it interesting," you've never said about anyone. But if you did, you've probably said it about Alan Rickman, or as we all know him, Snape.
Well, actions speak louder than words, and watching him drink tea in the finest Shakespearean style beats any number of "I'll get you, Potter" + death stares.
Bear with it. It starts slow, but once you get to 1:22, the teabag hits the fan.
In which Batmanda watches the whole world around her fall to pieces, yet again. For the third time in a decade, our precious Emily Thorne watches as everything she holds to be true proves itself false - the truth that her father's a horrible criminal, the truth that his death was simple, the truth that she's capable of avenging him. The truth that there's any kind of happiness at the end of this long and fantastical rainbow of revenge.
Each time, there's one person to help her find her way forward. A fairy godtrepreneur, if you will. And so she lurches from cause to cause, this time ready to admit the truth and settle with the one she loves, but forced onward nonetheless. Nolan professes to save her from herself, but ultimately, he gives her what she needs to keep her hatred burning, to maintain her tendency toward chaos.
Without desire, there can only be chaos. This is why you can rarely find sense in the motivations of the Daleks, who don't want anything but to destroy the universe. Without Jack as her grounding principle, Batmanda would be nothing more than a Dalek, seeking destruction without end. Jack may not represent more than her ultimate desire, but without that positive want, Emily would have found chaos much sooner.
With Nolan and Jack, she forms a perfect trinity. The two men balance out her light and her dark; one could never suffice. Nolan gives her everything she needs to keep going, and Jack's existence restrains her worst impulses. Her father used to play both roles, and it makes sense that the chasm he's left in her life is so wide that it takes more than one to fill it.
This episode put a great capper on a fantastic season. While I loved the show from the start, I wasn't sure it had legs. Well done, writers. And if next season goes pear-shaped, we'll always have this year of perfection.
OTHER STUFF
-I am continually haunted by Victoria's engagement present of psychopathic loathing. The chutzpah's so off the charts that even Emily can't help but smile. This is why our Evil Queen can't be dead. No one else can ever replace her. Certainly not Charlotte. Who I hope stays dead.
-I've really enjoyed what the writers have done with Daniel this season. He tries and tries to be a good person, but at the end of the day, no one allows him to. I thought the only way to end his story was with death, but making him a villain works too.
-Finally, whoever gets to write the dialogue for Conrad and Victoria has the BEST FUCKING JOB EVER.
And just because it exists:
Finally, go check out Hello, Tailor's review of the costumes: http://hellotailor.blogspot.com/2012/05/revenge-season-finale-reckoning.html
Over the next week, I plan to bring you 5 revolutions in city-planning form.
Going to MoMA's always a crapshoot. The permanent exhibitions remain unquestionably fantastic, but the special exhibitions certainly vary in quality (that said, if you haven't seen the Cindy Sherman exhibition, get thee to 57th street)
Despite planning a leisurely afternoon in the museum, my last visit was brief (failure-to-brunch may have contributed to its abbreviation). Accompanied by a friend who's as obsessed with architecture as myself, I was drawn into the vortex of a one-room mind-fuck called "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream".
Weeks later, the exhibition continues to haunt me; I bring it up in casual conversation without any context to describe it with. Blog post ahoy!
In a nutshell (AAAARGH IN A NUTSHELL!), MoMA invited 5 teams of architects, planners, ecologists, engineers, landscapists and other urban professionals to create new ideas of home ownership and city design. They were assigned cities based on "The Buell Hypothesis," a re-assessment of the American Dream that argues that you "change the dream and you change the city" (you can read the full report here).
The Buell Hypothesis asked the design teams to imagine what a new American suburb might look like with different investment models and a changed responsibility for the "city."
Uniquely, this was not a contest. The five teams were invited to host open conversations with each other at MoMA, and the 5 designs, though wildly different, were actually the product of open collaboration. They have provided five new models of living, working, and commuting in a metropolis. Some of the ideas look like the product of a J.G. Ballard nightmare, but others are truly innovative.
Over the next few days, I will give you a loser look at each of the designs, their innovations, and what I perceive to be relative strengths and weaknesses. I hope that each piece becomes a thought-starter, and I look forward to your thoughts in the comments.
WHY I HADN'T SEEN IT
To be honest, I didn't even know about it ::fails::. For many reasons that are now obvious, it's not considered one of Sidney Lumet's great films, despite a fantastic performance by Al Pacino.
I found out about the film through The Savage City, T.J. English's fantastic account of police corruption and race riots in the 1960's and 70's. Frank Serpico's a minor character in the book, but his importance to changing the culture of the NYPD cannot be over-stated (in fact, the real-life impact of his actions are weirdly understated in the film).
THOUGHTS
The movie covers the 12ish years of Frank Serpico's life with the NYPD, from the clean shaven days to the full-blown hippie madness.
Serpico's shown as a paragon of virtue in his professional life, though we're given little context as to where his ideals come from. Certain scenes clearly inspired the original Life on Mars series, but somehow the idealism of the protagonist makes more sense in that more fantastical scenario. What gives Serpico the strength to maintain his virtue even when his sanity's at stake?
The film's tight focus on Serpico's greatest moments of stress gives Pacino about 90 minutes of Oscar material. I can't help but think how the film would have benefited from a slightly broader scope. We play ample witness to corruption within the police departments, but we're not shown how scary the '70s really was in NYC. The problem isn't just that policemen were corrupt; the entire politics of the city created a patronage system where entire populations turned to crime as a substitute for their self-worth.
I fully recognize that some of my issues with the film may have to do with the datedness of certain details, but it also seems like a case where Lumet's commitment to "issue-raising" takes precedence over making a deeper study of the setting. Also, Tony Roberts. Can't take that guy seriously. Which is definitely the Woodster's fault.
All that said, the film has many pleasures. Lumet gives New York so much attention that Woody Allen might be jealous. The West Village doesn't look like that anymore, and we can be sure that it never will again. Look at Dumbo, for godssake!
And now, a tour of Al Pacino's ridiculous outfits (Frank Serpico, ever the egoist, claims that Pacino doesn't nearly do justice to his "forward-thinking fashions):
In the spirit of the poem, I will keep this short. It's beautiful, it's simple, it's genius. I salute you, Richard Wilbur.
Wilbur made his name by translating our most beloved French satirists, Voltaire and Moliere. But poetry fell out of him wherever he went, including the battlefronts of World War II.
The best poetry manages to take the many contradictions and complications of the world and put it into order. This does it in spades.
"A Short History" by Richard Wilbur
"Corn planted us; tamed cattle made us tame."
"Thence hut and citadel and kingdom came."
I don't tend to write about endings, at least not at length (not even Sense of an Endings. There's only so many words I can devote to hatred). Endings never satisfy me; denouements are a necessary evil to closing a relationship with a book/show/film that I've loved. It almost seems churlish to complain about an ending; everyone knows the hardest part for a writer is the saggy middle.
I'll make an exception for Popco. The ending, quite frankly, sucked. Scarlett Thomas's sudden wallow in cod freshmanphilosophy might have been less disappointing if the rest of the novel wasn't so damned perfect.
In Popco, Thomas takes disparate topics like advertising, advanced mathematics, cryptography, treasure-hunting, adolescent angst, toy-production and lust and somehow makes it work. The novel's funny, warm and incredibly inventive in its twists and turns. There's a children's adventure novel, a bildungsroman and a lost adult story all in one, and the swerves almost feel natural.
We follow Alice Butler from her creative agency retreat back to her childhood, spent helping her beloved grandparents decipher an encrypted treasure map (Thomas's tale of the fictional pirate took me straight back to the joys of my childhood). Her grandparents, like most of the characters that Alice sides with, are resolutely anti-authoritarian (her grandfather suffered great humiliation at the hands of one Alan Turing).
The anti-authoritarian streak of the novel is subtle and established, and we come to love Alice despite her eccentricities and social ineptitudes, cause goddamnit, she solves puzzles!
So the last 10% (thank you Kindle) of the novel throws out all the subtlety and elegance of what came before, substituting in leftist propaganda so juvenile that even early-90's Ethan Hawke would roll his eyes. There's an amorphous organization devoted to bringing down capitalism from the inside! They'll break down the walls of the corporatocracy with nothing more than plastic sporks! Marketing is evil!
What's even worse is how these platitudes are expressed. The emissary from the shadowy organization Ayn Rands all over the place, with a 20-page monologue about how righteous their cause is. A is A and B is B and this shit be cheesy.
You should still read it though. How many novels promise 90% perfection?
And look at that gorgeous cover:
Two weeks late (and not a penny short), we return to recap our favorite show (to say that I'm in withdrawal is more than an understatement, especially after this doozy of an episode).
But it's ok, because I get to remind you of the most epic Alicia/Kalinda HoYay non-subtext in the history of the show.
"Flexible," Kalinda says, as Alicia restrains herself from jumping out of her chair with joy (I will take this opportunity to gloat at Hello, Tailor, who once accused me (mid season 2) of tinhatting in my firm belief that the secret story of this show is the relationship between Alicia and Kalinda). Parentheticals ahoy!
That's the last moment of happiness for our dearest Sexy Boots of Justice, as Alicia accidentally rips down the walls of her life with a single phone call. It's interesting that when Kalinda did the same to her last season, Alicia basically became this supermagnetic force, pushing away everything in opposition to her with almost lightning speed. Kalinda, on the other hand, attempts to reset to status quo by removing herself from the equation.
I've commented before that this show operates with an acute awareness of the laws of physics: energy cannot be created or destroyed; ions can't be shifted without having to rearrange everything surrounding it. By these laws, Kalinda can't just leave, not without creating a great imbalance in the show. Similarly, Cary couldn't come back until Will was pushed out.
But by the end of the episode, this fine dance of molecules doesn't matter anyway, as the entire Lockhart Gardner universe is faced with entropy. In the fine words of new-favorite-character Howard, "never, ever trust a man with a limp."
And in entropy, our only weapon is our freedom of choice. To quote a dearly beloved vampire, "when nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do." So when the chips are down, and Kalinda's at the end of her rope, she becomes decisive. And thusly we're left with my latest, greatest emo band name: Shotguns for Alicia.
(credit for this marvelous gif goes to ramarika.tumblr.com)
OTHER
-A very embarrassed part of me really hopes that Alicia/Peter work it out. Or work something out. Or just hook up for an night of angry passion based on their shared conquest of Jackie.
-Also, this episode has one of the most perfect comic awkwardness scenes in history:
