Mars Needs YOU!

I’ve often noticed with this blog that I only really get to writing quickly and easily when I’ve got something to shit on. I’ll write about TWILIGHT, I’ll write about SUCKER PUNCH, I’ll write about Vin Diesel needing to get outta the FAST franchise already.

But not today. Today, I speak to you, O My Dozens Of Readers, to tell you about JOHN CARTER. You probably haven’t seen it (yet), and that’s okay. Here’s why.

JOHN CARTER is based on a series of early 20th century books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (yeah, Tarzan dude) about a Confederate Civil War veteran transported to Mars where he has crazy adventures with green six-armed monsters and marries a space princess. Now, the first book was called A Princess Of Mars. People have been trying to get a movie made for decades (John McTiernan almost did in the early 90s, and Robert Rodriguez came close in the early 2000s), but the technology was either not yet completely there, or the money fell through.

Now, in 2012, we finally have a 250mil+ adaptation, a scant century after the book was first released. Produced by Disney and directed by Pixar guy Andrew Stanton (FINDING NEMO, WALL*E), the movie that’s in theatres now is a delight. Oh yeah, I can already hear you say, so why haven’t I seen it yet? I can recognize awesome when I see it!

Probably because you have no idea that it is awesome. You see, in 2011, Disney released MARS NEEDS MOMS, an apparently (I haven’t seen it) really shitty CGI cartoon that bombed big time. Shit man, this got suits at Disney to thinkin’. P-people don’t wanna see Mars movies, r-right? It can’t be cuz it was shitty, people watch shitty movies all the time! Yeah, yeah, that’s probably what happened! MOMS just bombed cuz people don’t wanna see Mar… Oh. Shit. We’re making another Mars movie. God, what are we gonna do??? It’s already deep in production! Oh! Oh! Oh! Let’s, like, never mention Mars in the advertising. The title’s gonna have to go too. Psssh, who the fuck wants to see JOHN CARTER OF MARS, right? JOHN CARTER, people will pay for that.

Interestingly enough, the last Mars movie to make decent money was TOTAL RECALL. This was twenty years ago though, and it had no “Mars” in the title, and starred the biggest movie star in the world at that time.

The trailers didn’t help any. By not focusing on “Mars” and strangely enough ignoring the “Civil War veteran” angle as well, people just thought it was a weird, blandly named STAR WARS/AVATAR rip-off. As a friend of mine said:

“[JOHN CARTER] sounds like a movie that stars Denzel or Cage, but one of those movies that you always forget they made when you’re naming movies they starred in, you know?”

Initial reports of box office showings have already been pretty bad, with CARTER’s US debut barely beating out last week’s winner THE LORAX for the number 1 spot. But you know what, that’s fine. When a movie underperforms in its first week, but sorta comes back in subsequent weeks, that’s what gets interpreted as good word-of-mouth. If you’re gonna see CARTER, it’s best that you give Disney the impression you heard from someone who saw it that it was actually pretty good, and that was what swayed you, not the shitty marketing campaign.

Why the fuck would I go and see it though brah?

OKAY ASSHOLE HERE IS A LIST OF THINGS THAT MAKE JOHN CARTER AWESOME

• JOHN CARTER is an earnest movie with lots of heart. It’s never winking at the audience, and the jokes it makes are jokes made by characters. No one ever comments on how dumb the situation is, or how silly an outlandish character looks. The movie just goes with its silly premise. When two green, tusked aliens get mad at each other, they literally go GRRR GRRR and butt heads and clank tusks together like mad elephants (scene pictured above). It looks silly as fuck, and my audience was giggling, but the music was telling us it was GRAVE and OMINOUS. I love that!

• JOHN CARTER is the anti-“STAR WARS prequel”. The acting in JC is broad, over-the-top, passionate; in short, perfect for such a big story. It is literally the opposite of the STAR WARS we’ve known for the past ten years, with emotionless robots reading boring lines. People yell and laugh and scream and hug and slap each other on the head for being dumbshits.

• JOHN CARTER’s effects work has CGI and mo-cap complementing amazing location shooting. Even though much of Mars, or Barsoom, as the natives call it, is desert-y, there’s constantly a sense of discovery, wonder and awe at seeing/learning new things about the place.

• JOHN CARTER stars Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, the aforementioned space princess. She is a woman in her early thirties with the tiniest bit of belly fat. She’s also absolutely gorgeous, and it’s kinda sad that this is a Thing That Should Be Remarked Upon. But good on you, Disney, for not casting a skinny 21-year-old in what I assume you wanted to be a franchise starter.

• JOHN CARTER is the kind of movie where a planet’s centuries-long civil war can be totally resolved by a Guy That Can Jump Real Far And Punch Things Good. Also, the bad guys were winning because GHOSTLY Mark Strong gave Barbarian King Dominic West a way awesome blue space laser that West mounts on his arm and shoots people with from his ship.

• JOHN CARTER is a bit slow to get going (in fact, I’d have scrapped the opening scene on Mars altogether), but it really excels at character relationships. The movie looks and sounds good, but unlike AVATAR, it actually makes you care about all of its principal characters the way any (good) Pixar movie would. Carter himself needs to shake off his BROKEN MAN VETERAN thing throughout the movie, and becomes pretty badass gradually. Dejah is smart, capable, sexy, and (dare I say it) someone little girls should find pretty cool. Tars Tarkas and Sola, Carter’s two green Thark friends have their own little personal subplot that resonates quite well with not much time devoted to it. And then there’s Woola. Pretty impossible not to love him.

I could go on, but this is already one of my longer entries. Point is, if you like movies like STAR WARS (you know, how it used to be) or INDIANA JONES (you know, before…), you will absolutely love JOHN CARTER. It’s a story seemingly belonging to another time and place, like its ‘”Suthun gennuwmun” main character. A story of adventure and discovery and chivalry and romance and six-legged dogs with top speeds of 250 mph.

“Evangelical” is not a mode I often assume when talking about a movie, but I, for one, would love to revisit Barsoom with the same people in front of and most definitely behind the camera. I hope I’ve managed to convince you as well.

Mass Effect Memories: 5 Badass Moments

With the release of its third installment this week, Mass Effect madness is hitting a fever pitch on the interwebs. Follow me and Matt down Memory Bank Lane and reminisce about the 5 most distinct, amazing, badass moments this side of Phoenix Massing. It’ll tide you over until EA fixes that face-importin’ bug.

5) Shepard, first human SPECTRE (ME)

Fairly early into the first game, you expose Saren for being a crooked ass SPECTRE. Despite his dastardly machinations and bald faced lies, Shepard manages to convince the council to throw him out on his Turian ass and in the meantime instate the very first human SPECTRE (aka Space Jack Bauer). It's the first in a series of expertly manipulative moments that give the player the idea that (s)he is pretty much the most important motherfucker in the universe, together with the appropriate pomp and circumstance to go with it, ending with the first launch of the Normandy. Are those two moments I smushed into one? I can do that, I'm a SPECTRE!

Hey! Listen!

4) Fuck you, Shadow Broker! (ME2 DLC)

Shepard has infiltrated the Flying Storm Cloud Castle of one of the most powerful and elusive information brokers in the galaxy. After having murdered your way through the Broker's elite assholes (in some cases making their corpses fall into an endless chasm, Wile E. Coyote style), you come face to face with the man himself. Although man may be too kind a word! Shepard, being the übermensch that (s)he is, immediately deduces what could have transpired to turn Space Bowser into Space Rupert Murdoch. The imposing creature rises up from the desk to ominous music, revealing an even bigger hulk than was previously imagined, with high tech shields to boot! But in an awesome display of why YOU, THE PLAYER, are fucking awesome, Shepard simply cracks his knuckles, goes "Let's do this the hard way, then," and simply decks the asshole. YES.

I MUST BREAK YOU

3) The Terminator Babbly (ME2)

At the end of ME2, Shepard and his crew have made the horrible discovery of exactly why the Collectors were abducting whole colonies of humans to their secret lair in the galactic core "where nothing can live." Reminding you that the MASS EFFECT franchise is a series of complex, human interactions, but also incredible pulp silliness. Were the Collectors torturing the humans for strategic information to aid their Reaper overlords? NOPE! They were grinding them into a fine mulch for their precious GENOME JUICE (mind on mah money and mah money on my mind) so they could make a HUMAN REAPER. And yes, it looks exactly like a Skynet foetus. It's ridiculous and retarded and amazing and awesome. I mean, were they just gonna attack the Citadel with a huge Beastie Boys robot?

2) Mordin of Penzance (ME2)

Bioware is well-known for their fantastic character interactions. In fact, a running gag among gamers is that flagship titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age are nothing more than extremely elaborate dating sims where, instead of taking Mitsuko out for Ramen, you kill darkspawn with Morrigan to get in her pants. But it's not just the dating side of things! Bioware consistently manages to make the majority of NPCs interesting and worth talking to, even if they don't have quests. Fast-talking geneticist Mordin Solus is a pragmatist first and foremost, but a hell of an operette singer if you get to know him!

Shepard really should have clapped after that.

1) SHEPARD COMIN'! FUCK YO GRAVITY! (ME)

A Reaper is laying waste to the Citadel. The skies are aflame. The Council may be reduced to molecules at this point. Your nemesis and former colleague Saren is high up in the Council Tower and has overridden all nearby mass relays, effectively cutting off all possible reinforcements. Even as you race to confront him, he cuts the power and artificial gravity, trapping you in an elevator about a mile down from where you need to be. In perhaps the most cinematic moment of the series, Shepard simply goes "Fuck that", opens the elevator and just walks to the top of the building, blasting bad guys all the way. Seriously, if a movie ever happens, the gravity shifting and Shepard walking out of the elevator, with a space war brewing around him would be a HELL of a trailer-ending "whoa" moment. And it's just such a perfect moment of Shepard doing shit on his own terms, thinking outside the box, giving you that whole "baddest crew of the galaxy" feeling.

Moment’s at 4:40.

Here's hoping ME3 provides us with many more of these moments.

I chose the FemShep trailer cuz FemShep is best Shep.

Vin Diesel: the Millstone around Fast & Furious’ Neck

Let’s flash back a decade and change.

Yours truly was a fresh-faced teenager with hair on his face that he totally needed to shave once in a while. He’d also recently started reading up on movies in development (thank you, prequels). At one point, he read about a film called THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. It was a car movie with no one in it that he knew, and the article (I’ve even forgotten the publication) deemed it a [paraphrasing] “spunky low-budget, much more charming than the soulless likes of GONE IN 60 SECONDS!”

“Sounds great!” I thought. I still do love a good chase movie. Skepticism about the unknown quantity that was, well, pretty much everyone involved aside, I was ready for this movie to wow me. It didn’t.

Now before we continue, here’s some “Millennial Teenage Cliques in Eastern Belgium 101”. For the purposes of this demographic outtake, “immigrant” means Mediterranean Person (Italian, Turk, Greek, Spanish, …)

Child of immigrants:

We had very few actual black people round our parts, no doubt to every reader’s great surprise.

Child of locals:

Luckily, we didn’t have any killer clowns around either.

My friends and I (mostly locals, I was a rather unorthodox Immigrant Child) went for the former, whose cartoony bullishness and exaggerated thuggery entertained us greatly.* The latter sort of music just seemd so dour and joyless: shouting and roaring punctuated with the occasional bout of self-pity (other bands that fell into the Slipknot mold: Papa Roach, Linkin Park, etc).

So an apparently badass, hip hop flavored, out-of-nowhere surprise hit was coming summer 2000! I still remember the exact moment I gave up on liking the movie.

About 45 minutes or so into it, Paul Walker is accepted into Vin Diesel’s racing crew and gets invited to a barbecue. I was already pretty grumpy at this point, since the film had only featured straight quarter-mile races and no awesome car chases. But mostly it was Paul Walker trying to impress Diesel/Diesel’s sister/Diesel’s crew of PG-13 hardasses**.

So at this BBQ, the autistic (I think? He’s kinda shy and awkward and they make it a point that “he can only talk to engines”) mechanic is bid by Vin to say grace. But you see, he is a special boy! So he thanks God for lugnuts and suspensions and NOS tanks and and and… I think I turned into Tom Cruise in MINORITY REPORT chasing my eyes down the aisle after they rolled out of my skull. Of course everyone at the table is SUPER CHARMED by this and they’re all like “Haha yeah those things are great we like racing so that is an apt prayer of thanks! *shoulderpat*”

So they were keeping any action from me, the rating guaranteed no profanity or nudity, and here was a scene completely dedicated to what a CLOSE-KNIT CHRISTIAN FAMILY UNIT the Torretto Crew really is.

Couple of years later, Vin Diesel returns in a different franchise, this one called xXx about some badass superspy. Alright, sweet, I plonk my ass down in the theater.

Opening scene: a spy is murdered at a Rammstein concert! I frown, as Rammstein is generally known in my environment as “pretty hip with the local racists”. But fuck it, it’s the bad guys’ intro, so I can dig it. Next scene: an expensive car pulls up. The camera shoots it all from low angles and shit, super-fetishy. Rims, exhaust, … bumper sticker with “Skateboarding IS a crime.”

That made me grin. “Skaters”, in the experience of my friends and I, were the kids who went for the Slipknot, who wore baggy pants but didn’t actually know how to skateboard, who were just full of teen suburbanite rage but didn’t really have much to complain about. This movie was promising me an action hero who didn’t abide by such whiny babblies! Right up until… it’s revealed that the car is actually owned by some grumpy old man senator and our hero XANDER CAGE pranks him somehow (involving a snowboard and parachute, I think). This movie lost me considerably quicker than F&F did.

Diesel was now, and has since been, a total dorkbag in my eyes. Contrast this to Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, whose first starring role I witnessed was in THE SCORPION KING. A pretty awful movie, at the level of quality of any Xena/Hercules two-parter, but Johnson was just bursting with charisma. He was having fun, not taking shit too seriously, and most importantly, I didn’t feel like he was so obviously pandering to a demo. I guess he was pandering to the wrestling demo by… fighting? But come on, it’s an action movie.

Diesel left the F&F franchise, only to return with the 4th instalment in 2009, nearly a full decade after its debut (barring a small cameo in TOKYO DRIFT). The second and third movies were campy fun, while the fourth movie was a dreary bore with characters mostly moping around being broody.

In 2011, FAST FIVE was one of the most fun movies of the year! What happened? Well, let me tell you that they certainly didn’t find some magical Diesel-B-Good potion: the subplot concerning his character Dom Toretto is (again) one of grief for a character we hardly knew, much less cared about. Meanwhile, Rock is turning half of Rio upside down, intimidating crooked cops and eyebrowing the shit out of anyone who disagrees with him. Tyrese is making vagina jokes. Two Jar Jar Binks latinos fall over a lot. But Vin’s the star! Somehow!

At one point in F5, Diesel and Walker go and pick up a car from the underground Rio racing circuit. The place pretty much looks like a neon-colored rap video from 2002. “Just like old times, huh?” growls Vin. It does, and it’s almost embarrassing***. Walker’s character is a married man, a soon-to-be dad, and Vin has… shall we say, never been super believable when asked to express desire towards a female. What are you guys smiling at?!

Mr. Moritz, ditch the Diesel. Walker and Tyrese work great together. The Rock works great with anyone. We just wanna see palm trees, explosions, girls in bikinis, car chases … we don’t really care about a monolithic and –syllabic grump mourning… anything.

Just give Vin his space movies and keep him out of everything else. I’ll gladly go and see them if it means I don’t have to suffer him in something I might potentially enjoy. I clamor for this… you might even say that…

om nom nom

*Disclaimer: there definitely was a very large, mostly-immigrant “2pac-is-god-even-though-we-can’t-understand-most-of-his-rhymes” category that made the Local Kids understandably skeptical of the whole genre.

**Liking hip hop made you very acutely aware of censorship. PG-13 is fine for any action/adventure movie, but it becomes really glaring when the movie is set in South Central or wherever, and the soundtrack is constantly playing RADIO EDITS of rap songs.

***Speaking of embarrassing, (white) Torretto crew member Vince keeps calling Walker a “busta” as a callback to when they originally met in the first movie, a term I’m not entirely sure is very current hip hop terminology anymore.

They Made An R-Rated Batman Movie In 1995

It was called VIRTUOSITY.

Haha, 1995, when Kelly Lynch got a higher credit than Russell Crowe. But bear with me here! Now, the Batman analogue in Denzel is pretty flimsy – it doesn’t hold up past him being a tortured, dark (not in that way!), brooding hero with a tragedy who has a personal grudge against the villain and is hunted by the authorities. Russell Crowe as SID 6.7, however, is so Joker it hurts. I mean, at one point the dude is strutting around in a purple suit, for Jerry Robinson’s sake!

SID 6.7 is a virtual training program for police officers of the future, whose “mental algorithms” are comprised of an amalgam of those of 183 serial killers. Denzel is PARKER BARNES (a comic book tough guy name if there ever was one), ex-cop and current convict. He is tormented because he has a hobo beard and Hermes Conrad style dreadlocks. Also, a biotic arm. So basically, our hero is:

+

Which of course equates to Batman in any sane mind.

Barnes is the only guy who can go ten rounds with SID (an acronym never explained, but I guess it sounds inSIDious or something). But since his fellow convict got brain-fried in the test run, the mayor (played by Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratched herself) wants to shut this damn program down to the great dismay of the movie’s Asshole CEO (William Fichtner) and SID creator Darryl (played by a guy called Stephen Spinella whom I don’t really know).

In the aftermath of what essentially boils down to a session of Kinect turning into the Ark of the Covenant, Barnes is let back into genpop at the prison. Instead of guards escorting him to his cell, he has to walk there by himself! The future prison is a weird palace of kabuki, where every inmate is a shadow behind an opaque white surface. They still manage to taunt him and throw stuff at him for being a former cop though, somehow! Parker is confronted by a big blonde guy with a “white power” tattoo who wants to kick his ass. He even gives a Hitler salute with his left arm. That’s either a Future Hitler Salute, or this guy is so right wing he turns all the way around to left wing. The scene comes outta nowhere and is generally just there to add a fight scene and also show the audience how cool Barnes’ robot arm is.

Meanwhile, SID is taunting Darryl about how he should stop acting like such a fucking pussy and transplant his programming into some physical vessel before funding gets cut. Why Darryl wants this, I have no idea. The movie never really gives him anything to do but stare wide-eyed at giant computer screens in a vaguely lecherous fashion. Darryl tricks robotics guy Clyde (Kevin O’Connor, aka BENI from THE MUMMY!) into thinking they’re gonna turn SHEILA 3.2 into a real sex lady for the IT guys to sex with. But little does poor Clyde know that Darryl has switched SHEILA and SID’s crystal cubes*!

After a while, SID’s brainwaves are done downloading into the goop o’ nannerbots Clyde set aside for him, and he crawls out of a weird xenomorph-like egg, causing Darryl and Clyde to turn away from their game of chess and gaze in awe at naked Russell Crowe. Seriously, the way it’s shot makes it look like the two geeks had just not been paying any attention whatsoever to the formation of (presumably) the world’s first nanorobot. They’re like “OH SHIT look at that!” when they see the egg.

(video = NSFW due to Crowebutt)

*ding*

SID goes on a rampage of murder, mayhem and buffoonery perfectly exemplified when he holds a dance club (such a NINETIES dance club, too) hostage, and starts recording the patrons’ screams for his SYMPHONY OF TERROR, conducting their output like some sort of deranged maestro. How Joker can you get!

Since Parker is the only guy who could do the training program, he’s reinstated and the chase is on. Kelly Lynch is the single mom criminal psychologist who is to accompany him and give the movie a female presence, but they don’t kiss or anything, because, you know…

Parker being let out of jail is actually the first time we get to see the outside world of this particular future. Before that it had always been labs and hangars and a weird prison, but now we get our first glimpse of the crazy future director Brett Leonard and his team have cooked up for us! And it is…

A bunch of hobos loitering around the prison entrance! You know, a couple push around a shopping cart, a few around a barrel. I guess it’s meant to be DYSTOPIAN but after that wide shot? It’s seriously just L.A. all movie.

Barnes finds out that one of SID’s personalities** is one “Matthew Grimes”, the guy who killed his wife and daughter. He emphatically communicates to his DUMB SUPERIORS (William Forsythe being the one chief with a lick o’sense) that

“You don’t understand! Matthew Grimes was a POLITICAL TURRIST! He would strike at any public display of democracy, as long as there were lots of people! A big audience!”

Well jeez, Parker, that literally sounds like the least-politically motivated terrorist ever maybe? So, it follows logically that SID goes to fuck up a UFC match (on account of his being so political and all) with lots of big screens so he can watch himself lethally troll the audience. He throws a guy super far, and jumps down a balcony a hundred feet and lands flat on his back with a wide grin. SID occasionally does that, but not too often. This movie is quite budget conscious.

Hey, look, I’m not trying to convince anyone to see it here, but Crowe really does turn in a rather hilarious/awesome Joker performance. So if that is your cuppa, by all means go ahead.

If not, let me leave you with this:

WHY SO SERIOUS

*Crystal cubes are the USB sticks of the future. They are much more powerful and are able to carry complex artificial intelligences in their vast memory banks of 50TB -- which is actually a pretty respectable number for a 1995 movie! They can only be transported with golden wands.

**Among the KILLAS used for SID’s programming: Hitler, “Jack the Ripper” (whose identity I guess we figured out by then?), John Wayne Gacy. CGI Gacy is actually programmed into SID’s mind with clown make-up and all. And Hitler shoots little swastikas into SID’s brain.

(This blog post was inspired by the hilarious and informative What's A Nice Actor Like You Doing In A Movie Like This? by the inimitable Dan Whitehead.)

Turtleneck & Chain: Mad Men, v.4

Here’s a pretty good visual representation of the fourth season of Mad Men:

I had never liked Don Draper as much as I did at the new offices of Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce. Maybe it had to do with his not having to keep up two façades anymore, what with the nuclear Draper family unit having disintegrated. Maybe it had to do with his sudden loss of mojo, resulting in steady frequenting of hookers.

This containment of Hurricane Don and its reduction to fart-in-the-bathtub Don lessened the negative impact he had on those around him. For instance, doing the occasional nice thing for the kids and being lauded for it while his wife has to take care of them 24/7 is now a bit more justified, as he can only see them on certain dates and times. Casual sex with hookers is okay since they don’t really expect anything but reimbursement (and are probably happy to have a client that looks like Jon Hamm for the evening). Of course, Don being Don he manages to hurt at least two women (Fay and Alison) by season’s end, and has to cancel a few visitations due to work.

But hey! He bonds with Peggy in one of the sweetest subplots of the entire series so far (see above screenshot), he takes Lane out to go see some classic kaiju and loses the one woman that knew his entire story – and accepted him as a person – to bone cancer he didn’t even know of.

Yes, 1965 puts Don Draper through the wringer. And the firm as well! After Lucky Strike pulls out, SCDP comes in serious financial dire straits. New accounts are needed, and fast! Unfortunately, no company wants to hitch their wagon to a sinking ship! So Don does a very Don thing and takes a full page ad out in the New Yorker, proudly, opportunistically, desperately proclaiming that SCDP won’t be taking tobacco accounts. Surely this is the superhero move that gets ‘em out of their slump!

Actually it just gets ‘em a non-paying American Cancer Association gig, and Peggy and Ken manage to reel in a small-time stockings manufacturer through good ole gumption ‘n grit. People need to be laid off still. Joan gets a promotion, but no raise to go with it. It’s time to tighten dat belt a few notches!

On a personal level, however, this season, Don came out on top. The season-ending proposal to his heretofore rather peripheral secretary Megan was an unexpected turn to a lot of people, I imagine. Pondering this, I decided it made sense in the end. Here’s a woman that sees him at his absolute lowest point both professionally and personally and still admires and respects him for what little good he occasionally manages to squeeze out (case in point, an example that nearly brought me to tears: Don fronting the $50,000 for Pete when the partners needed to pony up for a new loan). The weirdly angelic shot of Megan picking up freaked-out-and-tripped Sally in an SCDP hallway must have been some sort of precursor to this whose significance I did not yet understand at the time.

Wanna give a shout-out to a seemingly little loved character on the show, the ever-mature and occasionally surprisingly badass Henry Francis!

Betty: “I hate [Don].”

Henry: “Hate’s a strong word, Betty. I hate nazis. My ex-wife bothers me, I don’t like it when she shows up, but I don’t hate her.”

Betty: “You’re horrible.”

Henry: “I’m an adult.”

Coupled with his fairly constant defending of Sally, Henry is (to me, at least) an unsung hero of this crazy show.

I’m hoping for the next season(s?) to focus on the youth culture that has been steadily developing in Peggy’s social circles, and the reactions of people such as Roger Sterling (an increasingly “outdated” feeling guy!) to Abbie Hoffman and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the like. Get Quarterback Glenn and Flower Power Sally to Woodstock! I want Pete’s reaction to PLANET OF THE APES! More plaid ‘n pastel on the work floor!

God, this show’s turned me into a fanboy.

Here’s Chekov’s music video.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Mad Men, v.3

The myth of America: that simple, honest men born of her great plains and woods and skies have made a nation of her, and will prove worthy of her when the time is right.

Under harsh light it is false. But a good myth to live up to, all the same.

-- some guy in Preacher who is later suggested he hang himself for actually believing it

I’ll admit it. I was wrong. I was wrong for trying to make out whether or not Don Draper was an asshole or a cool guy. YOU AIN’T SEEN HALF OF IT, indeed!

The third season of Mad Men is all about growing up. About kids who come to realize that their parents are fallible. On the most personal level, Sally Draper had grampa Gene pass away and then later both Bobby and her were confronted with Don and Betty’s divorce. In the greater scheme of things, well, it’s 1963. Take a look at the picture up there. They’re not watching a Mets game. The great disillusionment has begun.

It was funny (not in a ha-ha way, but you know what I mean) watching the JFK episode from a Belgian point of view. Our monarchy was instated in 1831 when our government invited some German nobleman to be our first king. There’s not that supremely American (and I imagine pre-Vietnam, pre-Watergate) ideal that The President is the guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become The Numba One Representative Of The Nation. To most Belgians (and not even really radical ones), the king is just a guy we have to pay for.

There is a great risk of sounding patronizing here, which I don’t really want to do, but by the time I got to season three’s penultimate episode and It Happened… I felt so sorry for all of these characters for having their collective parents split up. MLK’s assassination and Vietnam alone are going to make sure it’ll be an ugly divorce. I felt sorry for America having to turn into Europe.

Now, I realize that Mad Men is all about showing that America’s Golden Years weren’t all dat but for a privileged elite, but Civil Rights would have come anyway. Vietnam wasn’t like the Civil War (and if you open a book, the Civil War wasn’t really much like “the Civil War” either) where something like abolition happened. It was just Mom and Dad fucking up all around.

Which brings us to Don and Betty, of course. In a cruel twist of irony, Betty ultimately left Don not for his myriad philanderings (his latest one actually spurred on by fatherly Conrad Hilton’s disappointment in him), but because she found a man that fit the daddy archetype better. Hoo boy, nobody can accuse this show of being subtle, huh?

I hear a lot of anti-Betty murmurings (even if I try to stay spoiler-free) on the interwebs. She definitely has her bad sides – vanity, self-centeredness, shallowness… but nobody’s a saint on Mad Men. Betty’s bad luck is just not being “evil” in a FUN way, like Roger. That guy’s a piece of shit most of the time but who cares? He’s hilarious! Additionally, Betty is kind of a princess forced into the role of housewife, and princesses are usually hated by either those who can’t have them or those who can’t be them. I’m looking forward to eating these words next season once more!

I still hope the kids end up at Don’s. Nobody really knows what makes Betty happy, but I’m pretty sure that, again in a shocking parallel with Rusty Venture, it ain’t them kids. Oh man, and Sal being fired for being one of YOU PEOPLE >:[ and that poor German nanny having to take Pete’s peter for helping her out cuz no way was she getting out of that one with her reputation intact.

It’s enough to get you to drink.

But hey, this show ain’t all doom ‘n gloom!

He’ll never golf again! But I will! See you next time, when I’ll pitch ya the (for now) last season of this donnybrook of a show called Mad Men! Very well! Happy Christmas!

Mad Men, pt. II–The Sucking Sixties

The sixties were a magical and wonderful time.

Unless you were black.

Or gay.

Or leaned to the left.

Or a woman.

Or a man.

I usually don’t return to my previous subject as quickly as this but since my last post on whether or not Don Draper was an asshole or awesome, I’d gotten a few interesting responses from a variety of people. They basically all boiled down to:

You can’t make such statements so early in the show!

…which kinda surprised me, since my general conclusion was simply that Draper could be both extremes (often within the same episode) and that this was the hallmark of a good show. But as always, I like to engage in a dialogue with my audience and since conversation is an art, I would greatly appreciate us chiseling/painting/pooping this one out together as I write something about each season of MAD MEN.

This season was all about confronting Don with his immaturity. After a vaguely un-PC stereotype of a comedian hinted at Don’s infidelity to Betty (with his own wife, no less), Housewraith decided she’d had it with Don’s shit and threw him out. This befuddled Don to such an extent – and Don’s quite a champ at being befuddled – the dude undertook a vision quest to the mystical land of Callehfornayay. I was seriously kinda feeling shades of Heart of Darkness/APOCALYPSE NOW with Anna Draper as a sort of inverted, benign Kurtz who gives Don his (admittedly kinda heavy-handed) rebirth. Full of contrition, Don returned to the East Coast (apparently still not equalling Roger in terms of days off) to face the rather debilitating news that Betty is expecting another baby right as the nukes seem ready to go off – the season finale is set against the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The show has gotten under my skin to the extent that I like the INCEPTION-style uncertainty of the season’s ending leaving hope for a reconciliation. But one thing I really hope both Don and Betty learn is that women don’t have to be Jackie or Marilyn, they can be whoever the fuck they want at any given time. Let ‘em be Anne Ramsay if it makes ‘em feel good. It didn’t even really piss me off that Don had affairs; it pissed me off that he had affairs and then all but calls his wife a whore when she buys a bikini.

Newly (extra) tragic characters this season: the Romanos and little Sally.

Sal and Kitty: god, if they’d met in, like, 2005 they’d probably be BFFs and go shoe-shopping together. Now all they can do is ruin each other’s lives while probably still caring about each other.

Sally Draper: the sweetest kid in television history? If the Venture brothers had a sister, she’d probably be it. Mixing drinks for the grown-ups, clumsily doing chubster-ballet, telling awful knock-knock jokes… every enchanting thing she does just drives it home more painfully that with parents like Don and Betty, this kid is about as fucked as if she really did grow up on the Venture compound.

In comic book news, Housewraith disavowed any affiliation with Boitaku after he spent a couple of days in her… well, not treehouse but… plastic… lawn house? Anyway, Glenn’s creepiness is explained after we find out that he’s a comic book aficionado (I wonder how much actual Silver Age Action Comics and Metal Men cost them, or if they got ‘em on loan or something). Don’t worry little buddy! Platinum will never leave you like that bitch Betty!

OH GLENN CARES ALRIGHT!

I’m greatly looking forward to season 3, if only to find out how much more miserable the lives of the characters can get.

So let’s recap:

• Joan is getting married to a guy who randomly rapes her (where the fuck did that come from?)
• Roger dumped his wife and daughter for a 20 year old secretary
• Is Pete gonna eat that fucking gun after finding out Peggy’s baby is his?
• Peggy believes she may be going to hell for renouncing catholicism (thanks, Father Neenan!)

No wait, I would be remiss for not mentioning the lovely Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) having found herself a schmuck of a husband and Peggy finally getting an office with her name on it and stop-the-motherfucking-presses some fairly consistent recognition from her male colleagues.

U GO GIRL (just keep the gay guy for maintenance okay?)

Bring on season 3!