Birdwings

El Camino (2019). A deserved and necessary love letter to Jesse Pinkman, who was somewhat neglected in the final episodes of Breaking Bad. Since I was very attached to Jesse, that made me the perfect audience for this tense thriller about his flight from cops and criminals alike. It also made me realize I was far more fond of Breaking Bad than I'd thought at the time, because just a few months later here I was getting honestly nostalgic at the various returning characters featured. There were flashbacks to various dead people, everyone was exactly in character, and par for the course, it also looked beautiful and had a perfectly calibrated script. This film did right by Jesse, and I was therefore completely satisfied with it.

Hard Core Logo (1996). This is probably not something I would have ever watched, except it was on YouTube and someone told me it had John Pyper-Ferguson in it, so I killed part of an afternoon and gave it a whirl. Although visually not that far removed from Brian Cullen's aesthetic, he once again sported a different accent and manner of movement, making him functionally unrecognizable (he wasn't even homicidal in this outing). All told, this makes it hard to define what I find so compelling in his characters. It also had Callum Keith Rennie, a name I vaguely recognized. Turns out he was also on Highlander, in an episode I almost never rewatch, because he was the only fun part of it. He's apparently a Big Deal in the realm of cult actors and this film is renowned and respected, and I had no idea in the world when I sat down with it.

( Spoilers, as I recap the whole thing below. )

I think my brain melted a little bit during the course of this episode, in which the entire show thus far twisted in on itself. It figures. They actually named this episode 'Paradox.' ( Read more... )

I made another super simple icon which will impress nobody (and a third for my ao3 account) so there's that.

Breaking Bad continues to gel with me, becoming easier to handle as it goes, seeming to buck the usual trend of television getting darker and darker as the writers compete to outdo early successes. Here, the introductory villains were off the wall psychos like Tuco, killed and replaced by far more subtle and nuanced enemies like Gus and Mike - a much better trajectory. The show also expanded into more of an ensemble piece, and less Walter White is more, I say. At the start of the story, almost every single scene was about him in some way and since so much of that material was a tissue of grotesque lies, it was much harder to endure. Seasons three and four were comparative cakewalk.

Another upside is in how they laid off a lot of the gross imagery (other than a scene throwing the Association under the bus, which I did not appreciate), allowing me to finally notice how damn gorgeous the camerawork is on this show (though occasionally on the nose, what with the color coordinated clothing and the way Walt is so endlessly separated from family via columns and other things). They also started leaning into some very western iconography, giving the visuals a sense of sweep and scale I found missing from the first two seasons. Bonus points for an amazing use of Fever Ray's If I Had a Heart.

I will say I preferred the finale of season three over that of four. Season three was quite genuinely stunning, and centered wholly on two incompatible concepts being seamlessly entwined: A killing done in self-defense and a cold-blooded murder of a non-combatant were made one and the same event. Season four went for something more literally explosive, but to get there jumped through some convoluted hoops involving the poisoning of a very minor character, and in hindsight it didn't hang together that well - kind of like the only Agatha Christie books I've ever read.

I find it fascinating how every single season (usually several times over) there's an opportunity presented for Walt, Jesse and now Skyler to get out of the game relatively clear, and they choose not to. Skyler has a lot more in common with her husband than appeared at first, and her desperate attempts to wrest control of the situation from Walt were terribly frustrating to witness, as she'd had my full sympathy from the start and lost it by deciding that perception was more important than reality. Skyler wants her son's image of Walt to remain pristine, unclouded by anything so terrible as the truth, while Walt continues to be outclassed in everything but chemistry and still insists that he is the smartest man in the room. This is going to end by blowing up massively, and if Breaking Bad is to be classified as a tragedy at all, I maintain it is the tragedy of Hank and Marie Schrader and the two White children - darlings all, who deserved much better.

I still have hope for Jesse.

Currently watching: Breaking Bad, of all things. I never wanted to see this show but my boyfriend finally decided to purchase the set and I agreed to watch the first episode with him, just to say I had. It was compelling enough to watch the second episode and now we're into season two and I kind of loathe the show, but nevertheless it's incredibly well done and facilitates some entertaining debates so I endure.

Notably, unlike other dark realistic shows such as The Wire, there are almost no "breather" scenes because every single plotline is pure unadulterated cringe/horror. Watching Walt reveal himself to be a total sociopath easily drifting into the emotional abuse of his family, I tense up every time he enters his own house. Hank and his escalating PTSD is no relief. The drug plot is a drug plot. There are basically no scenes on offer to counterbalance the despair - no Herc and Bodie meeting at the movies, no moving the desk in and out of the office, no front and follow in the grocery store.

It's incredibly well done and a brilliant character study of Walt, but as of yet I see no reason to declare this show the greatest one ever made or some kind of Shakespearean tragedy of a good man gone bad, because Walt was clearly always a monster - getting a terminal diagnosis just gave him the excuse to let it out and start a (very badly executed) double life. The show takes the time-honored tactic of playing up worse psychopaths and making Walt's murders self defense to make him more sympathetic, but it's not working on me because every situation he's in is his own damn fault.

Seeing The Mayor in a bit role as Walt's psychiatrist was awfully fun, though. I was rooting for him to become a giant snake and eat Walt for being a terrible human being.

Seriously, I absolutely despise that man.

On the other hand, and possibly being inconsistent here, I kind of love Jesse. I'm forlornly hoping that this will be a two-way street of a show, following Walt's descent and Jesse's salvation, but I really doubt it. Jesse registers as "just a kid" and so I feel an automatic protectiveness toward him, coupled with the fact that he gets most of the funny lines, often born from his actually understanding the reality of the situation (unlike Walt, who is completely deluded about what he's doing and whose lies are now turning into his fantasies, as when he claims the rich Schwartzes are bankrupt to get out of telling Skyler the truth AGAIN). Jesse is a drug addict and a total screw up but he's still a human being and watching Walt prey on him (because that's what Walt's done from the beginning) is repugnant.

This got me thinking what is it exactly that makes me tolerate a villain protagonist? I used to think it was intelligence but that doesn't work on me with Walt and I think this is because what I actually admire in a villain is actually competence. Walt thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, but he's a middle-class no-nothing when it comes to the game. His adventures in meth are clownish and clueless unless chemistry is involved, and even then his strategic blunders are endless. Comparing this show to Boardwalk Empire, whose main cast I also despised, I can see why Boardwalk was the easier watch for me, and it isn't just the costume porn: It's the fact that all of those characters (except Gyp Rossetti) were professionals. They were businessmen whose business was bootlegging and the more professional they were, the more I was able to be entertained by them.

But on the other hand, I didn't like any of them either. I did like several of the villains on The Wire and maybe I'll figure out why that is as I continue to compare these two.

What's kind of amusing is that my boyfriend, who called Tru Calling "morbid" when I watched a couple episodes on YouTube (and I still want to get back to that show, because time-traveling Eliza Dushku), went ahead and purchased the box set of this siphon of despair. I've told him he doesn't ever get to criticize my love for creepy supernatural shows again, because even Dollhouse wasn't this systemically disturbed.