By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Sep 13, 2013 at 5:00 PM ET
When we last left episode 5.13, “To’hajilee” of “Breaking Bad,” we were left with a tense cliffhanger — who would survive the standoff between the Neo-Nazi allies of Walter White and DEA law enforcement — with Walter and his former partner, now-bitter enemy, Jessee PInkman, in the crossfire?
We know from the flash-forwards at the beginning of the season that Walter survives. But what about Jesse? Walter’s DEA brother-in-law, Hank? Hank’s loyal partner Gomez?
My initial thought was that only Gomez would die — it is too early and too banal for Jesse and Hank, now the series’ moral centers, to perish.
But how would it be possible, given the Neo-Nazi’s massive weaponry, for only Gomez to survive?
So my bet is on a truce being reached, with no deaths. What say you?
By Jason Atkinson, on Wed Sep 11, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
I shot this Saturday and Sunday at Camp 584 and for those who’ve never seen a silver lab, meet Gunnel. This is only 4 minutes long and rest assured, for my big film, Why the Klamath Matters, we have a team of professionals.
Jenji Kohan, the creator of Netflix’s new hit series Orange Is The New Black, had to grapple with a pretty serious conundrum: How do you make a compulsively watchable series about a milieu whose defining characteristic is boredom? And yet, the show’s writers have pulled it off.
Of course, they have had to take some liberties; the series is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir but is highly fictionalized. So what did they get right about prison life, and what did they miss?
Though my year in federal prison was quite unlike Piper Kerman’s — largely on account of the differences between men’s and women’s prisons — here’s my assessment of where Orange nailed it and where it missed the mark.
Here’s what they get right:
Small things can have outsize consequences — in positive and negative ways.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Aug 20, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
The counter-attack on NBC’s Hillary Clinton miniseries will end up, like most of the pseudo fights in the culture wars, paying dividends for every faction in the dispute. Republicans will stoke their base with this newest evidence that powerful media elites harbor a liberal bias; NBC will end up reaping as many as 40-50 million viewers for two nights of television, the kind of ratings bonanza that is supposedly a thing of the past for non football events; and Hillary’s status as a political heavyweight is enhanced. Everybody not aligned with Joe Biden’s or Cory Booker’s presidential ambitions ends up winning.
But rather than dwell on the lines that a network crosses in promoting a potential candidate’s image when its news division will regularly be making coverage judgments about that candidate, and vetting tips and storylines that could weaken the bet its entertainment division is placing, Republicans would do better to remember why those lines are being crossed. Putting partisan blinders aside, it has infinitely more to do with the television industry’s single mindedness about money than any cheerleading agenda. And the nature of the popularity that makes NBC confident that a Clinton miniseries will pay off ought to stress Republicans considerably more than what questions an NBC moderator would pose during a Republican debate.
This is the Hillary threat in its broadest context: she is for a generation of professional women, the most conspicuous example of an exquisitely successful balance between motherhood, marriage, and career; for consumers of the last twenty years worth of political/celebrity culture, the Clintons are on a very short list of figures in this era whose reputation has survived so long and actually prospered (maybe Oprah, Buffett and Gates) ; and the resilience inside that survival is the kind of narrative that props up the self help-fixated space in our psychology that knows no class, gender, racial or ideological boundaries. Note that not one line of that portfolio has anything to do with her emerging childcare platform, her just rolled out proposal to undo voting restrictions, or her stewardship of the massive infrastructure that is the State Department, or any of the other standard policy components of a candidacy that her putative 2016 rivals are laboring to assemble right now.
Put another way, NBC is not so much creating a phenomenon around Hillary Clinton: it is preparing to make money from the phenomenon that already exists. And since the mythology that makes Hillary worthy of a commercial gamble is completely separated from her politics, conventional campaign attacks—politics as usual—will struggle to diminish that foundation. That’s not to say that 2016 is destined to be a coronation, but that certain casual assumptions about a Hillary race shouldn’t be as glibly tossed off as they are some in GOP consultant circles—namely that Obama fatigue will damage her, that she has already blown one presidential opportunity, or that the appetite for something novel will undercut her as it did in 2008.
Every one of those intuitions about Clinton’s vulnerability seems sound enough until they roll up against one undeniable fact: five years ago, her brand wasn’t strong enough that a network (and let us not forget a big screen movie in development) would have even considered betting its capital on her. The Hillary of 2008 was too wrapped in the psychodrama of her husband’s adventures, too polarizing, too retrograde to justify that kind of high stakes wager. For whatever combination of reasons, from one more bout of redemption by serving the president who defeated her, to the possibility that after the last four years, experience and bipartisan appeal seem valuable again, the Hillary of the present is decidedly more formidable: ultimately, she has reversed the disintegration over time concept that erodes most brands, a sizable achievement given our chronically weak attention span.
Whenever Stephen Colbert debuts one of his “People Who Are Destroying America”segments, you know you’re about to meet someone wonderful. It’s the brilliance of “The Colbert Report” that anything labelled as horrible or destructive is actually something that restores your faith in humanity.
Wednesday’s subject of Colbert’s fake ire was no exception. In fact, the story of Mayor Johnny Cummings of Vicco, Ky. and the people of his town is so heartwarming you might want to plan a visit there. If you recall, Vicco made headlines in January for being one of the smallest towns in America to pass a non-discrimination law. Naturally, this development sent chills down the spine of “Stephen Colbert”… not to be confused with Stephen Colbert.
While the segment offers plenty of laughs, we challenge you to watch the last moment without tearing up a little bit.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Aug 14, 2013 at 2:30 PM ET
MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” talks with Piper Kerman, the real-life inspiration behind the series, “Orange is the New Black”, and Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state
senator who read Kerman’s memoir while in prison on campaign finance violations, about the prison system in the U.S. and AG Holder’s recent remarks about mandatory prison minimums.
(Click here to read Jeff Smith’s body of work about his time behind bars.)
By Mark Nickolas, on Wed Aug 14, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
From Pure Politics, CN2:
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s phone tracking programs are only the latest iteration of the lengths the government has gone to stretch the law in the name of national security, said a former Kentucky political consultant.
Mark Nickolas, now a film school graduate, was selected to film a documentary on Abdullah al-Kidd, who along with the ACLU, has sued the government after authorities detained Kidd in the wake of 9-11 under what’s called the federal material witness law. The film is called A Cloud of Suspicion.
Kidd, a Kansas-born college football player in Idaho who had only recently converted to Islam, was arrested in March 2003 at Dulles Airport and held under the material witness law under the guise of being called as a witness against a fellow Muslim and University of Idaho student. Kidd was held for 15 months and never called to testify.
The New York Times first reported on Kidd’s saga and has followed it as Kidd and the ACLU have taken it to court. Now the ACLU granted Nickolas access to some of its information and key players as Nickolas puts together the film, which he said will show how the Bush administration overreached, the Obama administration failed to correct it and the U.S. Supreme Court has failed to properly check the powers, including when it comes to “abuse” of the federal material witness law.
“You don’t have the same constitutional rights as a witness. You don’t have Miranda rights because you’re not being charged as a criminal,” Nickolas told Pure Politics (2:30 of the video). You’re being held as a witness. So it’s more insidious than what we had ever done before.
(2:30)
“From One Second to the Next,” the rather unlikely film below, came together when AT&T approached the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog and asked if he would direct a series of short films warning people about the dangers of texting while driving.
The result is haunting. It focuses on four accidents, some of them fatal, and Herzog aims his camera squarely at the faces of both victims and perpetrators, asking them to describe in detail what happened and the aftermath. Herzog emphasizes the change in civilization he perceives in part by examining an accident in which an Amish family was killed and another in which a horse-shoer’s truck was involved.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Aug 9, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET
Between Breaking Badand Homeland, looks like I won’t be getting out much this fall. Here’s the new official trailer that I will be analyzing with Talmudic-like intensity, in honor of one of my favorite Jewish TV characters, Saul Berenson, played by the sublime Mandy Patinkin.
New season begins September 29.
[And hey you, CBS and Time Warner Cable — get your beef worked out by then! Need me some Homeland.]
