The Social Network (***)

David Fincher's "The Social Network" is like a movie about cake that ignores the concept of flour and replaces it with rice pudding. It's a good movie in almost every respect - well-directed, well-acted, well-edited, with a confident flow for its storytelling and a compelling central drama. Unfortunately, it's also about a movie ostensibly dealing with a culture of geekhood written by someone who obviously doesn't have the first goddamn clue about geeks. For its positive attributes, rare and crisp, I rate it positively and recommend its viewing, but in its discussion one cannot ignore the elephant in the room. It looks nice, smells nice, and holds its form, it might even taste all right, but the simple fact remains that this isn't goddamn cake.

As most sentient beings are probably aware, the movie tells the story of the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed rather unsympathetically as an angry, thin-skinned, socially inept loser who also happens to be a genius with computers and, through an embittered jealousy of those that were cool enough to be invited to one of Harvard's exclusive Final clubs, and to spite a girl that dumps him in the opening scene, invents Facebook, becomes a billionare, and along the way screws over his best friend and business partner, who winds up suing him for 600 million dollars. The story is told from the context of that lawsuit, and one other, through the depositions made by the now-ex-friends.

That story itself is somewhat familiar by now. As a Sophomore at Harvard, Zuckerberg was dumped by a girl and went on a now-somewhat-infamous drunken and misogynistic rant about his ex in particular, and girls in general, including such unflattering remarks as to the "false advertising" of her supposedly-34-C cup size (hurtful? no doubt. Unforgivable? probably not. Par for the course for just about any college student going through a nasty breakup? sad to say, yes). Simultaneously he and his friends whip together facemash, a web site that collected the online photos from Harvard's online "facebooks", and pitted photo against photo, ranking them using the same algorithm used for chess ratings. Very sexist and very illegal, the site accrued tens of thousands of hits in the few hours that it was up and managed to crash the Harvard web server.

So far, so good; much of the screenplay to this point is pulled straight from reality, including the near word-for-word text of Zuckerberg's now-mildly-infamous drunken blog. In justifying the rest of the movie, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has stated the following:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

You see what he did there?

It must be nice, I have to say, to be able to extrapolate from a single night of angry, drunken blogging an entire raison d'etre for an enormous demographic.

The statement must be addressed, because it is central to my issues with "The Social Network".

First off: news flash for Mr. Sorkin: the nerds didn't give a flying fuck about the cheerleaders in High School. The Cheerleaders bored us. It's not that we're immune to the charms of a pretty girl entirely, it's just that we lose interest in the mundane so quickly. Yes, we can get jealous and bitter about the girls we could not have, but it does not mean that once we're old enough to correct our early mistakes and have women that are interested in us, we surround ourselves with tramps and bimbos. The goddess of Nerd World is, and has been for the past few years, a girl named Felicia Day. I'm not saying she's not pretty - she is - but if looks are your only barometer, she's not the one you're going to immediately single out in a crowd of Hollywood starlets (Day herself, I imagine, would be among those to acknowledge this). "Pretty" doesn't get you close to 2 million Twitter followers. The kicker is that she's actually interesting: a writer, producer, actress, and social commentator that combines a cute, shy geekhood with a sharp and unique voice.

That's why it's so grating, I think, to see the carelessly aggressive depiction of the early days of facebook, where the "wired-in" young men stare intensely at code for hours upon hours weiring oversized blaupuncht headphones while vapid, beautiful girls (perhaps of-age, perhaps not, it's rude to ask) lounge around in their underwear and trade hits from a (gigantic) bong. I didn't actually know much of anything about the details of Facebook's early days going in, but research after the fact has verified my suspicions: that the Zuckerberg of real life doesn't at all match up with his on-screen counterpart (though Zuckerberg has admitted that they got the clothes right), that he's not at all the bitter, angry nerd as depicted in the film but rather a shy, somewhat awkward, genius, that the early days of Facebook were basically just a boy's club with only a minimal female presence, with coding and design being the focus, and not some elaborate revenge scheme toward the clubs and girls that rejected them, and perhaps most telling of all, that Zuckerberg kept a long-term girlfriend for the entirety of that time, that he's still with to this day, and that is neither, by any account, a bimbo nor a bombshell.

It's an interesting story, still, but it's telling that Sorkin has managed to excise any details about the actual story that happened that don't coincide with the story he had in his head about what must have happened, and why, all while opining that his role is merely the messenger of unequivocal fact.

Not that I'm a purist, when it comes to biopics, except as is so often the case, to tell the story more realistically would have actually made it more interesting. Instead, the nebulous motivations of a computer programmer obsessed with the social power of the Internet gets boiled down to "he only wanted to reconnect with the girl," leading to a final scene so cloying and condescending that it actually started to trigger my gag reflex.

The film also needs a villain, it supposes, and so it finds one in Sean Parker, infamous for his creation of Napster, a complex man by all accounts, played by Justin Timberlake as a shallow, paranoid, revenge-obsessed egomaniac. He gives the Facebook guys some good advice - drop the "The" in "The Facebook"; move to California; seek out VC as opposed to begging for advertising - but also threatens to run them aground, splitting Zuckerberg from his friend and business partner Eduardo Saverin, and just in general being a douchebag. Again, a complex character is reduced, to the effect of making him considerably less interesting than he is in real life, for the purpose of simplifying a story that already needs complexity to be interesting at all.

I've focused on the negative here, I know, and that isn't really my intent; this is a good movie, and has the stuff of true generational significance. That's what makes it all the more frustrating that we're getting here the simplified, reduced version about a boy who just wanted his girl back (blech). I know that greatness can come from reducing a complex life down to simple motivations (Rosebud, QED), but that does not make them in and of themselves interesting lives, nor does it make them more entertaining than the characters that don't always abide to such simple maxims.

"The Social Network" is a good movie, but for me it will be most memorable, I fear, for what it's not.

Rating: ***

Easy A (***1/2)

There's a running theme throughout "Easy A" in which its heroine, Olive Penderghast, bemoans the lack of resemblance her own love life bears to that of the heroines of her favorite 80's High School movies. "John Hughes did not direct my life," she grumbles to her webcam. More's the pity for her. More's the pleasure for us. Nostalgia often seems to work on Newfie time, half a generation out of phase. We are loathe to admit the possibility that our parents grew up in a time that was cooler than our own, but when you're 18, well, the 30-year-old teacher always seems to have had it good. It is very much to the credit of this movie, and of Emma Stone, its star, that it makes you want to give a chuckle to her and say "Sister, I grew up in the 80's, and I'll take 'Juno' over 'Sixteen Candles' any day." I'll take "Easy A" too, for that matter, which is a bit of a downgrade from the Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody/Ellen Page mastersnark, but only just.

Not that I have any particular dislike for the collective works of Mr. Hughes, to be clear, it's just that as they (and I) have aged, their true, unfettered belief in the Mystical Power of True Love makes them read almost as fantasy parable, which clashes with the tone they sometimes establish, particularly with regard to his love for the misfits and outcasts. His misfits wanted to be - and were - like anyone else. Deep down, those movies were about similarities, which sometimes makes them come off as facile. What the newest breed of High School comedies - the smartest of them, at least, which includes this one - is doing is better, and more subtle. The misfits and outcasts really are different, they would argue. They're also more interesting.

So here we have Olive Penderghast. She's very, very smart. That's nothing new, of course - intelligence is the High School staple baseline for outcast status, particularly for a pretty girl - but what seems new is the way in which it is presented. I'll love "Say Anything" - another movie referenced liberally by this one - until the day that I die, but it never gave me the actual sense that the Ione Sky character was actually as smart as the movie claimed her to be. Here, Olive's intelligence is presented in more the way that you more regularly actually see it: an inability to shun vocabulary words, an uncommon eloquence, a natural skill with numbers. In a flashback, an eighth-grade Olive tells a boy she has a crush on that of their Seven Minutes in Heaven they have 384 seconds left. He's intimidated by her. Most of her peers surely share that feeling, though it's never actually made explicit. It certainly explains the alacrity with which the knives come out.

It all begins innocently enough, as it must: Olive wants out of a weekend camping trip with her best friend Rhiannon, whose parents are Creepy with a capital C, so she invents a date. Nobody they know, she's quick to extemporize. A boy at her brother's community college. Safe enough. Her only miscalculation, really, comes in underestimating Rhi's pestering after the fact. Unprepared to provide any details, and unready to admit that she actually spent most of the weekend alone in her room with an earworm of a song on an infinite loop (an amusing montage), she carelessly lies that she spent the whole weekend with him. Ohmigod! You lost your V-card to him! No, she tries to explain, but the train has left the station, and it's of no use. The confession that comes is hers, but it's clearly coerced, West Memphis style. Anything to shut the friend up, except that it doesn't. Now she has to invent details. And a funny thing happens: she starts to kind of enjoy it. It's a kind of power over her brash friend that she's not quite used to. Lie after lie starts piling up. It might have been good, clean fun, if not for the fact that the school's resident Jesus-Freak-slash-Gossip-Hound, Marianne, overhears her every last pulsing detail. Soon the rumors of Olive Penderghast: Super-Tramp are abuzz.

Yes, I pause to justify, undoubtedly a nontrivial percentage of the Senior class is no longer unspoiled. The movie knows it to the point that you understand the characters know it, even though it goes pretty much unsaid. That's not really the point, of course. Sex with your boyfriend is one thing, sex - practically ANONYMOUS sex; a ONE-NIGHT-STAND for goodness' sake - with a COLLEGE BOY is something else. Compounding upon that is the fact that it's Olive, the farthest thing from such a sexpot imaginable. It wouldn't exactly make the front page were we to learn that, say, Randy Moss has a different girlfriend in every city he visits. Olive's rep is more like that of Tiger Woods, though: the clean-cut breed whose image of course always makes for the best kind of scandal.

Further compounding the rumors is the fact that she actually kind of enjoys them. To go from thinking of yourself as anonymous to very much not being so, even if it comes in the form of infamy, can be intoxicating. Olive is not immune. She's too smart to be truly invisible, of course, but try telling that to a pretty girl in High School that has trouble finding a date. When she gets called a name in class, she responds by upping the ante (side note: I had no idea that the word "Twat" was suitable for PG-13) and winds up in detention. Her parents discuss the possibility of punishment. It's determined they don't know how. They offer "no dating" as a potential consequence. It's a joke. Everyone laughs. We appreciate her self-deprecation, but it also gets us into her head, and helps to justify the wry smile she gets when she makes a few drastic alterations to her wardrobe - including sewing on a red "A", inspired of course by "The Scarlet Letter", which they are reading in English class - and starts turning heads.

Olive's stint in detention brings her into the orbit of a boy named Brandon, who is clearly on the receiving end of bullying but gets in trouble because the principal is a bully himself. He's a "Kinsey-six gay" (the movie, to its credit, assumes you know to what that refers), and gives a speech to Olive about how they can talk all they want about how things will be better for him in the future, but that that doesn't stop today from being Hell, that's so well-written, and well-acted on both sides, that it actually elevates the whole movie around it. What follows is an act of kindness, brought to a spectacle through Olive's disdain for doing anything half-assed. At a party that weekend, they show up feigning drunkenness, and quickly steal away to an empty bedroom. The fake - though noisy and boisterous - sex that follows is heard by several dozen of their nearest and dearest. Brandon gets a shiny new hetero reputation, easying up on the bullying, and as for Olive, well, everyone is assuming that she's a slut anyway, so no real harm done.

That's the classic double-standard, of course, and the movie, to its credit, doesn't belabor the point, so neither shall I.

The situation escalates, as it must. Soon she is accepting gift cards for similar deals. Sometimes out of kindness, sometimes because, well, what harm is there by now? The scene where a particularly large, unattractive student asks, then meekly threatens, then finally begs for her help is of particular note. You know, she responds, if you'd actually been a gentleman and asked me out straight-up, I might have said yes (that ship having sailed, of course). It's just the right note, in a movie that hits more than a few. All the while, Olive vamps around the school looking like a bona fide porn star, the red "A" always emblazoned on a breast. "I just realized something," she says to a boy Rhiannon is talking to, "my name is an anagram for 'I Love'." He doesn't know what an anagram is. Heh.

As her parents, Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson exude the image of having entirely too much fun in the roles. They're frequently compared to Juno's, unfairly, I think, the only real similarities being their intelligence and unwavering support for a daughter while retaining their ability to snark. "No judgment," the mother opines, "but you look like a stripper." "A high-paid stripper," the father amends, "like for governors and athletes, but a stripper nonetheless." They're a little piece of perfect, particularly the mother, who understands the complexities of her daughter's situation far better than even Olive would care to hear. Any time you can watch a complicated teen girl interact with their parents and your first thought is "Ah, I see where she gets it from now", the movie has done its job well.

In addition to Malcolm McDowell, who plays the principal as a straight-up asshat (refreshing in its own way, to be sure), the other notable adults in the movie are Thomas Haden Church, as Olive's favorite teacher, and Lisa Kudrow as his wife the guidance councilor, who notes "I should know every girl in the school, particularly the ones dressed like prostitutes" when she encounters Olive and doesn't recognize her. Their presence takes unexpected turns that I will not reveal, but that keep the movie fresh, interesting, and still funny even when it delves into more serious territory.

Outshining them all is Emma Stone, as Olive, who carries the movie on her lovely shoulders, in a performance that should cement her as a star. She masks her character's vulnerability, making it clear without miming it in the slightest, and effortlessly breezes her way through very complex dialogue sequences without ever making it seem like she's reading memorized lines from a script. She plays intelligent so well that I'm not sure she could do stupid (even her supporting character in "Superbad" seemed more intelligent than she was probably written, now that I think on it). That's actually quite a compliment in my book. I don't think Jodie Foster can do stupid, either.

I also liked that neither Marianne nor Rhiannon played quite the role I expected. Rhiannon in particular seems relegated to the role of the heroine's snarky BFF - Jane to her Daria, Rebecca to her Enid, Leah to her Juno - but the movie takes a different tack, and soon she's holding the picket signs with the rest of the crowd (the distinct possibility that she desires more than friendship with Olive is not lost to the discerning viewer, either). Marianne appears at first to be the standard-issue Jesus Freak antagonist, but the movie explores her motivations with more lucidity than most, and in the end we can conclude that she's more of a well-intentioned extremist who genuinely wants to help Olive but only knows the One Way.

The movie's biggest weakness, by far, is in the development of its romance angle, which comes kind of out of left field, and which would be fine except for the fact that it seems to want us to accept it as more than it reasonably should be. Suffice to say that I believed that Todd was a very nice guy, but didn't believe a girl as smart as Olive would describe him as so much more.

That's such a small facet of what the movie is about, though, that it doesn't even really damage it, and there's so much more here than in not just so many High School comedies, but so many more ostensibly serious movies altogether, that it would be tragic to miss out on it because of its marketing category. "Easy A" earns its grade and its adjective.

Rating: ***1/2

Notes:

- There's an undercurrent of the exploration of the culture of trash celebrity here, but a Snookie reference seemed too meta.

- The scene where Olive is being picketed, and all she can think of is disappointment at the apparent lack of effort put into the signs, is reminiscent of Kevin Smith telling the story of how he attended a protest of his own movie "Dogma." There's no way that story wasn't a reference. It's a freaking hilarious story and should definitely be checked out on YouTube.

- Marianne holds her "Cross Your Heart Club" meeting at "Libby Park", an obvious shout-out to TV Tropes (look up "The Libby").

- The movie was originally written as a hard R, but the transition to PG-13 is less glaring than you'd think. I wouldn't say it's appropriate for most 13-year-olds - the discussion of sex is particularly frank and straightforward - though it should be a welcome choice for anyone older than that. There's enough Emma Stone eye candy not to be bored, but the movie probably gets away with more than most because it actually, you know, has a point.

- Best (only?) brick joke in cinematic history involving "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

- Best laugh resultant from a ring tone in cinematic history as well, though that's obviously a pretty new category.

- It's been wrongly lumped into the category of High School-themed "remakes" of more classic stuff, in this case obviously "The Scarlet Letter". Olive is inspired by Hester Prynne, and puts the red "A" on her blouses, but there isn't much more to the comparison than that, really. "Easy A" is better than "The Scarlet Letter" anyway; I've always considered it by far to be the most overrated of the "classics" they make you read in High School.

- The movie's trailer is ghastly, and makes it seem like a garden-variety PG-13 "American Pie" wannabe High School sexcom. It ain't, not by a long shot. In a stroke of marketing genius, though, the studio put the first ten minutes of the movie up for free on YouTube, which did a much better job of selling the movie to me than the trailer ever could have. Given that the movie did very good business (cost ~$8M, grossed close to 70), I expect that tactic to gain ground in the future.

The Wire: Season Three (****)

"Reform, Lamar. Reform."
-Brother Mouzone

It's not until Season 3 that we truly begin to grasp what The Wire is really about. We saw in Season 1 a depiction of the Drug War that showed it as futile and unfailingly dumb, and we saw in Season 2 a lament for the demise of the working class, but where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, the first two seasons could still be described as a Cop Show. Such a label doesn't do them justice, to be sure, but the label isn't entirely inaccurate for them in the way that it is for Season 3. Here, The Wire truly makes its transformation from a show about cops and criminals to what I can only describe as a City Procedural.

In so doing it asks - and provides at least the first hint of an answer for - a very important question: with a system so clearly broken, why does nothing seem to change?

From that question, a political structure is born. To date, only one politician (with a speaking part, at least) has graced the screen of The Wire: the dirty State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), whose driver the detail caught rolling out of a Barksdale drug tower with a bag full of drug money (he appeared in Season 2 as well, wrangling more than his share of the dirty lobbying money Sobotka was throwing around). The dirt on a player like him is obvious; on someone like Mayor Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman), the connections are more subtle. Some of the deals, such as those between him and Davis, are under the table. Others, like those with big time developer Andy Krawczyk (Michael Willis) are in the open, but Krawczyk's dealings include some of the "legitimate" investments of Stringer Bell. The political infrastructure needs money for its campaigns, and wherever money is required, the drug trade is never more than a couple of steps away.

A rung down on the power ladder exist the city councilmen, including the white, Italian rep from the first district, Tommy Carcetti (Irish actor Aiden Gillen), his friend Tony Gray (Christopher Mann), and the oft-mentioned, rarely-seen Eunetta Perkins, whose attendance at council meetings is sparse, but who has coasted along for years on the Mayor's ticket out of loyalty. All three will become involved in the upcoming election, with Tony Gray talking about making a run at the chair, which Carcetti sees as an opportunity to split the black vote and sneak into the office himself. Perkins, meanwhile, faces competition from none other than Marla Daniels, the now-estranged wife of our favorite police lieutenant, who left him due to his failure to leave the police department, in light of the observation that his career didn't seem to be going anywhere. She has the ear of Delegate Watkins, an influential State representative who has the ear of the ministers and other important community leaders.

Speaking of Daniels, in any case, his bargaining and good policework in Season 2 have led to the creation of his promised Major Crimes unit, which focuses on high end drug enforcement, its members including such familiar faces as Sydnor (who was missed in S2), McNulty, Greggs, Freamon, and Pryzbylewski. It did not, however, include the promised promotion to Major; that's being held up for political purposes (he's still married to the woman that's challenging a councilwoman on the mayor's ticket).

Notably missing from Major Crimes are the perpetual duo of Herc and Carver, who, frustrated with their treatment in previous seasons, have left for the greener pastures of the Western District, which is under the command of Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) and the always-amusing Lieutenant Mello (Jay Landsman, an ex-cop upon whom Delaney Williams's character of the same name is based), and it's here where the real meat of the season will be focused.

There's an election year coming up, and that means the mayor's office is coming down hard. Ervin Burrell, the erstwhile Deputy for Operations, is now Acting Commissioner, and Rawls is now his Deputy Ops. "The word from on high is that the murder rate will drop by twenty percent by years end," Rawls barks in one of their weekly ComStat meetings, which Rawls uses as an opportunity to taunt, torment, belittle and beshit his ranking officers, which in turn starts the shit rolling downhill: early on, we see him put an entire unit on night shifts because he steamrolls their major into relenting. Of course, in a city like Baltimore, whose police department more closely resembles a MASH unit than a hospital, effecting crime prevention with the police seems like something of a pipe dream. The police fudge the stats for the mayor, who quotes them to get elected, and appoints the police who will ensure the stats will be fudged.

Season 3 of The Wire is in many ways the story of Bunny Colvin, the aforementioned Major in command of the Western District, who, close to his retirement and sick of the bullshit, comes up with a different plan. After an officer of his is shot and nearly killed over a petty hand-to-hand operation, he develops a plan: find three geographical entities of the district that aren't worth salvaging, and setting them up as "free zones" where his officers are instructed not to intervene; in effect, legalizing drugs.

That the show is pro-legalization is not left in doubt. Full disclosure: so am I. So, in fact, are most people with any academic understanding of the consequences of the drug war, who can get over their mealy-mouthed "drugs are bad" moralistic crap.

Rest assured, though, it's not a one-sided portrayal. The free zones, which come to be known as "Hamsterdam", are anything but a utopia; they are hell-holes of debauchery and drugs, prostitution and general chaos. And yet, because of their existence, some remarkable things start to happen. First and foremost, every other street in the Western cleans up, almost overnight. Second, the overall crime rate drops quite substantially. And third, a back-and-forth develops between the police and the drug dealers that would be impossible to fathom under any other circumstance: the dealers feel they need the police, since the stick-up crews see Hamsterdam as gathering fish into a barrel, and the police need the dealers. One of the rules of Hamsterdam is, no violence allowed. But the dealers only know what they know, and before long someone finally gets shot, over some petty bullshit. Colvin's livid at this, and threatens to shut the whole operation down unless they provide him with a shooter. Word reaches Stringer Bell - the shooter was a nobody in his crew - and that night, a scared-shitless kid walks up to the desk at the Western District to confess, a very big dude who no doubt had worse things in store for the kid if he failed to comply quietly slinking out the door. The show, here, is saying something very simple, very powerful, and very true: this murder, like so many others, would never be solved but for an action as rash as Colvin's.

In today's political climate, though, that sort of reform can't possibly stick. When the higher-ups learn what Colvin has done, they are incensed, and orchestrate his fall in a means that's almost perverse (it's no accident that his words in the ComStat meeting in which they crucify him - "Get on with it, motherfu..." - echo those of another character assassinated this season). While the mayor sees the drop in the crime rate and suffers a brief bout of insane consideration for the idea, seeing how it actually plays on the news once the media gets a hold of it triggers a humorous, if tragic, reaction. A visit from the Deputy Drug Czar in Washington, where he threatens millions in federal funding, seals it home: for whatever insane reason, the idea of treating drug dealers and users as anything but criminals is too politically unpalatable to fathom. Even Carcetti, who asks for a tour of Hamsterdam from Colvin personally, and who seems sympathetic to the idea, can't pass up the opportunity to use it to rip the Mayor a new one. The final speech he gives is remarkable for the way it sounds inspiring but manages to say exactly nothing.

Of course, one rogue Major's attempt to reform the War on Drugs isn't the only subject of reform brought into play; a season of The Wire is too big and too sprawling for that. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the season, then, is the attempts to reform the drug trade from within. Avon Barksdale is still in prison, leaving Stringer Bell in control of the West side. At the end of Season 2 we saw him cutting a deal with Proposition Joe to trade some of his territory for the good dope that Joe was bringing in from his connections at the port. By Season 3 the two have formed a co-op that gathers all the major dealers in Baltimore together, both for economic reasons (a discount for buying in bulk) and for conflict resolution, as both Stringer and Prop Joe recognize that the shoot-em-up gangsta lifestyle is bad for business.

Their reform is met with resistance in the form of Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), an up-and-comer who is cold, smart, and utterly ruthless. He wants nothing to do with the co-op, and is making his move on the gamble that Avon Barksdale's crew is weak, with most of his enforcers being locked up in Season 1. When Avon gets out of prison, roughly halfway through the season, it escalates into a full-scale war.

This war, after some inconsistency of direction within the department, provides the ultimate meat for the detail's wiretap investigation. The technical details of this year's investigation dwarf those of the previous seasons, which were more of less limited to wiretaps and gps trackers. Here, where Stringer Bell has evolved the organization into utilizing pre-paid cell phones - "burners", in the drug lexicon - that they organize into a network before dumping their phones every couple of weeks. Given the amount of time needed to process a court order for a wiretap, that makes them difficult to get a line into, to say the least.

Lester Freamon works his magic, though, and soon the detail finds itself tracking down the small-time flunkie for Stringer Bell's gang that's actually purchasing the burners, a boring, thankless job. Before long they are scamming him into buying their phones from him, which are pre-authorized for a tap. Then they're pulling phone numbers off of cell towers to get a line onto a separate, insulated network, using technical gadgetry that I could explain, but then, that would give even more away than I already have. Suffice to say it's very cool.

There's one more aspect of reform that's explored: that of ex-convict Dennis "Cutty" Wise (Chad Coleman). This area of reform, interestingly, is handled with much less cynicism than the other, perhaps because it involves an individual's struggle with his own past nature rather than the struggle against an unflinching bureaucracy or culture. We first meet Cutty on his last day in prison, coming home after doing 14 years for a murder. He was deep in the drug game, and upon his return home finds that the drug dealing culture has changed in his absence, but no so much that they won't have a use for him. "The game done changed", he notes to Slim Charles, whose response is poetic: "The game's the same. Just got more fierce."

But when he finds a rival dealer of Marlo's, who he's been ordered to take out, in his gunsights, he finds he can't pull the trigger. It's not in him any more. He wants out. Avon lets him go.

But where can he go? He was a child when committed his crime, and now he's in his mid thirties. Society rejects him, and you can't really blame them: he's an ex-convict, a murderer. For money, he finds a job cutting lawns with a group of illegals. It's work, at least. Eventually he decides to open a gym; the one thing he does know is boxing. Here he finds some unexpected help in the form of a Reverend, named Wright, who hooks him up with the political connections needed to obtain the right permits, including Delegate Watkins and Marla Daniels. It's not an easy road, but time will allow him to succeed.

I would suppose The Wire is saying that personal battles are more feasible than institutional ones, but there's something deeper going on, something more personal to the show's creators, I think, an affection for the ex-convict, whom everyone else in society passes over on first. On this, the show practices what it preaches. The very Reverend that helps Cutty out is played by Melvin Williams, a real life ex drug kingpin of Baltimore upon whom the character of Avon Barksdale is reportedly based. Snoop, an enforcer of Marlo's, is played by Felicia Pearson, an ex banger who did prison time for manslaughter. There are others. You might argue that the show makes these casting choices for the purposes of upkeeping its renowned verisimilitude, but I would argue that its creators are saying something far more specific: that redemption is possible, but best achieved from within.

With Season Three, The Wire shows its true promise in utilizing the medium of fictional television to make a sharp, true, and unpopular political statement. It succeeds at every aspect, and in so doing makes for one of the most complete dramatic entities ever committed to a screen of any size.

The Wire - Season Two (****)

Herc: Fuckin' white boys, I love 'em. I fucking love 'em!
Kima: Yeah?
Herc: Dumb as a box of rocks.
Kima: Who?
Herc: White boys. Talking about the brain-deads in my Kane Street case. I call him up, I tell him I wanna buy some drugs. You know what he says? He says "Okay, I'll sell you the drugs. How much drugs do you want?" I swear to God, Kima, they don't code it, they don't ask for a meet, nothing. And then when you make the deal, there's no runner, no bullshit. It's the guy himself walking up to you in the parking lot, saying "I brought the drugs, did you bring the money?" I'm not kidding. I have much respect for black people after working with these idiots for two weeks. Seriously, if white boys want to sell drugs in Baltimore, they have to make different laws for it, like, even it out for them.
Kima: Affirmative action.
Herc: Leave no white man behind.

If Season Two of The Wire proved anything, it proved that the show had no interest in kowtowing to the expectations of its viewers, its network, or anyone else. After Season One established it as a gritty police procedural, a "black show" dealing with the inner workings of inner city drug gangs and the cops that chase after them, albeit with some certain political (and harshly cynical) underpinnings, to open as Season Two opens, transferring the point of interest to the mostly white port of Baltimore is something of a shock. It doesn't feel like the same show. In a lot of ways, it's not.

And yet it is, in every way that matters. Season Two clarifies in many ways things people could only guess at in Season One: that the creators of The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns, were interested in far more than the drug trade of West Baltimore.

So we are introduced to the Port, its characters and its problems. Primarily white, Polack, and working class, mostly concerned with the jobs produced by the loading and unloading of ships that park themselves in the harbor, the Southeastern district is a very different animal from the Western we've become familiar with. It's the district Major Valchek (Al Brown), who we remember from Season 1 as Pryzbylewski's petty father-in-law, has command over. After an always-symbolic opening sequence ("We got a lot of party going on here"), it's him of all people that we open on, ignoring his son-in-law as he waxes reminiscent on the events of Season One, focusing instead on a stained glass window he plans to donate to his Catholic Church.

It's a church he shares with the head of the local Checker's union, Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), and much to Valchek's dismay Sobotka has beaten him to the punch, donating a window that dwarfs his own. It's the dumbest of reasons (by design, I imagine), but it will start a feud that provides one of two catalysts for the season's port plot. Sobotka is more concerned with other issues: the rebuilding of a grain pier, and more ambitiously, the dredging of the canal. Two more feet, and the port, which is dying slowly, could be prospering. The window donation was a primer to get an audience with a Senator.

Valchek surmises that the money Sobotka's throwing around is a lot more than the union can provide, meaning it seems likely that Sobotka's into some dirt. On that, and that alone, he's right. Sobotka, along with his nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), are being paid by a man named Spiros Vondopoulos (Paul Ben-Victor) to disappear cans off the docks. What's in the cans? They don't ask. They don't want to know.

Which leads to the second catalyst for the port plot, when the local port patrol cop, Beadie Russel (Amy Ryan) makes an ugly discovery: a container full of girls. Thirteen of them, foreign, young, and pretty, being smuggled into the country for clubbing and prostitution. All dead, suffocated, when the air pipe into the container was smashed in.

Jimmy McNulty, resigned after the events of Season One to the city's marine unit, makes a discovery of his own: a floater in the water that is quickly linked to the container (thirteen bodies; fourteen bedrolls). Able to convince the medical examiner that all fourteen were homicides (the air pipe was smashed in with multiple blows), and from the time of death that they suffocated while in the city's jurisdiction, he succeeds in a petty way in sticking Rawls, the major that fucked him over, with fourteen unsolvable homicides.

Meanwhile, Valchek is able to leverage his way into a detail targeting Sobotka, supposedly spearheaded by his nephew. As with last season, he's sent humps, but rather than making lemonade as Daniels was able to, he complains to Burrell, who is more concerned with gathering the votes to be named the next police commissioner. Burrell appeases him, drawing Daniels out of where he was stuck in Evidence Control. Daniels in turn was planning on retiring - to become a lawyer - but the appeal of the case and the promise of a promotion if it's seen through successfully draws him back in. He also insists on choosing his own people, and he's loyal. It's also because the show has a finite cast, although it doesn't always seem that way.

So, yeah, the case is more complex than the previous season's, and where Season One was more concerned with the intricacies of its primary investigation, Season Two puts the spotlight on the internal workings of the police department: how the homicide detectives are anxious to avoid having more murders to investigate, how the politics of the department dictate what kind of cases get made, how political "suction" trumps competence in all circumstances.

So now, I'm way the fuck into this review and I haven't gotten back to the street. The primary thread of Season One does continue: Avon Barksdale is behind bars, albeit with a light sentence, while Stringer Bell stays on the street, struggling to hold on to the towers with their connections dried up. Proposition Joe, seen briefly in Season One, offers a deal to cut Stringer in on his package ("straight off the boat" - tying directly back into the port) in return for a slice of the towers.

More to the point, the season's primary political issue shifts from the futility of the war on drugs to the struggles and ultimate suffocation of the working class. It's an interesting argument, and one I have to admit I'm less amenable to than that of the first season, yet it's presented compellingly enough. I buy them, I like them, I understand their struggles.

I also reserve some judgment, such as when Sobotka, late in the season, attends a presentation where a salesman touts the efficiency and safety of robots doing the majority of the cargo unloading, such as in Rotterdam. They view it as a horror movie. I'm reminded of the Darwinian maxim of those being least able to adapt being the first to die off. So while I reserve some affection for their lifestyle - one of non-stop alcohol consumption (in a hilarious moment, Valchek sets up a DUI checkpoint at 8 am to catch dockworkers on their way to work, straight from the bar).

I also sympathize with the dilemma of Nick Sobotka, who, desperate for hours in a union that values only seniority (and where he isn't senior), starts to see the allure of getting involved in drugs. And of Ziggy, Frank Sobotka's son, who lacks his cousin's competence but not the desire to get involved in dirt. His story ends tragically, and while justice is served, it doesn't seem that way.

Still, the season is as tight as they come, a seemingly strange adjective to apply to a plot that sprawls as The Wire's does. Like with the first season, and every season to come, it tells one cohesive story with no attempt to turn each episode into its own mini-arc.

And strangely, I sympathized with the plight of D'Angelo Barksdale, who ate the biggest charge in the fallout of Season One despite being a clear underling. He wanted out of the game, and his mother convinced him otherwise. He is and was not a brutal man. He deserved better.

But The Wire doesn't give him better, because that's not it's way. Sentimentality was never its concern. It's saying something more. Even when I don't agree with it, it's making an argument, which is something almost no shows do, and it's making it passionately, eloquently, and with verve and wit, which makes it stand alone.

The Wire - Season One (****)

Because the plot of Season One of The Wire involves cops attempting to catch a drug dealer, to mistake it for a police procedural is a forgivable offense. Certainly as a police procedural it is as raw, realistic and compelling as one could hope for in the genre, but to mistake it for a member of a genre you've seen before is to do it a disservice. It involves police, and criminals, and the interaction between the two, yes. But there's so much more going on. What is The Wire about? The problems, the bureaucracies, the policies, the sycophants, the petty priorities that morph into our policies of America. Baltimore is the canvas. America is the subject. The War on Drugs is the paint.

Consider that it is the War on Drugs that created Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), who is the kingpin of West Baltimore, and whose control of the cocaine and heroin trade has made him a wealthy and influential man. His empire is large, profitable, and organized, and gets one to realizing just how much structure goes into the flow of the narcotics trade, and how much implicit racism takes place in our categorization of that structure. If they were white, we'd call them a mafia. Because they're black, we call them a gang.

What's his organization, then? Where Avon brings street cred, street smarts, and ruthless ambition to the table, his right-hand man, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), handles the money and the day-to-day. It goes places you wouldn't guess - you'd expect a drug gang to have outlets to launder their dirty money, and they do - assets like a strip club, an auto body shop, a funeral home, are par for the course. More surprising are the political campaign contributions. It is some time into the first season before the extent of the Barksdale empire is revealed, and when it is, the characters are as surprised as we are. When a driver, who is pulled over going out of a housing project tower with $30,000 in drug money, turns out to work for a state senator, you can see the transition occur between an intelligent and somewhat cynical cop show to a show that has very specific observations to be made about the structure of America, top to bottom.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The plot of the show starts as one might expect: D'Angelo Barksdale, nephew to the king and a mid-level dealer in his uncle's organization, faces a murder trial. The act itself appears to have been one more of panicked self-defense than of malice, but nevertheless, he's on trial, and we see how his uncle has managed a work-around. There were two witnesses, upon whose testimony the entire case hinges. The first tells it as he saw it, but the second flips on the stand, saying D'Angelo wasn't the shooter. It's pretty clear pressure (alongside money) was applied: Stringer Bell is present in the courtroom, as is much of his muscle: shooters like Wee-Bey (Hassan Johnson), Bird (Fredro Starr), and Stinkum (Brandon Price), scaring the shit out of the witnesses. By the end of the pilot episode, the first witness, the one who didn't flip, will be dead. These motherfuckers don't play.

Homicide Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), knows all of this. Unlike most of the Baltimore Police Department, whose focus is largely on stats and "street rips" - that is, making undercover drug buys and hoping to roll the people you're buying from, usually juveniles, up on their superiors, which doesn't often work - McNulty's ear is to the ground, and he's natural police even if he's a hopeless alcoholic and seen by the department as a rabble-rousing fuck-up. He and Judge Phelan (Peter Gerety), who presided over the Barksdale trial, go back. McNulty was in the courtroom, and Phelan calls him up to his office. "What happened in there?" Phelan asks him. McNulty lets go of some information, and before he knows what's up, Phelan, who is a political entity, is calling the BPD's Deputy for Operations, Ervin Burrell (Frankie Faison), asking for a detail of police to target Barksdale.

It's in that process that you see the things you don't normally see in a cop show: the internal bureaucracies of a police department. Burrell, the second to the police commissioner and the one largely in charge of the day-to-day operations, is a hack when it comes to policework, though throughout the series will prove himself to be a shrewd political maneuverer. His top major, named Rawls (John Doman), is ruthless and cold, but also whip-smart and eloquent. Burrell wants to please Phelan, but doesn't make it a priority, and tells the unit commanders to pick what cops get sent off to the detail. The result: the commander of the detail, a smart and ambitious Narcotics Lieutenant named Cedric Daniels (Lance Riddick), takes along his best detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), and her two proteges Herc and Carver (Dominic Lombardazzo and Seth Gilliam), while other departments offload their dead wood.

From Homicide, Rawls sends McNulty, who he sees as disloyal, and an ineffectual detective named Santangelo. Two drunks are sent from Property named Polk and Mahone, who prove useless. Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), from Auto Theft, is a fast-becoming-legendary fuck-up who is established to have shot up his own radio car, calling in a distress call saying he was under fire from a sniper (he only avoided being fired because his father-in-law is a Major who has "suction" - friends - at City Hall). Because of him, Daniels is able to horse-trade for Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson), an effective cop. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) makes for the most interesting dramatic choice amongst the cops, as an older cop from the Pawn Shop Unit, who in a classic reveal that literally takes something along the lines of five episodes, is revealed to be a brilliant ex-homicide detective who stirred up shit in the department and for it was buried for thirteen years (and four months) in a unit that does nothing but paperwork.

When the witness from the trial turns up dead, a meeting of the police brass discusses the potential political ramifications of solving versus not solving the murder. At no point in the meeting is the reasoning that the murder should be solved for its own sake ever mentioned. It's typical of the tone of the show.

Eventually, as the case progresses, various factors intercede. The first is the character of Bubbles (Andre Royo), a dope fiend with a great memory who Kima, in narcotics, has made wonderful use of as a confidential informant. When a friend gets stomped on and put in the hospital by some of Barksdale's crew, including young dealers Bodie (J.D. Williams) and Poot (Tray Chaney), who work for D'Angelo, he helps the detail identify many of Barksdale's key players. Another is the ubiquitous Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), a stick-up artist who makes his living robbing drug dealers (a profession not for the faint-of-heart). He's gay, and when his boyfriend (who was helping him with his robberies) is killed by Barksdale's people, he agrees to snitch, albeit in a limited capacity.

If this is seeming like a big show, well, it is: big and seemingly hard to follow, but after a time the characters feel like old friends. Shit. I haven't even mentioned Bunk (Wendell Pierece) yet, McNulty's partner in homicide, and enabler to many of his more self-destructive habits. He is a character all his own, and more quotable than anyone even Samuel L. Jackson has ever played. The scene where he and McNulty investigate an old crime scene, a murder believed to be linked to Barksdale's people, where they hold an entire conversation consisting only of the word "fuck" and its derivatives, is a true classic of the small screen. I'm really not kidding.

These days we expect a degree of serialization in our shows: everything North of Law and Order has at least something in the way of a plot thread or two that connects one episode of a show to another. That said, viewers not expecting it may be more than a little uncomfortable with The Wire's slow structure. Unlike just about every show I've ever seen, The Wire makes no attempt to structure each episode as its own dramatic arc with its own beginning, middle, and end. Some episodes, particularly early in a season, are all setup with little to no payoff. And yet, it's all the more effective, because when you do hit the payoffs, it's almost orgiastic. Most shows play like a series of short stories, connected only by the characters and an arc here and there; The Wire unfolds like a full-blooded novel, rich and textured. There are no "filler" episodes. Every season is a single story, and as Lester Freamon succinctly puts it, all the pieces matter.

That characteristic may be seen as some as the most off-putting aspect of the show but it is in truth its greatest strength.

Another potentially off-putting characteristic to many viewers is the show's strict commitment to verisimilitude. Because it deals with Baltimore drug gangs, the majority of its characters are black (even though its creators are white, The Wire quickly gained a reputation as a "black show"), and it is clearly more concerned with protraying an air of authenticity than worrying about alienating viewers who won't understand what's being spoken. Although as a white guy who grew up in 98% white suburbia I have no real knowledge to draw from, The Wire makes me believe that this is the authentic language of the streets: coarse and vulgar, with no qualms about throwing around the n-word, but also with an air of poetry. This is the culture that produces many of our rap artists, and the connection is not hard to find.

Ultimately that is a goal of any art: to connect its audience with characters that they will almost certainly never in reality meet, but convince them that they are real nonetheless. That's not true just in this case of the Major Players in the story, but also with their underlings. Bodie (J.D. Williams) and Poot (Tray Chaney) are two good examples among many: 16-year-old kids who are already deep in the drug game, dealers working under D'Angelo, whose status in the organization has made them relatively wealthy, who have status in the neighborhood, for whom the threat of jail is an occupational hazard but only really a minor concern, who go about their day and live their lives the best way they know how. In a sense, they're born into the life. Some choose to avoid it, sure, but in so doing forsake wealth and status in favor of a straight life that seems stacked against them. The great irony of the story, which in turn reflects reality, is that so many of these drug kingpins would be so very successful in everyday society if that's what they were raised to be. The Game is nothing if not a ruthless meritocracy.

It's clear where the show's politics lie (and becomes even more clear in the following seasons), particularly when it comes to the politics of the drug war. That most people favor the status quo, the show would argue, is a knee-jerk reaction born from a lack of understanding of why things are the way they are. That drugs do an enormous amount of damage cannot be denied. The character of Bubbles, whose portrayal by Andre Royo as a dope fiend is so convincing that in one memorable anecdote, while filming on the streets of Baltimore, an actual dope fiend wandered onto the set and placed an actual score of heroin into his hand saying he needed that more than he himself did, is the show's acknowledgment of this. The damage done by the drug dealers themselves is even worse. They bring violence and intimidation with them everywhere they go. Thus it's easy to place the blame on them: to say, if you would just come correct and followed the rules, none of this would happen. But of course that's bullshit, and rather than govern a fantasy city where everyone does what you say just because you make what they're doing illegal, the more prudent course seems obviously to face the problem head-on, treat addicts as something other than criminals, and provide a means for people to acquire their drugs that doesn't require distribution via black market gangs, whose only true means of solving disputes is via violence.

If I have drifted afield from entertainment to politics, it's because The Wire meshes the two so seamlessly that it's impossible to discuss otherwise. There's no sermonizing - not in Season One, at least - but by merely depicting its own interpretation of what's going on in the streets, it's impossible to walk away with any other interpretation. The War on Drugs is a sham, and The Wire knows that the best way to communicate this is simply to depict it. What good comes from Season One? Some dealers are locked up, others stay on the street. Where enough damage is done to one organization, another will inevitably rise to pick up the slack. The politicians, and the high-ranking police officers who are close enough to politicians so as to make no difference, will first look to cover their asses before anything else. Much is made, in the reality of the case in The Wire, about the political pressure rolling down the hill to keep the case from sprawling. Considering that when the detectives start to follow the Barksdale money, Lester Freamon's first stop is the Balitmore Board of Elections, it's no wonder.

The Wire is that rare television show that makes a legitimate claim to being more than entertainment. It's entertaining, yes - I was caught up in the characters on both sides of the law as the plot progressed - but more than that, it shows the ability of art to make palatable an otherwise unpopular political argument. Such will be the case with the show as it progresses through its five seasons - always smart, dry, sometimes funny, compelling, realistic, but angry, fed up, and unrelenting in its diagnoses. Why do we continue to fight a war we can't win, against a force of economics that can't possibly be stopped, committing countless amounts of money and resources and effort and energy and innovation? Because not nearly enough people have seen The Wire.

Deadwood - Season 1 (****)

When it comes to a show like David Milch's Deadwood, one can't help but wax a bit philosophical about the state of television these days. I don't mean that as a lament; television is as good as it's ever been, with shows being afforded real budgets, attracting real actors, and more and more acting as a destination for talent as opposed to a launching pad. That's a good thing. Movies are like short stories. A season of television can be like a good novel. It's given room to breathe.

Take a breath of fresh air, then, and wander into Deadwood - today of South Dakota, erstwhile an illegal town settled on Sioux lands after the discovery of what was to become the largest gold rush in history. This is a show not quite like any other I've seen - it's a western, a character-based drama, a study of good and evil, of order and chaos, and of nothing less than the origins of civilization. How did we, as feudal packs of crafty apes, eventually settle into having laws, morals, society? What were the principles involved? These are the questions, I intuit,that David Milch is exploring.

In working with such lofty themes, then, it is something of a wonder that the majority of the characters are based on real historical figures. The main character, if you can say the series has one, is Seth Bullock, as played by Timothy Olyphant. A Montana sheriff, he is tired of that life and heads to Deadwood with his Jewish partner, Sol Star (John Hawkes) to open a hardware store. Upon arriving, he forms a friendship with famed gunfighter and ex-lawman Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine), and comes into conflict with Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), who owns the Gem Saloon, the epicenter of the town, and is the de facto boss of Deadwood by virtue of being the smartest and biggest asshole in the bunch. Other characters include Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie), a longtime friend of Hickock's, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), who loves Bill Hickock but is a hopeless drunk, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), a henchman of Swearengen's, Doc Cochran (a fantastic Brad Dourif), wracked by mental scars of the Civil War, E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), a the smarmy owner of the local hotel, and Trixie (Paula Malcomson), Swearengen's favorite whore. That is by no means a comprehensive list. This is a big fucking show.

It's the sort of show where you don't really know how where to start talking. I could talk about the plot. About the threads of characters, and how their lives intersect. It doesn't seem to fit, though. Maybe the place to talk about for now is the dialogue. I think you can tell a lot about someone by how they respond to the actual words of this show. The simplistic sorts will be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of vulgarities uttered - the show would become famous for the depths of its profanity - and yet, there's poetry in the filth. Read the following exchange, and picture the words being savored by good actors:

Wild Bill Hickock: "You know the sound of Thunder, Mrs. Garret?"
Alma Garret: "Of course."
Wild Bill: "Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?"
Alma: "Yes I can, Mr. Hickock."
Wild Bill: "Your husband and me had this talk, and I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am, listen to the thunder."

More than any other show I've ever encountered, Deadwood is full of this level of dialogue: Milch has a flair for talking in circles, of composing a sentence from the inside out, of giving his actors the natural flow of Iambic Pentameter. It's been called "Shakespearean" by reviewers more credible than I, and I am not going to be the one to disagree. No point is ever made straight up. Everybody has the eloquence. Everybody has the flow.

The show is fully serial, and the first few episodes simply flesh out the characters. Plot begins to move forward via a rich Eastern dandy named Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson) who has moved into Deadwood, and finds himself in way over his head in dealing with Swearengen over the property rights to a patch of land. His wife Alma (Molly Parker) is lost, at first, in a laudanum stupor, but as the plot progresses takes more of an active role.

The second, and more meaningful plot catalyst is the (and I hope I'm not giving anything away here) murder of Wild Bill Hickock, and the trial that ensues. Looking at the series as a single entity, that's the point where it stops being about the atmosphere of Deadwood and turns more into a show about the fate of a community at whole. In that context, Al Swearengen shifts from plot-necessary antagonist to complex wheeler and dealer who, while he is certainly greedy and ruthless, in the end sees what's best for the community as best for himself. Other, less obvious evils exist, such as in the form of Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) who opens a saloon/primitive casino/brothel that's in competition with Swearengen's. His character is hinted out in the lead-up to a smallpox epidemic striking the camp (based off a real historical event), and fully revealed in the fate of a pair of orphaned children who arrive in the town. What happens with them is what drives his primary madam Joanie (Kim Dickens) away, for she is more of the heart-of-gold sort.

In writing about where the series goes, I doubt that I can give off the impression of the sort of things that happen, but hopefully in reading this one can tell what sort of show they're getting into when it comes to something like Deadwood. It's the sort of experience I would definitely say is not for novices - it can be hard to follow and if you're concerned with profanity that is very much in excess, it's not for you. But it's a fascinating exercise in television, and the first season represents a unique marker in showing what a television show can do.

Rating: Four Stars (out of four)

There Will be Bood (**)

So what the hell am I to think of There Will be Blood, I ask? Am I to praise it for its craftsmanship, its operatic nature, its captivating performances by hard-working and incomparably talented actors, or am I to slam it for its fundamental flaws? It's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, which means that it's likely to be dealing with despicable people. That much I figured on going in. What I didn't figure on was the presentation of despicable people as though their despicable nature made them worthwhile viewing.

I suppose I should have. I had the same complaint about Magnolia, which others seem to have enjoyed much more than I did - Roger Ebert, the critic I most respect, recently added it to his "Great Movies" collection. Did I miss the boat? Is there value in this sort of film, which also presents despicable people doing despicable things on lavish sets upon which actors portrayed their characters' despicable acts with considerable verve? Perhaps it asks us to empathize with these characters, or find the humanity inherent in their flaws. The problem wasn't that the characters were flawed, though. It's that they were fundamentally defective. "If I saw that in a movie," Magnolia's narrator described our argument to the coincidences in that movie, "I wouldn't believe it." My response was to think "If I saw any of these characters in a movie that purported to have a villain, I'd say they were empty antagonists, cartoonish to a fault. Why on earth would anyone want to focus a movie around a dozen of them?"

So too is my complaint with There Will be Blood, which shares many of the same tonal characteristics. There are differences in presentation, sure, but the movie struck me in remarkably the same way. Where Magnolia is a mosaic, There Will be Blood is a character study; where Magnolia presented directionless characters whose lives fell into chaos, There Will be Blood presents a man essentially defined by his ambition and drive but with no moral compass whatsoever; where Magnolia presented its religion in mostly hidden symbols before its gob-smackingly off-the-wall finale, There Will be Blood presents it as an institution of people at odds with our supposed protagonist.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing here, Daniel-Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, and Daniel Plainview is a thorough, unrepentant son of a bitch. We first meet him digging for silver in a Texas hole. He finds some, but cruelly breaks his leg, drags himself out of the hole and miles away, we gather. This is disconnected from the rest of the film both in plot and character; I get the feeling I know what p.t.a. was trying to set up here, but it just doesn't fucking work. Start at the character's personal low point, show what drives him, blah blah blah. When we next meet him he's prospecting for oil, or more properly, attempting to persuade people to sell or lease him land upon which to set up wells.

A teenage boy finds him and tells him he believes there is oil on his father's land, near his tiny Texas town. This tip is given to him by Paul Sunday (played by Paul Dano). Paul's brother Eli becomes a figure in their local church. The church is of the crazier persuasion. Speaking in tongues. Sarah Palin shit. I should also mention that Eli is also played by Paul Dano, and let me tell you here and now that that was pretty fucking confusing for a time.

Most of the movie consists of Plainview drilling on the Texas land and trying to keep the religious wackos off his back. If that doesn't sound very interesting, it's not. He has a habit of making false promises, such as donating $5,000 to building a new church, or allowing Eli to bless the well before they start drilling. When a man is killed in the drilling, Eli says "This could have been prevented." Right. By the blessing. We know we're not supposed to like the church people, because Eli's youngest sister says to Daniel's son H.W. (to us) early that if her father beats her if she doesn't pray. And of course we can't like Plainview, whose son he uses as a prop and who, after going deaf in an accident, he finds not useful to him anymore and sends away.

Plainview bought up most of the property around this town, but there was a holdout. No matter, Plainview explains in his most condescending tone (which is saying something): seepage has insured that the oil that was under his land is in his possession anyway. But Plainview needs to build a pipeline, and needs to go through the holdout's land. The holdout tells him it's no problem, so long as he converts. Ah, Christians.

Plainview agrees. I am told by the dick-sucking sycophant that wrote the IMDB synopsis that the conversion is "hilariously false." Hilariously? People of that persuasion - which the effetes that write plot summaries for IMDB may not be aware actually exist in enormous numbers in places where they don't live, but who offer the best scientific explanation for the election and re-election of George W. Bush - will be sickened by the falseness of the conversion, while people not of the persuasion should be sickened by the conversion itself. To what purpose is the scene in the movie? To show that Plainview will stoop to any charade in order to make his money. You know, the same point that the movie has been banging us over the fucking head with for the last two and a half fucking hours.

The last scene of There Will be Blood is memorable, at least. I'll give it that much. Far be it for me to decry any scene where a man is beaten to death with a vintage bowling pin.

I dunno. My problem, as I think about it, becomes less specific to There Will be Blood and more general to its creator. I have nothing against Paul Thomas Anderson personally, but I guess I'm just more of the Kevin Smith school (Kevin Smith once famously ranted against Magnolia on his message board: "They sent me an Academy screener DVD this week. I'll never watch it again, but I will keep it. I'll keep it right on my desk, as a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work." - so take that for what it is). Anderson knows how to make a nice-looking movie, he's good with steadicams, he inspires good performances, and at time he seems almost channeling Scorcese or Kubrick, but I've never been given evidence that he knows what a movie should be. He reminds me of the great George Carlin's description of white people playing the blues. "It ain't enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played." He doesn't.

There Will be Blood has been described by some fellators as comparable to Citizen Kane. I've seen Citizen Kane. It's not. I understand that Anderson dropped out of NYU's film school, presumably because he felt there was nothing they could teach him. Maybe he should have stayed long enough to get to the point where they write in bold all-caps letters across the chalkboard, "WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I CARE?"

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4).

Currently plowing through Deadwood: Season 1 at an alarming rate.