HBO's Newsroom "Willie Pete" Episode 3 Examination

Show creator Aaaron Sorkin has decided to hit us over the head with a mallet in this episode. For some reason, in a show about news for news followers, he and his team of writers have decided that they need to spend three-quarters of an episode highlighting for us the redundant and permanently evasive nature of modern day political campaigning.

The character Jim does this ever so eloquently for us by asking the Romney campaign that he's following similarly trapping questions every opportunity. They evade. All of the reporters use the campaign's talking points as "news" at the end of each day on trail. This is a disgusting reality of modern day politicking, yes. And one scene of this would have sufficed. About six repeated scenes of this is merely annoying and redundant itself. Irony isn't effective if it's not funny or insightful. This is neither. It's a storyline that could go on for every stop of everyone's primary campaign everywhere. Where would that take us?

The episode is essentially ruined by this, only not in full. When the show drops out of its high moral crusade gear, it manages to return to its uniquely raw and engaging avenue of humor. It works well from Sloan Sabbith's deadpan to Maggie Jordan's fragility. The show has a certain realistic charm to it. As felt in the scene in which MacKenzie McHale uses a word to Will, stops, and admits to not knowing the "right word" while trying to smile it off in awkward jest. When the writers stop overwriting every bit of snappy jargon they can think of into a scene and simply let the characters breathe, the show embraces something outside of the formulaic box  it too readily occupies. No one wants to hear Will correct his old pal and boss about 25 movie references in 35 seconds. At least I don't. The show needs to take a cue from Will's weekends and find a little room for an elixir.

Speaking of Will's weekends...the show once again ventures into a monotonous love script between Will and MacKenzie. The ever-so-close, oh-I-just-missed it romance is not an enthralling plot line, gang. I think all intelligent viewers, which this show aims at almost exclusively, lost interest in these sorts of ongoing plot lines after, oh maybe, Friends. I was 12 then, I think.

For once, can a show simply allow romance to tumble into a character's existence, as if it could happen by chance? And no, we do not need to know the other character of said romance for 40 episodes prior, I don't think. I feel that an audience is fully comfortable with a small bit of spontaneity as opposed to one of those circling penny pieces of shit that used to be in Big Box stores. What do you know those two pennies that were neck and neck for 80 episodes landed on top of each other? Yay. Cool trick.

Next episode, guess what? Maggie and Jim will have their little to-and-fro. How fascinating.

It probably seems like I don't like this show. And yeah, there are times I don't. Like 85% of this episode. But between its doggedness and message-heavy hands and formulaic time consumption, it does offer some truly well caught nets to be laid out upon a fabric that is real. That is recent. That is relevant. Its design allows for so much to be said. I just hope that it finds the right angles of approach. The right tone and right step to set up a grandstand with all the hard to catch together fixings falling one by one. It's just swinging in the wilderness at this juncture.


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Post-Script

Teasing the next conflict however, at show's end, is a direction that seems to have all of the wandering edges that make for a dynamic superimposition over news and the way we were readily able to perceive it such a short reality ago.

In another post script, Will's only moment's on-air during the show were highly effective. Message-driven, but nonetheless far from used up.

Oh and one more thing, this "romance" with the tabloid woman that is happening in this episode does not fall into the spontaneous category I am alluding to above. When you can see something through to the other side, it's not really there.

Mad Men: "The Flood" Retrospective

The show returns to one of its most profound techniques. It puts reality in the background - the place reality always is.

Then it allows the characters to be superimposed over an era. To breathe it into existence within scenes. Not like all the crap we watch where characters are representative of an era. These characters appear to actually exist within it. As motion pictures go by us, so go by the events.

When the news is announced of MLK being assassinated in this episode, Paul Newman is on stage giving a speech to the room full of advertisers. It continues the theme of Don and all those around him having no inkling of celebrity worship. It's another element of a by-gone attitude that contributes to the aura of other-worldliness.

No one approaches Newman. Just as Don didn't care to meet the Rolling Stones in an earlier episode. He merely cared why a girl backstage had become such a devotee of the band. He asked her questions from the angle that he once inherited asking his former lover turned heroin addict why she had taken so strongly to the drug.

Don looks at all things as art or shallow portrayals of such. He takes unto people as he may a series of signs representing different ad slogans to choose amongst.

Want to understand some of the mystery of the main character of this show? Look no further than the fact that he takes his own sensory experience more seriously than any fad or person or passing train. He's a well dressed man in an art gallery.

And here we are, watching, from a society that orbits, as if orbiting were the way to appreciate a thing.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present documentary review

What is the documentary called Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present you ask? Well...

It's a film about an artist. A very different one. She calls herself a performance artist. She does things you'll see in the beginning that may have you ready to turn this film off. Seemingly, she's just seeking attention when you see her desecrating her naked body or running into walls naked. It's disturbing and alarming and not too moving. Well, ignore these things if you must. Remain and watch this martyr turned art world sensation.

The basis and the building leads to something wholly different. This

art show on which the documentary is based illuminates one of those rare instances where art and commerce meet with success. Usually the latter corrupts and buries the former. This experiment of Marina's is a spiral staircase in which the two rely upon each other to get to the proper locale.

The experiment, you ask? Let's see..

Photo courtesy of Andrew Russeth

It's pretentious. It's absurd. It's flamboyant. It's presumptuous. It's so far out of the normal realm that we keep ourselves confined to. It almost begs to be called insane. Yet, it is none of these things in full delivery. It merely broaches them, due to our confines, and moves on. With them, and all of our confinement baggage, in tow, dripping off of it, look by look. One onlooker turned provocateur at a time.

It's overall effect, the "Artist is Present" experiment with all of it's charm and dignity and grace hands us something much more than the painting in the Museum of Modern Art around her could hand us, as Marina had set out hoping. Her gaze upon gaze with regular art gallery goers repeats itself, yet with such stunning grip that it dislodges the viewer from their set-upon spot. It moves the bounds of human exchange, if said human is willing to fully enter that vacuum that she so patiently occupies. It assaults all we've decreed about "knowing someone" or "meeting someone." There's a layer she's found that lies exposed for hours at a time in a gallery of static things. A nerve we don't want touched. A way we've turned away from.

Marina Abramovic is an explorer. a poet. a fake. then naked. turned visionary. turned simpleton. flipped back. beacon. runner. avoider. pontificator. necessity.

Never has a documentary affected me so viciously – in mysterious buildup, to ultimately, a wind tunnel trip to the place she's looking out from. There she stays on this perch that she's found, and brought anyone sensible enough to wander up. Few paintings I know of could accomplish as much. And no documentary I know of could convey art more unavoidably.

I defy anyone to watch it and not come away slightly askew. To not walk away with a different hitch. To not sit, unaware of the depths of a single sitting.

Just sit back, and watch it already.