Our rain continued off and on over the weekend. It wasn’t too bad on Saturday but we had a heavy downpour yesterday. The timing was perfect: I hadn’t yet mowed the lawn so I couldn’t.
The first thing I got out of the way was my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes live tomorrow. It’s called The Illustrious Man.
I’m about halfway through Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. Some of the authors really get what it means to be inspired by Bradbury, whereas one or two so far try way too hard, with characters baldly stating Bradbury themes to each other in the guise of story. And who would have known that Margaret Atwood could right something so brief and nasty.
I spent most of the rest of the weekend watching videos to prep for an essay I’m writing for Screem magazine. A couple of the films I’d seen before (one, in fact, was the first movie I ever watched on my brand new VHS VCR back in 1984) and a couple I hadn’t. The two I’d seen before hold up surprisingly well to time. The two I hadn’t, well, one was okay and the other was wretched. The things I do in the name of non-fiction.
On Saturday night we watched Le hérisson (The Hedgehog), a French film about…well, I could say it’s about the live-in concierge in a posh Paris building who loves literature but has been a loner ever since her husband died a few years ago. To most of the tenants, she’s not a person but a role, and they wouldn’t recognize her on the street out of context. I could also say it’s about an 11 year old girl named Paloma whose parents are distant. Her father works too much and her mother has been in therapy for ten years. She takes a lot of medication, drinks a lot and talks to her plants. Paloma decides that life is a big joke and a waste of time, so she plans to kill herself on her 12th birthday. In the meantime, she is making a documentary that will illustrate her notion that life is ridiculous. However, she gets to know the concierge, and the concierge gets to know the Japanese man who moves into the building and everyone’s lives are changed. It’s based on The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. A charming film with some big surprises.
Last night we watched Masterpiece Theater – the latest Inspector Lewis mystery movie. Lewis used to be Inspector Morse’s sidekick in the Colin Dexter novels and the BBC adaptations, but Morse died (as did the actor playing him, John Thaw) and now Lewis is in the foreground. The stories are set in Oxford, where my wife and I both lived at the same time in the early eighties (unbeknownst to each other), so the scenery is familiar, and the stories are quite good. I think I’ll have to add this to the DVR and maybe go back and pick up some of the earlier seasons.
And then there’s Breaking Bad. I’ll end up watching this again with my wife, but I watched it this morning while exercising. They’re calling this the final season, but to my mind it’s really an eight episode Season 5 with another eight episode season next summer. The same situation as with The Sopranos.
I suspect the opening scene at the Denny’s is something that won’t pay off until the very end. Sort of like the season about the air traffic controller, where there were teasing shots through the entire season that didn’t mean anything until the end of the last episode. Walt is 52 (or at least his alter ego is) and he was 50 at the beginning of Season 1, so it looks like some time has elapsed. He also has a full head of hair.
There was some good housekeeping in this episode. Some loose ends wrapped up. Walt really was behind the ricin poisoning. Ted didn’t die of his fall, although he looks like he wished he had. He was terrified of Skyler who, for a moment at least, became Mrs. Heisenberg. Skyler actually had a lot of emotional terrain to cover in this episode: afraid for her husband, afraid for her family, afraid of her husband and then cold and professional with Ted.
Walt, on the other hand, has an incipient God complex. Things are so because he says they’re so. Even Jesse must realize that the guy he still insists on calling Mr. White is turning into a monster. Good on Jesse, though, for conjuring up the magnet caper. That was fun (although I’m not sure why the batteries didn’t get sucked into the magnet). I love unexpected moments. I thought maybe something would break through the wall, but I never for a moment expected the truck to tip over. And though the caper worked, it also revealed something that might otherwise have been overlooked: the Swiss bank account info in the picture frame.
I also love how two secondary characters—Saul and Mike—have become so vivid. Saul often gets some of the best scenes and Mike some of the best lines. First of all he showed his exasperation with Walt when he says, “Keys, douchebag. It’s the universal symbol for keys.” And then, when the junkyard guy talks about having a beer to celebrate their caper, he deadpans, “I can foresee a lot of possible outcomes to this thing, and not a single one of them involves Miller Time.” I think their should be a little inspirational book called The Wit and Wisdom of Mike Ehrmantraut.
Good to see Jim Beaver (Deadwood, Justified) back as Walt’s favorite gun dealer, too.
