Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012)

As a claustrophobic, I got tremendous discomfort from Argo's crushed shots against throngs of hostile crowds packed so tightly that navigation looks impossible even for those not under the hostile suspicions of an entire nation. Spatial relationships mean nothing in these moments, as there is no real path to escape for the Americans stranded in Iran after the fall of the shah and the installation of Ayatollah Khomeini. After an animated prologue, Argo begins with a mob beating at the gates of the US embassy in Tehran until they storm the compound, and the fear of reprisal against Americans for their country's role in propping up the former regime pervades the film.

Those animated credits, however, hint at the other major element of Argo's construction. When the Iranians take the embassy's workers hostage, six Americans escape and hide out in the home of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). Everyone knows they cannot stay there forever, but if Iranians find these Americans on the street, they will be executed as spies as fast as a kangaroo court will allow. The United States government cannot risk open involvement without provoking a war, so CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) concocts an extraction plan so absurd that, as they say, it just might work. Mendez will travel to Iran as a Canadian filmmaker and pull the staffers out under the ruse of being his crew on a location shoot. As Lester Spiegel, the fading film legend who helps prop up this farce says, he went on suicide missions in the Army less dangerous than this idea.

Capsule Reviews: While the City Sleeps, Cracking Up, The Kid, Rock of Ages

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Fritz Lang's underseen noir blends the yellowest of journalism with King Lear in a prescient, savage view of media feeding a public frenzy. A news empire is offered to three successors, with the new kingdom to be ruled by the one who can beat the cops to solving the identity of a serial killer infamous only from the organization's own salacious coverage. Lang's framing is more stripped down than some other efforts but no less immaculate: the newsroom of transparent but isolating glass and roaring presses speak to the capacity of journalism to reveal and obscure, and how a giant conglomerate can drown out the truth instead of exposing it. As much as the actual string of murders, the tension operates on simple office politics, in which the promise of a raise and a title change to move up the modern social ladder can bring out the basest, most primitive behavior. The characterization of the sexually confused killer is oh-so-standard, but Lang's ability to make high style out of even the most basic movements and mise-en-scène combines with the otherwise fantastic story for a great anti-journo noir. Grade: A-

Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011)

[Note: this review is spoiler-free but I would still encourage those who haven't yet seen the film to go into it as cold as possible.]

Having proudly managed to seclude myself from practically anything related to Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive following its rapturous reception at Cannes, I found myself surprised by the extremity of the praise that filtered through my blinders. What particularly caught my eye was one rhetorical headline (I did not read the story in my anti-hype lockdown) that asked whether Refn and his star Ryan Gosling were the new Scorsese-De Niro, a comparison I found particularly odd since this is only their first collaboration. Having now seen Drive, however, I can almost see where that writer was coming from: Gosling represents a synthesis and an embodiment of the director's goals, thematic intent and emotional frequency. Refn's previous film, Valhalla Rising, was an abstract tone poem to masculine horror, the kind codified and even encouraged by chauvinistic, barbaric religious organization. Gosling introduces feminine contours to Refn's stylized but dimmed and rough side, though the sensitive actor with the gentle eyes displays an equal capacity for brutality here that places him on the tipping point between grace and savagery.

But then, maybe the invocation of Scorsese and De Niro was just that writer's way of getting in on the  referential action. Refn, who says he modeled Bronson on Kenneth Anger films (there's a reference here, too) and Valhalla Rising on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, here unloads a dump-truck of stylistic homages, from early Michael Mann to stripped-down car movies like Two-Lane Blacktop and The Driver to an overt reference to Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin. Hell, the most visible reference point, to my surprise, was that of Wong Kar-wai, particularly his devastating In the Mood for Love. For some, all these references will be a delight, a smorgasbord of retro cool gussied up further by the inexplicable (but fun) use of '80s synth music. For others, this is merely a sign of self-satisfied theft, a lazy repackaging of ideas. Either way, this fixation misses the true joy of Drive: watching Refn wring tension out nearly every moment, even doe-eyed, wistful stares of impossible love.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Breaking Bad — Season 3

[Warning: Contains spoilers for previous seasons]

The perpetual moral free-fall of Breaking Bad should not be as sustainable as it's proven to be. By the start of its third season, which begins only with the show's 20th episode, Breaking Bad has already traveled such dark territory the question arises whether it can keep going before slipping into absurdity. However, the program already had a built-in black comedy that underscored its drama, and somehow the greatest show currently on television only gets better as things continue to spiral.

Breaking Bad — Season 2

*Warning – contains spoilers*

Breaking Bad's second season leaps so far above the bar it set for itself with the first seven episodes to such an extent that television audiences did not even have to wait a full year to watch a show in the same league as The Wire after David Simon's masterpiece went off the air. Clearly the series struck a nerve, as the opening moments of the season premiere, itself actually a flashback of the final moments of the previous finale, looks crisper despite being recycled footage. AMC rolled out the high quality film stock for its critical smash, and the visual upgrade serves as an immediate symbol of the extreme boost in the quality of the show's writing, placing the series into the pantheon of great shows with only 20 total episodes to its name.


The first season ended with Walt and Jesse having solved their distribution problems by hitching their wagon -- or RV -- to drug dealer Tuco. The partnership immediately created a new issue, however, in that Tuco's insanity made them expendable at a moment's notice, likely for no reason at all. Indeed, the final act of the last season, and the first part of this one, showed Tuco beating one of his crew to death with his bare hands simply for talking tough to the amateur meth producers on his boss' behalf. After the ordeal with Krazy 8, Jesse and Walt were understandably wary of getting in over their heads, but they clearly entered a whole other realm of danger with Tuco.

Sure enough, the crazed dealer rounds up his new suppliers by the end of the first episode, convinced that the increased DEA pressure on him is less a result of his horrific, hyperviolent management of his territory and instead the product of someone in his crew being an informant. Walt, increasingly withdrawn from the family he's attempting to care for with his new trade, botches several opportunities to reconnect with his pregnant wife due to his paranoia, only for his fears to be founded when Tuco shows up to kidnap him just as Skyler nearly sets an ultimatum for Walt to spend more time with the family.

That increasing strain between Walt and Skyler forms one half of the larger arc of the character development. By this point, Walt has told too many lies to keep track of, and he must continue to spin fabrications as he dedicates himself even further to meth production to cover the costs of a surgery that will run his family nearly $200,000 and to satisfy the demands of his "customers." Where he could once get away with a few lines about "needing to get away," now Walt has to explain his days-long absence by stripping naked in a store and pretending that he blacked out for several days. Even worse, he uses the excuse of visiting his mother in a rest home to tell her about his disease in order to spend the weekend cooking up a massive amount of crystal meth.

This marks a shift in Walt's personality from a man uncomfortable with deceiving his family even as he did what he did to help them to someone who can lie with ease and base his mendacity in horrible personal areas that will cause unbearable pain if and when someone finally pulls a thread and unravels his falsehoods. Reflecting this change in his personal life, Walt's attitude toward the drug trade takes a much darker turn. His chemical ingenuity saved his and Jesse's lives more than once in the first season, but these were last-resort methods of self-preservation. But when Walt stands over a gut-shot Tuco after he and Jesse manage to overpower the dealer and escape his desert hideaway, we can see that this is not the same man who reluctantly killed Krazy 8 despite knowing that the first distributor was going to kill him. That Walt even apologized to his attacker as he choked the life out of the dealer, but this bald, hardened man looks down on Tuco and decides to let him bleed to death in agony rather than put a bullet in his head for instant gratification.

Over the course of the season, Walt increasingly identifies with his alter-ego "Heisenberg," the sobriquet he chose for his business dealings that becomes a hushed whisper among the drug community. Hoping to avoid yet another incident with a dealer, Walt finally decides to distribute his stuff himself, using several of Jesse's friends as street-level dealers. He speaks knowledgeably about infrastructure and the need for foot soldiers and enforcers as if he'd been in the game all his life, and even forces Jesse to handle two thieves who rob one of their dealers lest word get out that Heisenberg's crew are easy marks. By the end of the season, he's viciously warning wannabes to "stay out of [his] territory" and going to incredible lengths to stop a blackmailer from pushing him around. He even hires a lawyer, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk, who gives maybe the greatest performance of a sleazy attorney ever seen), to take care of busted dealers and find a way to launder his cash.

Bryan Cranston more than earned his Emmy for his work in the first season, capturing the stress of Walt's condition and forcing the audience to consider what might drive anyone -- not just an innocent (and white) high school teacher -- to get into the drug trade. What he proves in the second season, however, is that a show doesn't need a likable protagonist to be captivating. Walt may not be a psychotic on Tuco's level, nor a calculating killer like Krazy 8, but the game is changing him, making him more ruthless. Consider how he reacts to the incredible news of the chemotherapy's success, driving him to flashes of anger and a need to repair the whole house to vent his frustrations with normalcy. Even Skyler, so desperate to help her husband through his ordeal despite being in the advanced stage of her pregnancy, begins to pull apart from him in disgust. Cranston handles this shift without breaking a sweat: where neurotic bemusement and outright fear creased his face, now his shaved head furrows in choked rage: rage at Jesse for his constant screw-ups, at rivals for infringing on his profit, even at his family, who continue to ask questions of his behavior that he grows tired of excusing. Only rarely does he betray humanity, such as seeing his son make a web site about his dad's struggle that praises Walt to the entire world, or arriving to see his newborn daughter after missing the birth due to a drug exchange.

At all times, Cranston and the rest of the cast are backed by the writing. "Down," the single best episode of the show's first two seasons, plunges both Walt and Jesse into personal crises. Jesse's parents, aware of the DEA breathing down his neck after the Tuco incident, finally crack down on their son, and the cardboard painting of a future that Jesse made for himself gets torn apart when he suddenly finds himself homeless. Meanwhile, Walt has the chance to at least partially explain himself to Skyler and ultimately chooses, perhaps permanently, to place his new occupation above his own family. It is one of the most heartbreaking episodes of television I have ever seen.

Elsewhere, however, the same comedy that made so much of the first season a riot comes back into play, particularly the scenario in which Jesse accidentally drains the battery of the RV out in the middle of nowhere and subsequently puts out a minor gas fire in the backup generator by pouring his and Walt's entire water supply onto the machine, shorting it out. Even Walt's slow breakdown into a monster contains elements of dark comedy, seen most visibly in the celebratory party Skyler throws when they get a favorable diagnosis, a party Walt ruins by making his son drink until he pukes and starting a fight with Hank. And who can forget the mad image of a cartel snitch (Danny Trejo!) named Tortuga -- Spanish for "turtle" -- beheaded and placed onto a tortoise with the words "Hola DEA" painted on its shell?

That mix of comedy and horror is but one small facet of Breaking Bad's vise grip on emotion. Even when the show moves quickly, it takes its time to subtly build and break down characters: when Jesse pulls some of his affairs together and gets an apartment, he befriends the young landlady, Jane (Krysten Ritter), a tattoo artist who runs the apartment for her dad. They enter into a relationship, and Jane's status as a recovering addict, combined with Jesse's wake-up call, creates the hope that the young man might finally straighten himself out. When the Mexican cartels begin to push on "Heisenberg," however, the pressure leads Jesse to old comforts, and he and Jane enter into a frightening spiral that hooks Jesse on even more dangerous poison. If Walt is slowly being undone by Skyler's growing distrust of him, Jesse suffers even more by finding someone to care for; it seems as if no one can win in their line of work.

Even the direction adjusts to this nightmarish turn of events. With Jesse and Walt involving themselves more personally in the business, the various directors take us into a dark underworld only briefly glimpsed in the first seven episodes. When Walt dispatches Jesse to deal with those meth thieves, the partner stumbles into a cracked-funhouse-mirror vision of a home, littered with various pilfered goods and uncleaned food remnants, with a malnourished child who barely has the strength to turn on a television as his parents, covered in festering sores, spend their days robbing and shooting up. Jesse inadvertently walks away from the situation with some credibility, but he looks as shaken by the end result of his addictions as we are, and the world of Breaking Bad slowly comes to resemble the hell that Walt makes for himself across the season's 13 episodes.

The most crystalline moment of this downward trajectory, however, involves the random intersection of two characters who don't understand how close they really are. Jane's father, aware that she is using again, happens to sit across a bar from Walt, and the two strike up a conversation. As both can only think of the addicts close to them, each speaks vaguely of the frustrations of watching young ones destroy themselves for nothing, and they share a moment of understanding despite not knowing who the other really is. Afterward, Walt commits his most heinous act yet -- without even lifting a finger -- and Jane's father will himself be responsible for an action that could be marked as a jumping the shark moment if it wasn't hauntingly teased all season and ultimately such a perfect metaphor for the cataclysmic place in which Walt has found himself by the end. I came away from the second season not knowing if he could possibly redeem himself, yet the true beauty of the series is that such a big question is among the least of my worries for these characters as they move forward into an apocalyptic situation.

Breaking Bad — Season 1

Breaking Bad has ridden such a tidal wave of critical adulation -- perhaps the most effusive since The Wire earned every plaudit under the sun -- that I reached the point where every day I didn't get around to trying it out felt like a missed opportunity. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer, so I set aside the various TV series I'm catching up on to give it a go. Naturally, this AMC series about a cancer-stricken man cooking crystal meth lives up to the hype, and while this first season contains a few wrinkles at the beginning, by the end of its truncated order it establishes itself as great television and leaves plenty of room for growth.


Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, works a second job at a car wash to supplement his meager income to account for his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), taking off for maternity leave. After collapsing in a coughing fit at the car wash, Walt discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer, which he cannot bring himself to tell his family. Concerned with leaving his wife, his palsy-stricken son and his coming daughter deeply in debt, Walt decides to build a nest egg for his family. Following his brother-in-law, Hank, a DEA agent, on patrol one day, Walt gets the idea to cook meth to make fast, easy money to leave behind. What's life in prison when you've only got months to live?

Initially, Breaking Bad has such a deadpan absurdity to it that I wondered if the show was a black comedy instead of a drama. While watching the lab bust that inspires him, Walt sees a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), flee the scene. Rather than rat him out, Walt tracks the boy down and decides to make him his partner: Walt cooks, Jesse deals. The kid is as incredulous as the audience, and the insanity of it all only compounds when Walt ends up cooking the purest batch of meth in the Southwest, which he modestly chalks up to basic chemistry. (When the DEA eventually gets a sample, agents note that their own chemist could not make a batch this good.)

The madness only piles up from there. Jesse's old partner, Emilio, got busted, leading him to believe that the kid ratted him out and threatening Walt's attempts to sell his product wholesale to dealer Krazy-8, Emilio's cousin. The two dealers come to kill Walt under suspicion of him being a cop, and once again his chemistry skills avail him when he suddenly throws his materials together to create mustard gas, killing the two. Well, not quite, and the tough-talking Krazy-8 suddenly comes to fear Walt when he comes to and sees the mad genius who can kill him with a few mixed powders.

For all of the attention to scientific detail -- with necessary gaps in editing to prevent people from getting ideas for recipes -- Breaking Bad does not conform to the same realistic elements that made The Wire so memorable. Hell, it doesn't even try to play it as straight as CSI. The show introduces a succession of grotesques in quick order and then tries to make sense of them through the grounding element of the chemical accuracy. Mild-mannered Walt tries to set a standard for himself as a meth manufacturer, as if a proud entrepreneur slapping his name to a quality product, and he evolves over the seven episodes into a surprisingly hard-edged figure completely at odds with his weak frame, made even weaker through chemotherapy.

The rest of the characters are just as insane: Marie, Skyler's sister, shoplifts while husband Hank uses FBI connections to get his hands on illegal Cuban cigars. Jesse slips in and out of meth-induced paranoia, and his wannabe gangsta demeanor begins to fade as the quality of Walt's ice attracts dangerous men. Amusingly, he begins to follow Walt's example somewhat when he attempts to cook some of the teacher's pure meth with another junkie friend and spends most of the time chastising the other for the same childish behavior Jesse himself exhibited in the pilot.

The first four episodes generally play out as high comedy: when Krazy-8 survives the attack and Jesse locks him in his basement, the kid and Walt argue over who will kill the dealer. Walt tries to pawn all such responsibilities onto Jesse and thinks that his instructions -- in this case to dissolve the bodies in strong acid -- fulfills his end of each bargain and leaves the heavy lifting to the boy, but Jesse will hear none of it. Jesse wins a coin toss, setting in motion a long, tense subplot of self-doubt as Walt questions whether he can kill a man. There can only be one conclusion to the situation, but the depths Cranston plunders with minimal face movement and hesitant body languages makes the two episodes over which the question of his action plays out unbearably suspenseful, even tragicomic in his conversations with Krazy-8 (or Domingo, as his parents would call him). And then the writers can break up the tension of this plotline with the hilarity of Jesse ignoring Walt's instructions to get plastic containers in which to dissolve the bodies and simply melting Emilio in his bathtub, only to discover that the acid also eats through ceramic, metal, wood and anything non-plastic, thus burning a hole through the second floor and dropping wet mounds of soupy flesh all over the place. Shaken by the experience, Jesse attempts to quit the game and return to the upper-middle-class parents who threw him out, only to be cast out again for not ratting on his preppy, younger brother when discover the tween's pot (perhaps explaining how Jesse could have thrown away such a nice life).

The series takes a turn for greatness, however, in the fifth episode. After Walt's cancer is finally revealed to his family and friends, the he tries to argue against getting chemotherapy, knowing that he'll just put his family in debt before dying. Episode writer Patty Lin finds just the right balance between the snatches of drama seen up to this point and the black comedy that defined most of the early episodes when Walt's family stages an intervention, a subtle irony that tics across Cranston's face as he ponders it, only instead of drugs they plea with him to save his life by undergoing a treatment that will force him to down dozens of pills a day. It starts funny, with meathead Hank typically unable to share his emotions and Skyler trying to find some stability after hearing the news by insisting that no one speak unless holding the "talking pillow." Yet the show undermines and breaks expectations by structuring the severe parts of the intervention in a way that doesn't turn out in a pat manner. Walter Jr. gives a moving speech about the difficulties he faces with his disability and asks his father point-blank, "What if you gave up on me?" that brings Walt to the verge of tears. Then, however, Marie, who sees chemo patients every day at the hospital, says that Walt should be allowed to make a choice for himself and bluntly notes how many chemo patients seem as if they'd prefer death to their suffering.

At this point, Cranston proves why he got the Emmy over more well-known names. He quietly tells his family that he feels he never had a choice in life, suggested earlier by seeing his former co-worker, Elliot, who runs a lucrative chemical company with his wife Gretchen after Walt dropped out in the company's infancy to teach. When evidence comes to light that he and Gretchen shared something that might have driven Walt not only to sever his partnership but even refuse Elliot's financial aid in this time of need, the impoverished pointlessness of Walt's life takes on a deeper sadness. He notes that chemotherapy could prolong his life, but to what end? What is life if he's too weak and nauseated to move? Though he eventually agrees to the treatment, Walt shatters the normal way these interventions play out on the screen by calmly but urgently requesting that he be allowed to die.

There's something ingenious, insane yet oddly plausible about Breaking Bad's premise. Cranston's bent-over, nervous frame carries that hint of authority present in any good teacher, broken down by a crap paycheck and youthful defiance and apathy but still able to silence an unruly teenager with a growl. Watching his arc from nervous law-breaker who hangs his good clothes outside the RV in which he cooks to avoid getting odors on his clothes and rousing suspicion to a bald, Stoic presence in the drug trade who can brew false meth to act as explosives when someone tries to harm him or his partner is as fascinating as television gets.

Still, the writers never lose the comedy. The first great deadpan of the series showed Walt finding an outlet for his shock at receiving his diagnosis by fixating on a mustard stain on his doctor's coat, and the central gag of the finale involves Walt having to cook several pounds of glass in Jesse's basement to appease a dealer while a realtor shows up to hold an open house in the place. By the end of the season, Walt is set to make more money than he's ever dreamed of but he's also under the thumb of a psychotic dealer. This produces a sinking feeling in one's stomach but, in context of what came before, all you can do is laugh, and that's Breaking Bad in a nutshell.